Kolkata, June 30 (IANS) The Bihar government will not acquire agricultural land for industry, Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi said here Thursday.
‘We do not want any confrontation with the farmers. We will not even acquire any single crop land… We will not promote industry at the cost of agriculture. Agriculture and industry can go side by side,’ Modi told reporters on the sidelines of the 83rd annual general meeting of the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC) here.
‘Every inch of land is fertile in Bihar. It is not like western states or southern states where a large chunk of land is desert,’ he said.
He said the state government was providing 240 percent of the market rate of the land to those farmers who have given their land willingly to industry.
Still, Bihar faces problem on the issue as land holdings are very small in the state, he said.
‘The state and central governments should formulate a new policy in which farmers should be made stakeholders, or there should be equity participation or land-for-land policy,’ he added.
