TENS of thousands of flag-waving farmers rallied in India’s capital New Delhi yesterday to protest against government plans to ease rules for obtaining land for development.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims that existing rules, which were established in 2013 to stop land-grabbing and forced relocation, are creating obstacles that are spooking investors.

Mr Modi made an executive order in December doing away with some of the rules. The unilateral move upset opposition parties and rights groups that had long fought for safeguards, and they vowed to fight any effort to make the changes permanent after the order expired earlier this month.

Farmers, trade unions and rights activists say the changes effectively trample the rights of the poor.

They have accused Mr Modi of catering to corporate interests and said that eliminating hard-won safeguards for landowners would expose them to abuse by governments or private companies that offer poor compensation packages or force them from ancestral lands.

“With the single-minded agenda of kneeling before the corporates while hundreds of millions of our citizens are exploited, displaced, disposed and deprived, this government has shown that it simply does not care for the poor and toiling people, for our land, agriculture and nature,” said the National Alliance of People’s Movements.

The opposition Congress party accused Mr Modi of winning the election with funding from industrialists he now needs to pay back.

“How will he pay back the loan now? He will do it by giving your lands to those top industrialists.

“He wants to weaken the farmers, then snatch their land and give it to his industrialist friends,” Rahul Gandhi told more than 50,000 cheering farmers who came to the capital from all over India.

The opposition is most upset about proposed changes eliminating residents’ approval for land acquisitions sought for defence, infrastructure, affordable housing or industrial corridors.

The changes would also remove the requirement assess the social impact of such projects.

Restrictions on buying fertile agricultural land would be removed.

Abuses by government employees, now answerable in law, would be exempt from prosecution unless ordered by the government.

by Our Foreign Desk