According to Kamal Nath, Road, Transport and Highways minister, there are two dominant issues that stand in the way of quickening highway construction - land acquisition being one and the need for capacity building at the National Highway Authority of India, which is the nodal authority for highway construction being the other. This article is going to deal with the land acquisition.Other Kamal Nath's quotes state again the problem, such as the following ones:-"We require land to build roads and the land acquisition problem is the major factor behind project delays as multiple authorities are involved," he said.-"We recognise the problem and the ministry is working on a new strategy for land acquisition which we will work out soon."LAND ACQUISITION IN THE LAST YEARSIn the fiscal year ended March 31, there were no bidders for 38 of 60 road projects unveiled by the Ministry of Roads. More than 150 of 187 projects under way are behind schedule, according to ministry data, with difficulty in acquiring land in rural and forest areas cited as the major reason.According to a survey, of the 190 infrastructure projects facing delays, 70 per cent were delayed due to land acquisition problems. Forty projects by NHAI, 60 being implemented by Indian Railways and 28 power projects are facing difficulties in acquiring land."Of the total land to be acquired for 5,200 km of roads being built under Phase II, only 10 per cent of the land has not been acquired and we plan to do it by the end of this fiscal," said a senior NHAI official. It is fait to say that NHAI's Phase II was approved in December 2003.Responsibility for acquiring land rests with the National Highway Authority of India under the federal roads ministry. The federal government usually approaches state governments to identify land parcels and negotiates the purchase price with the owners, who are usually far flung rural land owners.Unclear land titles, absent or incomplete revenue records in villages and the fragmented nature of rural land holdings complicate the sale process with a large number of families having to be compensated for their land. According to Ministry of Agriculture data, 62% of Indian farmers have land holdings of less than one hectare. This last data is really alarming as the nature of the problem is historical and no solution can be provided easily.KAMAL NATH'S SOLUTIONTo deal with those challenges, the federal authority that purchases private land and awards highway projects last month announced plans to set up 150 acquisition units or so called Special land units (SLU) in various states.These units will be headed by an additional district magistrate or sub-divisional magistrate who will report to the NHAI through project directors (NHAI officials put to look after the development of the project).The SLUs are coming up all over the country -- 10 in Rajasthan, 13 in Bihar, 25 in Uttar Pradesh 7 in Gujarat, 11 in Orissa, 13 in West Bengal ,4 in Jharkhand, 11 in Maharashtra and 5 in Assam. Around 40 are already operational in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and sanction has been received for Goa."We will... have specialized people to handle this. It's not a problem of money; what we have is mostly an administrative problem," said A Didar Singh, in charge of finance with the National Highways Authority of India. Of course, this is something that can be solved, a money problem would involve worse consequences.CONCLUSIONDue to the fact that acquiring land for road projects is one of the major hurdles in creating infrastructure, private developers should embrace this measure as it is a great initiative to partially solve the problem. Will this measure mean that the process of dealing with so many owners will shorten? Every country has its own historical problems and land acquisition never was an easy issue to be solved. But it is good for developers that the problem has been identified and solutions are being wanted.The government should ideally have available 70%-80% of the land required for a project before inviting bids from builders, something that in reality never happens. Kamal Nath's plans for road construction sound great but there are some processes in construction that take some time and this is one of them.