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Kaushik Das: The right to property
It is high time the government makes it a fundamental right again
Kaushik Das / New Delhi April 14,2004
Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto is the recipient of this year’s
prestigious Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, which carries a
cash award of $ 500,000. The first winner of this biannual prize — started in
2002 by the Cato Institute — was the late London School of Economics
economist Lord Peter Bauer. de Soto has been awarded this prize for his
ground-breaking work on property rights.
According to de Soto, the people of less-developed countries seem to be
poorer than they actually are because their wealth is often not formally
recognised. As he has pointed out in his 1986 book The Other Path, “They
have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes
of incorporation....”
Take India, for example. The Indian Constitution does not recognise
property right as a fundamental right. In the year 1977, the 44th amendment
eliminated the right to “acquire, hold and dispose of property” as a
fundamental right. However, in another part of the Constitution, Article 300
(A) was inserted to affirm that “no person shall be deprived of his property
save by authority of law”. The result is that the right to property as a
fundamental right is now substituted as a statutory right. The amendment
expanded the power of the state to appropriate property for “social welfare
purposes”.
In other words, the amendment bestowed upon the Indian socialist state a
licence to indulge in what Fredric Bastiat termed “legal plunder”. This is one
of the classic examples when the “law has been perverted in order to make
plunder look just and sacred to many consciences”.
Before we go into the technicalities of property rights, it is worth
investigating how property rights evolved in the