5 ms·

> Yes, you need to obtain “permission” before you build any manufacturing structure on your own land with your own money. This permission is called the NA or No

by giva 4y ago

> Yes, you need to obtain “permission” before you build any manufacturing structure on your own land with your own money. This permission is called the NA or Non-Agricultural Certificate. Well, I though it was this way everywhere in the world. In Europe, at least, you cannot build anything on agricultural land unless it is a n agricultural structure or you get the classification changed, which is not easy.

newyankee 4y ago
Everything is right in theory. This article is about how difficult it is for a small entrepreneur, you essentially need big pockets and right connections to start something even very small. All this does is creates a set of entrenched local businesses which run hand-in-hand very transparently with local political interests. This is the whole reason Western folks never understand why China succeeded so fast, it is because they made the trade-offs necessary for growth. For rapid growth you cannot make everyone happy right away. The good thing about India is that e-Governance initiatives have at least provided some transparency and understanding for the average person which did not exist before.
- giva 4y ago
  Had this article been the difficulties to build a manufacturing plan on an area reserved for industrial use, I would agree. But I don't believe that changing the destination of agricultural land has to be a fast and easy process.
  - postingawayonhn 4y ago
    It should be fast and easy, but not necessarily guaranteed. You should be able to get a decision quickly regardless of whether it's 'yes' or 'no'.
arlcode 4y ago
The idea itself is sound and reasonable. If you let people built wherever you'll find yourself out of arable land in an instant. What seems overly complex and inefficient is the amount of permissions and the subpermissions. Even to my German bueorcracy adjusted ears this sounds like a great way to extract bribes and fees. At least the process here is quite clear (but not always fast)
- kragen 4y ago
  This does not seem sound and reasonable. Yes, India has been civilized for 5000 years, with the result that it's very densely populated; but "very densely populated" is only 418 people per square kilometer, less than twice Germany's 232. 53% of India's land area is arable land: 790 people per square kilometer of arable land, or 1270 square meters of arable land per person. I feel like 100 square meters of factory area per person is more than adequate, which would decrease the arable land by some 8% if you built it all on previously cultivated fields, rather than mountains or forests or deserts (or polders!); but that assumes you're employing the entire population in the factories. Some factories do have lower density than that; for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI was 370 acres (150 hectares in modern units) and employed 5500 people at its closure in 02006. This works out to 270 square meters per worker. But now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Fremont_Factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Fremont_Factory occupies that space and some additional (175 hectares total) and employs 22000 people, 80 square meters per person, despite extensive automation. If some of those factories are producing fertilizers, tractors, irrigation equipment, and food products, converting some fields into factories might actually increase your agricultural production rather than decreasing it. Germany harvests 7 tonnes of cereals per hectare that's planted in cereals; India, despite being tropical, harvests only 3.3: https://tradingeconomics.com/india/cereal-yield-kg-per-hectare-wb-data.html https://tradingeconomics.com/india/cereal-yield-kg-per-hecta... Allocating scarce resources like land by means of capitalism is maybe not ideal unless you can make more of them (polders!), but it does seem to work better than allocating them by bureaucracy and laws.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    Population density of Nederlands: >500 people/sq.km.
    - kragen 4y ago
      See, with industrialization you can support higher population densities than India can.
rob74 4y ago
This! In Germany it's simply not possible to declare a parcel of your own choosing as "Non-Agricultural". Land is of course taken out of agricultural use and reclassified for industrial or residential use, but only in predefined areas. Of course there's lobbying and speculation involved, because reclassification multiplies the value of the parcels, but it takes much longer than a year from the first proposal until you can actually build something, and certain conditions have to be met, e.g. good accessibility by road, other infrastructure (power supply, sewage etc.)...
- protomolecule 4y ago
  Same thing in Russia. All land is classified according to its use and changing intended use is a lot of paperwork.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Very similar in most parts of the US
franciscop 4y ago
I have a funny story from Spain: My father's has an orange field, so at some point he wanted to dig a well to get some water. He went to the City Hall, got all the tricky paperwork and applied for permission to build it. Months passed by without hearing anything, and at some point he just forgot about it, assuming he'd be denied silently. There's some people in the city hall don't like him too much BTW. Few years later an official from the government came, "I'm here to check on the well you built", to which my father was of course confused "what well? You never gave me permission to dig it!". Apparently and according to this official, the normal thing to do is that you apply for permission, then build the project and finally then you'll receive the permission eventually, so he'd assumed my father had the well built already. Since as mentioned some people were against him, he was also not gonna officially break the law and build it before getting permission.
- pelorat 4y ago
  A friend of mine in Spain bought a masia, but was not allowed to tear down the old building to build a new house (protected heritage or something, even though it was junk). So the way around it was to do it in steps. Replace it whole building part by part. So now he has a new house (but it looks like the old one in shape), but there's nothing left of the original.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    Not limited to Spain: here in Somerville MA I see people doing this pretty often. They leave just enough of the building standing (two walls?) that it counts as a remodel and they can keep all the zoning exemptions from the old structure. If they tore it down entirely they wouldn't be able to build anything nearly as large. Completely legal, but a good illustration of how even our new (and honestly much improved) zoning is too restrictive.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    This is the main way people under the California Coastal Commission's authority did projects up until I moved as well.
  - 4y ago
dreen 4y ago
In Poland atm you can't even buy farmland unless you are a registered farmer in the local county already. Its a new rule and hopefully they remove it cause its insane. And then of course you can't just build on it. You may attempt to reclassify it into building land but from TFA it seems the process is just as tedious as in India and definietely not guaranteed to succeed. Theres a big chance, once you get to the building, you will have to monitor the builders constantly otherwise they rob you blind. From my friend in India I was told they have the same problem.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  First you have to ask yourself why would such a rule exist? Sometimes it is done in the interest of national security. Or you run into issues such as a desert kingdom purchasing rights to use massive quantities of farmland where water is already scarce. See Saudi Alfalfa in California. Or why Bill Gates is the biggest private farm land owner in the United States at around 242,000 acres and climbing. You need to look past the knee jerk assumption that the government is schizophrenic. There may be greater forces at play this intends to put the brakes on without overtly prohibiting those activities.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    This reply is the perfect "Chesterson's Fence"!
  - dreen 4y ago
    The policy doesn't make sense. Farming benefits massively from economies of scale, and farmland in most of Eastern Europe is already very fragmented due to "agricultural reforms" in 45. If you're not familiar with that situation it is you who need to ask themselves some questions. Look at how messed up Haiti is, much of that results from the way they delt with land ownership. Every family owing their own little scrap of land sounds nice, but makes zero economic sense. I didn't say the goverment is schizofrenic, but their message certainly plays on xenophobic fears. Its clearly a part of a populist agenda, because we need people with capital buying up land, but its super easy to frame this as a malevolent action to less educated people, and that is what is being done for purely political reasons. And this policy is exactly what I would call "overly prohibiting": I can't sell my farmland even to local farmers who live a few miles away cause they happen to be in a different couty. Cmon thats just stupid.
kumarvvr 4y ago
Yeah, that statement is a bit of a hyperbole. I think in the US this is called Zoning and you need Zoning permissions or something similar.
mminer237 4y ago
In the US you typically have to make sure the land is in the right "zoning" for manufacturing, but that's typically not too hard to find. How easy it is to get preexisting land changed varies widely. If it's agricultural land, that often won't need rezoned in places with cumulative zoning: https://matthewminer.name/law/outlines/1L/2nd+Semester/LAW+516-001+%E2%80%93+Property+II/Zoning https://matthewminer.name/law/outlines/1L/2nd+Semester/LAW+5... Then you probably need a building permit, but they usually just need the plans for the building to be built for that.

by giva 4y ago

newyankee 4y ago

Everything is right in theory. This article is about how difficult it is for a small entrepreneur, you essentially need big pockets and right connections to start something even very small. All this does is creates a set of entrenched local businesses which run hand-in-hand very transparently with local political interests. This is the whole reason Western folks never understand why China succeeded so fast, it is because they made the trade-offs necessary for growth. For rapid growth you cannot make everyone happy right away. The good thing about India is that e-Governance initiatives have at least provided some transparency and understanding for the average person which did not exist before.

giva 4y ago
Had this article been the difficulties to build a manufacturing plan on an area reserved for industrial use, I would agree. But I don't believe that changing the destination of agricultural land has to be a fast and easy process.
- postingawayonhn 4y ago
  It should be fast and easy, but not necessarily guaranteed. You should be able to get a decision quickly regardless of whether it's 'yes' or 'no'.

arlcode 4y ago

The idea itself is sound and reasonable. If you let people built wherever you'll find yourself out of arable land in an instant. What seems overly complex and inefficient is the amount of permissions and the subpermissions. Even to my German bueorcracy adjusted ears this sounds like a great way to extract bribes and fees. At least the process here is quite clear (but not always fast)

kragen 4y ago
This does not seem sound and reasonable. Yes, India has been civilized for 5000 years, with the result that it's very densely populated; but "very densely populated" is only 418 people per square kilometer, less than twice Germany's 232. 53% of India's land area is arable land: 790 people per square kilometer of arable land, or 1270 square meters of arable land per person. I feel like 100 square meters of factory area per person is more than adequate, which would decrease the arable land by some 8% if you built it all on previously cultivated fields, rather than mountains or forests or deserts (or polders!); but that assumes you're employing the entire population in the factories. Some factories do have lower density than that; for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI was 370 acres (150 hectares in modern units) and employed 5500 people at its closure in 02006. This works out to 270 square meters per worker. But now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Fremont_Factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Fremont_Factory occupies that space and some additional (175 hectares total) and employs 22000 people, 80 square meters per person, despite extensive automation. If some of those factories are producing fertilizers, tractors, irrigation equipment, and food products, converting some fields into factories might actually increase your agricultural production rather than decreasing it. Germany harvests 7 tonnes of cereals per hectare that's planted in cereals; India, despite being tropical, harvests only 3.3: https://tradingeconomics.com/india/cereal-yield-kg-per-hectare-wb-data.html https://tradingeconomics.com/india/cereal-yield-kg-per-hecta... Allocating scarce resources like land by means of capitalism is maybe not ideal unless you can make more of them (polders!), but it does seem to work better than allocating them by bureaucracy and laws.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Population density of Nederlands: >500 people/sq.km.
  - kragen 4y ago
    See, with industrialization you can support higher population densities than India can.

rob74 4y ago

This! In Germany it's simply not possible to declare a parcel of your own choosing as "Non-Agricultural". Land is of course taken out of agricultural use and reclassified for industrial or residential use, but only in predefined areas. Of course there's lobbying and speculation involved, because reclassification multiplies the value of the parcels, but it takes much longer than a year from the first proposal until you can actually build something, and certain conditions have to be met, e.g. good accessibility by road, other infrastructure (power supply, sewage etc.)...

protomolecule 4y ago
Same thing in Russia. All land is classified according to its use and changing intended use is a lot of paperwork.
tomcam 4y ago
Very similar in most parts of the US

franciscop 4y ago

I have a funny story from Spain: My father's has an orange field, so at some point he wanted to dig a well to get some water. He went to the City Hall, got all the tricky paperwork and applied for permission to build it. Months passed by without hearing anything, and at some point he just forgot about it, assuming he'd be denied silently. There's some people in the city hall don't like him too much BTW. Few years later an official from the government came, "I'm here to check on the well you built", to which my father was of course confused "what well? You never gave me permission to dig it!". Apparently and according to this official, the normal thing to do is that you apply for permission, then build the project and finally then you'll receive the permission eventually, so he'd assumed my father had the well built already. Since as mentioned some people were against him, he was also not gonna officially break the law and build it before getting permission.

pelorat 4y ago
A friend of mine in Spain bought a masia, but was not allowed to tear down the old building to build a new house (protected heritage or something, even though it was junk). So the way around it was to do it in steps. Replace it whole building part by part. So now he has a new house (but it looks like the old one in shape), but there's nothing left of the original.
- jefftk 4y ago
  Not limited to Spain: here in Somerville MA I see people doing this pretty often. They leave just enough of the building standing (two walls?) that it counts as a remodel and they can keep all the zoning exemptions from the old structure. If they tore it down entirely they wouldn't be able to build anything nearly as large. Completely legal, but a good illustration of how even our new (and honestly much improved) zoning is too restrictive.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  This is the main way people under the California Coastal Commission's authority did projects up until I moved as well.
- 4y ago

dreen 4y ago

In Poland atm you can't even buy farmland unless you are a registered farmer in the local county already. Its a new rule and hopefully they remove it cause its insane. And then of course you can't just build on it. You may attempt to reclassify it into building land but from TFA it seems the process is just as tedious as in India and definietely not guaranteed to succeed. Theres a big chance, once you get to the building, you will have to monitor the builders constantly otherwise they rob you blind. From my friend in India I was told they have the same problem.

orangepurple 4y ago
First you have to ask yourself why would such a rule exist? Sometimes it is done in the interest of national security. Or you run into issues such as a desert kingdom purchasing rights to use massive quantities of farmland where water is already scarce. See Saudi Alfalfa in California. Or why Bill Gates is the biggest private farm land owner in the United States at around 242,000 acres and climbing. You need to look past the knee jerk assumption that the government is schizophrenic. There may be greater forces at play this intends to put the brakes on without overtly prohibiting those activities.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  This reply is the perfect "Chesterson's Fence"!
- dreen 4y ago
  The policy doesn't make sense. Farming benefits massively from economies of scale, and farmland in most of Eastern Europe is already very fragmented due to "agricultural reforms" in 45. If you're not familiar with that situation it is you who need to ask themselves some questions. Look at how messed up Haiti is, much of that results from the way they delt with land ownership. Every family owing their own little scrap of land sounds nice, but makes zero economic sense. I didn't say the goverment is schizofrenic, but their message certainly plays on xenophobic fears. Its clearly a part of a populist agenda, because we need people with capital buying up land, but its super easy to frame this as a malevolent action to less educated people, and that is what is being done for purely political reasons. And this policy is exactly what I would call "overly prohibiting": I can't sell my farmland even to local farmers who live a few miles away cause they happen to be in a different couty. Cmon thats just stupid.

kumarvvr 4y ago

Yeah, that statement is a bit of a hyperbole. I think in the US this is called Zoning and you need Zoning permissions or something similar.

mminer237 4y ago

In the US you typically have to make sure the land is in the right "zoning" for manufacturing, but that's typically not too hard to find. How easy it is to get preexisting land changed varies widely. If it's agricultural land, that often won't need rezoned in places with cumulative zoning: https://matthewminer.name/law/outlines/1L/2nd+Semester/LAW+516-001+%E2%80%93+Property+II/Zoning https://matthewminer.name/law/outlines/1L/2nd+Semester/LAW+5... Then you probably need a building permit, but they usually just need the plans for the building to be built for that.