Amit Varma, whose brilliant dispatches from TamilNadu should surely win India Uncut an award for Best New Blog (there! My first endorsement) had a post some time back speculating that Jayalalithaa has designs on coastal land.

I don’t know if that’s true. Given JJ’s record, it may well be. But if I were the Government of India, and if I had designs on coastal land, my methods wouldn’t be as hamfisted as issuing fake warnings against eating fish. Here’s what I’d do.

1. On flimsy grounds, (say the need to protect mangroves in Bengal) I’d put a nationwide ban on any construction anywhere within a certain distance of the coastline.
   
2. Of course, I’d have to be flexible about it and accept that an absolute ban won’t make sense. So you build in some exceptions to the rule. Which is more, I will build in a procedure to grant case-by-case exemptions because no one can be perfectly prescient.
   
3. This means that only the rich can get those exemptions. That’s because it takes a lot of bribing and lobbying to get it. Only if you are planning to build a seven-star beach resort can you afford the bribing and lobbying. My mission is a partial success – why bother to formally own the land when you can extract “rents” in the form of bribes and contributions to party funds?
   
4. Because it is illegal to construct on land close to the coast, naturally shanties will spring up there. The poor, who cannot afford to buy land legally would have settled there illegally.
   
5. Because they are poor, the construction quality of those shanties would be terrible. The houses least able to withstand a tsunami would be at a place most vulnerable to a tsunami.
   
6. Actually, there’d be another reason why the construction quality would be terrible. The government would periodically get urges to enforce the law and demolish those shanties. Obviously it is not worth building strongly if there is a clear and present risk of getting demolished.
   
7. Because they are illegal, those houses can’t be insured.
   
8. Because they are illegal, those who dwell there can’t get loans by mortgaging the land.
   
9. Because they are illegal, there would be no record of who owns which house. This is convenient if ever those houses get destroyed in a natural disaster, say a tsunami. There is so much scope for making money by cornering the relief.
   
10. Because it is illegal, that land cannot be sold. Um.. Actually, it can be sold. There will develop a parallel economy. If you are rich and powerful, you can buy up the land and dirt cheap prices and then bribe and lobby for exemptions (see point 2)
    
11. Those shanty dwellers are a useful vote-bank for my politicians. They can become heroes by stopping demolitions (see point 6) and by periodically legalising stretches of the illegal occupation.
    

It turns out that the Government of India has put such a ban. It is called Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) and Amit, you just supported it

Why?