Full title: Sovereign Land Banking in the Bengal Delta: Khas Land, Private Equity Leasehold, Transit Value Capture and Sovereign AI — A Companion Volume
This companion volume applies the generic sovereign public land bank architecture set out in the South Asia study to a single land-scarce deltaic jurisdiction, where arable land amounts to only about 0.045 hectares per person. It traces 230 years of statutory land control, from the Permanent Settlement of 1793 and the nineteenth-century tenancy acts through mid-twentieth-century state acquisition, a 1972 land ceiling and recent consolidation of economic-zone, PPP and investment law under a single investment authority.
The paper examines public khas land and its dual-track allotment to landless households and to enterprise leases, together with the cadastral and forest-tenure complexities of mangrove and hill forest zones. It analyses an economic-zone land bank of 79,019 planned acres and its private-equity leasehold regime: 50-year renewable leases, SPV delegation rights and a fiscal shield covering stamp duty, a developer tax holiday and dividend and capital-gains exemptions.
A transit-oriented land value capture model combines betterment levies with development-rights auctions, with a worked illustration labelled as an assumption. A sovereign data and analytics pipeline reconciles deeds, revenue records and imagery, flags unlawful wetland filling and protects forest-carbon data. Six design recommendations complete the study. The paper is written in a personal capacity and is not investment or financial advice.
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