The Land Question in India

The Land Question in India

State, Dispossession, and Capitalist
Transition

Edited by
Anthony P. D’Costa
and Achin Chakraborty

1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© the various contributors 2017
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950870
ISBN 978–0–19–879244–4
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Preface and Acknowledgments

The land question in India is a weighty subject and a single volume such as
this is unlikely to do justice to the complexities of the topic. Nevertheless,
there are some core dimensions around which land could be contextualized
and the place of land in economic development re-conceptualized as new
social forces impinge on the value and usage of land and the livelihoods that
depend on them. India, like many other developing countries undergoing
capitalist economic transition and transformation, offers a wide lens to view
such change through the land question. More distinctively, India, with its
particular form of democratic practices, provides a rich landscape in which the
conflict between the social obligation of the state to protect its vulnerable
small and marginal famers and the increasingly rapacious demand for land for
nonagricultural purposes has become highly pronounced.
The replacement of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act with the 2013 Right to
Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and
Resettlement Act is reflective of this democratic sentiment. While the state has
always exercised eminent domain and compensated those whose lands were
appropriated for “public purpose,” rehabilitation and resettlement have given
new meanings to land acquisition. The 2013 act has certainly altered the terms
and conditions by which land is to be transacted but has not eliminated the
process of dispossession. However, it has meant long, drawn-out negotiations
over “fair” prices and institutional demands for resettling and rehabilitating
the dispossessed or “project-affected people.” This has slowed the process of
land transfer and thus presumably nonagricultural-based accumulation, while
at the same time the Act has provided a legal apparatus by which the acqui-
sition of land would inevitably be facilitated.
The significance of land in capitalist transition is well documented. Land,
along with labor, is a vital factor of production. Historically, transforming the
role of land from a source of subsistence livelihood to a source of capital
accumulation has been fundamental to capitalist transition. Separating the
direct producers from their land has been a structural imperative for primitive
accumulation and agricultural sector dynamism and subsequent expansion and
diversification of a capitalist industrial economy. Postcolonial societies such as
Preface and Acknowledgments

India, having inherited colonial structures, favored modern industry as a

response to such structures; instead of the anticipated strong linkages between
industry and agriculture, India has witnessed a lagging agricultural sector.
Where state-led land reforms aimed to induce rural dynamism, they instead
led to supporting livelihoods (or coping mechanisms) for peasants and not
rural accumulation to fund industrialization as experienced by other late
industrializers such as South Korea and Taiwan. It appears transition in India
has been stalled and land as a source of capital accumulation has been
bypassed. India’s capitalist transition, if it can be called that, is thus argued
to be following a trajectory that does not entail rising agricultural productivity
and labor-absorbing industrialization. Instead, income from the utilization of
land through cultivation continues to be low, even though the market value
of land in general has seen a meteoric rise due to nonagricultural usage such as
industry, infrastructure, real estate (and thus speculation), in the context of
growth-friendly economic reforms led by the state.
To tackle these different facets of the land question in India, including the
changing role of the state in its pursuit of capitalist development and its tense
relationship with democratic politics, this volume brings together multiple
theoretical perspectives and a variety of empirical details to critically examine
the place of land in the broader process of India’s economic development
under contemporary capitalism. The chapters are mostly drawn from a three-
day conference held in March 2014 at the Institute of Development Studies
Kolkata and co-organized by Anthony P. D’Costa of the Australia India Insti-
tute and the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne;
Achin Chakraborty of the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata; and
Mritiunjoy Mohanty of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
This is the first major project on Contemporary India initiated by Anthony
P. D’Costa since joining the University of Melbourne. The Faculty of Arts
Committee, Dean Mark Considine, and Associate Dean (Research) Janet
Fletcher all have been very supportive of this project by providing seed
money to get the project off the drawing board. Amitabh Mattoo, then the
director of the Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne, also contrib-
uted funds as part of the Institute’s mission of working with Indian academic
institutions. The Institute of Development Studies Kolkata and the Indian
Institute of Management, Calcutta also contributed funds to meet all local
expenses.
There have been a number of people who have helped with the logis-
tical aspects of the conference. The operations staff at the Australia India
Institute helped out with the paperwork for participating India-based as
well as international scholars traveling to Kolkata and provided web-based
publicity support. At IDSK, Sanchari Guha Samanta managed a number of

vi
 Preface and Acknowledgments

organizational aspects of the conference ranging from keeping track of the

abstracts and paper submissions to overseeing the arrangements at the venue.
We would also like to thank a number of people who helped with the call for
proposals for the conference and intellectually contributed to the deliberations
of the conference. Partha Chatterjee of Columbia University and a resident of
Kolkata presented the opening paper, which has been subsequently reworked as
the Prelude to the volume. Amiya Kumar Bagchi of IDSK actively engaged the
participants. For agreeing to chair the sessions and discuss the papers we are
grateful to Sushil Khanna, Hari S. Vasudevan, Anjan Chakrabarti, Manish
Thakur, Manabi Majumdar, Priya Sangameswaran, Dwaipayan Bhattacharya,
and Mritiunjoy Mohanty.
Anthony D’Costa would also like to thank Adam Swallow, the Economics
Commissioning Editor at Oxford University Press, Oxford. He has thus far
worked with Adam on four projects, the first one in 2004 when he was a
Sabbatical Fellow at UNU WIDER in Helsinki and Adam was the publications
manager. Last but not least, Janette Rawlings, as always, copyedited the entire
manuscript in fine detail. To all these individuals and institutions we grate-
fully acknowledge their help and inspiration. The editors are responsible for
all errors and omissions.
Anthony P. D’Costa
Development Studies Program, University of Melbourne

Achin Chakraborty
Institute of Development Studies Kolkata
June 2016

vii
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 27/2/2017, SPi

Contents

List of Figures xi
List of Tables xiii
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xv
List of Contributors xix

Prelude: Land and the Political Management of Primitive

Accumulation 1
Partha Chatterjee

1. The Land Question in India: State, Dispossession,

and Capitalist Transition 16
Anthony P. D’Costa and Achin Chakraborty

Part I. Primitive and Contemporary Accumulation

2. From Primitive Accumulation to Regimes of Dispossession:
Theses on India’s Land Question 49
Michael Levien

3. Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance in

Neoliberal India: Persistence of the Self-Employed and
Divergence from the “Transition to Capitalism”? 76
Shapan Adnan

4. Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation in Rural India: Locating the

Land Question within the Agrarian Question 101
Arindam Banerjee

Part II. Legal-Institutional Dimensions of “Regimes of Dispossession”

5. Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony in
Neoliberal India: Toward a Critical Perspective on the 2013
Land Acquisition Act 129
Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Alf Gunvald Nilsen
Contents

6. Land Acquisition and “Fair Compensation” of the “Project

Affected”: Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation 151
Malabika Pal

7. The Adivasi Land Question in the Neoliberal Era 176

Rajesh Bhattacharya, Snehashish Bhattacharya, and Kaveri Gill

Part III. Regional Perspectives

8. Noncultivating Households Owning Land in an Agrarian
Economy: Some Observations from Andhra Pradesh 199
R. Vijay

9. Land and/or Labor? Predicament of Petty Commodity Producers

among South Indian Villages 216
R. V. Ramana Murthy

10. Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal: Two Stories of Left
Reformism and Development 242
Anirban Dasgupta

11. How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need? Historical Patterns

of Land Acquisition and Indian Industrialization 265
Mircea Raianu

12. An Ethnographer’s Journey through Land Grab for Capitalists

by the Left Front Government in West Bengal 283
Abhijit Guha

13. Land and Dispossession: The Criticalities in the Hills

of Northeast India 302
Gorky Chakraborty and Asok Kumar Ray

Postscript: Land, Livelihoods, and Late Capitalist Development 325

Anthony P. D’Costa

Index 331

x
List of Figures

1.1. Decline of agriculture and the changing composition of the Indian

economy (% of GDP) 25
2.1. Rate of accumulation by dispossession 63
2.2. Impoverishment by dispossession for Mahindra World City SEZ
in Rajasthan 65
13.1. Northeast India 303
List of Tables

1.1. Distribution of agricultural households by principal source of income

during 365 days preceding the survey 23
1.2. Average monthly income from different sources, consumption
expenditure and net investment in productive assets per agricultural
household for each size class of land possessed (July 2012–June 2013) 23
1.3. Changing distribution of the workforce across sectors in India 25
4.1. Labor hiring-in and hiring-out: West Bengal (WB) and Telengana (TL)
(in labor-days) 107
4.2. Distribution of assets across peasant classes (in %) 109
4.3. Income situation across peasant classes (in INR) 110
4.4. Total household income and poverty line per household by economic
and land size-classes: West Bengal advanced region (in INR) 112
4.5. Rural India: Agricultural household monthly income from all sources,
consumption expenditure, and investment in productive assets
(in INR), 2012–2013 114
4.6. Share of rural households in operated area 119
4.A1. Percentage distribution of households across classes in the three regions 121
4.A2. Total household income and poverty line income per household
by economic and land size-classes (in acres): Telengana advanced
region (in INR) 122
8.1. Percentage distribution of rural households by occupational category
at the national level (1971, 1981, 1991, and 2002) 202
8.2. Relative importance of households owning land but not cultivating land
in the rural areas at the national level 202
8.3. Value and composition of assets owned by cultivators and
noncultivators (2002) 203
8.4. Location, number of households, and sources of irrigation
in the surveyed villages 205
8.5. Distribution of households and land owned across class groups 207
8.6. Land-based importance of NCHs in the surveyed villages 208
List of Tables

8.7. Distribution of land transacted in land market across classes between

1999 and 2003 209
8.8. Distribution of area leased in and leased out across classes 211
8.9. Options open to agricultural labor households and poor peasantry
in the surveyed villages 212
9.1. Class-wise relative shares of operational holdings in
Andhra Pradesh (in %) 223
9.2. Area, production, and yield of food grains in Andhra Pradesh (in %) 224
9.3. Agrarian structure in sample villages in Andhra Pradesh 227
9.4. Sources for land acquisition (in %) 228
9.5. Caste–class distribution of households (in %) 228
9.6. Average size of landholding across castes (in acres) 229
9.7. Institutional and non-institutional credit (in %) 230
9.8. Farm costs and returns in Andhra Pradesh, 2012–2013 (in INR) 231
9.9. Average net agricultural, nonagricultural, and total incomes of rural
households (in INR and %) 232
9.10. Average household net income from agricultural activities
(in INR and %) 233
9.11. Net income from nonagricultural activities (in INR and %) 234
9.12. Average welfare transfers to households per annum in three villages
(in INR) 235
12.1. Succession of events showing land acquisition for CTIL 290
13.1. Perception gap on land: Customary vs. positive law 307
13.2. The three-tier model of land use and conservation of ICAR 308
13.3. Hydropower potential assessed and developed in NER (in MW) 318

xiv
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

ABD accumulation by dispossession

AGL Agricultural labor households
AHPL Average Household Poverty Line
AIR All India Review
APDR Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights
AQ agrarian question
AROGYSREE Health Insurance Scheme of Government of Andhra Pradesh
ASSOCHAM Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India
BJP Bharatiya Janata Party
BPO Business Process Outsourcing
CEA Central Electricity Authority
CHT Chittagong Hill Tracts
CII Confederation of Indian Industry
CMIE Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy
CPI (M) Communist Party of India (Marxist)
CPI (ML) Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) (Maoist)
CTIL Century Textiles and Industries Limited
DLF Delhi Land and Finance
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization
FDI farm disposable income
FDI foreign direct investment
FIAN Food First Information and Action Network
FICCI Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry
FLI farm labor income
FRA Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of
Forest Rights) Act, 2006
GLR Gauhati Law Review
GLT Gauhati Law Tribunal
GNEA Greater Noida Extension Area
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

GoM group of ministers

GR green revolution
GVO gross value of output
HYV high yielding variety
ICAR Indian Council of Agricultural Research
ICDS Integrated Child Development Services
IDFC Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation
INR Indian Rupee
IT information technology
JPC Joint Parliamentary Committee
JUSCO Jamshedpur Utilities and Services Company
KARA Kerala Agrarian Relations Act
KARB Kerala Agrarian Relations Bill
KLRAA Kerala Land Reforms Amended Act
LAA Land Acquisition Act
LARR Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition,
Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013
LFG Left Front Government
LWE Left wing extremism
MASS Manab Adhikar Sangram Sanity
MD managing director
MLA Member of the Legislative Assembly
MoEF Ministry of Environment and Forest
MoU Memorandum of Understanding
MP Member of Parliament
MP middle peasantry
MPCE monthly per capita expenditure
MW megawatts
MWC Mahindra World City
MWCSEZ Mahindra World City special economic zone
NAPM National Alliance of People’s Movements
NCEUS National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector
NCH noncultivating landowning households
NDA National Democratic Alliance
NEI Northeast India
NER Northeastern region

xvi
 List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

NFS non-farm sector

NGO non-governmental Organization
NOC No Objection Certificate
NOIDA New Okhla Industrial Development Authority
NREGA (also MNREGA) Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act
NRRP National Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy
NSS National Sample Survey
NSSO National Sample Survey Organization
PA primitive accumulation
PCP petty commodity production/producers
PDS public distribution system
PESA Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996
POSCO Pohang Iron and Steel Company
PP poor peasantry
PPP public-private partnership
PRI Panchayati Raj institutions
RBI Reserve Bank of India
RP rich peasantry
RTI Right to Information
SC scheduled caste
SCR Supreme Court Review
SEZ special economic zone
SHG self-help group
SOMALA Social Organizations of Meghalaya Against Land Alienation
ST scheduled tribe
THI total household income
TISCO Tata Iron and Steel Company
TL Telengana
TMC Trinamool Congress
UP Uttar Pradesh
UPA United Progressive Alliance
UPS Usual Principal Status
USD US dollar
WB West Bengal
WBHDR West Bengal Human Development Report
WBIDC West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation

xvii
List of Contributors

Shapan Adnan obtained a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the University of
Cambridge. He is currently an independent scholar based in the UK. He has formerly
taught at the National University of Singapore and Universities of Dhaka and
Chittagong. He has been a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford and is
currently an Associate of its Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme (CSASP).
He is a member of the international advisory board of the Journal of Peasant Studies and
the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission. His research and publications cover political
economy, sociology, anthropology, and development.
Arindam Banerjee is Associate Professor in Economics at the School of Liberal Studies,
Ambedkar University Delhi. He has completed his doctoral degree from the Centre for
Economic Studies and Planning, JNU, New Delhi, on agrarian crisis and peasant accu-
mulation. He has earlier worked at the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum,
and Research and Information System, New Delhi. His primary areas of research
interest are agrarian change, food security, political economy, and colonialism.
Rajesh Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor in the Public Policy and Management
Group at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He has also taught at South
Asian University, University of Calcutta, and Presidency University. He obtained his
PhD in Economics from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research areas
include capitalism and dispossession, informal economy, urban political economy,
and financialization of capital.
Snehashish Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Economics at South
Asian University, New Delhi. He has also taught at Franklin and Marshall College,
Pennsylvania, and The New School University, New York. His research interests include
the political economy of development and the informal economy.
Achin Chakraborty is Professor of Economics and the Director of the Institute of
Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). Before joining IDSK in 2004 he had been an
Associate Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala. Chakraborty
received his PhD in Economics from the University of California at Riverside. He
was a visiting professor at Sciences-Po, Paris. He has published widely in journals
such as Economic Theory, Journal of Environment and Development, Social Indicators
Research, and Economic and Political Weekly in the areas of development economics,
welfare economics, and methodology of economics.

xix
List of Contributors

Gorky Chakraborty is Associate Professor of Economics at Institute of Development

Studies Kolkata Kolkata. He works on issues related to development in Northeast India.
His most recent book is Look East Policy and Northeast India (2014).
Partha Chatterjee is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Columbia
University, New York, and Honorary Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,
Calcutta. Among his many books are Bengal: The Land Question (1984), Nationalist
Thought and the Colonial World (1986), The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), The Politics
of the Governed (2004), and Lineages of Political Society (2011).
Anthony P. D’Costa is Chair and Professor of Contemporary Indian Studies,
Development Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. He has taught at the
Copenhagen Business School and the University of Washington. He has written exten-
sively on the political economy of steel, auto, and IT industries covering themes of
capitalism and globalization, development, innovations, industrial restructuring, and
international mobility of labor. Of his several books, his most recent ones are After
Development Dynamics: South Korea’s Engagement with Contemporary Asia (2015, edited)
and Changing Structures of Accumulation: Global Capitalism and the Mobility of IT Profes-
sionals from India to Japan (2016). He is currently working on labor markets in high-tech
cities.
Anirban Dasgupta is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics, South Asian
University. He is a development economist with interests in agrarian studies and
inclusive development strategies. He has published in Conservation and Society, Devel-
opment and Change, European Journal of Development Research, and Journal of Peasant
Studies. His current work is on the impact of global integration on Indian agriculture
and the status of development theory in the contemporary world.
Kaveri Gill completed her Tripos, MPhil, and PhD, as well as a post-doctoral fellowship,
at the University of Cambridge. She has worked with the Planning Commission;
UNICEF; the Think Tank Initiative, IDRC; and Oxford Policy Management in New Delhi.
Kaveri has published widely, including a monograph with Oxford University Press. Her
research interests include the political economy of development and the informal
sector; waste and sanitation; and public policy and its implementation in social sectors,
especially health.
Abhijit Guha is Professor of Anthropology at Vidyasagar University, West Bengal,
India. He has been studying land grabs by the government in West Bengal since
1994. Guha has uniquely combined anthropological fieldwork and archival data from
departmental files and West Bengal Assembly Proceedings to construct ethnographies
of land acquisition. His book Land, Law and the Left: A Saga of Disempowerment of the
Peasantry in the Era of Globalisation (2007) is the first micro-level policy critique of the
Left Government in West Bengal. He was selected as an expert in 2008 to give recom-
mendations to the Parliamentary Standing Committee for the making of the new Land
Acquisition Law of India.
Michael Levien is Assistant Professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His
articles on land dispossession in India have appeared in Politics & Society, World

xx
 List of Contributors

Development, Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian
Change, Development and Change and The Hindu.
R. V. Ramana Murthy is Professor of Economics teaching at the School of Economics,
University of Hyderabad. His current areas of research are agrarian transition and
agrarian question in India, structural transformation, and political economy of
global capitalism, and neoliberalism. He teaches research methodology, agricultural
economics, and the Indian economy since independence.
Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist working at the Department of Sociology,
University of Bergen, Norway. He also coordinates the Norwegian Network for Asian
Studies hosted by the University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and the Environ-
ment. His most recent book is a co-edited volume on The Politics of Caste in West
Bengal (2016).
Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Bergen,
Norway, and a visiting senior researcher at the Society, Work and Development Insti-
tute at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His research focuses on social
movements in the global south, with a particular concentration on India. He is the
author of Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (2010) and
co-author of We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight
of Neoliberalism (2014).
Malabika Pal is Associate Professor in Economics at Miranda House College, University
of Delhi. She obtained her PhD in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi. Her research interests are in the fields of Law and Economics and Inter-
national Economics. She has worked on the economic analysis of tort law, the issues
related to the acquisition of land and on financial crises. She is a recipient of the
National Scholarship and the Ford Foundation Scholarship.
Mircea Raianu is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Harvard University,
completing a dissertation entitled “The Incorporation of India: The Tata Business Firm
between Empire and Nation, ca. 1870–1960.” He was the recipient of a Fulbright-Nehru
Fellowship in 2013–14. His broader research interests include political economy and
the legal and intellectual history of capitalism in modern South Asia.
Asok Kumar Ray was a visiting fellow at Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change
and Development, Guwahati. He works on political anthropology and institutions of
the tribes in Northeast India and has written extensively on these issues.
R. Vijay is Professor of Economics at University of Hyderabad. He has completed his
doctoral work on land markets with specific emphasis on peasant migration as a factor
for an alternate land use pattern. His main research interests are the process of agrarian
change in the rural economy and to analyze the impact of institutions on economic
performance. He has published extensively on changing rural economic structure and
nature of agrarian relations.

xxi
Prelude

Land and the Political Management

of Primitive Accumulation

Partha Chatterjee

The People as a Political Construct

It is well known that the people first emerged in the history of the modern
state sometime in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the
French, the American, and the Bolivárian revolutions in the Spanish colonies
of South America. These were republican revolutions against monarchy and
empire. They shifted the locus of legitimate sovereignty from the divine or
dynastic rights of kings to that of the people. It is also well known that the idea
of the people in this new concept of popular sovereignty was entirely abstract.
In actuality, only a small part of the people was regarded as proper citizens
with the right to be consulted in matters of law making or administration. But
when new republican elites began to wield power, sometimes in thoroughly
authoritarian ways, they always did so in the name of the people. And when
the wave of democratic revolutions swept through Europe in the nineteenth
century and anti-colonial revolutions became victorious in Asia and Africa in
the twentieth, it was the idea of the people as the only legitimate foundation
of sovereignty in the modern world that became universally recognized as a
feature of modernity itself.
The idea of populism as we know it today arose in the twentieth century
with the emergence of mass democracies, first in Europe and then in other
parts of the world. In some ways, it is connected with a very old idea, going
back to ancient Greece, which, while accepting the principle that regular
public consultations among proper citizens made for good government, was
The Land Question in India

at the same time deeply suspicious of the rule of the demos. The industrial
societies of Western Europe and North America first established bourgeois
norms and practices of representation and equality before the law within a
limited section of the population and subsequently spread them to the rest of
society through the extension of the suffrage to workers and women, the
universalization of primary and secondary education, the growth of civil–
social associations including national trade unions among the working
classes, and the creation of national political parties with mass electoral
following. For most of the twentieth century, liberal democracy in Europe
and North America confidently asserted that the most efficient way to main-
tain the rule of capitalist property and merit-based reward was to do so within
a system of competitive electoral democracy with universal adult franchise.
Populism has challenged this confidence, so that the orthodox view in
political theory is to regard populism as a perversion of democracy. Populism
points to the inequalities in wealth, income, and power that prevail in con-
temporary democracies and claims, on behalf of the authentic people, to
attack those enemies of the people who rule by force, corruption, and false-
hood. There have been several kinds of populism in the twentieth century,
especially in Latin America but also more recently in Asia. Some have been
right-wing, others left-wing; many defy classification in traditional ideological
terms. In recent years, populism has become the subject of sophisticated
theorization, especially following the writings of Ernesto Laclau (2005).
I bring up the phenomenon of contemporary populism in order to connect
it to another recent development in the political economy of capitalist
development in Asia and Africa. This is what Marx referred to in Capital, volume
1, as “the so-called primitive accumulation” (Marx 1990). Some recent scholars
in India have revisited Marx on this topic and suggested that it has much to do
with the recent spate of populist politics in postcolonial democracies in Asia
and Africa. By connecting populism to primitive accumulation in the specific
context of claims to the possession of land in contemporary India, I hope to
frame the discussions in this volume within a broader political-economic field.

The Concept of Primitive Accumulation

The concept of primitive accumulation has recently reappeared in academic

circles as a result of David Harvey’s discussion of “accumulation by disposses-
sion” in his book The New Imperialism (Harvey 2003). I will have more to say
later about Harvey’s argument. However, for our present discussion, an even
more important recent intervention, in my view, was made in 2007 by the late
Indian economist Kalyan Sanyal. But before I come to that subject, let me
quickly review Marx’s discussion of primitive accumulation.

2
 Prelude

In the last chapters of Capital, volume 1, Marx engaged in a historical

discussion whose immediate object was to show the erroneous idea in Adam
Smith of what Smith called “the previous accumulation” of capital as simply
the accumulation of stock that precedes the division of labor. Marx showed
that in order to emerge as industrial capital, there must first be a primitive or
primary accumulation of capital in which three essential preconditions would
have to be established. First, the direct producer, whether peasant or artisan,
belonging to the precapitalist economy, must be dissociated from his or her
means of production. Second, those means of production must come into the
possession of the capitalist. Third, the dispossessed peasant or artisan must
then have no option but to become a wage laborer and sell his or her labor-
power to the capitalist. The emergence of the free wage laborer, freed from
precapitalist bonds of servitude as well as from his own means of production,
is an essential condition for industrial capitalism. Marx’s historical chapters
summarized the process in England from the end of serfdom to the expulsion
of peasants from the land which created the mass of property-less workers that
would form the labor force for the industrial revolution.
All of those who lost their means of production could not be immediately
absorbed into the new factories. Marx did talk about the political management
of primitive accumulation when he mentioned the laws against vagabondage,
the workhouses for the poor, or packing off the destitute to Australia. But we
will see why his discussion on this point is inadequate.
Since dispossessed workers no longer had any means of production of their
own, they now had to buy all of their subsistence needs as commodities from
the market. In other words, the pool of wage laborers also created a home
market for the products of industrial capital. Historically, therefore, the destruc-
tion of handicrafts in general, and rural domestic industry in particular, was a
necessary precondition for capitalist production.
In all of this, the role of the state was crucial. The destruction of feudal
property required the force of law. In addition, Marx mentions the role of the
public debt which had to be paid by increased taxation, which in turn led to
the pauperization of small owners. But, as we will see, there are many other
ways in which the state was instrumental in facilitating the primitive accu-
mulation of capital.
In Western Europe, primitive accumulation was more or less accomplished
by the middle of the nineteenth century. This was, we must remember, before
the age of universal franchise and mass democracy. In the white settler
colonies of the Americas and Australia, the indigenous populations were expro-
priated by force by the European colonists who seized their lands. In North
America, the indigenous peoples were not included at all within the colonial
economic formation, not even as an exploited workforce. The abundance of
land and other means of production meant that most white settlers were small

3
The Land Question in India

owners and few were wage laborers. Colonies in the US South and the
Caribbean, which had large plantations, had labor consisting of African slaves.
The rise of industrial capitalism in North America required the creation of a
pool of free wage laborers. This was accomplished by the emancipation of slaves
and the new influx of migrant laborers from Europe in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. With the end of slavery in the Caribbean, plantation
labor was supplied by free but indentured laborers, mostly from India. In all of
this, once again, the role of the state was crucial.
To return to the story of primitive accumulation in Europe, not all those who
were dispossessed of their means of production could be absorbed as wage
laborers in industry. Marx underestimates the scale of this surplus population.
Emigration to the Americas, Australia, and other colonies was a major part of
the political management of primitive accumulation in Europe. Between 1815
and 1920, some 60 million Europeans migrated to the Americas. Besides, there
were the millions of soldiers who died as cannon fodder in the endless European
wars of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. A million people
died in the Seven Years War in the middle of the eighteenth century, 5 million
died in the Napoleonic wars in the early nineteenth century, 20 million died in
World War I and at least 50 million died in Europe in World War II. Deaths by
famine and epidemic were quite significant in European countries even in the
nineteenth century, the most well known being the Irish famine of the 1840s,
in which a million and a half people perished. The point is that in an age before
mass democracy, such catastrophic deaths in wars, epidemics, or famines were
politically far less damaging to the ruling powers than they would be now. That
is a crucial point of difference in the conditions in which primitive accumula-
tion is being managed in the countries of Asia and Africa today.
One should also mention here that in the so-called latecomer capitalist
countries, the classic English way of the emergence of capital from below
was not available. Germany and Japan industrialized in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century under a centralized authoritarian state extracting
surplus from the agrarian sector to finance huge military expenditures to
create demand for industrially produced consumption and capital goods.
The dispossessed peasant population was—often coercively—mobilized into
a labor force for state-financed infrastructure projects, state-sponsored indus-
try, and, most significantly, the rapidly expanding armed forces. What is
often called the second way of capitalism opened up the political possibility
of the authoritarian management of primitive accumulation in the twenti-
eth century. Indeed, the political management of primitive accumulation in
the Soviet Union could be said to have been accomplished largely along the
lines of the second way. This was theorized in the 1920s by the Soviet
economist Yevgeny Preobrazhensky as “primitive socialist accumulation”
(Preobrazhensky 1965). Primitive accumulation was carried out in the

4
 Prelude

1930s under Stalin’s collectivization program using extremely coercive and

violent methods.

Luxemburg’s Elaboration

Rosa Luxemburg claimed in The Accumulation of Capital (1913) that a capitalist

economy with expanded reproduction must necessarily face a crisis in realiz-
ing the surplus because the under-consumption by workers caused by their
low wages would not provide sufficient markets for the additional products of
expanded industrial manufacture. This crisis would have to be resolved by
finding new markets in noncapitalist economies. Luxemburg’s theoretical
claim of a necessary tendency toward a realization crisis has been disputed.
It has also been shown that if trade between the capitalist and noncapitalist
sectors is balanced, it would not resolve the crisis by providing new markets.
Nevertheless, Luxemburg does provide a valid account of the actual histor-
ical process by which capital from advanced industrial countries dispossessed
direct producers in the less advanced countries of Europe and in the European
colonies of the East. She describes, first, the struggle against the natural
economy through war and oppressive taxation in which the objects were to
gain possession of land, forests, and minerals; to extract coerced labor; and
to introduce a commodity economy. The examples were the British in India,
the French in Algeria, and the Opium War in China. Second, she spoke of the
attacks on the simple commodity economy of peasant societies. Third, she
pointed out the international struggle for accumulation by export of capital
to Russia, Turkey, Persia, India, Japan, China, and North Africa.

Primitive Accumulation in Large Agrarian Countries

Let me turn briefly to the history of primitive accumulation in the colonial

countries of Asia, especially those with large agrarian populations. If we look at
India, one of the most thoroughly administered European colonial posses-
sions in the world, we find that primitive accumulation was first accomplished
by colonial officials and European traders in the eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries who, by plundering the wealth of India, contributed, as
Marx himself noted, to the formation of merchant capital in Britain. In the
nineteenth century, Europeans acquired land in India for tea and coffee
plantations as well as for mining, with the active support of the colonial
state. British companies also built railways and other infrastructure in India
with the legal and financial help of the state. Following the industrial revolu-
tion in Britain, imported manufactures, especially textiles, flooded the Indian

5
The Land Question in India

market causing widespread destruction of the traditional crafts and forcing

the dispossessed artisans into complete dependence on agriculture. This cre-
ated a somewhat unique problem for the colonial government in India. The
dispossessed peasantry had no alternative occupations. Hence, large-scale
dispossession of peasants carried the constant threat of peasant revolt as well
as famines. British rule in India is marked by a long series of local peasant
uprisings as well as numerous famines, large and small. Consequently, while
the colonial state promoted capitalist accumulation, it was also careful to
protect the tenancy rights of peasants. As we will see, this set an enduring
condition for postcolonial development.
After India gained independence in 1947, Indian capitalists initially looked to
the new postcolonial state to mobilize the capital required for heavy industry
and infrastructure. In the 1950s and 1960s, a large state sector in steel, heavy
engineering, mining, oil and gas, roads, railways, airways, and even banking
and insurance was created, much like in the second way of capitalist growth.
The consumer goods sector was left to private capital. The interesting feature of
the Indian case was the popular base of anti-colonial nationalism, organized
through the Indian National Congress, a democratic political organization. This
made it necessary for the postcolonial state to grant ownership rights to small
farmers and protect the occupations of traditional craftspeople. Even when they
were politically mobilized by the rural rich, small farmers exerted considerable
pressure on government through the process of electoral democracy.
This regime of planned economy with a large state sector and strictly
regulated private sector came to an end in 1991. The economy was opened
up to the entry of foreign capital and consumer goods. Several state sectors
such as transport, telecommunications, infrastructure, mining, banking, and
insurance were opened up to private capital. Before the financial crisis of 2008,
the annual growth rate of the Indian economy reached 8 or 9 percent. With
this began a new phase of primitive accumulation, which has shaken the
foundations of traditional small-peasant agriculture.
The key features of this new phase of primitive accumulation are the fol-
lowing. First, there is the growth of a vast informal economy. This is not the
remnant of the traditional subsistence economy. Rather, it is the product of
the new phase of capitalist accumulation. Official estimates show that more
than 80 percent of enterprises in India are in the informal sector and most
owners are self-employed, using family labor (National Commission for Enter-
prises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) 2007). While many of these units
are in the traditional sector such as subsistence agriculture, there is clear
evidence that rural populations are being increasingly forced to abandon
agriculture for informal nonagricultural activities.
Second, there is a migration of dispossessed people from rural areas, espe-
cially into medium- and small-sized towns. Recent censuses show that

6
 Prelude

population growth in the large metropolitan cities of India has stabilized,

while in smaller towns it is rising rapidly. Third, there is the spread of non-
agricultural occupations in rural areas. In many regions, the majority of people
living in villages no longer pursue agriculture as their main occupation. All of
these are new features of primitive accumulation, posing completely new
political challenges.

The Political Problem of Primitive Accumulation

Recent discussions on primitive accumulation in India follow from the theor-

etical arguments made by Kalyan Sanyal (2007). As we have said earlier, one of
the historical conditions under which primitive accumulation is taking place
today in postcolonial countries is the absence of some of the key methods of
its political management that were available to European capitalism—mass
emigration, conscription into the army, or deaths in epidemics and famines.
As a result, postcolonial history has brought into the open a constitutive
feature of capitalist development that was hidden in its European journey.
The massive surplus population of the dispossessed that primitive accumula-
tion in contemporary postcolonial countries is producing shows that in the
process of its emergence, capital creates its own outside, which is not preca-
pital but something entirely new. The new dispossessed population is not a
reserve army of labor waiting to be absorbed into the industrial labor force: it is
entirely redundant to the capitalist growth economy.
In other words, primitive accumulation largely destroys the old precapitalist
economy, especially traditional small-peasant agriculture. But in its place,
capitalist growth creates a huge sector of informal production and services
that is not a vestige of precapital but is in fact a new outside of capital. Those in
the informal sector compete in the same marketplace with formally incorpor-
ated firms. They manage to survive because their logic is not, as in the formal
domain of capital, that of accumulation but sheer subsistence. A large number
of informal units operate with family labor; where outside labor is employed,
the owner is often himself or herself also a worker. Survival is frequently the
result of self-exploitation.
How is the surplus population living under such precarious conditions in
the zone outside of capital to be governed? Sanyal argues that even though
capital is economically self-subsistent and does not need this outside to
guarantee its conditions of reproduction, it is not politically or socially
self-subsistent. That is to say, for reasons of social and political legitimacy, it
cannot afford to ignore this outside and simply allow it to perish. Hence,
Sanyal argues, it becomes incumbent upon postcolonial capitalism to reverse
the effects of primitive accumulation.

7
The Land Question in India

How is this done? A part of the revenues that accrue to the state from taxes
levied on the capitalist growth sector is used for social expenditures to support
the livelihood of the dispossessed population. While primitive accumulation
continues to destroy traditional occupations, its effects are sought to be
reversed through the mediation of the state.
Several techniques have emerged for carrying out this process of reversal.
First, there are direct transfers of money and commodities to the dispossessed
groups through projects of poverty removal, for example subsidized food,
guaranteed employment for specific periods, housing loans, and so on. Sec-
ond, subsidized public services are provided for poor and disadvantaged
groups in transport, health, schooling, and so on. Third, easy loans are pro-
vided for small businesses and self-employment. Fourth, production and
service units in the informal sector are allowed to violate tax, labor, or pollu-
tion laws that apply to the corporate sector. Fifth, specific groups may be
allowed to build unauthorized housing, vending stalls, production units,
and so on. However, the crucial condition is that all of this must be done
without jeopardizing the formal legal structure of property and civic norms.
This condition is achieved in most cases by administrative decisions that treat
these specific cases as exceptions to the law.
How are these governmental techniques of the reversal of the effects of
primitive accumulation actually negotiated in the field of politics? It could
be done through either authoritarian decisions or democratic compromise.
Each has its own advantages and risks. The example of India may be useful in
discussing these alternative strategies of political management of primitive
accumulation.

Political Society as a Field of Negotiation

The state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975–7 was the last
sustained attempt in India to push through a developmental agenda by
authoritarian bureaucratic methods of the kind that had been used, with
varying degrees of effectiveness, in many other Third World countries. For
India’s governing classes, the failure of the Emergency drove home the lesson
that biopolitical projects that have to do with the physical conditions of the
life of the people could not be successfully pursued without passing them
through the sieve of voluntary consent. Further, it also became clear that
welfare measures could not be effectively administered except by opening
their terms to negotiation with the affected population groups. The difficulty
was that the ordinary conditions of citizenship and representation on which
the constitutionally ordained structure of rights and duties was founded could
not uniformly be made to apply to all population groups, especially not to the

8
 Prelude

urban poor making a living in the informal economy. Most of the time, the
poor in the city were not property owners, nor did they always observe the
duties of proper urban citizens. What were the terms on which they might be
recognized as parties to governmental negotiation?
The idea of political society (Chatterjee 2004, 2011) recognizes something
new in the way governmental authorities began to negotiate with population
groups. This no longer fitted the old form of patron–client relations between
local notables and their protégés, nor was it quite the same as a political fixer
getting things done at a government office on behalf of a local community. In
the older models, the form of the local community was already given by the
history of local social structures, and the function of the patron, too, was
usually made possible by the prevailing hierarchies of class and status. Political
society, on the other hand, often creates a community where none existed
before, or else it gives new form to older community structures. That is to say,
population groups by engaging with political society acquire the moral char-
acter of community. The phenomenon was particularly novel in the Indian
city of the late twentieth century.
But the period following the end of the Emergency was also the time when
postcolonial democracy gained wider and deeper foundations in rural India.
The result was the emergence of political society around the new forms of
negotiation between rural population groups and governmental agencies.
Rapidly expanded governmental activities in rural India provided the grid
for population groups to be mobilized into the moral form of communities
with voice and identity. Consequently, the idea of political society marked a
new moment in the democratization of Indian politics and society.
Take the familiar example of squatter settlements of the poor in numerous
cities of India. These urban populations occupy land that does not belong to
them and often use water, electricity, public transport, and other services
without paying for them. But governmental authorities do not necessarily
try to punish or put a stop to such illegalities, because of the political recog-
nition that these populations serve certain necessary functions in the urban
economy and that to forcibly remove them would involve huge political costs.
On the other hand, they cannot also be treated as legitimate members of civil
society who abide by the law. As a result, municipal authorities or the police
deal with these people not as rights-bearing citizens but as urban populations
who have specific characteristics and needs and who must be appropriately
governed. On their side, these groups of urban poor negotiate with the
authorities through political mobilization and alliances with other groups.
On the plane of governmentality, populations do not carry the ethical
significance of citizenship. They are heterogeneous groups, each of which is
defined and classified by its empirically observed characteristics and consti-
tuted as a rationally manipulable target population for governmental policies.

9
The Land Question in India

Consequently, if, despite their illegal occupation of land, they are given
electricity connections or allowed to use municipal services, it is not because
they have a right to them but because the authorities make a political calcu-
lation of costs and benefits and agree, for the time being, to give them those
benefits. However, this can only be done in a way that does not jeopardize the
legal order of property and the rights of proper citizens. The usual method is to
construct a case such that the particular illegality associated with a specific
population group may be treated as an exception that does not disturb the
fundamental rule of law. Governmental decisions aimed at regulating the vast
populations of the urban poor usually add up to a series of exceptions to the
normal application of the law.
Populations respond to the regime of governmentality by seeking to con-
stitute themselves as groups that deserve the attention of government. If as
squatters they have violated the law, they do not necessarily deny that fact,
nor do they claim that their illegal occupation of land is right. But they insist
that they have a right to housing and livelihood in the city, and, if they are
required to move elsewhere, they must be provided with rehabilitation. They
form associations to negotiate with governmental authorities and seek public
support for their cause. This becomes a major form of political participation
for these groups, invoking their status as formal citizens but acting in ways
that often contravene the approved practices of civic life. Their political
mobilization involves an effort to turn an empirically formed population
group into a virtuous community. The force of this moral appeal usually
hinges on the generally recognized obligation of government to provide for
the poor and the underprivileged.

Populism as the Political Form of Mass Democracy

This is where the politics of populism comes in. If we consider the example of
elections in India, we will find that the overwhelming bulk of the political
rhetoric expended in election campaigns concerns what governments have
or have not done for which population groups. The function of rhetoric here
is to turn the heterogeneous demands of populations into the morally coher-
ent and emotionally persuasive form of popular demands. In this sense,
populism is the only morally legitimate form of democratic politics under
these conditions. It is important to emphasize that unlike traditional theories
of modernization that would regard such populism as a perversion of mod-
ern democratic politics, our present approach would consider it with utter
seriousness as a new and potentially richer development of democracy. It is
also worth pointing out that one of the persistent findings of election studies
in India is the relatively high electoral participation of voters belonging

10
 Prelude

to the poor and underprivileged sections of the electorate (Stepan, Linz,

and Yadav 2010).
If we follow Ernesto Laclau’s argument on populist reason, the crucial
condition is set by the sheer heterogeneity of demands made on government
in any contemporary society. This heterogeneity is not unrelated to the fact
that the massive social mobilizations that were effected in the twentieth
century by giant trade unions and mass-based political parties have been
largely dissolved in the last three or four decades by the administrative tech-
niques of governmentality that no longer distribute universal welfare as an
entitlement of citizenship but rather offer specific benefits to specific target
population groups on the basis of specific empirically established needs. The
heterogeneous population groups who are today the recipients of governmen-
tal benefits do not carry the moral significance of citizenship; they are merely
population groups that need to be appropriately governed. The political strat-
egy on the part of the ruling powers was clearly calculated to break up the large
mobilizations that often challenged the stability of the capitalist order
through paralyzing strikes by large trade unions and threatening electoral
challenges by socialist or communist parties with mass electoral support. As
Foucault (2010) explained in his lectures on biopolitics, the success of neo-
liberal governmentality was to put in place a different rationality of looking
after populations—one that was flexible, attuned to individual needs and
motivations, operating through a system of incentives and penalties that
would achieve the desired social outcome by relying on the apparently free
choice of individual beneficiaries.
But no system of governmentality can ever satisfy every need in society. If it
did, government would be reduced to mere administration and there would be
no place at all for any politics. In actual fact, demands are constantly made for
governmental benefits, even though they are quite heterogeneous. It is in the
domain of politics that they have to be turned into more comprehensive
demands. Populism turns heterogeneous demands into the rhetorical fullness
of popular demands. Laclau (2005) argues that chains of equivalence are
established among these heterogeneous demands in order to claim that des-
pite their substantive differences, they are all unfulfilled demands of the
authentic people who are being denied those benefits by the ruling group
who are none other than enemies of the people.
The field of electoral politics in postcolonial democracies like India is marked
by competitive populism. Parties and leaders seek to give voice to a set of
heterogeneous demands by different population groups. But they must also
establish chains of equivalence among these demands in order to put together
large voting blocs that would enable them to win seats and form governments.
Populist rhetoric pitting the deprived people against their oppressive enemies
is the usual way by which these electoral mobilizations are achieved.

11
The Land Question in India

From the point of view of those who survive in the informal sector and make
claims through what I have called political society, the field of negotiation with
governmental authorities is necessarily uncertain, laying down no firm prin-
ciples, recognizing no definite rights, but leaving everything to the repeated and
always temporary negotiation of claims. Groups in political society have to pick
their way through this uncertain terrain by making a large array of connections
outside the group—with other groups in similar situations, with more privil-
eged and influential groups, with government functionaries, with political
parties and leaders. They often make instrumental use of the fact that they
can vote in elections. But the instrumental use of the vote is possible only
within a field of strategic politics. This is the stuff of democratic politics as it
takes place on the ground in India. It involves what appears to be a constantly
shifting compromise between the normative values of constitutional propriety
and the demonstrative assertion of popular demands.
Governmental authorities, on the other hand, when conceding a demand by
making an exception to the law in a particular case, have to be careful that the
interests of proper law-abiding citizens are not thereby threatened. Thus, squat-
ters may be allowed water and electricity connections at specific negotiated
rates as an exception to the usual structure of rates paid by regular customers, or
vendors may be allowed to set up temporary stalls on the pavement without
threatening the regular shops that have licenses and pay taxes, or small indus-
tries and services in the informal sector may be allowed to ignore labor laws and
pollution regulations that apply to the formal sector. Declaring exceptions of
this kind is always a balancing act and creates an unstable arrangement that
may be disturbed either because the courts decide that the exception is unjus-
tified or the political balance shifts against the population group concerned.
Given the huge number of demands that arise in an immensely heteroge-
neous society such as India where the vast majority of the population lives and
works in the informal sector outside the properly regulated zones of civil
society, the administrative response to these demands ends up in an array of
temporary and often inconsistent exceptions. Population groups, too, do not
seek to fundamentally change the existing structure of rules and regulations
but claim that an exception be made in their case. As a result, the working of
political society ends up in the piling up of exceptions.
The populist politics that tries to bring together the demands of disparate
and localized groups does not constitute a revolutionary challenge to the
structure of state authority. As a political imaginary, it seems to have little
potential for radical democratic change. Many commentators think that the
idea of political society empties the political actions of poor and exploited
people of any concerted or sustained resistance to an oppressive and corrupt
state machinery deeply involved in supporting the primitive accumulation of
capital. Instead, it seems to focus exclusively on the negotiated transactions

12
 Prelude

between government agencies and target population groups over the distri-
bution of governmental benefits. It involves limited struggles for daily survival
and prevents the emergence of a long-term strategy or vision of radical trans-
formation (Gudavarthy 2012).
The charge is not entirely untrue. The form of politics spawned by political
society has a horizon limited to the demands of particular groups and does not
seek to generalize its claims to all citizens. But the techniques of struggle
frequently go beyond the limits of the law and sometimes even use violence
(or show of violence) in order to demonstrate extraordinary outrage or draw
the attention of the wider public through the news media to the demands of
the group. There is resistance in political society, sometimes even of a spec-
tacular kind. But more often than not, it is resistance that tests rather than
overtly violates the limits of conventional political practice. In so doing, it
sometimes manages to induce responses from governmental agencies that
change the familiar forms of the conventional.
Some of these changes happen cumulatively. Thus, repeated local struggles
against eviction have led over the decades to a conventional view in most
Indian cities that long-standing slums cannot be cleared. The recognition by
the authorities of the claims of one group of pavement vendors becomes a
precedent that can be used by other groups. Urban groups of this kind
have managed to build national coalitions to coordinate their struggles,
learn from one another and present to the authorities more coherent sets of
demands. The long struggles against slum demolition have brought forth
national policy statements from the government laying down a framework
for the rehabilitation of evicted populations. But there are moments when
apparently uncoordinated local struggles could, simply by their simultaneity,
force the issue into the limelight and bring forth a policy response from the
government. Thus, a spate of agitations in different parts of India against the
acquisition by government of land for industry has led to new legislation
offering better terms of compensation to those who lose their land. The
present government in India, acting under pressure from corporate capitalist
lobbies, has failed so far to push through new laws making it easier to acquire
the land of small farmers for new industry and urban housing. Examples of
such coordinated resistance in political society are clearly growing.

To Conclude

David Harvey has argued that the term “primitive” is an odd characterization
for accumulation in today’s context when capital is several centuries old and
that “accumulation by dispossession” is a far more general description that
could include older as well as recent instances of the history of accumulation

13
The Land Question in India

(Harvey 2003). But Harvey overlooks a central feature of Marx’s definition.

Harvey’s focus is, of course, on the shift from manufacturing to finance capital
in Western capitalist economies where much new accumulation is taking
place through the acquisition of assets in real estate, housing, pension
funds, and so on by speculative financial operations. The result is the dispos-
session of millions of people with small properties. This is undoubtedly a
major new feature of contemporary capitalism. However, this dispossession
does not involve the separation of the primary producer from his/her means
of production. Those losing their homes in the United States because of the
collapse of housing companies or financial corporations were not primary
producers and had no means of production of their own. The theoretical as
well as historical significance of this sort of dispossession is quite different
from the dispossession of peasants and artisans in Asian and African countries.
The point is illustrated by a pervasive feature of contemporary postcolonial
politics that would be hard to find in Europe or North America. There is a deep
distrust in the popular mind in Asian and African countries of the procedures
of justice established in the formal courts of law and administration. These are
seen to be slow, opaque, and needlessly complicated that only the wealthy
and the powerful can manipulate to their advantage. Instead of the procedural
fairness promised by the courts, there is a deep yearning for an impartial judge
whose authority would be accepted by all and who would have arbitrary
powers to deliver justice. Much populist politics plays on this expectation
widely shared among the people. As a result, once in power, populist leaders
and parties will frequently violate procedure and use arbitrary power to deliver
a supposedly good outcome. Needless to say, this tendency in populist politics
only strengthens its authoritarian side. As we have said before, populism can
come in many different ideological shapes.
Looking ahead, it seems certain that as industry, mining, commercial farm-
ing, exploitation of forest resources, and urban development proceed rapidly
in Asian and African countries, primitive accumulation will also continue
unabated. This will mean greater challenges for governments to supervise
this process and minimize its political costs. The more authoritarian forms
could deliver quicker growth but will involve high costs in terms of coercion,
violence, and the stability of the state. The more democratic forms will be slow
and messy but could afford greater flexibility and the possibility of course
correction. Both strategies have their supporters. For those who value the
norms of participation and consultation in the process of government, there
is no question which strategy is to be preferred. However, political outcomes
are not necessarily decided only by rational debate. They depend on move-
ments, organization, and political struggle. The struggle over primitive accu-
mulation, especially in relation to the possession of land, continues to be
waged today in the countries of Asia.

14
 Prelude

References

Chatterjee, P. 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of
the World. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chatterjee, P. 2011. Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Foucault, M. 2010. Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979,
translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador.
Gudavarthy, A. (ed.) 2012. Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating
Political Society. London: Anthem Press.
Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. London: Oxford University Press.
Laclau, E. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Luxemburg, R. 1951 (1913). The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Marx, K. 1990. Capital, vol. 1, part VIII, translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS). 2007.
“Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised
Sector.” Government of India, New Delhi.
Preobrazhensky, E. 1965. The New Economics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmen-
tality and Post-colonial Capitalism. New Delhi and London: Routledge.
Stepan, A., Linz, J. J., and Yadav, Y. 2010. Crafting State-Nations: India and Other
Multinational Democracies. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

15
1

The Land Question in India

State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

Anthony P. D’Costa and Achin Chakraborty

1.1 Introduction

The historical process of capitalist economic transformation, and occasionally

transformation on socialist lines, has relied fundamentally on generating
capital out of agriculture for nonagricultural purposes, mainly for industrial-
ization. This simple routine of structural change has taken many forms over
time and across space, sometimes organically but mostly through direct inter-
vention. In either case, violent forms of change have accompanied capitalist
transition from agriculture to industry. It continues to be that way today.
More squarely, it has been the agrarian transition nested within the larger
capitalist transformation process that lay behind the material and techno-
logical advancement of economies. The speed of change was dependent on
the grip of past institutional arrangements governing land tenure systems, the
rise of incipient capitalist classes in rural areas as well as in urban towns and
mercantile cities, state intervention in creating capitalists by facilitating the
enclosure movement, and the scale of benefits accruing to imperialist nations
from colonialism. The rise of agrarian capitalists has historically spearheaded
the accumulation process by transferring capital to industry in urban areas.
The ensuing dispossession and displacement of peasants and small farmers
from the land contributed to “free” labor, migration, and thus the rise of the
urban industrial proletariat.
This in a nutshell is the transition problématique. Consequently, similar logic
is applied to developing countries where the agriculture sector must undergo
a capitalist revolution for the accumulation process to advance, leading to
a diversified economy that includes strong intersectoral linkages between
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

agriculture and industry. Rising agricultural productivity is key to pushing the

economy forward, just as it pushes the rural workers away from it. Both
Marxist and non-Marxist approaches have dwelt on the theoretical and prac-
tical aspects of agrarian transition in various ways deeming it a necessary
condition for capitalist transformation. While the contemporary advanced
capitalist countries may have undergone some version of this transition,
with a scattering of similar experiences in a handful of East Asian late-
industrializing countries, the position of most of the developing world
(the former colonies and peripheries to metropolitan centers), does not
approximate this trajectory. For some countries, such as India, the agrarian
transition, or its absence, has been hotly debated and pursued piecemeal
through state-mediated land reforms. Gunnar Myrdal in the 1960s had
already proclaimed that India missed a transformational opportunity because
of a poorly designed land reform program (Breman 2010: 322). However,
today this classic form of transition has become moot due to the increasing
insignificance of the agricultural sector in India in fueling overall capital
accumulation. Some would go further and point out that the agricultural
sector depends on public largesse for its viability. In fact, much of India’s
recent high growth rates have resulted largely from both rural and urban
nonagricultural sectors, and curiously, from the growing services sector. The
role of land as conventionally understood in he transition/transformation
problem has taken on a different form and substance.
The objective of this volume is to take a fresh look at the land question in
India. Rather than re-engage in the rich transition debate, which has reached a
cul-de-sac, we go beyond it by critically examining both theoretically and
empirically the role of land in contemporary India. We do not completely
bypass the political economy discourse surrounding the classic question of
capitalist transition in agriculture in India; in fact, our inquiry springs from it.
It is not our intent to debate whether a socialist path exists from the transition
trajectory (à la Brass 2011). However, our focus gravitates toward the devel-
opment discourse that inevitably veers toward land and the role of the state in
pushing a process of dispossession of peasants through direct expropriation
for developmental purposes. By development we mean materialist progress on
largely capitalist lines. Contemporary dispossession may look similar to the
historical process of primitive accumulation whereby peasants were separated
from their land to make room for capitalist agriculture and act as a source of
economic surplus for expanded accumulation. But as we argue in this chapter,
land in India is sought not only for accumulation proper but also for non-
agricultural purposes. For example, farmers purchase land to reduce risk, real
estate developers seek land for the well-off urban residents, and (local) states
acquire land for infrastructure development and on behalf of business to
support the latter’s accumulation strategies such as special economic zones

17
The Land Question in India

(Banerjee-Guha 2013) while states anticipate legitimacy through economic

progress. At another level, tribal communities (adivasis), who depend on land
for their livelihoods and a moral economy that is independent of any price-
driven markets, hold on to such property not as individual owners for profit
but for collective security and to protect a way of life. Thus land, notwith-
standing its historical and contemporary role in the accumulation process, has
been and continues to be a turbulent arena in which classes, castes, and
communities are in conflict with each other, with the state, and with capital,
jockeying to determine the terms and conditions of land transactions or their
prevention, through both market and non-market mechanisms.
The rest of this chapter is divided into three sections. In Section 1.2, we
develop a pathway for analyzing the land question in contemporary India. We
begin with a discussion of the broader transition question in the context of
India’s specific capitalist trajectory, position this volume in the recent litera-
ture that has dealt with the land question, and offer an alternative perspective
as to why the land issue is no longer a transition question. In Section 1.3 we
anticipate some of the political economic consequences of land as a commod-
ity, such as dispossession and conflicts, and the role of the state in develop-
ment today, especially when it comes to mediating land transactions. In this
section we cover three overlapping areas that show the different ways the
Indian state engages with the land question. The first is state intervention in
land for development, the second is the intensification of conflicts over land
today as land is converted into a commodity, and the third is the dual but
contradictory role of the Indian state that gives, as part of its liberal-democratic
responsibilities, and takes, as part of its aggressive pursuit of capitalist develop-
ment on behalf of dominant classes. In Section 1.4 we present a brief sketch of
the individual chapters, dividing them into three groups and integrating them
into the wider context of the land question in India.
This volume goes beyond the perspective traditionally taken in the political
economy of agrarian transition question, and deals with, inter alia, distribu-
tional conflicts arising from acquisition of land by the state for capital
accumulation on the one hand and its commodification on the other. As a
result, one would naturally expect inclusion of the issue of gender in the land
question. We acknowledge that there is a need for “engendering the political
economy of agrarian change” (Razavi 2009: 197), and a volume such as this
using heterodox approaches should ideally include chapters focusing on gen-
der issues when unpacking land institutions to make our understanding more
comprehensive and inclusive. However, the chapters included in the volume
contribute to a thematic unity in which the distributional conflicts have been
viewed mainly through the lens of class and the transformational process or
lack thereof through capital accumulation. Even when the identity of groups,
such as the tribal population and violation of their rights to land, have been

18
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

examined in this collection, they have been viewed primarily as belonging to

the deprived and marginalized classes, without of course ignoring the tribal
identity question. The issue of gender, in our opinion, would require a rather
different analytical orientation to deal with questions such as how the pre-
vailing laws and patriarchal social norms and practices form a self-reinforcing
institutional complex that denies the right of women to own or control land.
In fact, critics have rightly questioned the transformative and empowering
potential of market-led agrarian reform policies. But the critiques sometimes
embraced the “customary” or “traditional” property right institutions as an
alternative. A gender lens would guard us against such a tendency, as it would
help us see the disempowering implications of the return to the “customary”
as exemplified by the experience of sub-Saharan Africa (Whitehead and
Tsikata 2003). Inclusion of this dimension as part of the analytical framework
would have made this volume unwieldy but intrinsically it very much remains
worthy and a challenging subject for fuller exposition.

1.2 Land and Capitalist Transition Today

One starting point for discussing land is the agrarian transition question,
which refers to a turning point when capitalist relations of production enter
the countryside providing the motor force for further capital accumulation
outside of agriculture. Land enters the transition discussion on account of
primitive accumulation, a Marxist take on the process by which precapitalist
peasants are separated from their land to make room for capitalist growth.1
Agrarian transition refers to “those changes in the countryside, in the relevant
economies, necessary to the overall development of capitalism and to its ultim-
ate dominance in a particular national social formation” (Byres 2002: 55).
Primitive accumulation by definition is “non-market” driven and often
equated with “extra-economic coercion” (Bernstein 2010: 27), which suggests
violence accompanying dispossession. This is considered integral to the
Marxist “origin” of capital, whose emergence creates free wage labor for capit-
alist industrialization as peasants become unhinged from their land (D’Costa
2014: 324). The process of primitive accumulation has varied temporally
and spatially (see Allen 1999; Mezzadra 2011) but it is viewed as necessary
for capitalist transformation, or alternatively, for socialist industrialization.
Yevgeni Preobrazhensky’s primitive “socialist” accumulation was pursued in
the former Soviet Union by collectivizing agriculture and generating economic
surplus for heavy industrialization (see Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010: 19). Social-
ist or not, primitive accumulation in theory, experience, and practice entailed
the destruction of precapitalist (ergo noncapitalist) social and economic sys-
tems to generate initial capital, which would then be reproduced and expanded

19
The Land Question in India

on capitalist or socialist lines (see Saith 1985). In theory, the uprooted peasants
become wageworkers or the industrial proletariat, while agricultural product-
ivity rises as capitalist farmers introduce efficiency-enhancing production
methods, accumulate, and contribute to economic diversification. Under this
scenario, agrarian capitalists endogenously generate economic surplus, which
then drives the nonagricultural sector suggesting the historical necessity of
primitive accumulation in capitalist development.
Abstracting from this linear dynamic, Arthur Lewis (1954) suggested mech-
anisms, such as higher industrial wages to induce rural-to-urban migration, to
absorb surplus labor from the countryside in urban industrial activities and
thereby enhance agricultural productivity. Dynamic agriculture would then
fund industry, which would in turn accommodate the migrants leaving the
countryside. Efficient agriculture would keep prices of food low and thus hold
down urban wages that are marginally higher than rural wages to induce
migration. The ensuring rapid industrialization is expected to make a dent
in the dual structure of the economy, a common feature of postcolonial
societies. Furthermore, rising incomes in the countryside would become mar-
kets for industrial goods and the two sectors would positively reinforce each
other as savings were directed toward capital formation.
At a general level the broader Marxist historical dynamic for some places
and the Lewisian theoretical possibility of structural transformation of dual-
istic societies remain valid. However, both have three major shortcomings,
theoretical and empirical, when we apply the role of land in the classical
transition equation to contemporary postcolonial societies, and especially
India. First, there is the issue of temporality, which means the genesis of
capitalism from noncapitalist relations of production occurred at a particular
historical moment. Today it is essentially complete. If the rise of capitalism,
despite the precise dating problem, was in the long sixteenth century
(Wallerstein 1979), is it possible to speak of primitive accumulation in post-
colonial societies such as India in the twenty-first century, which has both
capitalist and noncapitalist forms of production organization for surplus
extraction? So, a basic question that requires addressing (other than the one
attributed to it in the classical transition question) is, what role does land have
in the accumulation process today? Is dispossession creating the space for
dynamic capital accumulation in the countryside and thus for the economy
as a whole in the future?
Second, the teleological narrative of capitalist logic in terms of the inevit-
ability of structural transformation is wanting (D’Costa 2014; Sanyal 2007).
For example, the persistence of a “subsistence economy” or the “need econ-
omy” in the milieu of a thriving and advanced capitalist sector belies the more
mechanistic forms of structural transformation. This “incomplete transition”
has raised doubts about the teleological underpinnings of the idea of

20
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

transition itself. Contrary to the received Marxist interpretation, primitive

accumulation for Sanyal (2007) is a permanent feature of capitalism in post-
colonial economies, which requires continual dispossession of those who
inhabit the spaces external to the circuits of capital proper (what he calls
the “accumulation economy”). While the idea of being “outside of the
circuits of capital” is contestable since the dispossessed are linked to formal
production through petty commodity production (D’Costa 2016; Adnan,
Chapter 3 this volume), the conditions for the hegemony of capital require
diversion of some surplus from the accumulation economy toward the dis-
possessed in the “need economy” for their survival, or what approximates
Chatterjee’s “political society” (Chatterjee 2008). In other words, primitive
accumulation in the postcolonial economy does not produce wage laborers
to be employed by capital. It leads to confinement of the dispossessed in the
informal sector. Therefore, instead of a capital–precapital binary, Sanyal uses
“capital–noncapital” in order to free both capital and precapital from the
historical or chronological ordering and renders the idea of transition in
the classical sense irrelevant. To quote Sanyal:

[T]he characterisation of the postcolonial economic as a complex of capital and

non-capital, with the latter emerging in a space produced by the internal logic
of the former, totally dispenses with the notion of transition. If there is a possible
transition in this scenario, it is from pre-capitalism to the capital-non-capital
complex . . . [Thus] what we have is capitalism with an inherent heterogeneity.
(Sanyal 2007: 40; emphasis in original)

Whether we agree with this interpretation of Indian political economy (need

economy and political society), what is empirically valid is India’s capitalist
trajectory that is a blended integration of primitive accumulation and capit-
alism proper. Here primitive accumulation is not precapital nor is the unfree
labor associated with precapital temporary. Rather, it is part of mature capit-
alism (Brass 2011: 13). The dispossession arising from alienation of peasants
from their land does not lead to the dissolution of the peasantry nor the
creation of an industrial proletariat as experienced by early capitalist regions;
it instead contributes to the coexistence of “surplus” labor, which is today
approximated by the official understanding of the unorganized sector. In the
words of Sanyal (2007: 249) the displaced represent a “dark space,” whose
reproduction, aside from contributing to absolute destitution, is absorbed
through precarious forms of employment, such as self-employment and cas-
ual labor (National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector
(NCEUS) 2009).
Third, the empirical reality, at least for India, fundamentally challenges the
received transition question simply because agriculture is not playing out its
historic role in the transformation process. Cross-country econometric studies

21
The Land Question in India

have demonstrated that initial differences in landholding patterns have long-

lasting implications for growth and social development much later (Banerjee
and Iyer 2005). That land is unequally distributed and becoming fragmented
suggests differential rates of growth across classes and pronounced social
differentiation in the countryside. More importantly, the peasantry has not
completely disappeared nor has a large industrial proletariat appeared despite
a fair degree of structural transformation in India through nonagricultural
development. It appears that something internal to the agricultural system,
although influenced by exogenous factors, could be contributing to the stale-
mate in India’s capitalist transition.2
Byres (1993) had already identified the failure of capital accumulation in the
Indian countryside thus signaling the absence of an endogenous dynamic. For
one reason or another accumulation in agriculture was being blocked (see also
Bharadwaj 1985). At least for a while there was some sort of a consensus that
“semifeudal” relations persisted in the Indian countryside because of the
particular way metropolitan capital during colonial rule reinforced rural class
structures (Bagchi 2010). More recent developments in India, however, have
questioned the existence of semifeudalism (Harriss 2013) and now there
appears to be a consensus that capitalist relations characterize the Indian
countryside even if vestiges of noncapitalist forms of production organization
remain in many parts.
In a recent survey of farming conducted in the National Sample Survey
(NSS) seventieth round (January–December 2013) the agrarian picture cap-
tured was quite dismal.3 For example, during the agricultural year July
2012–June 2013, rural India had an estimated total of 90.2 million agricul-
tural households.4 These agricultural households were about 57.8 percent
of the total estimated rural households of the country during the same
period. In other words, about 42 percent of rural households earn almost
no income from cultivation; their major source of income is either wage
labor (farm and nonfarm) or nonfarm self-employment. The percentage of
agricultural households in total rural households vary widely across the
states of India—from a high of 78.4 percent in Rajasthan to a low of 27.3
percent in Kerala. Among the agricultural households (constituting 57.8
percent of all rural households), 63.5 percent of households reported that
their principal source of income was cultivation (Table 1.1), which means
only 36.7 percent of all rural households reported cultivation as their
principal source of income. However, the importance of cultivation as the
principal source of income sharply declines with the amount of land (size
class) possessed. Households possessing less than 0.01 hectare principally
depend on wage labor. Even among those who possess 0.01–0.40 hectares,
only 42.1 percent of households reported cultivation as their principal
source of income.

22
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

Table 1.1. Distribution of agricultural households by principal source of income during 365
days preceding the survey

Size class of land Cultivation Livestock Other agricultural Non-agricultural Wage/salaried Others
possessed (ha) activity enterprises employment

<0.01 1.6 22.9 2.7 10.8 56.4 5.5

0.0–10.40 42.1 4.8 1.2 7.5 35.2 9.3
0.41–1.00 69.2 2.3 0.9 3.6 20.0 4.1
1.01–2.00 83.0 2.5 0.9 3.2 8.6 1.8
2.01–4.00 85.9 2.4 1.1 1.6 7.1 1.8
4.01–10.00 87.9 2.7 0.5 0.9 5.9 2.0
10.00+ 89.4 5.5 1.5 1.8 1.7 0.1
All sizes 63.5 3.7 1.1 4.7 22.0 5.1

Source: NSS 70th Round

Table 1.2. Average monthly income from different sources, consumption expenditure and
net investment in productive assets per agricultural household for each size class of land
possessed (July 2012–June 2013)

Size class of Income Net receipt Net receipt Net receipt Total Total Net
land from from from from non- income consumption investment
possessed wages/ cultivation farming of farm (Rs.) expenditure in
(ha) salary (Rs.) animals business (Rs.) productive
(Rs.) (Rs.) (Rs.) assets (Rs.)

<0.01 2902 30 1181 447 4561 5108 55

0.02–0.40 2386 687 621 459 4152 5401 251
0.41–1.00 2011 2145 629 462 5247 6021 540
1.01–2.00 1728 4209 818 593 7348 6457 422
2.01–4.00 1657 7359 1161 554 10,730 7786 746
4.01–10.00 2031 15,243 1501 861 19,637 10,104 1975
10.00+ 1311 35,685 2622 1770 41,388 14,447 6987
All sizes 2071 3081 763 512 6426 6223 513

Source: NSS 70th Round

The fact that cultivation is not the principal source of income for an
overwhelming majority of the rural households does not necessarily mean
that they cannot earn a decent income from other sources. However, Table 1.2
shows a rather gloomy picture in this regard. Households belonging to the
bottom three landsize classes earned on average Rs. 4,561, Rs. 4,152, and
Rs. 5,247 respectively, per month in 2012–13. How good are these incomes?
For 2011–12, the Planning Commission pegged the national poverty line at
Rs. 816 per capita per month for rural areas, which means that a family of five
would need at least need Rs. 4,080 to be considered not poor. In other words,
the income that an agricultural household possessing less than one hectare of
land would earn from all sources taken together would on average be slightly
above the poverty line income. Furthermore, they are most likely to be all net
dis-savers because their consumption expenditure would typically exceed

23
The Land Question in India

income (Table 1.2). The precariousness of life in the rural areas is evident from
above. What is striking is that even possession of land up to 0.4 hectare (one
acre) does not make it better.
As is evident from the recent survey data, Indian agriculture is not dynamic
in the capitalist sense. It does not generate a massive surplus for the rest of the
economy. Furthermore, this rural stalemate is reproduced and reinforced by
income from nonagricultural sectors. Several scholars have already posited
(and we believe correctly, though others such as Banerjee, in Chapter 4 this
volume, have a different perspective) that the “agrarian question has been
bypassed” (Bernstein 1996, 2010; Lerche 2013; see also Dasgupta, Chapter 10
this volume).In fact, to a great degree, Indian agriculture as a whole is
dependent on state subsidies rather than being a source of economic surplus.
Not surprisingly, powerful rural social classes remain the principal beneficiar-
ies. Others have argued that both the bypassing of agriculture as a source of
economic surplus and the weakening of agriculture–industry linkages are due
to India’s insertion in the global circuits of capital since the 1980s (Harriss
2013: 359; Lerche 2013: 391). The paradox is that the weak links between
industry and agriculture have been more than matched by stronger links
between industry and the Indian services sector (Chandrasekhar 2007),
thereby precluding the more classic variant of capitalist economic dynamics.5
The net result of the lack of agricultural dynamism has been the freezing of
social differentiation and polarization of peasants in the form of household
subsistence farming. This has been reproduced through precarious forms of
employment and reinforced by (remittance) income from nonagricultural
employment (Harriss 2013: 358, 363). The inevitable consequence has been
the decreasing significance of Indian agriculture (Figure 1.1). From 54 percent
of GDP in 1950 1, the share of agriculture fell to 38 percent by 1980 1,
which further declined to 16 percent in 2011 12.
This decline is consistent with the broader capitalist development in India
outside of agriculture, namely relatively faster growth and expansion of non-
agricultural sectors. It also reflects slow productivity growth in agriculture and
thus the absence of the classic dynamism of rising productivity (and profit-
ability) necessary for an agrarian transition. The continued reliance of a large
fraction of the Indian population on agriculture is visible in Table 1.1. For
example, soon after the economic reforms of 1991, agricultural employment
in 1993–4 stood at a high of 65 percent of total employment. However,
by 2011 12 the share of agricultural workers to total workers dropped to
50 percent (Table 1.3). This decline could be used to argue that agriculture is
dynamic since fewer people are now engaged in agriculture, which presum-
ably means higher productivity. While that may be the case in a few places
and during certain years, the empirical reality suggests otherwise. Indian
agricultural growth as a whole has fluctuated greatly, as evident by indices of

24
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0
1950–1
1952–3
1954–5
1956–7
1958–9
1960–1
1962–3
1964–5
1966–7
1968–9
1970–1
1972–3
1974–5
1976–7
1978–9
1980–1
1982–3
1984–5
1986–7
1988–9
1990–1
1992–3
1994–5
1996–7
1998–9
2000–1
2002–3
2004–5
2006–7
2008–9
2010–11
Agriculture, etc. Manufacturing, etc. Services F, I, R, BS

Figure 1.1. Decline of agriculture and the changing composition of the Indian econ-
omy (% of GDP)
Notes: “etc.” includes other subsectors in each of the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors.
F = Finance, I = Insurance, R = Retail, and BS = Business Services.
Source: Government of India, Ministry of Finance (various issues), Economic Survey; available at:
<http://indiabudget.nic.in/survey.asp> (accessed September 14, 2016).

Table 1.3. Changing distribution of the workforce across sectors in India

Sectors Number of workers (in millions and %)

1993–4 1999–2000 2004–5 2009–10 2011–12

Agriculture 241.5 246.6 268.6 244.9 231.9

% of total 64.6 61.7 58.5 53.2 48.9
Manufacturing 38.9 42.8 53.9 50.7 59.8
% of total 10.4 10.7 11.7 11.0 12.6
Other industries 15.8 20.4 29.4 48.3 55.3
Services 77.7 89.8 107.3 116.3 127.3
% of total 20.8 22.5 23.4 25.3 26.8
Total 374.0 399.5 459.1 460.2 474.2

Notes: Until 2004–5, the absolute number of workers in agriculture in the country as a whole steadily increased, even
though agriculture’s share in total workers declined throughout the period from 1993–4 to 2011–12.
Source: From National Sample Survey (NSS) rounds 1993–4 to 2011–12

25
The Land Question in India

production and growth rates of agriculture at factor cost (Patnaik 2007:

115–50).6
Aside from the rural power structures that continue to direct state largesse to
the dominant castes and classes, the grip of the dominant classes in the Indian
countryside is reinforced by rental and interest income and speculative
returns. The inadequate performance by a slow-growing agrarian economy
owes its legacy to the continuing decline in public investments (Bardhan
2006). Furthermore, the sustained fragmentation of land due to coparcener
inheritance practices has created uneconomically small landholdings thereby
also contributing to subsistence, low-cash-income-based rural economies.7 It
is therefore no surprise that indebtedness of peasants and low productivity
continue to characterize Indian agriculture today (Harriss 2013: 357).
Our take on the transition question is that there is little capitalist expan-
sionary dynamic in Indian agriculture and hence it does not follow the
teleological trajectory of the classical transition. Instead, a sharp but inte-
grated dualism is generated between primitive accumulation and capitalism
proper because of continuing dispossession on the one hand and the much
higher growth in nonagricultural sectors in both rural and urban areas. This
suggests, and Sanyal (2007) argues, that the historical process of primitive
accumulation is also contemporary but because of its historical specificity is
also quite Eurocentric (Marx (1958–71) in Mezzadra 2011: 308), meaning it
is a European phenomenon rather than a universal one and certainly less
applicable to former colonies. Thus, discussion of transition that is linked to
primitive accumulation has generated different perspectives precisely because
of the way primitive accumulation today is used. Our task, however, is not to
settle this issue. We can simply use the term to denote the separation of
peasants from their land through market and nonmarket mechanisms with-
out imputing any implications for transition (Adnan 2013). In those instances
where dispossession of advasis could clear the way for large-scale accumula-
tion, such as mining and infrastructure projects, primitive accumulation
could be applied (Banerjee-Guha 2013). However, by most accounts, primitive
accumulation in the historical sense is complete.
To the extent the concept of primitive accumulation is used to characterize
the so-called origin of capital, it sits uncomfortably with the contemporary
rush to grab land by capital worldwide. One has to answer why capital requires
forceful expropriation of land at a particular juncture to sustain accumulation
(Levien 2012). Sustaining accumulation implies the nonprimitive variety.
Some suggest that the concept of “accumulation by dispossession” put for-
ward by David Harvey might be more appropriate (Banerjee-Guha 2013). One
of the goals of contemporary scholarship in land dispossession is to explore
how concepts such as primitive accumulation or accumulation by disposses-
sion can be reassessed to illuminate the regionally diverse experiences of land

26
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

expropriation. In this context we need to keep in mind India’s empirical

realities vis-à-vis the much-discussed phenomenon of global land grabbing
in the contemporary world. Unlike the experiences of African and Latin
American countries (Borras et al. 2012; Cotula 2012; Li 2011; Wily 2012:
768), large-scale expropriation of land in India is primarily done by domestic
capital rather than foreign capital and the dispossession of peasants due to
special economic zones in India stand out markedly from other experiences
(Sampat 2010).8
It is also important to recognize that surplus labor in the countryside and in
urban areas is a persistent feature of India and should not be viewed outside
the orbit of contemporary capitalism; in fact, it is a product of capitalism
(Adnan 2013; D’Costa 2014). Furthermore, the land question today is less
about transition and more about the conflicts and the political economy of
the differential benefits of circulation of land as a commodity. The land reality
in India thus points to different sets of questions and demands a better
understanding of the role of land today in capitalist development in postco-
lonial societies.
If agrarian transition, and by extension capitalist transition, is hobbled by
low agricultural income, small plots of land, nonagrarian sources of income,
and other factors such as declining water table, salinity, and soil erosion, then
the place of land in the larger process of economic development is less
significant in Indian agriculture. In this scenario rural dynamism is limited,
unless offset by a massive expansion of off-farm activities in both rural and
urban areas. In reality, off-farm rural economic activities are not deep, at least
at this time, nor is contemporary industrialization sufficiently robust and
widely spread to absorb rural labor en masse and alleviate rural misery. The
persistence of a large unorganized sector in rural areas indicates the difficulties
of reproducing capitalist production relations even if they are part of a capit-
alist India (Brass 2010: 27). Thus the transition question involving dynamic
capitalism in Indian agriculture is currently moot. A different role must be
attributed to land in India.

1.3 State, Development, and Dispossession

The centrality of land in contemporary Indian society and polity can hardly be
exaggerated. As the land issue frequently overwhelms the popular discourse
due to the development–dispossession dynamic, we must step back from the
heat and tumble of the short run and take a hard look at the larger picture of
how land fits into contemporary Indian political economy from alternative
analytical perspectives. This volume, as the previous section indicated, goes
beyond the political economy paradigm that centers on the structural

27
The Land Question in India

aspects of the transition question. What we try to do is to read the evolution

of the land question from multiple perspectives, which could broadly be
called “institutional.” This broader approach enables us to view public pol-
icies, and thus the role of the state, as the choices resulting from conflicts
among competing interests that take place within political institutions. In
this view, politics over land is seen as a distributional struggle (Grindle 2001)
with the state and other institutions producing “audacious reforms” (Grindle
2000) and influencing policy formulation (Bates 1989). Both contestation
and state intervention are political and are omnipresent in the land question
in India today.
Today there is considerable pressure to transform land into a commodity to
be bought and sold in the market for nonagricultural purposes. The motiv-
ation behind this dramatic turnaround in how land is used is driven by India’s
contemporary economic development concerns, such as industrialization,
infrastructure, special economic zones (SEZs), and real estate expansion. This
is not inconsistent with capitalist development thus far and the possibility of
even greater capital accumulation over the longer term. What is different
fundamentally is that land no longer acts as the source of economic surplus
nor is the motivation of the state rooted in making agriculture dynamic in the
capitalist sense. On the contrary, acquisition of land today is directed at
nonagricultural development. For example, witness the well-known Singur
case where the local state government acquired land on behalf of private
industry to set up an automobile factory (Nielsen 2010; Guha, Chapter 12
this volume). Furthermore, the conversion of agricultural land or disposses-
sion of adivasis for various industrial and infrastructural projects is also not
new. What has changed is the role of the state in securing land by way of
“eminent domain” or using “public purpose” arguments, in some instances
coercively, as in West Bengal (see Guha, Chapter 12 this volume), less for itself
and more on behalf of business (see also Bhattacharya, Bhattacharya, and Gill,
Chapter 7 this volume). For example, there is evidence, even if scattered, that
the state (and its representative politicians such as Narendra Modi, now
India’s prime minister) aided local businesses in the state of Gujarat such as
Adani and others by acquiring land at well-below-market prices (Jaffrelot
2015). Additionally, the state has also introduced measures that try to shield
the dispossessed from the worst effects of losing land and livelihoods but in
effect has created the structural and legal basis to facilitate land transactions
more transparently and more definitively. In other words, an incipient land
market is increasingly becoming a realized one.
The operative phrase here is “capitalist context,” meaning, in the absence
of land as a dynamic source of accumulation, it is being transformed into a
commodity, to be bought and sold in the market. This is akin to Karl Polanyi’s
description of the “great transformation” (2001) where land gradually

28
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

becomes like any other product. However, far from the invisible workings of
the market through the price system, there is also institutional intervention,
namely, by the state, which acts as an owner, intermediary, buyer, and dis-
tributor all rolled into one in the emerging land markets in contemporary
India. It is not the market supplanting the state but the state becoming more
business friendly (Sud 2014). The analytical as well as the actual economic,
political, and legal implications of this transformation are manifold. For the
purposes of this volume, we identify three overlapping areas in which the role
of the state is revealed in its many forms when engaging with the land
question. The first is state intervention in land for development, the second
is the intensification of conflicts over land today, and the third is the dual
contradictory role of the Indian state that gives as part of its liberal-democratic
responsibilities and takes as part of its aggressive pursuit of development on
behalf of dominant classes.
First and foremost, India, as a late entrant to industrialization, has had an
interventionist state. Since independence it has tried transforming the econ-
omy through planning, public investment, and detailed economic manage-
ment and social development. While heavy industry under infant industry
protection received substantial state attention, agriculture with some excep-
tions was largely neglected. A few local states such as West Bengal and Kerala
introduced land reforms aimed at both economic development and social
justice but the reforms failed to induce the classical transition dynamic
(Dasgupta, Chapter 10 this volume). Some states such as Punjab and Haryana
experienced a green revolution that contributed to an agrarian transition of
sorts. Overall, Indian agriculture remained structurally underdeveloped. The
Indian state, however, remained developmentalist, at least in intent if not in
outcomes. With economic reforms that started in the 1980s and accelerated
since 1991, the state has been withdrawing from the market and facilitating
more intense working of the market (see Walker 2008). It is in this context that
land takes on a different role, namely, it becomes a commodity and the role of
the state is substantial because it wants to facilitate development by making
land available for a variety of nonagricultural purposes.
Economic development remains an aspiration in India and as Marx, with
reference to India opined in a different context, advanced capitalist countries
are a mirror image of India’s future (in Larrain 1989: 47). The future, as
imagined by the state and expected by the society, is the transformation of
the material basis of the country. Development promises jobs, fewer everyday
struggles from rising incomes, better health, and all the modern trappings of
consumption. Capitalism as an economic system has excelled in its ability to
produce but on the consumption side has been less successful. In fact, the idea
of development is so ingrained institutionally and in the psyche of people that
it is impossible to separate development from the Indian state, despite the

29
The Land Question in India

actual functioning of and results achieved by the state. The idea of develop-
ment is further reinforced by multilateral and national organizations such as
the World Bank and the former Planning Commission. In the absence of
agrarian transition, development has been increasingly funneled through
nonagricultural activities such as urban development, industrialization, and
modern infrastructure. It is here that land comes to the fore and the state is
directly involved in ensuring that land can be transacted in the market,
secured, and made available for profit-based economic activities by private
capital. These uses include SEZs, infrastructure, real estate, mining, and manu-
facturing. Such private accumulation is equated with development, especially
when India’s economic growth rate has been halting and the jobs outlook
remains bleak for the millions of its youth. One might add that land transac-
tions are never a one-way process; rather, multiple actors impinge on the
process, including the owners of the land who could very well be willing
sellers provided the price is right.
Second, by addressing why conflicts around land have intensified the role of
the state is revealed. After all, both in pre-independent and post-independent
India, both the private sector and the Indian state did usurp land for public
and private purposes, for dams, roads, steel mills, and other infrastructural
projects (see Raianu, Chapter 11 this volume). There was also popular resist-
ance in the past where people were dispossessed and displaced but then the
state using its power of eminent domain could get away with it easily. Today,
however, it is a different matter; “public purpose” of the state has taken on
“private benefit” and is rationalized with economic development arguments
(Pal, Chapter 6 this volume). Land disputes have arisen today principally
because of increasing commodification of land that has been responsible for
the recent surge in land-related conflicts. The uncertainty associated with the
sale of land, and in most cases loss of livelihoods, and the asymmetry of price
information between eager buyers and reluctant sellers contribute, often vio-
lently, to the contestation among the different players. This occurs when
transactions are not transparent, titling is unclear, laws and regulations gov-
erning land acquisitions are poorly designed or do not adequately recognize
community rights of common property, evictions are coerced, land is under-
valued, and when livelihoods are seriously at stake. Consequently, many
large-scale industrial and infrastructural projects in recent years have been
held up and in some instances cancelled outright.
The consequences of converting land to a commodity are many as dispos-
session and displacement are integral to this process. However, the use of the
term “commodity” to characterize land at the present juncture is still conten-
tious. A commodity is typically bought and sold in the market at a price
determined by the interaction of supply and demand. But the heavy presence
of the Indian state in acquiring land from the peasants and landowners in

30
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

rural areas, based on ad hoc administered prices, without adequate compen-

sation, and handing it over to capitalists almost free of cost does not conform
to the standard notion of a commodity. However, at the same time, land is
now being bought and sold in rural India much more frequently than before,
both as an asset and a factor of production. Consequently, there are many
concerns surrounding the land acquisition process. These include but are not
limited to: interclass and intra-society conflicts arising from the increasing
commodification of land; distributive implications after the transactions; the
real and latent coercive evictions of tribal communities whose attachments to
land and forests go beyond subsistence livelihood dependence; the legal and
ethical implications of acquisition under both market and extra-market forces,
especially under a democratic political system where certain rights are recog-
nized and exercised; and the role of the state vacillating between recognition
and denial of rights in its quest for development.
Land acquisition and dispossession as practiced and experienced typically
proceed by diluting or denying both individual and communal property rights
to land under the rubric of “public interest.” Here the primary role of the state
has not been to promote efficient working of the price mechanism in the land
market; rather it has been to suppress the price mechanism through acquisi-
tion with unilaterally determined “compensation.” Payment of compensation
is typically bureaucratically governed and poor farmers (sellers) are always at
the receiving end. The resulting conflict of interest between the farmers and
the capitalists may be reminiscent of the well-known Ricardian conflict
between capitalists and landlords but the Indian experience shows a different
kind of conflict. In the case of state-mediated acquisition and dispossession,
the losers in the game are the marginal and small farmers, poor tenants, and
agricultural workers, who are most likely to lose their livelihood options along
with their land. The conflict thus revolves around the state and owners of
land. Furthermore, unlike the Ricardian dynamics of falling land prices over
the long haul due to nonagricultural sources of income and wealth (see Piketty
2014: 6), in India as elsewhere there is an upward pressure on land prices. The
irony is that this price increase is for the same reason, namely, wealth and
income accrued from nonagricultural activities, which is increasingly invested
in land to cater to urban–industrial demand.
In post-independent India, the need for modernization and industrializa-
tion within the model of a mixed economy with the state sector to attain “the
commanding heights” in the economy was articulated by both big business
and the government. This approach also drove the state’s attitude toward land
as private property. Land was needed for rapid industrialization and urbaniza-
tion, and the state engaged in land acquisition for “public purposes.” The
colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 has since been invoked to acquire land
by the national and subnational governments in India. The history of

31
The Land Question in India

development in postcolonial India cannot be discussed without reference to

the large-scale displacement of people, a disproportionate number of whom
happen to be tribal people. Over the past six decades in independent India a
significant amount of land has been acquired by the Indian state for infra-
structure and industrial development. Large dams and multipurpose projects,
such as Bhakra Nangal, Hirakud, Damodar Valley, and Narmada Valley led to
large-scale dispossession and displacement. Big public sector industrial pro-
jects and the townships around them in Bhilai, Rourkela, Bokaro, Durgapur,
and so on, also entailed the acquisition of land.9 What distinguishes the more
recent rush for land acquisition from earlier ones is that the state has increas-
ingly stretched the definition of public purpose or “eminent domain” to
acquire land for private capital. For example, the Singur land acquisition was
justified as public purpose as the resulting industrial jobs would meet that
social goal. Consequently, agricultural land since the 1991 economic reforms
has succumbed to the exponentially increasing demand by private capital for
industry, shopping malls, office complexes, and residential enclaves for the
burgeoning middle and upper-middle classes. By extension, speculation in
land has risen, which involves not only brokers, agents, and real estate com-
panies but also landowners. The latter resist parting with land now due to
unattractive prices but may be willing sellers in the future when prices are
higher. Thus the friction surrounding market non-clearing prices and coerced
clearing prices lie at the root of these conflicts.
In view of this uncertainty caused by lack of clarity in property rights and
the inefficiency of the land administration system, the World Bank’s policy
recommendations concerning rural land in India make sense (World Bank
2007). The Bank’s recommendations focus on the need to improve the land
administration system and land policy to reduce the high costs of transferring
land in India. The inefficiency of the land policy and administration system is
also responsible for restricting the development of a rental market for land.
A rental market can be beneficial for the rural landless poor and thus has
equity consequences as well. Therefore, little objection can be raised against
the efficiency-enhancing administrative reforms that the World Bank has
recommended. However, the neoclassical economic argument for allocative
efficiency that underlies these recommendations is not consistent with the
Indian state’s forceful acquisition of land. It is hard to argue that acquisition of
large tracts of land for the benefit of private capital improves allocative effi-
ciency for the simple reason that market signals are completely ignored by the
state and sometimes extra-economic influences exercised, not to mention the
reluctance of the dominant private interests to accept “true” market forces.
The recent timing of intensified land disputes is also explained by the rapid
increase in land prices throughout India, with some locations and regions
experiencing multifold increases within the space of a few years because of

32
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

uneven capitalist development and differential links with the world economy.
The greater Bangalore area is a good example of globally influenced real estate
prices, driven by the export-oriented information technology (IT) industry.
The intensity of conflicts over land acquisition is more severe today partly
because of the frequency and scale of dispossession but also because of better
knowledge of land prices due to the spread of information (Chakravorty
2013). This makes the conflicts double sided, in that not all farmers are
unwilling sellers since prices are moving up and they prefer to sell at even
higher rates. Consequently, it becomes difficult to settle at a reasonable
market-clearing price acceptable to both transacting partners. As one study
of special economic zones shows, people likely to be displaced were willing to
sell land, provided the price was “right” (Cross 2014). This also suggests that
land transactions are not just a matter of unwilling sellers hijacking develop-
ment projects but rather the inability to arrive at mutually agreeable prices
and the non-availability of alternative livelihood options.
The third area is the contradictory role of the Indian state that both gives to
the people and takes away from them. Thus far we have presented the inter-
mediary role of the state in acquiring land for development purposes. The
Indian state, however, is also subject to India’s democratic practices and the
electoral significance of people that often bear the brunt of land disputes.
Today the rights of those who might be dispossessed and displaced are recog-
nized and they are protected through the Right to Fair Compensation and
Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR)
Act, 2013. The Act was introduced by the United Progressive Alliance of the
Congress Party, which pursued various “rights-based” legislations. This
“rights-based” act, consistent with others such as Forest Rights, NREGA, and
Education (Jenkins 2013: 608) has replaced the colonial Land Acquisition Act
of 1894, which effectively allowed the government to acquire any privately
owned land for “public purpose” in exchange for a fixed compensation.
Interestingly, the LARR was up for revision under the new pro-business gov-
ernment elected in 2014, which was determined to make land acquisition less
cumbersome. However, lacking a majority in the upper house, the ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could not muster sufficient support to alter the
2013 LARR Act, indicating a strong sentiment against land acquisition with-
out fair rehabilitation and resettlement.
The conflicts are as much about land prices as they are about compensation,
which in a dynamic environment can fluctuate based on structural and
electoral power. The National Democratic Alliance today under the BJP is
exploring ways to alter the act to facilitate business investments and induce
higher economic growth rates. However, the resistance offered by farmer and
peasant groups has been strong enough for the government to take a softer
“pro-farmer” position. The question is how much the state will give if the act is

33
The Land Question in India

diluted against farmers and what might be the legal and livelihood implica-
tions for the dispossessed.
The vacillation on the part of the state arises for both political expediency as
well as civil rights action based on democratic aspirations and practices.
Acquiring land for development without politically negotiating “price” and
“rehabilitation” of the displaced is fraught with conflicts, which the Indian
state has learned the hard way. It is also evident that capitalist accumulation
proper can be slowed down or deferred as resistance to land acquisition
intensifies, a small space afforded to India’s “political society” (Chatterjee
2008). The agrarian crisis and farmer suicides that plague India cannot be
ignored by any government that is elected but if dispossession and displace-
ment without adequate rehabilitation and resettlement goes unaddressed,
land acquisition will be stymied. As it is now evident, investments in large
nonagricultural projects necessarily require land and the acquisition of land
has become a critical bottleneck to seeing these projects through. In addition
to sources of conflict mentioned above, the difficulty in aggregating frag-
mented landholdings into larger holdings contributes to the complexity of
the acquisition process even if land has increasingly become a commodity to
be bought and sold in the market where mutually agreed upon prices have a
significant bearing in clearing markets. However, as it was also indicated, these
are imperfect markets because of the various institutions governing and
impeding land transactions. Resistance to ill-functioning markets is a political
process as well as a result of institutional responses to the inherent tension
between the goals of capitalist expansion outside of agriculture and a demo-
cratic polity. The broader question for future research is not just the trajectory
of Indian capitalism, where land is either taken away or protected on a large
scale, but how land disputes are to be settled while not giving up the quest for
capitalist economic development.

1.4 Brief Chapter Descriptions and Integration

There are fourteen chapters in this book, sandwiched between a Prelude and a
Postscript to the land question. In all the chapters, the land question is viewed
with reference to the property rights regime, its connection with the structure
of accumulation, and the role of the Indian state in shaping development
through the land acquisition process. These chapters reveal the conflict-
ridden dynamics among chief stakeholders such as the owners and buyers of
land, the various private intermediaries, and the state. Aside from theoretically
analyzing the role of land today in India’s capitalist development and social
transformation, these chapters also address how conflicts arising from land
acquisition are negotiated, resolved, or left unresolved. Furthermore, these

34
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

chapters theoretically and empirically discuss the role of legal and policy
interventions on acquisitions and thus the differential impact on dominant
and marginalized groups, the stand of the state on the issues of land and
livelihood rights for those displaced through acquisition, and how they con-
flict with alternative interpretations of rights and practices.
The chapters are divided into three groups. The first two groups comprise
mostly theoretical chapters and provide a grand narrative of the land question
in contemporary India. They cover primitive and contemporary accumulation
and legal–institutional dimensions of “regimes of dispossession.” The third
group of six chapters is informed by different theoretical and historical under-
standing and provides a variety of regional empirical perspectives on the
contemporary land question in India. Similar to the theoretical positions taken
in several chapters, the empirical chapters go beyond the transition question
to include new forms of socioeconomic dynamics and political responses to
the pressures of accumulation, dispossession, and loss of livelihoods.

1.4.1 Primitive and Contemporary Accumulation

As indicated earlier, there seems to be an agreement that the classical agrarian
question pertaining to the mobilization of agricultural surplus for industrial-
ization is less relevant for India. Therefore, we go beyond this discourse. The
existing theoretical perspectives on dispossession of land, such as different
variants of Marx’s “primitive accumulation” or David Harvey’s “accumulation
by dispossession,” provide insights into the contemporary processes of dis-
possession in India. But how adequate are they in explaining the relationship
between land dispossession and capitalism? While acknowledging that
Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession marks a significant advancement on
primitive accumulation as it attempts to capture diverse examples of contem-
porary dispossession, Levien (Chapter 2) observes that Harvey underempha-
sizes the fact that land dispossession is a deeply political process in which
owners of the means of coercion redistribute assets from one group to another
and in which the role of the state remains central. He examines this question
and advances the concept of “regimes of dispossession” as an “alternative way
of understanding how dispossession is politically organized in different
phases of capitalism.” A regime of dispossession is an institutionalized way
of expropriating land from the current owners or users. Levien observes that
India has passed from a regime that dispossessed land for state-led industrial
and infrastructural expansion to one that dispossesses land for private capital.
He argues that beginning in the early 1990s, India shifted from a regime that
dispossessed land for state-led projects of material expansion to one that
dispossesses land for private and decreasingly productive investments. This
new regime of dispossession, in which states have become mere land brokers

35
The Land Question in India

for private capital, is arguably less “developmental” than its Nehruvian pre-
decessor. The upshot is that India’s “land wars” are unlikely to dissipate any
time soon, and the “land question” may be the largest contradiction for
Indian capitalism for the foreseeable future.
Shapan Adnan (Chapter 3), takes a different theoretical approach, in which
the mechanisms of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession
(ABD) are not restricted to the use of force, but also include land transfer by
agreement, as well as indirect mechanisms that are concerned with very
different objectives. Analyzing evidence on land alienation, resistance, and
workforce trends, Adnan shows that the outcomes of primitive accumulation
in India under neoliberal globalization do not accord fully with the classic
Marxian schema of transition to capitalism. Critical assessment of trends in
employment status over 1999–2012 indicates that the self-employed
accounted for at least half of the Indian workforce, whereas workers in regular
wage employment remained restricted to 20 percent or less. These trends
suggest that primitive accumulation in neoliberal India has not been substan-
tially followed by the absorption of the dispossessed in regular capitalist
employment. Adnan puts forward three hypotheses to explain these trends
based upon: (i) inability of the formal and the informal capitalist sector to
generate adequate incremental employment; (ii) limited options of survival
other than self-employment for dispossessed groups, particularly given the
predominance of unproductive capital and precapitalist rent extraction over
productive capital; and (iii) the ability of such groups to shift to forms of
“distress employment” under worsening economic conditions. Moreover,
the parallel trend of Indian migrant workers finding wage employment in
the international labor market suggests that the prospect of the transition to
capitalism in India remains an open question.
If the historical role of the peasantry is reduced to simply abdicating claims
on land and other natural resources for the purpose of industrialization, then
“should one categorize peasant resistance to land acquisitions as a Luddite,
anti-progressive, anti-capitalist position?” This is the central question raised
by Arindam Banerjee (Chapter 4). This is important since the official stance
against farmers’ resistance to land acquisition seems to be an affirmative
answer to this question, which has been forcefully asserted by the mainstream
media in India. Banerjee critically interrogates the historical trajectories of
capitalism and the resolution of the agrarian question therein. The paths
of early capitalist development are not possible to replicate in developing
countries, more so under contemporary globalization. However, far from the
agrarian question being “dead” for these countries, it is all the more relevant
within a complex of neoliberal exploitation of developing world peasantry.
The chapter studies the patterns of accumulation under neoliberalism in
Indian agriculture based on primary and secondary data. The accumulation

36
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

process under agrarian crisis in India illustrates the new delineations within
the peasantry and possible alliances against neoliberalism. This chapter links
the agrarian question with that of land and draws insights on the different
streams of growing resistance to land acquisition in recent times.

1.4.2 Legal–Institutional Dimensions of “Regimes of Dispossession”

Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (Chapter 5) take the idea of
“regimes of dispossession” further by looking at one of the means through
which such a regime is institutionalized: passing laws either to facilitate land
acquisition or to contain the political voices against the means of acquisition
the state often resorts to. For Nielsen and Nilsen, lawmaking serves as a
modality through which a “compromise equilibrium” can be established
between dominant and subaltern groups, which facilitates the neoliberal
restructuring in the longer term. They argue that the institutions, discourses,
and technologies of rule that attach to the state are not just sites in which
hegemonic power is exercised, but also nodes of contention where subaltern
resistance can be articulated and pursued. With the concrete case of the land
acquisition attempt in Singur in the state of West Bengal, and drawing on
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, they show that the modes of resistance
against land acquisition form a complex process that leads to “unstable equi-
libria” of compromise “in which the interest of the dominant social groups
prevail.” These processes seem to culminate in a “compromise equilibrium”
that would reconcile the demands of industry with the demands of social
movements for greater protection of the rights of the individual landowner
within a legal framework. Nielsen and Nilsen pursue this dialectic that gave
rise to LARR Act of 2013, which was passed by the Lok Sabha in August 2013
and came into effect on January 1, 2014, and which was later subject to a set of
ordinance-driven amendments by the Modi government in early 2015.While
the authors acknowledge the progressive measures contained in the act, they
also suggest that it may nonetheless, in the long run, facilitate the process of
neoliberal social and economic restructuring in India.
Malabika Pal (Chapter 6) examines the fairness claim of the LARR Act of
2013. She uses the utilitarian fairness standard proposed by one of the most
influential American constitutional scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, Frank Michelman. His study of judicial decisions from an ethical
perspective introducing the concept of “demoralization costs” has shaped the
interpretational debate on takings law in the United States. His analysis is
particularly relevant for the land question in India today since there is wide-
spread feeling that millions of people have been unfairly deprived of their land
and livelihoods. Pal looks at the role of the Indian judiciary in interpreting the
land acquisition legislation since landmark judgments affect the morale of

37
The Land Question in India

society. She concludes that using Michelman’s standard would help in bring-
ing about greater “fairness” than what the new legislation has achieved.
A series of legislative actions like the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled
Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA) and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest
Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA) have been passed to
institutionalize adivasi (tribal communities) autonomy and recognize their
customary and community rights over natural resources. However, these
have not protected the adivasis from the risks of dispossession as the state
can still take away land and natural resources for private capital. This contra-
diction between the “giving” state and the “grabbing” state in the particular
social setting of adivasis’ customary rights over the forest lands has been dealt
with by Rajesh Bhattacharya, Snehashish Bhattacharya, and Kaveri Gill
(Chapter 7). They argue that a series of legislations enacted by the state
granting autonomy to tribal communities over land have facilitated access
to natural resources by capital. These acts are often celebrated as a victory for
such struggles, leading to a circumscription of the ability of capital to access
natural resources at will. In Chapter 7, Bhattacharya, Bhattacharya, and Gill,
however, argue that such politico-juridical interventions may also point to the
emergence of a more protean neoliberal governance structure. Given the
ambiguous character of land as a commodity, particularly adivasi land that
refuses to be encompassed by the logic of the market, the more protean
neoliberal order may seek to instrumentally use these legislative acts to clearly
define property rights over resources, which can then form the basis of nego-
tiations with the adivasi communities over land for the benefit of capital.

1.4.3 Regional Perspectives

It is a common observation that different regions in India follow different
trajectories as far as development dynamics are concerned. Even in the old
agrarian transition debate in India of the 1970s, accumulation of agrarian
surplus and signs of capitalist transition were never uniform across the coun-
try. Punjab and parts of western Uttar Pradesh manifested accumulation
processes that were quite different from what was observed in the mainly
rice-growing eastern states. It is therefore obvious that for more illuminating
discussions on the land question one has to be sensitive to the diversities
observed in different regions of India. Although the phenomenon of the
erstwhile “peasants” being constantly transformed into part-time cultivators,
landless workers, or self-employed in petty production and services is com-
mon throughout India, the processes are not identical everywhere and there-
fore it is worth looking at how certain factors external to the immediate
surroundings of a peasant production-based economy, such as increasing
penetration of the market and changing role of the state, influence this

38
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

process. The role that the states of the Indian federation play is particularly
important in this context since agriculture as well as land are constitutionally
(local) “state subjects.”
The increase in noncultivating rural households owning land may be a
common phenomenon all over rural India, based on primary data collected
from nine villages in Andhra Pradesh. Vijay analyzes this phenomenon
(Chapter 8). These households continue to exert influence on the land and
land-lease markets and shape the production structure of agriculture. These
households are noncultivators as they themselves do not cultivate the land
but are peasants to the extent that they are moving away from cultivating
practices to nonfarm activities without completely breaking from the peasant
origin by holding on to the land. On the other hand, in the prosperous coastal
areas of Andhra Pradesh, the evolving rural economic structure is witnessing
the emergence of a new class of landlords. They own land but do not cultivate
the land themselves and derive a ground rent by leasing land out. Unlike the
earlier landlords who were from “landlord families” and owned large tracts of
land, these new landlords could be erstwhile cultivators who have diversified
out of agriculture but continue their interest in land. As Vijay shows in
Chapter 8, these households do not sell their land either because of increasing
land prices or rental income earned from such land. Thus a revival of absentee
landlords of a different kind and a revival of tenancy are apparent in some of
these areas, implying a departure from the classic transition dynamic.
These village-level changes need to be juxtaposed with the widespread
phenomenon of petty commodity production that gives rise to the paradox-
ical phenomenon of weak livelihood sustainability of the households in the
rural areas. Based on field data, Ramana Murthy’s analysis (Chapter 9) points
to self-exploitation by small and marginal farmers, suggesting that the reso-
lution to the agrarian question no longer seems necessary for capitalism.
Similar to Vijay’s findings, Ramana Murthy shows that there are indications
that the owners of land are leaving the production space to petty commodity
producers through tenancy. However, unlike the findings in the previous
chapter Ramana Murthy shows that owners also sell their land to become
suppliers of various agricultural and nonagricultural inputs and earn interest,
rents, and quasi-rents. This chapter shows that this petty commodity produ-
cing class and the area operated by them is increasing, in spite of the fact that
their agriculture is essentially unviable. Farmer suicides reflect the distress
faced by this class. However, this chapter also shows that this class survives
through various strategies, including considerable diversification away from
their dependence on farming. As a result, land becomes no longer central to
their survival, while the postcolonial state manages their desperate condition
through welfare transfers. This chapter provides evidence for the changing
profile of rural farm households, landholding structure, farm and non-farm

39
The Land Question in India

incomes of rural farm households, and welfare transfers. The changing port-
folio of rural incomes brings out the shifts in dependence on agriculture for
the rural households and their implications for the land question.
A comparative perspective sometimes may be more illuminating if the
entities to be compared are chosen based on strong similarities. The two
Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal have apparent commonalities as
both have tried to radically change their agrarian institutions, although
there are important differences in the specific methods of intervention and
their implementation. Anirban Dasgupta (Chapter 10) revisits the experience
of land reforms in Kerala and West Bengal to provide a comparative analysis of
the impact of left reformism on the nature of capital accumulation in these
two states. The chapter builds on a conceptual framework combining a
contemporary Marxist reading of the agrarian question and the theoretical
justification of land reforms from a developmentalist perspective. The analysis
in the chapter shows that land reforms were not able to generate a process of
inclusive industrial development in either state. While the reform programs of
leftist governments in these two states were not driven by a clear development
agenda, fundamental changes in agrarian relations brought about by success-
ful implementation of land reforms had potential to kick-start a process of
inclusive industrial development. The analysis in this chapter demonstrates
that this did not happen in either case. In Kerala, land reforms did not
revitalize agricultural production primarily because of a powerful trade
union movement leading to overpricing of labor and resistance to techno-
logical upgrading. With the absence of surplus generation in agriculture, the
intersectoral linkages for industrial growth could not be operationalized. In
contrast, West Bengal witnessed a significant increase in agricultural product-
ivity at the initial stages of land reform implementation but a variety of
institutional factors prevented the transmission of this success to the overall
economy including the manufacturing sector. Dasgupta interprets the experi-
ence of the two states as a disarticulation of the accumulation problematic of
the agrarian question in the sense that agriculture was not able to contribute
toward capital accumulation and therefore long-term industrial development
in spite of major interventions in land tenure relations.
To return to the regional perspectives on regimes of dispossession the two
case studies across time and space show interesting contrasts. Mircea Raianu
(Chapter 11) goes back to the colonial period, and examines patterns of land
acquisition in the establishment of two enterprises that would obtain the
status of proto-national industries before independence in 1947: the Tata
hydroelectric power companies in the Western Ghats, and the Tata Iron and
Steel Company at Jamshedpur. Adopting a comparative regional perspective,
he shows how the legal instruments of dispossession varied according to the
distribution of power. He argues that the entry of Indian capital in the

40
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

industrial sector in the early twentieth century made possible two seemingly
contradictory but mutually constitutive trends: the legal designation of pri-
vate capital as capable of fulfilling a “public purpose,” and the increasingly
direct involvement of the state in resource capture and management for the
purpose of industrial development. The chapter uncovers the origins of key
aspects of the “land question” in India, including the predominance of
domestic over foreign capital, the enabling role of the state, and the persist-
ence of surplus labor, dimensions that are also present today in postcolonial
India.
The ethnographic account of land acquisition in Medinipur district of West
Bengal presented by Abhijit Guha (Chapter 12) shows how the administrative
wing of the (local) state rationalizes acquisition of land for private interests
and how the state has dealt with the feeble voices of protest. The irony is that
the West Bengal government has been by and large pro-peasant and yet sided
with industrial capitalists to foster economic development and manufacturing
employment in the state. The chapter is written in a reflexive personal narra-
tive form in which the author travels in time and space juxtaposing his direct
fieldwork experiences and encounters around land acquisition with archival
data collected from the land acquisition files in the department and the
assembly proceedings. The chapter reveals a clear mismatch in the behavioral
pattern between the actual cultivators of land and the policymakers and
executers of land acquisition operating under market forces. The transition
from a land-based rural economy towards an industrial regime was not
smooth. It was characterized by protest, resistance, and bargaining by the
peasants. There was also government and corporate failure, since the official
claims of industrial development and employment were not met during the
transition. These episodes finally led to a stalemate in the transition from
agriculture to industry in particular rural areas of West Bengal.
The hill areas of Northeast India provide a substantially different context for
the land question. The sixth regional case, presented by Gorky Chakraborty
and Asok Kumar Ray (Chapter 13), discusses the state’s role in changing
property right institutions in the hills of the Northeastern states. The authors
examine the appropriation of community land and subsequent dispossession
of the tribes embedded in the social economy of the hills of Northeast India.
They point out that the historico-epistemological hiatus between the custom-
ary law-abiding tribes vis-à-vis positive law imposed by the state is fundamen-
tal to understand the difference between the two contrasting interpretations
of property rights enacted in the highlands of the region. Traditionally, shift-
ing cultivation was the main system of agricultural production in this region,
which was not for surplus generation, unlike the mode prevalent in the
wet-field-dominated plains. Shifting cultivation was discouraged by both
the colonial and postcolonial state. Thus the policy shift toward settled

41
The Land Question in India

cultivation led to large-scale dispossession among the tribal groups by the

settlers from neighboring regions. The chapter highlights the implications of
trivialization of community land and dispossession of the tribal masses in
Manipur, Meghalaya, and Tripura and suggests that the constitutional protec-
tions have fallen short in protecting the community resources of the tribes in
the region. To make their point, the authors argue that the emerging issue of
hydropower in Arunachal Pradesh and the associated threats of dispossession of
the communities (through wet rice and commercial crop cultivation) under the
hegemony of state-business collusion are the manifestation of the continuing
process of appropriation of community resources in the hill areas of Northeast
India. This is another instance of dispossession where the state played an
indirect role and was not directly involved in acquiring land for private interests.

Notes

1. In earlier debates, transition also referred to the possibility of socialist development.

The term “transition” today is deployed to refer to former Soviet Union, East
European countries, and China, which are presumably in various stages of moving
toward capitalist market economies.
2. Exogenous here does not mean international influences as was the case in Latin
America’s agrarian outcomes, where both history and exogenous international
factors have contributed to a “disarticulated accumulation” model (de Janvry
1990: 32–45). Rather it is the Indian nonagricultural sector that is influencing
rural outcomes.
3. The Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households.
4. For this survey, NSSO defined “agricultural household” as a household receiving a
value of produce more than Rs. 3,000 from agricultural activities (e.g., cultivation of
field crops, horticultural crops, fodder crops, plantation, animal husbandry, poultry,
fishery, piggery, bee-keeping, vermiculture, sericulture, etc.) and having at least one
member self-employed in agriculture either in the principal status or in subsidiary
status during the 365 days preceding the survey.
5. This could be due to the fact that almost all manufacturing requires dedicated
services (see Cohen and Zysman 1988).
6. Government of India, Ministry of Finance, 2015. Economic Survey, 2014–15,
available at: <http://indiabudget.nic.in/survey.asp> (accessed May 19, 2015).
7. Coparcener refers to the inheritance custom of property being divided equally
among (generally) male siblings of a household, thereby generating smaller plots
of land over time for those inheriting land.
8. In the former cases, land grabbing is driven by food insecurity, access to raw
materials, or presumably fostering more efficient (large-scale) agriculture.
9. One estimate puts the number of people displaced by the state under the aegis of
eminent domain (a hangover of the colonial government’s Land Acquisition Act of
1894) to at least 50 million (Sampat 2010: 170–1).

42
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

References

Adnan, S. 2013. “Land Grabs and Primitive Accumulation in Deltaic Bangladesh:

Interactions Between Neoliberal Globalization, State Interventions, Power Relations
and Peasant Resistance,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1): 87–128.
Akram-Lodhi, A. H. and Kay, C. 2010. “The Agrarian Question: Peasants and Rural
Change.” In Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the
Agrarian Question, edited by A. H. Akram-Lodhi and C. Kay. Abingdon: Routledge,
pp. 3–34.
Allen, R. C. 1999. “Tracking the Agricultural Revolution in England,” Economic History
Review, 52(2): 209–35.
Bagchi, A. K. 2010. “Nineteenth Century Imperialism and Structural Transformation
in Colonized Countries.” In Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural
Transformation and the Agrarian Question, edited by A. H. Akram-Lodhi and C. Kay.
Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 83–110.
Banerjee, A. V. and Iyer, L. 2005. “History, Institutions, and Economic Performance:
The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India,” The American Economic
Review, 95(4)(September): 1190–213.
Banerjee-Guha, S. 2013. “Accumulation and Dispossession: Contradictions of Growth
and Development in Contemporary India,” South Asia, 36(2): 165–79.
Bardhan, P. 2006. The Political Economy of Development in India. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Bates, R. H. 1989. Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian
Development in Kenya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bernstein, H. 1996. “Agrarian Questions Then and Now,” Journal of Peasant Studies,
24(1–2): 22–59.
Bernstein, H. 2010. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.
Bharadwaj, K. 1985. “A View on Commercialisation in Indian Agriculture and the
Development of Capitalism,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 12(4): 7–25.
Borras, S. M., Franco, J. C., Gómez, S., Kay, C., and Spoor, M. 2012. “Land Grabbing in
Latin America and the Caribbean,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4): 845–72.
Brass, T. 2010. “Unfree Labour as Primitive Accumulation?” Capital and Class, 35(1):
23–38.
Brass, T. 2011. “Primitive Accumulation, Capitalist Development and Socialist Transition:
Still Waiting for Godot,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 41(1): 1–24.
Breman, J. 2010. “The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in India.” In Routledge
Handbook of South Asian Politics: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal,
edited by P. R. Brass. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 321–36.
Byres, T. J. 1993. “State, Class and Development Planning in India.” In The State and
Development Planning in India, edited by T. J. Byres. Delhi: Oxford University Press,
pp. 5–50.
Byres, T. J. 2002. “Paths of Capitalist Agrarian Transition in the Past and in the Contem-
porary World.” In Agrarian Studies: Essays on Agrarian Relations in Less-Developed
Countries, edited by V. K. Ramachandran and M. Swaminathan. New Delhi: Tulika
Books, pp. 54–83.

43
The Land Question in India

Chakravorty, S. 2013. The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Chandrasekhar, C. P. 2007. “The Progress of ‘Reform’ and the Retrogression of Agriculture,”
available at: <https://www.academia.edu/3338396/The_Progress_of_Reform_and_the_
Retrogression_of_Agriculture> (accessed March 18, 2015).
Chatterjee, P. 2008. “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India,” Economic
and Political Weekly, 43(16): 53–62.
Cohen, S. S. and Zysman, J. 1988. Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial
Economy. New York: Basic Books.
Cotula, L. 2012. “The International Political Economy of the Global Land Rush: A Critical
Appraisal of Trends, Scale, Geography and Drivers,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4):
649–80.
Cross, J. 2014. Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India. London:
Pluto Press.
D’Costa, A. P. 2014. “Compressed Capitalism and Development: Primitive Accumula-
tion, Petty Commodity Production, and Capitalist Maturity in India and China,”
Critical Asian Studies, 6(2): 317–44.
D’Costa, A. P. 2016. “Jobless Growth Even in Labor-Abundant India: Capitalist Transi-
tion and the Challenges of Employment.” Paper presented for the Panel on “Global
Capitalism, National Experiences, and Changing Labor Markets in Asia,” at the
Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, Washington State Convention Center,
Seattle, March 31–April 3, 2016.
de Janvry, A. 1990. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Grindle, M. S. 2000. Audacious Reforms: Institutional Innovation and Democracy in Latin
America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Grindle, M. S. 2001. “In Quest of the Political: The Political Economy of Development
Policymaking.” In Frontiers of Development Economics, edited by Gerald M. Meier and
Joseph E. Stiglitz. Washington, DC, and New York: The World Bank and Oxford
University Press, pp. 345–80.
Harriss, J. 2013. “Does ‘Landlordism’ Still Matter? Reflections on Agrarian Change in
India,” Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3): 351–64.
Jaffrelot, C. 2015. “Business-Friendly Gujarat under Narendra Modi: Towards a New
Political Economy?” Paper presented at the South Asia Studies Center, University of
Washington, Seattle, November 6, 2015.
Jenkins, R. 2013. “Land, Rights and Reform in India,” Pacific Affairs, 86(3): 591–612.
Larrain, J. 1989. Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism and Dependence.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lerche, J. 2013. “The Agrarian Question in Neoliberal India: Agrarian Transition
Bypassed?” Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3): 382–404.
Levien, M. 2012. “Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in
India,” Journal of Agrarian Change, 11(4): 454–83.
Lewis, W. A. 1954. “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,”
Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, 22(May): 139–91.

44
 State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition

Li, T. M. 2011. “Centering Labor in the Land Grab Debate,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 38
(2): 281–98.
Marx, K. 1958–1971. “Brief an die redaktion der ‘Otetschestwennyje Sapiski’.” In
Werke, 39 Bde. und 2 Erg. Bde. Edited by K. Marx and F. Engels, Berlin: Dietz.
Mezzadra, S. 2011. “The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s Analysis of
So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” Rethinking Marxism, 23(3): 302–21.
National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) 2009. The
Challenge of Employment in India: An Informal Economy Perspective, Volume I, Main
Report, New Delhi.
Nielsen, K. B. 2010. “Contesting India’s Development? Industrialisation, Land Acquisition,
and Protest in West Bengal,” Forum for Development Studies, 37(2): 145–70.
Patnaik, U. 2007. The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays. Gurgaon: Three Essays
Collective.
Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Polanyi, K. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our
Time. 2nd edn, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Razavi, S. 2009. “Engendering the Political Economy of Agrarian Change,” Journal of
Peasant Studies, 36(1): 197–226.
Saith, A. 1985. “Primitive Accumulation, Agrarian Reform and Socialist Transitions: An
Argument,” Journal of Development Studies, 22(1): 1–48.
Sampat, P. 2010. “Special Economic Zones in India: Reconfiguring Displacement in a
Neoliberal Order?” City and Society, 22(2): 166–82.
Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmen-
tality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge.
Sud, N. 2014. “Governing India’s Land,” World Development, 60(August): 43–56.
Walker, K. L. M. 2008. “Neoliberalism on the Ground in Rural India: Predatory Growth,
Agrarian Crisis, Internal Colonization, and the Intensification of Class Struggle,”
Journal of Peasant Studies, 35(4): 557–620.
Wallerstein, I. 1979. The Capitalist World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Whitehead, A. and Tsikata, D. 2003. “Policy Discourses on Women’s Land Rights in
Sub-Saharan Africa: The Implications of the Return to the Customary,” Journal of
Agrarian Change, 3(1–2): 67–112.
Wily, L. A. 2012. “Looking Back to See Forward: The Legal Niceties of Land Theft in
Land Rushes,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4): 751–75.
World Bank. 2007. India: Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.

45
Part I
Primitive and Contemporary
Accumulation
2

From Primitive Accumulation to Regimes

of Dispossession

Theses on India’s Land Question

Michael Levien

2.1 Introduction

Since the mid-2000s, the dispossession of land has become unprecedentedly

central to India’s political economy. While tens of millions of people were
dispossessed of their land in the period of state-led development (Fernandes
2008), the scale of land dispossession has accelerated since liberalization. Its
causes, moreover, have profoundly shifted as privatized forms of industry,
infrastructure, real estate, and extraction have eclipsed public sector projects as
causes for forcibly taking land from farmers. What has also changed, particu-
larly in the last decade, is the breadth and strength of anti-dispossession politics.
While dozens of movements, most notably the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save
the Narmada Movement), fought tenaciously against dams and other public
sector development projects from the 1980s onwards, since roughly 2005
so-called “land wars” have become more widespread and successful in stopping
and stalling projects than ever before. This opposition has been occasionally
aided (although typically not started) by political parties as land dispossession
has become electorally salient for the first time in India’s history. This oppos-
ition has, in the aggregate, reached a point where it now poses a significant
obstacle to accumulation: by one estimate, in 2011, capital investments worth
3 percent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) were stalled due to land
acquisition problems (CMIE 2012). Stalled investments have been singled
out—rightly or wrongly—as a cause of India’s recent economic slowdown and
have become a key object of concern for both state and capital. Overcoming
The Land Question in India

these “roadblocks” was the goal of a historic revision of India’s Land Acquisition
Act (LAA) in 2013 and a top priority of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) govern-
ment that assumed power in 2014. The Indian state remains caught, however,
between the land requirements of capitalist growth and the political compul-
sions of electoral democracy; whether, how, and for whom this contradiction
gets resolved constitutes India’s “new” land question.
Like the other contributions to this volume, this chapter seeks to under-
stand this conjuncture. It suggests that doing so requires theoretical recon-
struction and comparative historical perspective. It argues that existing
theoretical perspectives, whether Marx’s primitive accumulation or Harvey’s
accumulation by dispossession, are not adequate for understanding the rela-
tionship between land dispossession and capitalism—in India or elsewhere.
They are inadequate because they do not help us understand how disposses-
sion changes over time and space, and they do not illuminate the politics of
dispossession. While building on this theoretical tradition, I advance the
concept of “regimes of dispossession” as an alternative way of understanding
the relationship between land dispossession and capitalism. Dispatching with
the obfuscating assumption that dispossession is a “necessary” cost of devel-
opment or stage in the development of capitalism, I argue that dispossession is
fundamentally a social relation of coercive redistribution. While this relation-
ship exists in probably all social formations, it is driven by different forms of
accumulation and class interests under different historical phases of capital-
ism. We can thus think of dispossession as being organized into socially
and historically specific regimes. Under different regimes of dispossession,
states seek to redistribute resources to different classes (or class fractions) for
different economic purposes. Given these purposes and interests, regimes of
dispossession have different combinations of means—force, legitimacy, and
material concessions—available for making people comply with their dispos-
session. The concept of “regimes of dispossession” is useful, I argue, for two
reasons. First, it helps us to compare and thus critically interrogate the specific
economic purposes that states, at any given time, seek to legitimize as “devel-
opment.” Second, it helps us to understand the conditions under which
dispossession is most likely to encounter noncompliance and be effectively
stopped. Regimes of dispossession thus provide the basis for a political
economy of dispossession without the assumptions of economic progress or
political inevitability.
Applying this concept to land dispossession in post-independence India,
I argue that beginning in the early 1990s, India shifted from a regime that
dispossessed land for state-led projects of industrial and agricultural trans-
formation (the production of commodities) to one that dispossesses land for
private and decreasingly productive investments (the commodification of
land itself). This radical transformation of Indian states into land brokers for

50
 Theses on India’s Land Question

private capital is entirely missed by economists who insist that today’s land
grabs are a necessary cost of “development” (Banerjee et al. 2007; Bardhan
2011; Chakravorty 2013) as well as those theorists who see them as part of
India’s passage through the (presumably inevitable) stage of “primitive accu-
mulation” (Chatterjee 2008). Both formulations naturalize dispossession by
turning contemporary forms of “class robbery” (Thompson 1963: 218) into
historical necessity.1 The land grabs of the neoliberal period do not represent
simply more “development-induced displacement” or the inexorable march
of “primitive accumulation,” but rather the emergence of a new regime of
redistributing landed wealth upwards. This new regime of dispossessing land
for increasingly financialized private purposes is arguably less “developmen-
tal” than its Nehruvian predecessor. It is certainly far more politically tenuous.
Its continuance depends on the Indian state’s questionable ability to substi-
tute land prices for nationalist legitimacy.

2.2 Six Theses on the Indian Land Question

In the following six theses, I develop the concept of regimes of dispossession

as a way of understanding the relationship between land grabs and specific
historical phases of capitalism, and demonstrate its ability to illuminate In-
dia’s contemporary land question.

Thesis 1: Contemporary land grabs are not “primitive accumulation.”

While the concept is much beloved and applied generously to land grabs and
many other social phenomena that smell of theft and fraud, it is time to
recognize that so-called “primitive accumulation” obscures more than it illu-
minates about contemporary forms of land dispossession. In the final chapters
of Volume 1 of Capital, Marx advanced the concept to explain how the origins
of capitalist social relations lay in “the historical process of divorcing the
producer from the means of production” (1977: 875). Basing his analysis partly
on the English enclosures, Marx argued that the bloody and violent process
of expelling peasants from the land generated the preconditions for capitalism by
effecting the “two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence
and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned
into wage-laborers” (Marx 1977: 875). In a process stretching over several cen-
turies and culminating in the Parliamentary Enclosures Acts of the eighteenth
century, the English common lands (along with state and church lands) were
turned into sheep walks and capitalist farms while commoners were turned into
a proletariat. Mocking Adam Smith’s “idyllic” fairy tale of capitalism’s origins,
Marx observes that capital came into the world “dripping from head to toe, from
every pore, with blood and dirt” (1977: 926).

51
The Land Question in India

It is important to recognize that there is ambiguity in Marx’s own concep-

tion of primitive accumulation. Fundamentally, this section of Capital offers
an origin story about how the preconditions for capitalism came into being.2
In this sense, primitive accumulation is defined by its function in the develop-
ment of capitalism: it is those historical processes that establish capitalist
social relations. On the other hand, Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation
also appears to make a means-specific distinction between those processes that
gave rise to a capitalist mode of production in which “conquest, enslavement,
robbery, murder, in short, force, played the greatest part” (1977: 874), and a
mature capitalist system that, once developed, can dispense with extra-
economic coercion and rely on the “silent compulsion of economic relations”
(1977: 899). In the first possible conception, it is the function that distin-
guishes primitive accumulation from capitalist accumulation proper, and in
the second it is its extra-economic means. This leaves two possible ways of
understanding primitive accumulation as a general concept: 1) it is any pro-
cess that creates the preconditions for capitalism; or 2) it is any process that
creates capitalism’s preconditions through the use of force. There is also a
third possibility: primitive accumulation is any process of accumulation that
involves force. Only in this last option would primitive accumulation be
ongoing under capitalism. Marx, however, confined primitive accumulation to
an early chapter in the development of capitalism, calling it, “an accumulation
which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of
departure” (1977: 873).3 To the extent that it continues, it does so serially as
different countries transition to capitalism.4
Within the functional conception, there is another ambiguity. How much
emphasis should one place on each of the “two transformations”: turning the
land into capital, and turning the peasantry into a proletariat? In his analysis
of the enclosures, Marx devotes little attention to the economic forces motiv-
ating the gentry to enclose the commons for sheep walks (the rising price of
wool generated by the booming textile industry of Flanders) compared to its
main consequence: creating a class of wage laborers “freed” from their means
of production. This is because Marx was more interested in providing a
historical account of the emergence of a proletariat rather than a political
economy of land dispossession. But by focusing on dispossession’s conse-
quences rather than its causes, Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation is
based on a kind of post hoc functionalism that prevents it from becoming a
theory of ongoing land dispossession under capitalism. Merely calling primi-
tive accumulation “ongoing” does not resolve these conceptual problems.
Subsequent applications of primitive accumulation, particularly in the lit-
erature on agrarian transition, have compounded the initial ambiguities in
Marx’s conception. First, analysts of the transition to capitalism in England
have argued that it was not necessarily the enclosures but rather reduction to

52
 Theses on India’s Land Question

“market dependence” that signaled the rise of capitalist social relations in the
countryside (Brenner 2001; Wood 2002), raising the question of whether
coercive land expropriation is necessarily a part of primitive accumulation.
Decades of research on the “agrarian question” outside of England demon-
strated that the widespread enclosure of land constitutes only one historically
specific pathway to capitalist development (Byres 1991). Primitive accumula-
tion, consequently, came to mean one of two things. First, it could refer to any
process that proletarianized peasants and forged a class of agrarian capitalists.
This often proceeded not through wholesale eviction from land but through a
gradual process of class differentiation (Adnan 1985: 57; Kautsky 1988: 17;
Lenin 1967). Economic processes like debt came to be seen as equally effective
levers of primitive accumulation as the extra-economic enclosure of land
(Bhaduri 1983). Second, primitive accumulation could refer to the general
process of diverting agricultural surpluses for capitalist industrialization
(Byres 1991: 11). In this usage, primitive accumulation did not necessarily
mean establishing capitalist social relations, but transferring surpluses from
agriculture to industry.5 Such primitive accumulation was seen as a necessary
condition for economic growth in all “backward” countries, including social-
ist ones (Byres 1991: 11; Ka and Selden 1986; Preobrazhensky 1965).6
The vast research on the origins of capitalism and agrarian transitions in
Europe and the Global South has thus amplified the original ambiguities in
Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation. It is no longer clear if primitive
accumulation refers to the dispossession of land through extra-economic
means, to any process that generates the preconditions of capitalism, or
even to any process that provides surpluses for industrialization. My purpose
here is not to question the utility of primitive accumulation for understanding
transitions to capitalism,7 but to simply point out that it is not adequate for
explaining the persistence of land dispossession and the various forms it
assumes within capitalism. Agrarian transitions and land grabs for capitalist
development are distinct phenomena in need of different concepts.
Today’s dispossessions cannot be understood in the old functional sense of
creating the preconditions for capitalism: dispossessing farmers for special
economic zones (SEZs) or factories or mines does not necessarily inaugurate
capitalist social relations (which often already exist) and it does not mark
transitions between modes of production. Dispossessions today often
have little to do with agriculture and are not about resolving the “agrarian
question.” They involve dispossessing land—sometimes already held within
capitalist social relations—for nonagricultural development and are thus
entirely orthogonal to the slow and uneven development of capitalist agricul-
ture. They are, moreover, geared toward capitalizing land with little regard for
what happens to the dispossessed farmer whose labor power is largely super-
fluous (both to specific projects and to accumulation as a whole). They reflect

53
The Land Question in India

not an early stage of capitalism but advanced capitalist demands on land and
natural resources. They take a myriad of sector-specific forms—whether dams,
highways, mines, steel plants, SEZs, or housing—that do not resemble the
“classic” pattern of the enclosures. They must be understood within a new
problematic: not what is the role of land dispossession in transitions to
capitalism, but what is the role of land dispossession within capitalism? This
requires, I suggest, shifting attention from the transition between modes of
production to variation in regimes of dispossession within the capitalist mode
of production. Before developing this framework, however, we must turn to
the strengths and limitations of Harvey’s more recent formulation of “accu-
mulation by dispossession.”

Thesis 2: While contemporary land grabs may be considered accumulation

by dispossession, we should understand this as a political process of state
redistribution and not a functional response to over-accumulation.

In The New Imperialism (2003), Harvey argues that “accumulation by disposses-

sion” has become the predominant mode of accumulation under neoliberalism
and that the traditional Marxist focus on labor must be complemented with
greater attention to proliferating struggles over the dispossession of various
forms of public and private wealth. Harvey’s examples of accumulation by
dispossession include the expropriation of land and natural resources from
peasant populations; the conversion of common or state property into private
property; the extraction of rents from intellectual property rights; the privat-
ization of collective social assets (such as pensions, health care, and other social
entitlements); and the various predations of finance capital. Harvey sees the
resurging importance of these mechanisms relative to “expanded reproduc-
tion” as a response to the problem of over-accumulated capital in the core
economies of the Global North.
To its merit, Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession explicitly recognizes
that dispossession is driven by advanced capitalism. Accumulation by dispos-
session unmoors the notion of primitive accumulation from the interstices of
modes of production, making it applicable to very diverse forms of disposses-
sion that have little do with agriculture and that do not necessarily inaugurate
capitalist social relations: for example, dispossessions for factories, dams, SEZs,
slum redevelopment, mining, privatized infrastructure, and real estate. Accu-
mulation by dispossession marks a significant advancement on primitive
accumulation precisely in its ability to capture diverse contemporary dispos-
sessions that take sector-specific and geographically dispersed forms, and
whose significance for capital lies more in the expropriated asset (e.g., the
land) than in the labor power of the dispossessed owner.
But what exactly defines accumulation by dispossession? While freeing primi-
tive accumulation from its function of generating capitalist social relations,

54
 Theses on India’s Land Question

Harvey redefines the concept through another, more contemporary function:

namely, absorbing over-accumulated capital in the global economy. We might
expect Harvey to further specify accumulation by dispossession as those pro-
cesses that provide outlets for capital through extra-economic means—as in
Marx’s characterization of primitive accumulation as involving, “conquest,
enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force” (1977: 874). However, Harvey
does not provide a clear definition of accumulation by dispossession, and expli-
citly claims that it is “primarily economic rather than extra-economic” (Harvey
2006a: 159). Without this means-specific distinction, it is not clear what these
different processes share, nor what separates accumulation by dispossession
from other “fixes” to the problem of over-accumulation or from the “normal”
expanded reproduction of capital (see Brenner 2006; Levien 2011, 2012). The
concept’s boundary is vitiated, undermining its analytical utility.
The consequence is that Harvey underemphasizes the most significant
aspect of land dispossession: namely, that it is a deeply political process in
which owners of the means of coercion transparently redistribute assets from
one group to another.8 Although he recognizes that state force can be central
to dispossession (Harvey 2003: 154), he overextends the concept to include so
many diverse phenomena—including those such as finance capital that have
an indirect or unclear link to state force—that he cannot explicitly incorporate
the state into his theory. As a result, Harvey’s framework misses the crucial and
distinguishing feature of accumulation by dispossession as it applies to land:
its fundamental and transparent reliance on state force. This prevents him
from grasping the distinctive politics of dispossession.
As a process of transparent and coercive redistribution, land dispossession is
a political process whose outcome is determined by class struggle and not
merely the circuits of capital (Brenner 1976; De Angelis 2007). There is noth-
ing automatic about capital (over-accumulated or not) finding outlets in land
or in any other asset; by reading every instance of dispossession as a result of
the global impulses of capital, Harvey fails to answer the question of why
impulses toward accumulation translate into dispossession in a particular con-
text? Why do capitalists need states to dispossess land for them rather than
simply purchasing it on the market? And why do states do it for them?
Dispossession requires a state that is willing and able to use its monopoly of
the means of violence to expropriate land from certain classes for the benefit
of others. It often arises, as in the case of land dispossession in India, from the
desire of states to help capitalists overcome barriers to accumulation, such as
rural land markets dominated by smallholding peasantries. But, in different
times and places, we find that states have been willing and able to dispossess
land for different classes (or class fractions) for different economic purposes. In
India, the colonial state dispossessed land for railroads and natural resource
extraction to benefit metropolitan capital; the Nehruvian state dispossessed

55
The Land Question in India

land for public sector industry and infrastructure; and the neoliberal state
dispossesses land for all forms of private accumulation including real estate.
Looking across countries, dispossession in India and China today is predom-
inantly driven by urban–industrial purposes,9 while in Africa and Latin
America it is largely for agricultural plantations. Harvey’s concept offers little
basis for understanding this variation. While it may be true, as he argues, that
the quantity of dispossession is increasing with the institution of neoliberal
economic policies, it is unclear and probably impossible to show that over-
accumulated capital in the Global North is the cause (much of the capital for
India’s SEZs, for example, has come from India itself).10 More fundamentally,
what we must understand—and what Harvey overlooks—is how and why
states restructure themselves to dispossess land for different purposes and
different classes in different periods.
One must also explain how states succeed in dispossessing people of their
land for any given set of purposes and what accounts for variation in this
success. The transparent use of state coercion to dispossess land creates an
immediate antagonism between the would-be dispossessed and the state.
Unable to rely on the mystification common to the exploitation of labor
under capitalism, states must justify land dispossession with ideological
claims to be serving “a public purpose” or the “national interest”; in the past
century, they have typically done this through the language of “develop-
ment.” The persuasiveness of these claims rests considerably on whether the
economic purpose driving dispossession can be aligned with a widely accepted
concept of national development. Where ideological justifications and/or
material compensations prove inadequate and resistance emerges, the ability
of the state to dispossess is decided by the balance of political forces.
With accumulation by dispossession, then, the state, politics, and ideology
are—as Perry Anderson argues for precapitalist modes of production (1974:
403–4)—internal and constitutive features of accumulation itself. This is the
very significant implication of the fact that extra-economic coercion, which is
thought to subside with the transition to capitalism, is an intrinsic and
ongoing aspect of accumulation under advanced capitalism. It means that
the character and outcome of dispossession in different times and places will
be shaped by heterogeneous and nationally specific political, economic, and
ideological factors that cannot be read off of global imperatives of capital.
Their specific configuration in any given place and time can be understood as
a regime of dispossession.

Thesis 3: Dispossession is organized into socially and historically specific

regimes.

When owners of the means of coercion consistently dispossess land for par-
ticular classes for a fairly coherent range of purposes, we can call this a regime

56
 Theses on India’s Land Question

of dispossession. If a regime of production is an institutionalized way of

extracting surplus value from workers (Burawoy 1985), a regime of disposses-
sion is an institutionalized way of expropriating land from current owners or
users. It has two essential components: a state willing to dispossess for a
particular set of economic purposes that are tied to particular class interests,
and a way of generating compliance to this dispossession. These two aspects
are intrinsically linked.
At any given time, states have a set of economic purposes for which they
are willing and able to dispossess land. With respect to private property, this is
partly a legal matter of what is considered a “public purpose” under relevant
eminent domain statutes and domestic case law (common and state land are
typically dispossessed with little legal impediment). However, it remains pri-
marily a political question since, as we have seen in India, states amend (and
sometimes flout) these laws to suit their purposes at any given time, and,
further, because states might not choose to dispossess land for all the purposes
allowed to them by law.
Some might consider this a non-question under the assumption that
states are always instruments of the dominant class and are therefore
always willing to dispossess whatever that class desires. However, assuming
that state willingness to dispossess flows automatically from the “needs” of
capitalism elides important variation and also renders dispossession inev-
itable. First, many states have for long periods in their history limited the
forcible dispossession of land from their own citizens for “public purposes,”
construed narrowly as projects of the state (Reynolds 2010). While some
classes inevitably profit more than others from state projects, one must
distinguish between dispossessing land for public infrastructure and dis-
possessing land directly for private capital. The latter characterizes distinct
historical regimes (such as India’s present one), whose emergence must be
explained. Second, dominant classes and class fractions change during
different phases of capitalism; as such, the kinds of accumulation they
propose to undertake with dispossessed land change along with them.
This variation shapes the developmental consequences of dispossession as
well as its politics.
Every regime of dispossession must have a way of compelling people to
relinquish their land. This is a different power relation than that involved in
the exploitation of labor: whereas exploitation requires that workers continu-
ously work, dispossession requires a one-time expulsion of people from their
land. Whereas exploitation requires enduring consent at the point of production,
dispossession only requires one-time compliance at the point of enclosure.
Dispossessing people of their land is ultimately a question of political
authority, or the ability of states to make people comply with their orders
(Weber 1978: 212–15). Because dispossession cannot be mystified, there are

57
The Land Question in India

three basic means available for doing this: coercion, material compensation,
and normative persuasion (e.g., legitimacy). All regimes of dispossession rely
to some degree on the actual or threatened use of force. When a state notifies
farmers that it seeks to acquire their land, the potential use of violence backs
this intent; regardless of any compensation that might be offered, unless
farmers have the right to refuse, land acquisition is fundamentally coercive.
If farmers do ultimately refuse to vacate their land, the threat of coercion
becomes actual violence. Given its political costs, however, states typically
hope to economize on violence and rely on other means. Regimes of dispos-
session vary in the extent to which they must rely completely on coercion or
can additionally draw on normative and material inducements to separate
people from their land.
States almost always find it necessary to justify their use of coercive power to
redistribute property. This is not simply the case in liberal democracies; even if
they can use relatively more coercion, authoritarian governments still typic-
ally feel compelled to justify dispossession as serving the public or national
interest (as we see in China today). A major determinant of the success and
stability of a regime of dispossession is the extent to which its appeals to the
public interest are convincing to the dispossessed and to would-be supporters.
This hinges crucially on the economic purposes justifying dispossession and
their anticipated beneficiaries.
The other basis for compliance is appealing to the material interests of
the dispossessed. While there were scant incentives for English peasants to
relinquish the commons—they were driven off without compensation and
transformed into a destitute proletariat—most contemporary societies require
that those forcibly dispossessed of their private property be given some form
of compensation. States sometimes base this compensation on an assessment
of a property’s “fair market value” (though determining this in the absence of a
voluntary transaction poses a problem), and, in recent decades, they have
sometimes augmented this compensation with explicit policies for the
“resettlement and rehabilitation” of the dispossessed. While historically such
concessions have been meager, states almost always make some sort of material
promises to the dispossessed, trying to convince them that they will be given
some stake in the “development” that their dispossession makes possible. Both
the types of promises made—irrigated land, jobs, real estate values, and so on—
and the ability of states to deliver on these promises depend crucially on the
particular kind of accumulation that is driving dispossession.
Different regimes of dispossession are thus able to offer different kinds and
degrees of incentives to get farmers to comply with their dispossession. This
makes some regimes of dispossession politically formidable and others quite
tenuous. If seeing dispossession as a necessary aspect of capitalism can only
disempower political struggles against it, regimes of dispossession helps to

58
 Theses on India’s Land Question

identify why “accumulation by dispossession” can sometimes be halted by the

noncompliance of rural people.
In the remainder of this chapter, I argue that the framework of regimes of
dispossession helps to illuminate the changing political economy of dispos-
session in postliberalization India.

Thesis 4: Since 1991, India has passed from a regime that dispossessed
land for state-led industrial and infrastructural expansion to one that
dispossesses land for private—and increasingly financial—capital.

Between 1947 and 1991, the Indian state largely dispossessed land for public
sector projects to expand the industrial and agricultural productivity of the
country. The main forms of this dispossession were public sector dams, steel
towns, industrial areas, and mining. It is important to note that while India’s
Land Acquisition Act (LAA) allowed for the acquisition of land for private
companies, in practice this was relatively rare before economic liberaliza-
tion. While companies could receive plots of land in industrial areas/estates,
the state maintained ownership and collected ground rent from companies.
States did not acquire land for private companies to re-sell on the market;
rather, the rent from dispossessed land accrued to the state not private
capitalists, who were allotted leased land on the condition of engaging in
industrial production.
This is not to say that dispossession in this period actually served the “public
interest” or “development.” Such terms are always obfuscations of particular
class interests. Dispossessing land for these projects made possible accumula-
tion that disproportionately benefited the industrial bourgeoisie, dominant
agrarian classes, and public sector elites (Bardhan 1984; Dwivedi 2006; Nilsen
2010). Although this accumulation had some beneficial effects for other
classes, these projects were distributionally regressive as they came at the
cost of the impoverishment and proletarianization of approximately tens of
millions of rural people who were typically already among the country’s
poorest and most marginalized (Fernandes 2008). Many were also ecologically
destructive and failed on their own terms.
Nevertheless, these projects resonated with the Nehruvian vision of
national development that had widespread public legitimacy in the postinde-
pendence years. This is not to say that the dispossessed found their expropri-
ation and impoverishment legitimate, but that the broader legitimacy of
postcolonial developmentalism made resisting these projects difficult. This
legitimacy was inextricably linked to the fact that large numbers of people
believed they would benefit from the irrigation of large dams or receive jobs in
public sector industries. When farmers resisted, they were quickly suppressed
and this suppression was itself legitimized as in the national interest. Land
acquisition was not politically salient and farmers only occasionally found

59
The Land Question in India

allies to take up their cause, usually to demand more compensation (cf. Brass
2011; Struempell 2014). It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that strong
opposition movements began to challenge this model of development and
the “displacement” it required. Movements such as the Narmada Bachao
Andolan challenged the legitimacy of “destructive development” and pion-
eered anti-dispossession politics in India. Tragically, they were rarely success-
ful in stopping their own dispossession, underscoring the enduring strength
of the developmentalist regime of dispossession. A combination of coercion
and powerful ideological appeals to the nation ensured that the development
model would itself give way before these political movements could signifi-
cantly impede its ability to dispossess land.
In the early 1990s, however, economic liberalization initiated the genesis of
a new regime of dispossession driven by increasingly privatized, decreasingly
productive, and less labor-absorbing purposes. While there are many ways to
periodize India’s liberalization (cf. Kohli 2012), the early 1990s was the key
turning point for land acquisition.
First, economic liberalization after 1991 unleashed increasing private
demand for land for industry, infrastructure, and real estate. With the deci-
sion to liberalize private investment and to diminish the public sector’s role
in the economy (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2002), the share of private
capital in the economy steadily increased and became dominant by the
end of the decade (Kohli 2012: 45). While liberalization did not substantially
spur the manufacturing sector, it unleashed dramatic growth in India’s
service sector, particularly information technology (IT) and business process
outsourcing (BPO) (Bardhan 2010; Kohli 2012). This IT/BPO boom contrib-
uted to a dramatic growth in demand for commercial real estate that could
not be accommodated within the confines of older cities (Searle 2010),
leading to the growth of Hi-Tech parks on the peri-urban frontier. This
growth of the IT/BPO sector dovetailed with a second generation of reforms
that liberalized the real estate and infrastructure sectors (the privatization of
which is first considered in the Eighth Five-Year Plan formulated in 1992).
The central government introduced a series of policies to attract private
investment in power (1992), roads (1997), and ports (1997) as public–private
partnerships (PPP) became the preferred method for building infrastructure.
By the 2000s, 37 percent of infrastructure investment was coming from the
private sector (Gulati 2011: 380). Crucially, compensating private infrastruc-
ture investors with excess land and/or development rights became an
increasingly popular method of cost recovery in these arrangements—
whether for roads, airports, or affordable housing (Ahluwalia 1998; IDFC
2008, 2009). Infrastructure investment thus became a vehicle for private real
estate accumulation, culminating with special economic zones (SEZs) in the
mid-2000s.

60
 Theses on India’s Land Question

The privatization of infrastructure has thus been synergistic with the liber-
alization of India’s real estate sector. While urban development was a
state-dominated affair before liberalization, in the 1990s, the government
loosened restrictions on bank lending to private developers. By 2002, private
developers were allowed to obtain financing (for construction, though not
land purchases) from foreign investors. This policy was further liberalized
after 2005 (Searle 2010: 30). This credit expansion, combined with growing
demand for housing and office space, precipitated a dramatic real estate boom
by the mid-2000s.
In addition to real estate, economic liberalization unleashed a mineral rush
across central and eastern India. Beginning in 1993, India began to liberalize
its largely nationalized mining industry. The New National Mineral Policy of
1993 and subsequent revisions over the next decade facilitated private and
foreign investment in prospecting, extracting, and processing of most min-
erals. After changes in 1997 and 2000, foreign private equity investments of
up to 100 percent were granted automatic approval. By the 2000s, mineral
prices were increasing with the Indian and Chinese construction booms
driving up demand. While the mining sector has not grown exceptionally
fast, the number of memorandums of understanding (MoUs) signed with
private mining companies has accelerated and several states (Jharkhand,
Chattisgarh, and Orissa) have been particularly proactive in handing over
large mining concessions to private investors.
The process of economic liberalization that began in the 1990s has thus
created “a voracious appetite for space to meet the demands of industrializa-
tion, infrastructure building, urban expansion and resource extraction”
(Ghatak and Ghosh 2011: 65). This demand grew steadily over the 1990s,
receded somewhat during the East Asia financial crisis-triggered slowdown
between 1997 and the early 2000s, and ascended new heights in the mid-
2000s as India’s growth rate reached 9 percent and a liberalized real estate
market entered a dramatic boom.
This demand could not be met by the ordinary operation of land markets.
Most of the land available for such projects lay in the hands of India’s large
smallholding farmers and there are several well-known obstacles to consoli-
dating large chunks of rural land. First, very small holdings make negotiations
difficult and holdouts likely. Second, legal problems are almost guaranteed for
large projects given titling issues and ambiguity in ownership. Third, many
farmers remain reluctant to sell land for multiple reasons, including the lack of
attractive exit options from agriculture. The growing demand for land initi-
ated by liberalization in India thus confronted the supply barrier of rural land
markets that do not provide “an open field” for the circulation of capital
(Harvey 2006b: 271). If large land-consuming private investments were to go
forward, the state would have to dispossess land for them.

61
The Land Question in India

There were two main incentives for states to help capital overcome this
obstacle. First, liberalization also unleashed fierce interstate competition
for investment (Jenkins 1999; Rudolph and Rudolph 2001). What has been
underappreciated is the critical role land dispossession has assumed in this
competition.11 Given the barrier to amassing large chunks of land through
market purchase, companies making large enough investments insist on a
government commitment to acquiring it. Such a commitment is an invariable
item in the MoUs signed between companies and state governments. According
to both government officials and industry representatives that I interviewed in
seven states, the ability of state governments to dispossess peasants has become
of critical importance in the interstate competition for investment. As Nirupam
Sen, then Industries Minister of West Bengal, explained:

Providing land is one of the most important things, you see, because until
and unless you get a hold of the land, there is no question of setting up
industry. . . . That is the most important input. If you don’t get it, if you
cannot provide it, then they will seek somewhere else where they can get
that land. (Interview, February 28, 2011, Kolkata)

The flight of Tata Motors from West Bengal to Gujarat after meeting stiff
opposition in Singur powerfully illustrated the centrality of land to the inter-
state competition for footloose capital.
The second incentive for states to move into dispossessing land for private
and increasingly real estate-driven purposes was the enormous licit and illicit
rents this would make possible. Acquiring land and selling it to private invest-
ors became a significant source of revenue for industrial development corpor-
ations, urban development authorities, and other parastatals. Moreover, this
increasing state role in land acquisition and allocation expanded the oppor-
tunities for illicit graft, which takes the form of government officials and
politicians buying land in advance of projects being announced (or selling
that information to others) or demanding bribes for land allocation, land
conversion, or shifting project boundaries. This nexus of government officials,
politicians, brokers, and developers generates “corruption” and black money
on a scale that makes the “license raj” look quaint.
The upshot is that state governments restructured themselves into land
broker states. No longer confining themselves to dispossessing land for state-
led projects of productive material expansion, states turned to dispossessing
peasants for any private economic purpose that constitutes “growth,” includ-
ing real estate speculation. As a shorthand, we can characterize this as a shift
from a regime of “land for production” to one of “land for the market.” No
longer is land dispossessed just for the production of commodities, but
increasingly for its own commodification. This began in the early 1990s as
industrial development corporations and other agencies began acquiring land

62
 Theses on India’s Land Question

P3

Private Increment

P2

Public Increment

P1

Compensation

Private Rate of ABD=P3/P2

Public Rate of ABD=P2/P1
Total Rate of ABD=P3/P1

Figure 2.1. Rate of accumulation by dispossession

Source: Compiled by author.

for private and decreasingly industrial purposes (Levien 2013), and reached
maturity in the mid-2000s with SEZs, other forms of PPP infrastructure, and
the auctioning by urban development authorities of peri-urban farmland to
private investors. Rather than simply dispossessing land for production,
states began dispossessing land so that private companies could capture the
differential between the price paid to farmers and its ultimate market value.
I call this ratio between the compensation and market prices the rate of
accumulation by dispossession (illustrated in Figure 2.1). In the case of the
Mahindra World City SEZ in Rajasthan, I have used documents obtained
through the Right to Information (RTI) Act to conservatively estimate this
rate as 439 percent—including a profit of over Rs. 25 million per acre on land
turned to residential use—based on 2011 prices, which have more than
doubled since (see Levien 2012: 947–8). In peri-urban Delhi, the Greater
Noida Industrial Development Authority has been documented acquiring
land at Rs. 820 per square meter and reselling it to developers at Rs. 35,000
(Sood 2011). The key point is that under India’s neoliberal regime maximiz-
ing such windfalls has itself become the purpose of dispossession, devoid of
any broader considerations of “development.”

Thesis 5: Under this neoliberal regime, dispossession has become less

developmental.

The old term “development-induced displacement” always assumed what

needed to be examined: that it was in fact “development” for which people
were being displaced. This assumption, which resonates with the state’s claim
that anything it does is development, is reproduced by recent commentators

63
The Land Question in India

who, in analyzing contemporary land struggles in India, insist that acquiring

land is a necessary cost of development and that the main issue is the terms of
compensation (cf. Banerjee et al. 2007; Bardhan 2011; Chakravorty 2013). In
his recent book, Sanjoy Chakravorty argues, for example, that “Development
cannot take place without changing the use of some land. . . . The problem is
not with acquisition per se, but with unjust acquisition” (2013: 173). By
unjust acquisition Chakravorty means acquisition compensated at an artifi-
cially low price; the solution, according to Chakravorty, is to “get the prices
right.” This perspective, however, misses the historical transformation in the
economic purposes driving land dispossession from the developmentalist to
neoliberal periods, and simply accepts that these purposes constitute “develop-
ment” of a sufficiently “public” nature. Partha Chatterjee (2008) accomplishes a
similar reduction when, following Sanyal (2007), he chalks up today’s land
grabs to a vaguely specified “primitive accumulation” whose political fallout
must be managed by the state. While focusing on the “governmentality” he
sees involved in the latter, he ironically accepts an ultra-orthodox concept of
“primitive accumulation” that renders today’s land grabs into the necessary
birth pangs of capitalism when they are in fact simply new forms of class
redistribution mediated by the state. These accounts make it appear as if
the privatized and speculative forms of dispossession in the neoliberal era—a
Reliance SEZ, a DLF Mall, a high-end residential colony, a Formula 1 racetrack—
represent generic and laudable “development” (Chakravorty) or a necessary
stage in the development of capitalism (Chatterjee).
While development is an inescapably normative concept, by most defin-
itions many of today’s land grabs fail the test. Indeed, there is a strong case to
be made that the projects for which the Nehruvian state acquired land had
much greater claims to development than those of today. Consider India’s
steel towns, a huge source of dispossession in the early decades after inde-
pendence (Parry 1999; Parry and Struempell 2008; Struempell 2014). India’s
public sector steel towns provided relatively high-quality employment to tens
of thousands of people, including many of those whom they displaced. They
allowed India to autonomously manufacture the key building block of an
industrial economy. They had huge linkages with the domestic economy
and generated ancillary industries in their vicinity. And their revenues were
captured by the state. Even dams, for all their many problems, at least pro-
duced electricity and provided irrigation to hundreds of thousands of farmers.
Now consider today’s private SEZs. These zones are driven—and their location
determined—by the interests of their developers in reselling land at a profit.
Aside from real estate speculation, the production that exists in them is
oriented towards non-labor-intensive industries; almost two-thirds are in the
IT/ITES (information technology enabled services) sector (Government of
India n.d.). The tax breaks afforded to them represent a huge drain on

64
 Theses on India’s Land Question

government revenue. My own study of a multipurpose (but IT/ITES-focused)

SEZ in Rajasthan found that it employed one individual in only 18 percent of
dispossessed families (all in temporary subcontracted positions), created few
productive linkages to the surrounding areas, and that its main effect was real
estate speculation that dramatically exacerbated preexisting class, caste, and
gender inequalities. When the dust settled, my random-sample survey of
ninety-four households in four villages found that 65 percent of dispossessed
families and 88 percent of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) families
reported having less income; 50 percent of families and 75 percent of SC/ST
families reported having less food; and 76 percent of families and 88 percent
of SC/ST families reported receiving more “loss” than “benefit” from the
project (see Figure 2.2). And this was within water-scarce villages of Rajasthan
that received a better-than-average compensation package for an SEZ that
contains some of India’s largest IT companies and is considered a “success.”
One can imagine how much less impressive are the “developmental” results of

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%
With less income With less food Felt more “loss” than
“benefit”

Total Lower Caste

Figure 2.2. Impoverishment by dispossession for Mahindra World City SEZ in

Rajasthan
Source: Based on author’s fieldwork.

65
The Land Question in India

SEZs in more agriculturally prosperous regions, not to mention the residential

colonies, golf courses, racetracks, and malls for which land is being expropri-
ated in so many other parts of India.
It is no longer plausible to assume that dispossession is a necessary price of
development or stage of capitalism. Instead, we must begin to take seriously—
and empirically study—the variation in the socioeconomic consequences of
dispossession across kinds of projects and diverse agrarian milieu. Understand-
ing such variation helps us to interrogate rather than quietly accept the
justifications for dispossession put forward by states and capital in the name
of “development.” The concept of regimes of dispossession helps to highlight
this variation, illuminating the different forms of accumulation and associ-
ated class interests that dispossession serves in different times and places.
Recognizing that dispossession is organized into qualitatively different
regimes helps us to throw off the yoke of teleology and historical determinism.
If the economic purposes driving dispossession change over time and place,
then the dispossession of direct producers is not a necessary stage of economic
development: it is neither a stage nor necessarily generative of development. The
concept of regimes of dispossession invites us to see dispossession as a form of
coercive redistribution that serves different purposes and class interests in
different periods but whose contribution to economic change and the “public
interest” is not only open to question, but subject to political contestation.

Thesis 6: India’s neoliberal regime is politically tenuous and is unlikely to be

rescued by higher compensation.

Just as India’s neoliberal regime of dispossession was reaching scale in the mid-
2000s, it began to encounter increasingly widespread and militant land wars.
The dimensions of these struggles are by now well known and need not be
repeated. It is enough to say that since the mid-2000s, they have become
endemic and uncommonly successful. Beneath the more high-profile
struggles—Nandigram, Singur, Raigad, Kalinganagar, Jagatsinghpur, Bhatta-
Parsaul, Niyamgiri—are endemic wars of attrition across the country. In
addition to organized opposition are the more prosaic legal challenges that,
according to my interviews, besiege industrial development corporations,
urban development authorities, and other parastatals in almost all states.
Cutting across the vicissitudes of individual struggles is an aggregate picture
of remarkable obstruction. That land acquisition is now a top concern of
Indian capital and the central government is testament to this newfound
success.
What explains this remarkable success? There are several factors, which
prove challenging to isolate. The first is the previous groundwork laid by
movements against Nehruvian-era projects, such as the Narmada Bachao
Andolan and the many movements gathered under the National Alliance of

66
 Theses on India’s Land Question

People’s Movements (NAPM). The second is the spread of NGOs and mass
media into rural areas, and the rise of opposition parties. The precise effects of
these changes remain to be investigated, and it is important to remember that
journalists, NGOs, and parties typically arrive on the scene only once oppos-
ition to a project is well underway. But more fundamental than these back-
ground factors, I would suggest, are several features intrinsic to the neoliberal
regime of dispossession itself. As we have seen, the shift toward dispossessing
land for the private sector, and particularly for real estate purposes, has greatly
magnified the discrepancy between compensation prices and market prices.
Not only has the rate of accumulation by dispossession increased, but it is also
more visible under the neoliberal regime than it was before. Instead of dispos-
session subsidizing the internal rate of return of a large infrastructure project,
it is now a mere instrument for maximizing the profit of private companies—
and farmers need only know the market price of land to estimate the extent to
which they are being ripped off. The second and related factor, as I have
already suggested, is the increasingly exclusionary growth that land dispos-
session is facilitating in the neoliberal era (cf. D’Costa 2014; Dreze and Sen
2013; Kohli 2012). Inseparable from these material considerations is the
dubious legitimacy of dispossessing land for private and often speculative
purposes. Few farmers can be convinced that giving their land to a private
corporation for real estate constitutes a “public purpose” justifying their
forcible removal. Even the media, political parties (at least when they are in
opposition), and courts have become increasingly skeptical of forcible land
acquisition for real estate speculation, as seen in the uproar over SEZs (see
Levien 2013). Normative persuasion is simply not one of the resources avail-
able to India’s neoliberal regime for producing compliance. This leaves mater-
ial compensation and brute force as the main mechanisms for getting farmers
off their land.
After 2007, we saw concerted attempts by state governments and the central
government to overcome “land wars” by increasing material compensation.
Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Rajasthan were among the early states that put
policies into place that went beyond the usual below-market compensation
price (the “circle rate”) typically given to farmers. The overthrow of the Left
Front government by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) after
the former’s brutal treatment of farmers in Singur and Nandigram demon-
strated that land acquisition had arrived as an electorally salient issue and
that it would henceforth be politically difficult to continue shoving farmers
off their land with minimal compensation. For the first time, offering a better
deal to farmers became a matter of interparty competition. Nevertheless,
there are limits to state-level policies as capital can always flee to states that
are better able to politically manage with low prices—Andhra Pradesh, Tamil
Nadu, and Gujarat, for example, all continued acquiring land without giving

67
The Land Question in India

particularly high compensation (though not without problems). This gener-

ated a race to the bottom. As an official with the Haryana Industrial and
Infrastructure Development Corporation told me, after Haryana put into
place its unprecedentedly remunerative compensation policy at the behest
of powerful farmers’ groups, high land prices become a deterrent to investors
who started going to other states (Interview, February 21, 2011). The only way
to overcome this race to the bottom was national legislation to uniformly raise
compensation rates.
After six years of wrangling, and much dilution at the behest of capital, the
Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabili-
tation and Resettlement Act (henceforth LARRA) was passed in September
2013. Explicitly framed as a compromise between the needs of industry and
the interests of farmers, the legislation was intended to orchestrate a class
compromise that would overcome endemic land wars and ensure a predictable
supply of land for capital by giving farmers higher prices. Most essentially, the
act allowed the government to continue acquiring land for private companies
but required consent thresholds—80 percent of affected farmers for purely
private projects and 70 percent for PPP projects—and social impact assess-
ments.12 In turn, it offered farmers increased compensation and resettlement
and rehabilitation benefits. It sought, in other words, to ensure compliance to
an ideologically tenuous neoliberal regime of dispossession by making mater-
ial concessions in the rate of accumulation by dispossession, coupled with
some procedural safeguards. It was Rahul Gandhi who apparently came up
with the idea of turning land acquisition into a new right—the right to be
fairly dispossessed, as it were.
Most farmers’ groups were critical of LARRA, arguing that it allowed land
acquisition for private companies to continue, did not sufficiently increase
compensation to farmers and had many loopholes in its consent and resettle-
ment and rehabilitation clauses. Capital argued that the bill would make land
too expensive and delay projects, bringing economic growth to a grinding
halt. Within days of Narendra Modi coming to office on an election platform
that included fast-tracking large private investments, industry associations
began a lobbying offensive to amend the law. On December 30, 2014, the
government issued an ordinance—a temporary executive order that must
ultimately be approved by parliament—that overturned key provisions of
LARRA, including the consent and social impact assessment requirements.
But immediate and widespread opposition—led by a reinvigorated Congress
and supported by factions of the Sangh Parivar (family of Hindu nationalist
organizations) itself—forced the BJP, with an eye toward upcoming state
elections, to back down seven months later. Again, India’s neoliberal regime
of dispossession ran up against the political weight of farmers in India’s
democracy. LARRA remains the law of the land and the question is now

68
 Theses on India’s Land Question

whether it will significantly dissipate India’s land wars. I believe this is unlikely,
for three reasons.
First, the compensation rates under LARRA are unlikely to appease most
farmers. While early versions of the bill called for a uniform fixing of com-
pensation levels at six times the government assessed value of the land, or
“circle rate” (always much below the market level), the final bill reduced this
to effectively four times the rate in rural areas and two times the rate in urban
areas (a distinction it leaves to state governments to establish). Given the rates
of accumulation by dispossession described earlier in this section, this will
hardly bring compensation up to the level of market value. The relentless
lobbying of industrialists and builders to reduce compensation levels in the
drafting of LARRA illustrates Marx’s observation that capitalists have a difficult
time seeing beyond their noses (i.e., short-term profits) to coordinate their
long-term class interests. While some worried that the bill made prices too
high (Chakravorty 2013, 2015), this amounts to little more than a defense of
using eminent domain to generate corporate super-profits. LARRA did not
bring compensation prices up to market prices and is thus unlikely to signifi-
cantly reduce “land wars.”
Second, and more fundamentally, the idea of utilizing the exchange value
of land to build a class compromise between urban capital and farmers
assumes what needs to be explained, which is how farmers come to value
their land at its exchange value in the first place. In other words, it is not clear
that all farmers can be bought, or at least that their “reservation price” is in a
range acceptable to state and capital. Many farmers’ struggles on the periph-
eries of expanding cities are, no doubt, struggles over prices. Nevertheless, it is
a mistake to collapse, as Partha Chatterjee (2008) does, all of dispossession
politics into ad hoc negotiation over its terms. There remains a second
category of anti-dispossession movement that has shown absolutely no inter-
est in compensation. From Nandigram to Niyamgiri, Raigad, Singur, and
Jagatsinghpur, we find numerous examples of farmers unwilling to even
consider compensation. One should notice that not all of these are in adivasi
(indigenous or tribal) areas, where such attitudes are considered to be
more prevalent. By refusing to value their land at its exchange value, these
farmers cannot be brought into a class compromise on the terrain of
commodification.
Finally, even among those who are willing to consider compensation, a final
obstacle to the Indian state’s ability to pacify anti-dispossession struggles lies,
as pointed out earlier, in the developmental contradictions of the neoliberal
growth model itself. The non-labor-intensive and real estate driven growth
that characterizes India’s SEZs—and India’s growth model as a whole—has
little to offer most farmers aside from land values. If the Nehruvian state
dispossessed land for economic purposes that farmers could at least be

69
The Land Question in India

theoretically included in—irrigated agriculture and public sector

industrialization—the neoliberal regime of dispossessing land for real estate
and non-labor-intensive growth does not even offer this possibility. For
India’s vast semi-proletariat, this makes holding on to even small pieces of
land to supplement wage labor far preferable to pure landlessness. While
economists justify forcible land acquisition by the macro-level efficiency of
transferring land from agriculture to “higher value” land uses (Bardhan 2011;
Chakravorty 2013), what they fail to understand is the micro-level rationality
that is often behind a farmer’s opposition to this transfer.
If the neoliberal regime is short on legitimacy and faces several obstacles to
building compliance on a material basis, there remains the time-honored
route of intimidation and violence. Undoubtedly, the neoliberal regime of
dispossession has, like its predecessor, relied significantly on brutal state
violence. There are simply too many cases of states using police, party cadre,
and thugs to kill, beat, rape, and loot protesting farmers. Nevertheless, this
violence often backfires, and the land wars of the past seven years have shown
the limitations of brute coercion. The spread of media and the relentless work
of movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have made it
more difficult to hide this violence than in the past (although, to be sure, it
is still far easier to get away with it in the remote forested areas of central India
than in the peri-urban plains). It is also much harder to legitimize this vio-
lence, as I have suggested, when it is being used to transfer land to a private
corporation than to the state itself. Where anti-dispossession struggles have in
recent years succeeded in attracting significant outside attention, it has often
prevented the massive use of violence to definitively break their blockades—
witness the ability of farmers in Jagatsinghpur to hold up the largest proposed
foreign direct investment in India’s history with bamboo gates and human
chains. What the Maoist insurgency shows, moreover, is how this state violence
can backfire on a massive scale.
This is not to say that state violence against rural people who refuse to be
dispossessed will cease any time soon. The current government remains com-
mitted to fast-tracking private investments and infrastructure projects, and
doing this with inadequate material incentives implies greater reliance on
state force. Nevertheless, it is unclear how much an aggressive central govern-
ment can accomplish; acquiring land remains primarily the responsibility of
state governments, and it is they who most directly face the political fallout
of violently dispossessing farmers for the Reliances of the world. There will
certainly, therefore, be great subnational variation in how this plays out (Sud
2014). But the most likely aggregate scenario is that states will fumble towards a
less-than-fully-successful class compromise with politically influential farmers
in the plains, and continue to use substantial force against marginalized groups

70
 Theses on India’s Land Question

in remote areas. It is far from clear, however, that the sum total will be anything
resembling a stable regime of dispossession.

2.3 Conclusion

By the latter half of the 2000s, the Indian state had to confront the fact that
the land requirements of its neoliberal growth model were difficult to fulfill
under conditions of electoral democracy. India’s vast rural population, the
second largest in the world, controls the land that is desired in ever greater
quantities for the private investment that is central to the country’s neo-
liberal phase of capitalist expansion. Whereas in the period of state-led
development, states were able to mobilize the substantial legitimacy of
Nehruvian developmentalism to transfer land from farmers to public sector
projects, the neoliberal regime lacks the normative power to compel farmers
to “sacrifice for the nation.” Its remaining hope, aside from increasingly
illegitimate and counterproductive violence, is to offer farmers some share
of the unprecedented real estate values that dispossession is being used to
manufacture and capture. But land values are a bad substitute for inclusive
growth, both developmentally and politically. With land dispossession
increasingly being put to use by predatory state governments in the service
of an exclusionary development model, it is unlikely that this neoliberal
regime, even with recent legislative amendments, will be able to accomplish
what it seeks: the easy and predictable transfer of land from farmers to capital.
The upshot is that farmers are making themselves the most significant
obstacle to capitalist growth in India. While the peasantry has long been
seen as an obstacle to progress, this specific roadblock is as unexpected for
modernization theory and classical Marxism as it is for “India Inc.” These land
struggles are shaping the trajectory of Indian capitalism in unforeseen and
unpredictable ways, and have firmly lodged the “land question” at the center
of Indian politics. Whether these anti-dispossession movements can open the
way for more equitable paths of development and social change remains to be
seen. But their chances will be far greater if they can ally with a reinvigorated
left that has abandoned old theories of dispossession’s role in history.

Notes

1. On the need for “denaturalizing dispossession,” see Hart (2006).

2. As Perelman (2000: 25) points out, Marx translated Adam Smith’s “previous” into
German as ursprünglich, which was subsequently retranslated into English as
“primitive.”

71
The Land Question in India

3. In the more Hegelian idiom of the Grundrisse, Marx states, “The conditions and
presuppositions of the becoming, of the rising, of capital presuppose precisely that it
is not yet in being but merely in becoming; they therefore disappear as real capital
arises, capital which itself, on the basis of its own reality, posits the conditions for
its realization” (1973: 459).
4. Others have argued that a theory of ongoing primitive accumulation can be found
in Marx (De Angelis 2007). I think, at best, one can argue that Marx’s account of
primitive accumulation implies that it would be ongoing (why would capitalism’s
thirst for land come to an end?), but Marx himself relegates it to the “prehistory” of
capital. For the distinction between a serial and recursive conception of primitive
accumulation, I thank Michael Watts.
5. The two were connected to the extent that capitalist agriculture generated larger
surpluses that could be appropriated for subsidizing industrialization.
6. For a critique of this argument, see Gerschenkron (1962).
7. However, the problematic of transition faced its own difficulties and its relevance
may anyway be declining along with the importance of agriculture to national
projects of capitalist development (Bernstein 2012; Lerche 2013). See also the
introduction to this volume.
8. I use group here rather than class because the dispossessed often belong to multiple
classes (especially in the countryside), while the recipients of the land are typically
of the capitalist class (though they can be from different fractions of that class).
9. Although dispossession for agribusiness is also increasing in China.
10. See Levien (2012).
11. On the broader significance of land liberalization and new forms of urban
governance, see Sud (2012) and Goldman (2011).
12. It seems likely that states can get around this provision by allocating private
companies land from their “land banks.” Most states already acquire land well in
advance of demand for particular projects; since they are not explicitly for private
projects when acquired, these acquisitions would arguably not come under the
70–80 percent approval clause—though this may be decided by the courts.

References

Adnan, S. 1985. “Classical and Contemporary Approaches to Agrarian Capitalism.”

Economic and Political Weekly, 20(30): PE53–PE64.
Ahluwalia, I. J. 1998. “The Contribution of Planning to Indian Industrialisation.” In
The State, Development Planning and Liberalisation in India, edited by Terence J. Byres,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 254–97.
Anderson, P. 1974. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: New Left Books.
Banerjee, A. V., Bardhan, P., Basu, K., Chaudhury, M. D., Ghatak, M., Guha, A. S.,
Majumdar, M., Mookherjee, D., and Ray, D. 2007. “Beyond Nandigram: Industrialisa-
tion in West Bengal.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17): 1487–9.
Bardhan, P. 1984. The Political Economy of Development in India. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.

72
 Theses on India’s Land Question

Bardhan, P. 2010. Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and
India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bardhan, P. 2011. “Industrialization and the Land Acquisition Conundrum.”
Development Outreach, 13(1) (April): 54–7.
Bernstein, H. 2012. “Agrarian Questions from Transition to Globalization.” In Peasants
and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation, and the Agrarian Question,
edited by A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay, London: Routledge, pp. 239–61.
Bhaduri, A. 1983. The Economic Structure of Backward Agriculture. London: Academic Press.
Brass, P. 2011. An Indian Political Life: Charan Singh and Congress Politics, 1937–1961.
New Delhi: Sage.
Brenner, R. 1976. “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial
Europe.” Past and Present, 70: 30–75.
Brenner, R. 2001. “The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism.” Journal of Agrarian
Change, 1(2): 169–241.
Brenner, R. 2006. “What Is, and What Is Not, Imperialism?” Historical Materialism,
14(4): 79–105.
Burawoy, M. 1985. The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and
Socialism. London: Verso.
Byres, T. J. 1991. “The Agrarian Question and Differing Forms of Capitalist Agrarian
Transition: An Essay with Reference to Asia.” In Rural Transformation in Asia, edited
by Jan Breman and Sudipto Mundle, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–76.
Chakravorty, S. 2013. The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Chakravorty, S. 2015. “Improving an Unworkable Law.” The Hindu, January 7.
Chandrasekhar, C. P. and Ghosh, J. 2002. The Market That Failed: Neoliberal Economic
Reforms in India. New Delhi: LeftWord Books.
Chatterjee, P. 2008. “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India.” Economic
and Political Weekly, 43(16): 53–62.
CMIE (Center for Monitoring Indian Economy). 2012. “Sharp Increase in Projects Getting
Shelved.” Available at: <http://www.cmie.com/kommon/bin/sr.php?kall=wclrdhtm.
php&cmienvdt=20120704101759176&pc=099000000000&type=INSIGHTS> (accessed
August 15, 2012).
D’Costa, A. P. 2014. “Compressed Capitalism and Development: Primitive Accumula-
tion, Petty Commodity Production, and Capitalist Maturity in India and China.”
Critical Asian Studies, 46(2): 317–44.
De Angelis, M. 2007. The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital,
London: Pluto Press.
Dreze, J. and Sen, A. 2013. An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dwivedi, R. 2006. Conflict and Collective Action: The Sardar Sarovar Project in India.
London: Routledge.
Fernandes, W. 2008. “Sixty Years of Development-Induced Displacement in India.” In
India Social Development Report 2008: Development and Displacement, edited by
H. M. Mathur, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 89–102.

73
The Land Question in India

Gerschenkron, A. 1962. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ghatak, M. and Ghosh, P. 2011. “The Land Acquisition Bill: A Critique and a Proposal.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 46(41): 65–72.
Goldman, M. 2011. “Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City.”
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(3): 555–81.
Government of India. n.d. “Special Economic Zones in India.” Ministry of Commerce
and Industries. Available at: <http://sezindia.nic.in/> (accessed February 1, 2011).
Gulati, M. 2011. “The Infrastructure Sector in India 2010–2011.” In India Infrastructure
Report 2011: Water: Policy and Performance for Sustainable Development, edited by
Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, pp. 379–96.
Hart, G. 2006. “Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of
Resurgent Imperialism.” Antipode, 38(5): 977–1004.
Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. 2006a. “Comment on Commentaries.” Historical Materialism, 14(4): 157–66.
Harvey, D. 2006b. The Limits to Capital, London: Verso.
IDFC (Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation). 2008. India Infrastructure
Report 2008: Business Models of the Future. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
IDFC. 2009. India Infrastructure Report 2009: Land—A Critical Resource for Infrastructure,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Jenkins, R. 1999. Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ka, C. and Selden, M. 1986. “Original Accumulation, Equity and Late Industrialization:
The Cases of Socialist China and Capitalist Taiwan.” World Development, 14(10):
1293–310.
Kautsky, K. 1988. The Agrarian Question. London: Zwan Publications.
Kohli, A. 2012. Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lenin, V. I. 1967. The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lerche, J. 2013. “The Agrarian Question in Neoliberal India: Agrarian Transition
Bypassed?” Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3): 382–404.
Levien, M. 2011. “Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in
India.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 11(4): 454–83.
Levien, M. 2012. “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy
of Dispossession in India.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4): 933–69.
Levien, M. 2013. “Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic
Zones.” Development and Change, 44(2): 381–407.
Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. 1977. Capital,vol.1, New York: Vintage.
Nilsen, A. G. 2010. Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage. London:
Routledge.
Parry, J. P. 1999. “Two Cheers for Reservations: The Satnamis and the Steel Plant.” In
Institutions and Inequalities: Essays in Honor of Andre Beteille, edited by R. Guha and
J. P. Parry. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 128–69.

74
 Theses on India’s Land Question

Parry, J. P. and Struempell, C. 2008. “On the Desecration of Nehru’s ‘Temples’: Bhilai
and Rourkela Compared.” Economic and Political Weekly, 43(19): 47–57.
Perelman, M. 2000. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret
History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Preobrazhensky, E. 1965. The New Economics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Reynolds, S. 2010. Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for
the Common Good. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
Rudolph, L. I. and Rudolph, S. H. 2001. “Iconisation of Chandrababu: Sharing Sover-
eignty in India’s Federal Market Economy.” Economic and Political Weekly, 36(18):
1541–52.
Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Govermental-
ity, and Post-colonial Capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge.
Searle, R. 2010. “Making Space for Capital: The Production of Global Landscapes in
Contemporary India.” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Sood, J. 2011. “Road to Disaster.” Down to Earth. June 15.
Struempell, C. 2014. “The Politics of Dispossession in an Odisha Steel Town.” Contri-
butions to Indian Sociology, 48(1): 45–72.
Sud, N. 2012. Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and the State: A Biography of Gujarat.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Sud, N. 2014. “Governing India’s Land.” World Development, 60: 43–56.
Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage.
Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wood, E. M. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso.

75
3

Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation,

and Resistance in Neoliberal India

Persistence of the Self-Employed and Divergence

from the “Transition to Capitalism”?

Shapan Adnan

3.1 Introduction

Land grabs involving separation of non-capitalist producers from their lands

have been interpreted in terms of the theoretical framework of “primitive
accumulation” and the “transition to capitalism” (Marx 1976). This transition
schema envisages that the labor of the dispossessed groups and their erstwhile
lands would be potentially deployed in production processes run by capital-
ists, resulting in the progressive capitalist transformation of the economy.
However, the consequences of land alienation in India in the context of
neoliberal globalization appear to deviate partially from this schema because
significant sections of the dispossessed remain self-employed rather than
being absorbed in capitalist wage employment. The stability of this pattern
in recent times, despite continuing land grabs and primitive accumulation,
has raised questions about the inevitability and applicability of the schema of
“transition to capitalism” in India.
In this chapter I argue that such outcomes come about when dispossessed
producers cannot find adequate wage employment in the formal and informal
capitalist sectors and hence have limited avenues of survival other than self-
employment. This pattern is reinforced by the predominance of unproductive
capital controlled by merchant–usurers and the appropriation of precapitalist
ground rent by landowners, all of which are predicated upon extraction of
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

surplus from self-employed producers, and hence are systematically oriented

against the emergence of incremental wage labor.
In Marx’s (1976: 873–6) analysis of the origins of capitalism, the notion of
“primitive accumulation” is used to explain how the separation of non-
capitalist classes from their lands and productive assets enabled such resources
and the labor of the dispossessed to become available, in the first place, for
deployment in capitalist production. On the one hand, the expropriated lands
(and other inputs) were concentrated among actual or potential capitalist
producers, or landlords willing to lease them to capitalist tenants. On the
other hand, the dispossessed groups faced circumstances in which they had
no better avenue of survival than taking up wage employment in capitalist
production. Thus, a double transformation followed primitive accumulation,
whereby land became part of productive capital and the dispossessed were
converted into wage laborers in the workforce (Marx 1976: 874). It is this
sequence of interlinked processes leading from primitive accumulation to
capitalist production, taking place on a social-historical scale, which consti-
tutes the classic Marxian schema of “transition to capitalism.” The simultan-
eity of these two transformations was integral to Marx’s construct of primitive
accumulation, which was primarily based on the historical experience of
enclosures in Britain (Marx 1976). However, it constituted something of a
special case that need not hold in other historical instances (Adnan 2013,
2014: 23; Levien 2012).
Historically, primitive accumulation has not been limited to a one-shot
event at the origin of capitalism, but has constituted an ongoing process
that has continued to make available land and other inputs to capitalist
production (Marx 1976: 876; Perelman 1984: 8–12). However, the institutional
mechanisms and processes mediating primitive accumulation have varied with
evolving socioeconomic and political conditions. In the context of neoliberal
globalization, primitive accumulation has been characterized by distinctive
processes such as financialization, speculation, and the orchestration of crises.
Harvey (2005) has incorporated these novel features in the notion of “accu-
mulation by dispossession” (ABD), in addition to updating Marx’s original
concept of primitive accumulation in the context of “neoliberal imperialism”
(Ashman and Callinicos 2006: 117; Brenner 2006: 102; Fine 2006: 143–4).1
Given limits of space, however, it has not been presently possible to provide a
more comprehensive review of the theoretical issues pertaining to primitive
accumulation and ABD.2
When lands are grabbed from non-capitalist classes in an involuntary and/
or unjust manner, such acts can trigger resistance from the actually or poten-
tially dispossessed groups. These constitute struggles against primitive accumu-
lation/ABD, as contrasted to working class struggles against capitalism or
peasant struggles against landlords.3 Resistance to land alienation by the

77
The Land Question in India

dispossessed groups can take different forms: covert or overt, violent or non-
violent (Adas 1986; Adnan 2007: 210–11, 2013: 97–8; Scott 1985, 1986).
When lands are appropriated by powerful groups and agencies, particularly
the state, resistance usually takes nonviolent legal–constitutional forms, such
as public meetings and demonstrations. However, under limiting conditions,
resistance can be transformed into violent forms, including armed struggle
(Adas 1986: 82–3; Adnan 2007). The modalities of resistance can also change in
terms of scale, organization, and collective action, involving coalition forma-
tion and coordinated activities in multiple arenas (Tilly 1978: 7, 78). Such
shifts in the forms and modalities of resistance can critically affect the out-
comes of land alienation and primitive accumulation.4
While land has traditionally served as the means of production in agricul-
ture as well as the key marker of power and status in social and political
relations, in recent times it has become increasingly valued as a commodity
in the wider economic and social arena (Akram-Lodhi 2012; Hall 2013).
During the immediate postcolonial decades, the Indian state undertook
large-scale land acquisition for massive projects of infrastructure construc-
tions and development, which were justified in terms of “public purpose.”
However, with the advent of neoliberal globalization, there was a qualitative
shift in the nature and purpose of state acquisition of land.5 While the process
continued, its purpose shifted increasingly towards making land available to
private corporations and elite groups. Moreover, a variety of non-state actors,
including multinational corporations, political parties, private armies, and
criminal groups, became involved in large-scale land grabs (Banerjee 2014;
Walker 2008).
Viewed in historical perspective, the role of land alienation in India has
undergone a striking change in the context of neoliberal globalization. Conse-
quently, the contemporary “land question” has also taken on novel dimensions
beyond its classic formulation, as elaborated in the following paragraphs.
Trends in the composition of the Indian workforce in terms of employment
status raise problematic issues in relation to the schema of transition to capit-
alism. First, while the Indian economy has grown significantly during the
neoliberal era, expansion of wage employment has been uneven and limited.
Symptomatic of this trend is the phenomenon of “jobless growth,” the extent
of which has fluctuated due to multiple factors.6 Second, while people have
been displaced from their farms and settlements by land grabs, the dispossessed
groups have not necessarily been absorbed in wage employment—remaining
unemployed or self-employed. In the Indian discourse, such outcomes have
been dubbed “dispossession without proletarianization” (Basu and Das 2009:
158; Levien 2012: 954; U. Patnaik 1990; Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 35).
These trends in the Indian economy do not entirely accord with the schema
of transition to capitalism. Since the conversion of expropriated land into

78
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

productive capital has not been matched by the transformation of the dispos-
sessed into wage workers, only one of the “two transformations” postulated by
Marx has taken place substantively compared to the other (Adnan 2014; Levien
2012; Marx 1976: 834). The prospect of primitive accumulation being followed
by the “transition to capitalism” remains uncertain to the extent that land grabs
are not followed by the employment of the dispossessed in capitalist produc-
tion.7 Moreover, questions have arisen as to whether the Indian economy is
heading toward an alternative trajectory that diverges from the transition
to capitalism.8
In order to resolve these theoretical issues, it is necessary to examine empir-
ical evidence on the extent to which land grabs have been followed by the
absorption of the dispossessed in capitalist wage employment. However, while
some micro-level studies are available, there do not appear to be any national-
level data on the specific contribution of land alienation to the composition of
the Indian workforce in terms of the relative proportions of the self-employed
and wage workers. To the extent that national-level data are available on the
composition of the workforce by employment status, these reflect the overall
outcomes of multiple factors (Himanshu 2011), and hence cannot be
explained by the employment impacts of land alienation alone, which con-
stitutes just one of the contributory factors.
Given these data limitations, an indirect approach combining two com-
plementary methods has been used in Sections 3.4 and 3.5. First, the
national-level survey data are interpreted with suitable assumptions to
assess inter-temporal trends in the employment status of the Indian work-
force (divided into the self-employed, regular employees, and casual work-
ers). Second, evidence from a case study of land acquisition (Levien 2012) is
reviewed to trace the causal processes underlying the observed outcomes in
terms of the relative weight of the self-employed and wage employees.
While the findings of the micro-level analysis are not representative and
cannot explain national-level employment trends, they do provide grounded
evidence on the causal processes shaping the outcomes of land alienation,
particularly in terms of impacts on employment status. Until more appropriate
macro-level data are available, these micro-level insights can be utilized
for interpreting the national-level trends. In Section 3.6, the results of these
different methods have been put together to formulate a set of hypotheses to
explain the factors underlying “dispossession without proletarianization” in
neoliberal India.
Following from these considerations, the objectives of this chapter are
formulated in terms of the following key questions:

1. What are the diverse mechanisms of land grabs mediating primitive

accumulation in neoliberal India?

79
The Land Question in India

2. How have different forms and modalities of resistance by dispossessed

groups influenced the outcomes of land alienation and primitive
accumulation?
3. What have been the trends in the composition of the total Indian
workforce in terms of the self-employed and wage employees?
4. What does micro-level analysis tell us about changes in employment
status brought about by land alienation and its consequences?
5. What factors help to explain inter-temporal trends in the relative weight
of the self-employed and wage employees in the Indian workforce?
6. What are the implications of the analysis for prospects of the “transition
to capitalism” in India?

The rest of the chapter is laid out as follows. Section 3.2 summarizes the
salient features of the neoliberal policy regime in India and the ways in which
these have influenced different types of land alienation mechanisms.
Section 3.3 analyzes the forms and modalities of resistance to land grabs and
their varying outcomes. Inter-temporal trends in the relative proportions of
self-employed and wage workers in the Indian workforce are reviewed in
Section 3.4. Section 3.5 provides a critical review of existing interpretations of
trends in the relative weight of wage workers and the self-employed and puts
forward an explanatory hypothesis. In conclusion, Section 3.6 summarizes the
inferences of the preceding analysis, formulates possible explanations of the
trends in employment status, and assesses the prospects of the “transition to
capitalism” in India.

3.2 Mechanisms of Land Grabs

The contemporary Indian economy has witnessed massive expropriation of

land and natural resources through a range of mechanisms influenced by
neoliberal policies, as specified in Section 3.2.1 (Basu 2007; P. Patnaik 2011,
2012: 31–2; U. Patnaik 2012: 240–1; Sebastian 2012: 21–7; Walker 2008: 580–9).

3.2.1 The Neoliberal Policy Regime and Its Influence

Following the adoption of neoliberal “reforms” during the 1990s, the Indian
government undertook “massive programmes of privatisation and structural
adjustment” (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2002; U. Patnaik 2012: 234; Walker
2008: 559). The “license-permit raj” characterizing the post-independence
regulatory framework was replaced by a policy package combining deregula-
tion, trade liberalization, financial sector reforms, and devaluation (Sanyal
2007: 242–5; Shah 2008: 80). Under this neoliberal policy regime, there were

80
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

systematic cuts in public expenditure that led to reductions in redistributive

welfare benefits and social services, affecting the most vulnerable sections of
the population including the unemployed and the dispossessed (Basu and Das
2009: 159; Baviskar and Sundar 2008: 87–9; Bhaduri 2008: 12–13; P. Patnaik
2012; Shah 2008: 80; Walker 2008: 562).
Such policies of the Indian central government were aimed at opening up
the domestic economy and gaining the confidence of investors and financial
institutions regulating global capital flows in order to attract foreign direct
investment (FDI) and prevent capital flight (Bhaduri 2008: 11–12; P. Patnaik
2008: 109). Lifting of restrictions on private corporate investment triggered a
“race to the bottom” among the regional state governments of the Indian
Union, which vied with each other to offer concessionary terms to finance
capital for large-scale construction and development projects. Even trad-
itionally left-wing governments in the states of West Bengal and Kerala
joined the competition, reflecting a “virtual consensus among all major
political parties about the priorities of rapid economic growth led by private
investment” (Bhaduri 2008: 10; Chatterjee 2008: 57; Levien 2012: 944–6;
P. Patnaik 2011: 3).
As elaborated in Section 3.2.2, these varied strands of the neoliberal policy
regime and their consequences served to open up novel avenues of primitive
accumulation in India through land alienation.

3.2.2 Land Acquisition by Force and Manipulation

The central Indian government set up special economic zones (SEZs) to serve
as “hyperliberalized economic enclaves” for the purposes of “promoting
exports, attracting FDI, developing infrastructure, and generating employ-
ment” (Levien 2012: 934). The territorial dimension of the SEZs made a
substantive bounded area indispensable and hence their legal–institutional
framework was designed to enable systematic acquisition of land (Adnan
2016). The rapid approval and establishment of many such zones all over
India led to large-scale land grabs with varying outcomes.9
The key legal instrument used to obtain land for SEZs and other large
projects was the archaic Land Acquisition Act of 1894 embodying the legal
principle of eminent domain which empowered the state to acquire lands for
public purposes, overriding objections by those dispossessed in the process, as
also discussed by Malabika Pal in Chapter 6 in this volume (Adnan 2014: 29;
Levien 2012: 944–6; Vasudevan 2008: 41; Walker 2008: 589). Ironically,
however, while the state authorities invoked the rhetoric of public purpose to
acquire lands, they went on to transfer these to private profit-making corpor-
ations, making the state serve effectively as “land broker” to the private
corporate sector (Bhaduri 2008: 12; Levien 2012: 941–6; Walker 2008: 580).

81
The Land Question in India

Even though the law provided for compensation payments and rehabilita-
tion arrangements for those whose lands had been acquired, these were
implemented in discriminatory ways. While landowners holding formal own-
ership rights or titles were considered eligible for payment of compensation,
the common or customary “rights of use” of others to the acquired areas were
not recognized, although their livelihoods could depend upon access to these
resources (Banerjee 2014: 276–7; Bhaduri 2008: 13; Walker 2008: 582–90).
Even when compensation was paid, the rates offered by the administration to
those losing land were typically considerably below the prevailing market
price. This kind of compulsory undervaluation of land during acquisition,
juxtaposed with the higher rate charged when it was transferred to private
agencies, allowed the state to make inflated profits in a manner characteristic
of ABD (Harvey 2005: 149–50; Levien 2012: 947–8).
Moreover, even the laws and regulations were often manipulated or violated
in varying degrees during the processes of state acquisition, compensation,
and rehabilitation (Banerjee 2014: 295). Various state agencies were found to
use illegal means to circumvent legal restrictions on acquisition of communal
lands of adivasis (indigenous peoples) without their consent.10 In addition to
state violence by security forces, a key trend in Indian land grabs has been “the
use of officially sanctioned criminal violence at the level of the state and by
private landholders against the rural poor” (Banerjee 2014: 282–3, 293–7;
Nigam 2007: 6–7; Walker 2008: 559, 591–3).

3.2.3 Land Alienation without the Use of Force

In contrast to the points discussed in Sections 3.2.1 and 3.2.2, land alienation
in neoliberal India has also taken place without the use of force or violence. In
such instances, alternative mechanisms were at play, such as informal medi-
ation, negotiations, persuasion, temptation, fraud, or forgery to orchestrate
transfer of the lands (Adnan 2014, 2016).
For instance, the Tamil Nadu state government made use of a set of strategies
to acquire land by agreement and minimize resistance. It set up official com-
mittees for obtaining land through private negotiations rather than compul-
sory state acquisition and utilized market mechanisms streamlined by
supportive legislation (Vijayabaskar 2014: 303–20). In some cases, acquiescence
to land acquisition was encouraged by material incentives such as allotment
of housing plots and jobs with training facilities as part of a package deal. In
a similar vein, the Mahindra World City (MWC) SEZ in Rajasthan offered
compliant landowners smaller but developed, high-value commercial and resi-
dential plots in exchange for their acquired holdings (Levien 2012: 953).
In certain instances, land and natural resources were appropriated through
sheer technological superiority or market bargaining power (Adnan 2014: 30).

82
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

For instance, private corporations producing soft drinks extracted “pure

groundwater as a free raw material” from deep aquifers using expensive
capital-intensive technology that could not be matched by ordinary water
users of the locality (Bhaduri 2008: 13; cf. Walker 2008: 564–5).

3.2.4 Indirect Mechanisms of Land Alienation

There were also indirect mechanisms of land alienation that were mediated
by processes geared to quite different objectives, but which nonetheless led
to similar outcomes. For instance, measures of fiscal contraction in India led to
severe income deflation as well as reduction in public expenditure involving
cuts in public investment, rural development, welfare facilities, and employ-
ment generation programs (P. Patnaik 2008: 109, 2012: 35–7; U. Patnaik 2012:
249; Shah 2008: 80). While in the short run such neoliberal policy measures
reduced the real incomes and purchasing power of the poor, in the long run
their cumulative impacts undermined the viability of small-scale peasant and
artisanal producers, constraining them to part with their lands and assets
(P. Patnaik 2008: 113, 2012: 37; Walker 2008: 573–9). Such outcomes were
similar to those of direct land enclosure but corresponded to indirect forms of
primitive accumulation because they constituted unintended consequences of
policy and development interventions with very different objectives (Adnan
2014: 26–33, 2016).

3.3 Resistance and Contestations

As land grabs have intensified in neoliberal India, these have also been con-
fronted with different forms and modalities of resistance from dispossessed
groups (Levien 2012; Walker 2008). In particular, the sheer lack of legitimacy
of the Indian state’s role as “land broker” to the private corporate sector has
triggered a politics of resistance against primitive accumulation (Adnan 2014:
30–9). Among “the key markers” of the struggle were protests and social
movements against construction of “special economic zones, expressways
and other infrastructure projects,” involving large-scale population displace-
ments (Das 2012: 33–5). The need for protecting the land and livelihoods of
those confronted with dispossession typically involved the entire population of
the affected area, subsuming multiple classes and social groups. Those
involved were not only landholders with property rights, but also landless
peasants, adivasis (“tribes” or indigenous peoples), and other occupational
groups without such rights but whose livelihoods depended crucially upon
access to the acquired areas, for example farmlands, forests, wetlands,

83
The Land Question in India

pastures, and various common property resources (Kunnath 2012: 104–7;

Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 42–3).
The forms and modalities of such struggles against primitive accumulation
have evolved over time and space (cf. Adnan 2007: 183–6; 2013: 97–8). The
initial response of groups facing dispossession in different parts of India was to
form local-level organizations to mobilize support for protests and collective
action (Tilly 1978: 78; Walker 2008: 585–91). In subsequent stages, overarch-
ing federations such as the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM)
were formed to interconnect local-level and issue-specific movements, as well
as to contest, at the national level, policies and legislation designed to facili-
tate land grabs (Walker 2008: 590). Such shifts in the scale and modalities of
struggle led to growing coalescence and consolidation among the localized
movements and their supporting coalitions, making possible coordinated
collective action in multiple arenas (Das 2012: 35–7; Levien 2012: 933–4,
2016; Vasudevan 2008: 43; cf. De Angelis 2001: 3).
Resistance to land grabs and lack of compensation by weak social groups
usually made use of nonviolent and socially accepted forms of protest in India,
such as petitioning, demonstrations, and blockades (gherao) of the concerned
offices and installations. However, such protests typically proved futile against
the forces repressing them. Consequently, in some instances, the concerned
social groups and organizations embarked upon more active and overt forms
of resistance. In limiting cases, the affected groups took up armed struggles
against primitive accumulation caused by “displacement and dispossession
from land-based livelihoods” (Harriss-White 2012: 142–3). Such instances also
highlight the conditions under which nonviolent and/or covert forms of resist-
ance to land alienation were transformed into violent and/or overt ones
(cf. Adnan 2007: 214–15, 2013: 118–19; 2014: 31, fn 8).
For instance, in mineral-rich Chhattisgarh, the state authorities signed
dozens of MOUs with foreign and domestic corporations and issued licenses
enabling them to acquire minerals and forest resources at very low costs,
corresponding to ABD (Bharadwaj 2009; Walker 2008: 593–5). Confronted by
land grabs and forced displacements, the local adivasis had little option but to
take up armed resistance in alliance with units of the Maoist Communist Party
of India (CPI–ML) (Jha 2013; Kunnath 2012: 104–7; Sebastian 2012: 19–20).
Overall, land grabs for SEZs and other projects have triggered widespread
struggles against primitive accumulation in neoliberal India, involving expli-
citly political contestations (Levien 2012; Walker 2008: 590). The outcomes of
such contentions have varied considerably, depending upon the balance of
forces between expropriation and resistance in particular localities (Adnan
2014: 30–9, 2016; Banerjee 2014: 275–6, 281–4). On the one hand, many
SEZs have been set up successfully through state acquisition of land, forced
displacement, and crushing of resistance of the evicted groups. On the other

84
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

hand, the political chain reaction following violent repression of protesters in

West Bengal’s Nandigram SEZ “led to a cancellation of the project, a tempor-
ary moratorium on SEZs and a reduction in their maximum allowed size”
(Levien 2012: 933–4). Comparable struggles have resulted in the cancellation,
postponement, or downsizing of SEZs or other land-acquiring projects in
different parts of India (Levien 2012; Sampat 2015). To the extent that such
resistance has been able to reduce the pace and extent of land grabs, it has also
succeeded in imposing social and political limits upon the inroads of primitive
accumulation in neoliberal India.

3.4 Trends in the Composition of the Indian Workforce

In order to assess the outcomes of primitive accumulation mediated by land

alienation, it is necessary to ascertain what kinds of livelihoods have been
taken up by the dispossessed groups. Have they been transformed into wage
workers in capitalist production, as postulated in the schema of transition to
capitalism? Or, have their livelihoods shifted toward other forms of wage or
self-employment? In either case, what are the long-term implications for the
“transition to capitalism” in India?
While these issues are raised within the theoretical framework of the tran-
sition to capitalism, what trends have actually characterized neoliberal India
is an empirical question. Its resolution therefore requires assessment of
evidence on changes in the composition of the Indian workforce in terms
of the relative shares of wage workers and the self-employed, as well as the
factors explaining them.

3.4.1 Trends in the Composition of the Indian Workforce

by Employment Status
Inter-temporal trends in the composition of the total Indian workforce from
1999–2000 to 2011–12 can be derived from the repeat sample survey data
provided by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). These have been
summarized by Shaw (2013: 25, table 4), with all Indian workers classified
into three broad types of “employment status”: (i) self-employed, (ii) regular
salaried and wage workers, and (iii) casual wage workers.11
However, the concepts of employment status used by NSSO need to be
critically appraised before the data can be accurately interpreted. Both regular
and casual wage workers can be employed in either profit-making capitalist
enterprises, or non-capitalist production units such as peasant farms to sup-
plement family labor. Those participating in public works programs such as
the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) correspond to casual
workers, who are hired by state or local authorities for redistributive welfare or

85
The Land Question in India

employment-generation objectives as contrasted to working for profit-seeking

capitalist enterprises (Thomas 2012: 46–8). Correlatively, the category of the
self-employed is comprised of “own account” operators running their enter-
prises as well as their family workers who are typically not paid formal wages,
but receive “payments” or benefits in terms of sharing in the pooled resources
of the household for subsistence needs (Hirway 2002, 2012). While, in theory,
some of these could conceivably operate as capitalist enterprises, the vast
majority of self-employed producers are not in a position to do so because
they cannot meet capitalist conditions of reproduction requiring them to earn
normal profit, over and above meeting subsistence and input costs (Adnan
1985: PE–56; U. Patnaik 1979: 401).
It is evident that the “employment status” in terms of which the NSSO
workforce data are classified do not allow clear distinction between those who
are wage workers in capitalist employment and those who are not. Conse-
quently, I have made some stylized assumptions regarding the NSSO data
when analyzing them in order to estimate the relative shares of the self-employed
and wage workers.
As a first approximation, it is assumed that all regular and casual workers are
“wage employees working in capitalist enterprises.” This definition would
obviously provide an overestimate since significant proportions of wage
employment are generated by agencies different from profit-making capital-
ists, as noted above. Second, all the self-employed, consisting of operators
running their own units and their family labor, are assumed to be working in
non-capitalist petty commodity production (PCP) units. However, this is
likely to provide an underestimate of the share of the self-employed in the
workforce because of idiosyncrasies of the data collection procedures regarding
the varied activities undertaken by family labor. “The NSSO concepts
and methods are not able to capture . . . unpaid work, which consists of
(i) unpaid family work, (ii) free collection of goods of different kinds, and
(iii) household production for self-consumption” (Hirway 2012: 69–71).12
Such survey procedures, combined with the overestimation of wage employees
noted earlier, are likely to result in systematic underestimation of the self-
employed workforce derived from the NSSO data.13
Bearing these qualifications in mind, the following inferences can be drawn
about trends in the composition of the Indian workforce between 1999–2000
and 2011–12. The proportion of the self-employed has fluctuated in the range
of 49–52 percent of the total workforce during this period, accounting for just
over 50 percent in both the terminal years 1999–2000 and 2011–12, with a rise
to 52 percent in 2004–5 and a fall to 49.5 percent in 2009–10 (Shaw 2013:
23–5, table 4). Since the self-employed are likely to have been underestimated, it
may be warranted to infer that they constituted at least half, if not more, of the
Indian workforce during 1999–2012, despite mild fluctuations.

86
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

Correlatively, the combined weight of the regular and causal wage employ-
ees according to the NSSO survey data has been relatively stable despite
mild fluctuations, accounting for just under half of the Indian workforce:
from 49.8 percent in 1999–2000 to 49.6 percent in 2011–12.14 However, this
aggregate figure is likely to be an overestimate of the wage workers employed by
profit-seeking capitalist enterprises, since some of them were hired by petty
commodity producers to supplement family labor, or public agencies for
local area development, employment generation, and poverty reduction pro-
grams with redistributive objectives (Rangarajan, Iyer Kaul, and Seema 2011:
71). Moreover, there may be a certain degree of reversibility in employment
status involving temporary and contingent shifts between self-employment
(family labor) and casual work (“distress” wage employment), depending
upon changes in economic conditions (Himanshu 2011: 53–4; Hirway 2012:
68; Kannan and Raveendran 2012: 79–80; Rangarajan, Iyer Kaul, and Seema
2011: 69–70).15 These considerations suggest that wage workers employed
by capitalist enterprises are likely to have constituted considerably less than
half of the Indian workforce over 1999–2012.
Viewed in disaggregated terms, the share of regular wage/salaried employees
in the Indian workforce increased from 15.8 percent in 1999–2000 to 20.3
percent in 2011–12, while that of casual wage workers fell correspondingly
from 34.0 percent to 29.3 percent. Since the proportion of the self-employed
has been stable over the same period, the growth of the regular wage-
employed must have taken place at the expense of the casual wage workers
(Rangarajan, Seema, and Vibeesh 2014: 118). Such steady growth in the
proportion of regular employees (Rangarajan, Iyer Kaul, and Seema 2011:
71) and the corresponding decline of casual wage workers suggests that insti-
tutionalized capitalist production relations may have expanded and become more
consolidated in India over 1999–2012. Nonetheless, the share of regular wage
employees remained relatively small at one-fifth or less of the total Indian
workforce over this period.
Overall, it can be concluded that, while the proportion of the self-employed
in the Indian workforce accounted for a slightly larger share compared to that of
total wage employees, it undoubtedly constituted a much greater proportion
than that of the subset of workers employed in capitalist enterprises. Moreover, the
proportionate composition of the total workforce in terms of employment
status remained stable during 1999–2012, with only minor fluctuations.

3.5 Interpreting Trends in Wage Work and Self-Employment

These trends in the composition of the Indian workforce over 1999–2012 flag
a number of issues for further consideration. The fact that the self-employed

87
The Land Question in India

constituted the single largest component and accounted stably for half of
the workforce over the entire period, raises questions about what happens to
the livelihood and employment status of dispossessed groups after the loss
of their lands.

3.5.1 Divergence from the “Transition to Capitalism”?

While attempting to interpret (earlier) trends in wage and self-employment,
Sanyal (2007: 40) questions the very applicability of the classic Marxian
schema of “transition to capitalism” to contemporary India. Instead, he con-
tends that the dynamics of capitalist development generates contradictory
trends: “while on the one hand, the process of primitive accumulation . . .
leads to the destruction of the precapitalist sectors, on the other, it simultan-
eously produces a space that necessitates the recreation of those sectors”
(Sanyal 2007: 39). In other words, Sanyal postulates a two-way process such
that the breakdown and “re-creation” of precapitalist or non-capitalist pro-
duction units take place in parallel, entailing a complex outcome that diverges
partly from the schema of transition to capitalism. However, although he
refers to primitive accumulation and “the internal logic of the expanded
reproduction of capital,” Sanyal does not provide a clear causal explanation
of how and why precapitalist (or non-capitalist) units are “re-created” after
their disintegration through mechanisms of primitive accumulation.
While noting the significance of self-employment in petty commodity pro-
duction (PCP) in the Indian economy, Barbara Harriss-White (2012: 117–18)
observes: “[PCP] is not transitional. If it is but a stage in the differentiation of
individual capitals, it is constantly being replenished and reproduced . . . Its exist-
ence does not imply a teleology of development” (emphases added). This view may
be paraphrased as follows: while individual PCP units may disintegrate through
differentiation processes, they are also being continuously replenished, such
that PCP as an aggregate category continues to be reproduced over time. How-
ever, the existence of PCP does not imply that it is a “transitional” category in a
teleological framework of (capitalist) development.
Despite their differences, the views of Sanyal and Harriss-White are suggest-
ive of a two-way process through which PCP units are being simultaneously
undermined and re-generated in contemporary India. I have built upon these
ideas to formulate a complex hypothesis to explain the employment out-
comes of land grabs as the resultant of a two-way process, as follows. On the
one hand, ongoing land alienation separates pre-existing landowners from
their lands, including petty commodity producers, continuing to feed the
ranks of the dispossessed. On the other hand, since the dispossessed do not
find adequate wage employment, their alternative avenues of survival are
confined to forms of self-employment. In the case of erstwhile producers

88
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

who have lost their land, this involves reconstituting themselves into other
kinds of self-employed enterprises that operate at a lower level of income and
security (compared to the situation when they still had access to land).16
Taken together, this two-way process results in the net persistence of the self-
employed in the Indian workforce compared to wage workers.

3.5.2 Self-Employed Producers and Circuits of Capital

Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2009: 39) propose a “three-tier” classification of
the Indian labor force in which, apart from “direct wage-workers in capitalist
production,” they distinguish between two types/subcategories of the self-
employed. Type I consists of those working “in informal enterprises linked
to capitalist enterprises in the formal economy” through subcontracting,
outsourcing, contract farming, and/or putting out arrangements (Sanyal and
Bhattacharyya 2009: 38–9). Given their direct linkages with the capitalist
sector of the economy, this category of self-employed producers are integrated
with the circuit of capital.
In contrast, Type II consists of “independent” self-employed producers
working “in informal enterprises . . . with no direct linkages to the formal
economy.” Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2009: 38–9) regard them as constitut-
ing “an overwhelming share of the growing labour force [that] has been absorbed
mainly . . . in rural non-farm and urban informal activities . . . [and are located
in] a production space outside the circuit of capital” (emphases added).
This typology becomes relevant in explaining Sanyal and Bhattacharyya’s
(40) conclusion that “There is . . . a growing informalisation of the Indian
economy with a clear trend towards self-employment as the main source of
livelihood of the informal labour force.” In particular, the limited growth of
wage employees, coupled with the presence of both categories of the self-
employed, one of which (Type II) holds an “overwhelming share of the growing
labour force,” could possibly account for the greater weight of the self-employed
compared to wage workers.17
However, the claim that the Type II self-employed are “excluded from the
circuit of capital” is open to question. In the contemporary Indian economy,
there is little scope for autarkic production and even petty commodity produ-
cers are significantly involved in the market, as indeed noted by Sanyal and
Bhattacharyya (2009: 38). Consequently, to the extent that the Type II self-
employed transact in input and output markets, they cannot avoid interacting
with other classes of economic agents who also participate in the same mar-
kets, as well as the circuit of capital mediated by these “common markets”
(cf. Adnan 1985: PE–53–5). Therefore, the claim that this component of the
self-employed is “excluded from the circuit of capital” is not warranted.

89
The Land Question in India

Moreover, Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2009: 38) do not distinguish between

the circuits of productive and unproductive capital, or their qualitatively differ-
ent relations with self-employed producers. The circuit of productive capital is
generated by capitalist production based on inputs purchased from the market
including hired wage labor, leading to market sale of the products for realiza-
tion of profit (surplus value) (Marx 1976). In contrast, circuits of unproductive
capital are generated by usurers’ and merchants’ capital through manipula-
tion of price differences in non-labor input and product markets (Marx 1981:
728–45). The mechanisms of surplus extraction used by unproductive capital
are systematically predicated upon self-employed producers who are exploited
through the credit and/or product markets, as contrasted to the employment
of wage workers through the labor market (Adnan 1985: PE–59–60). The same
applies to the extraction of precapitalist ground rent through the lease market.
Consequently, rather than presupposing that a category of self-employed
producers (Type II) is “excluded from” the circuit of capital, it is more realistic
to explore the differential outcomes of their interactions with the circuits of
productive and unproductive capital, as taken up in Section 3.5.3.

3.5.3 Outcomes of Land Acquisition for a Special Economic Zone

The ground-level processes activated by land grabs and their impacts can be
traced with the micro-level evidence from Levien’s (2012: 948–65) ethno-
graphic study of the outcomes of land acquisition for the MWC SEZ in rural
Rajasthan. Significantly, the households whose lands had been acquired for
the SEZ did not show any lack of market linkages indicative of “exclusion from
the circuit of capital” (as postulated by Sanyal and Bhattacharyya for the self-
employed Type II). On the contrary, the extent of their market participation
had increased after acquisition of their lands, because they now had to buy the
goods that they had formerly produced themselves. The local economy as a
whole displayed increased levels of commoditization because of the ways in
which the money received as compensation for land acquisition had been
utilized, as well as associated changes in production relations involving the
land-losing households (Levien 2012: 953–60).
First, the households that had received large amounts of compensation
money typically invested to a greater extent in circuits of unproductive capital
compared to productive investment involving capitalist production with
wage labor (Levien 2012: 954). In many cases, they became involved in
extraction of surplus as merchant–usurers, collection of precapitalist ground
rent through purchase and leasing out of new lands, the “eating” of commis-
sion as land brokers, and/or making gains from real estate speculation (Levien
2012: 956–63). Second, the land-losing households with less compensation
money resorted to nonfarm self-employment, involving sale of a variety of

90
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

products and services in the village economy, becoming transformed from one
kind of PCP (landholding peasant) to another (non-farm enterprise). Moreover,
some of them were subjected to market-based surplus extraction by usurers’
and merchants’ capital or payment of precapitalist rent. Third, very few of the
dispossessed households gained wage employment in the high-tech capitalist
enterprises established on their former lands in the SEZ. Even those who were
employed had to work in low-paying and insecure jobs such as guards, jani-
tors, gardeners, and drivers, given their lack of skills and education (Levien
2012: 949).
Overall, the households whose lands were acquired for the high-tech MWC
SEZ experienced multiple and divergent outcomes. Paradoxically, even
though land acquisition was propelled by the needs of advanced capitalism,
it did not generate significant wage employment for those dispossessed in the
process. Most of them resorted to different forms of self-employment and/or
surplus extraction based on unproductive capital and land rental, as con-
trasted to involvement in the circuit of productive capital as either capitalist
producers or wage workers. It is evident that, in this particular instance, the
short-run outcomes of primitive accumulation through land acquisition devi-
ated significantly from the Marxian schema of “transition to capitalism.”
While the findings of this case study of a single SEZ are obviously not
generalizable for all India, they provide insights into some of the critical
factors shaping the employment outcomes of primitive accumulation through
land acquisition. In particular, the following hypothesis is suggested: the
predominance of unproductive capital and (precapitalist) rent extraction
systematically constrains the dispossessed to take up forms of self-employment
for survival, as contrasted to the option of wage employment made available
by productive capital.

3.6 Concluding Remarks

In this concluding section, I integrate the arguments developed in previous

sections and draw out their implications for the mechanisms and determin-
ants of primitive accumulation/ABD in neoliberal India. A set of hypotheses is
put forward to explain trends in the employment status of the workforce in
the Indian economy (Section 3.6.3). The domestic and global factors influen-
cing the prospects of the transition to capitalism in India are briefly indicated.

3.6.1 Mechanisms of Primitive Accumulation and ABD

As evident from the preceding discussion, the concrete mechanisms of land
alienation in neoliberal India display striking diversity. They involve market

91
The Land Question in India

or nonmarket agencies, as well as the application or absence of force; they

operate directly or indirectly, entailing intended or unintended consequences
respectively (Adnan 2013: 92–3, 2014: 33, 2016; cf. De Angelis 2004: 78–80).
Taken together, these varied options constitute a diverse repertoire from which
alternative mechanisms and strategies of primitive accumulation/ABD can be
chosen flexibly to suit specific social-historical circumstances (Harvey 2006:
159; Burawoy 1985: 214–19; Tilly 1978: 151–8).
In neoliberal India, ongoing primitive accumulation through land
alienation has been facilitated by policies of deregulation, privatization, and
austerity, as well as the growing significance of speculation by finance capital.
These features correspond to Harvey’s notion of ABD, and demonstrate its
applicability to land alienation in the context of neoliberal globalization.
Viewed in this perspective, primitive accumulation can be regarded as a generic
capitalism-facilitating process, which can assume particular forms such as ABD
at specific sociohistorical conjunctures (Adnan 2013: 123, 2014: 39, 2016; Hall
2013; Sampat 2008).

3.6.2 Factors Shaping Primitive Accumulation and Its Outcomes

The varied mechanisms of primitive accumulation/ABD in neoliberal India
were driven or constrained by powerful antecedent forces and mediating
institutions. In particular, the state exercised its power of eminent domain
as well as its repressive capabilities to enforce land acquisition and crush
instances of social and ideological opposition (Adnan 2014: 38, 2016; Jenkins,
Kennedy, and Mukhopadhyay 2014) (see Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Alf
Gunvald Nilsen in this volume (Chapter 5) for this dual role of the state).
Moreover, private corporations and finance capital grabbed new territories
and resources, making use of force or market transactions as necessary (De
Angelis 2004: 75; Sebastian 2012: 13–16; Walker 2008: 583–95). Taken
together, the Indian state, as well as domestic and transnational corporations
and financial organizations, served as key drivers of primitive accumulation/
ABD in the context of neoliberal globalization (Sampat 2008; Sebastian 2012:
13–16; Walker 2008).
Correlatively, land alienation in neoliberal India was constrained by
resistance in diverse forms, as well as in different modalities, ranging from
stand-alone movements to coordinated collective action in multiple arenas
(Bharadwaj 2009; Levien 2012; Sampat 2015).
The contestations between these factors driving and constraining primitive
accumulation/ABD in contemporary India have cut both ways, with varying
outcomes. In certain instances, opposition to land grabs has been suppressed
or defused by mechanisms ranging from violent repression to co-option and
negotiated settlements, facilitating primitive accumulation. In other cases,

92
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

however, resistance movements coordinated at local, national, and/or inter-

national levels, have been able to delay or cancel SEZs and other land-
acquiring projects (Levien 2012; Sampat 2015; Walker 2008). Wherever such
struggles have succeeded in stopping or slowing down land grabs, these have
also served to impose social and political limits on the pace and extent of
primitive accumulation/ABD in neoliberal India (Adnan 2014: 39).
Moreover, instances of resistance to primitive accumulation also constrained
capitalist production indirectly, by limiting the supply of its required inputs such
as land.18 It is such interactions between the mechanisms of dispossession and
resistance that have shaped the trajectory and contested limits of primitive
accumulation and capitalist development in neoliberal India.

3.6.3 Factors Sustaining Self-Employment in the Indian Workforce

The arguments developed in Sections 3.6.1 and 3.6.2 have been placed within
the broader framework of the Indian and global economies to formulate the
following hypotheses to explain the trends in the employment status of the
workforce, noted earlier.
First, the formal and informal capitalist sectors of the Indian economy have
not been generating sufficient incremental wage employment to absorb the
vast labor force available. This is in part due to the highly capital-intensive
(and labor-displacing) technologies that firms in India’s formal sector have
been constrained to adopt in order to remain competitive in the global market
(Bhaduri 2008; Sanyal 2007). While regular wage work has increased com-
pared to casual wage labor over 1999–2012, the scale of their total labor
absorption has not been such as to make a significant dent in the weight of
the self-employed in the Indian workforce.
Second, faced with the lack of wage employment after loss of their lands,
most dispossessed groups have become involved in circuits of unproductive
capital, or invested the money received as compensation payment or sale
revenue in buying new land for extracting precapitalist ground rent. The
production relations generated by the circuits of unproductive capital con-
trolled by merchant–usurers, as well as the appropriation of rent by landlords,
are systematically predicated upon extraction of surplus from self-employed produ-
cers rather than wage workers (Adnan 1985: PE–59–60). Consequently, the
predominance of unproductive capital and rent extraction over productive
capital has systematically constrained the transformation of dispossessed
groups into wage labor. This is likely to have been a critical factor contributing
to the higher proportion of the self-employed compared to wage workers in
capitalist employment in the Indian workforce, as well as the stability of this
pattern over 1999–2012.

93
The Land Question in India

Third, the fact that half or more of the Indian workforce has continued to
survive through self-employment over 1999–2012 cannot be uncritically
attributed to the purported “welfarist governmentality” and redistributive
“development” programs of the state, donor agencies, nongovernmental
organizations, and so on (Adnan 2014: 36–7), despite claims to the contrary
(Chatterjee 2008: 55–6; Sanyal 2007: 36–7, 59–61). While redistributive public
works programs such as NREGA have generated incremental employment and
raised wage rates across all segments of the labor market, their overall contri-
butions to reducing poverty and unemployment have been at best marginal
(Hirway 2012: 68; Kannan and Raveendran 2012: 80; Rangarajan, Iyer Kaul,
and Seema 2011: 71). More generally, cutting down on redistributive and
welfarist programs has been a key feature of the neoliberal policy regime
characterizing contemporary India (Basu and Das 2009: 159; Baviskar and
Sundar 2008: 87–9; Shah 2008: 80). Instead, the continued survival of the
self-employed is to be largely attributed to their resistance to land alienation
and primitive accumulation/ABD, as well as their resourcefulness in finding
avenues of survival based on their own efforts, inclusive of undertaking
“distress employment”—typically involving overwork and underconsump-
tion (Himanshu 2011: 53–4; Hirway 2012: 68; Kannan and Raveendran
2012: 79–80; Rangarajan, Iyer Kaul, and Seema 2011: 69–70).
Taken together, these three hypotheses help to explain why at least half of
the Indian workforce remained in various forms of self-employment over
1999–2012, rather than being increasingly absorbed in wage employment in
capitalist production. It is possible that the continuation and accentuation of
such causal processes in the long run could potentially make the trajectory
of the Indian economy diverge from the Marxian schema of “transition to
capitalism.”

3.6.4 Prospects of the Transition to Capitalism in India

It should be noted that the analysis so far has been focused on the impacts of
land alienation on the workforce within the bounds of the Indian economy.
However, if the framework of analysis is broadened to take account of the
wider global economy, other significant processes come into view. In particu-
lar, even during the neoliberal era, a fraction of those evicted from land in
India has been joining the stream of international migrant workers who have
found employment in capitalist enterprises in other countries of the world.
The paradox is that both the growth of international employment of
migrant workers and the stagnation in domestic wage employment constitute
divergent outcomes of common or comparable primitive accumulation pro-
cesses taking place inside India. Given the parallel operation of these opposed
trends, the direction of transformation of the Indian economy in the long run

94
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

remains an open question. While the prospects of the “transition to capital-

ism” in India continues to remain uncertain, it cannot also be ruled out at this
stage. Indeed, any teleological and deterministic presupposition or prediction
about the longer-term outcome would be unwarranted at this juncture
(Harriss-White 2012: 117–18; cf. Adnan 1985: PE–53).

Acknowledgments

I appreciate comments on the chapter made by the participants of the conference. I am

particularly grateful for critical feedback from Amiya Bagchi, Barbara Harriss-White,
Judith Heyer, and Pranab Basu. Comments from an anonymous reviewer were also
helpful in revising the paper. I am obliged to Anthony D’Costa for his patience and
editorial assistance. I thank Achin Chakraborty and Himanshu for helping with access
to source documents and Sushil Khanna and Mritiunjoy Mohanty for discussions in
Kolkata. This chapter was also presented at a national seminar at the Department of
Economics of Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan on March 21, 2014, thanks to arrange-
ments by Sudipta Bhattacharya.

Notes

1. Despite its innovative aspects, Harvey’s concept of ABD has been subject to a range
of theoretical criticisms, including conflation of its mechanisms with the normal
workings of capitalism (Ashman and Callinicos 2006: 119; Brenner 2006: 98–102;
Fine 2006: 143–6; Harvey 2006; Levien 2012).
2. However, critical reviews of the theoretical debates on primitive accumulation and
ABD are available in my earlier publications (Adnan 2013: 91–9, 2014: 24–7, 2016).
3. See Adnan (2014: 38–9); Borras and Franco (2010); Das (2012: 33–5) Harvey (2005:
162–9); Levien (2012); Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2009: 41–3); and Walker (2008).
4. See Adnan (2013: 97); Brenner (1976: 70–1, 1977: 73–5); De Angelis (2004: 79);
Moore (1966: 13, 28); and Perelman (1984: 46).
5. See Levien’s (2013) persuasive attempt to construct a periodization of modern
Indian economic and political history in terms of “regimes of dispossession.”
6. See Bhaduri (2008: 11); Chandrasekhar and Ghosh (2011); Chowdhury (2011: 23);
Himanshu (2011: 43–57); Sanyal (2007: 245–7); Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2009:
36–7); and Thomas (2012: 48).
7. D’Costa (2014) has attempted to explain this situation with the idea of “compressed
capitalism.”
8. See Harriss-White (2012); Levien (2012); Sanyal (2007); and Sanyal and Bhattacharyya
(2009). A critical review of these interpretations is available in Adnan (2014: 33–7).
9. As of February 2016, there were an estimated 187 SEZs in operation throughout India.
Available at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zone#India> (accessed
April 28, 2016).

95
The Land Question in India

10. For instance, by violating or bypassing the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled

Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA) (Bhaduri 2008: 13).
11. The sources of the data cited by Shaw (2013: 25, table 4) are the NSSO Employment
and Unemployment Surveys of 1999–2000, 2004–5, 2009–10, and 2011–12. The
data are computed according to the Usual Principal Status (UPS) measure based on
“workers who are employed for a major part of the year” (Shaw 2013: 23).
12. In particular, a range of social-occupational groups are excluded from the labor
force by definition (particularly code numbers 91–3), such that their possible
economic role and contributions are not included in the NSSO data (Hirway
2012: 69–71). In addition, activities for household self-consumption involving
“processing of primary products” and craft and artisanal activities are not even
considered by NSSO surveys, while “activities related to agricultural production,”
though formally considered, are treated as negligible and hence those undertaking
them are treated as non-workers (p. 69). However, Hirway argues that these
assumptions of NSSO surveys are refuted by time use survey data (pp. 69–71).
13. The problematic issues pertain to the “missing labor force” and the “withdrawal”
and “very low workforce participation” of particular social groups, such as women,
the elderly, and the disabled (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2011; Himanshu 2011:
48–9; Hirway 2012: 68–71; Kannan and Raveendran 2012: 79, table 5; Rangarajan
et al. 2014: 121).
14. Recomputed from the data provided by Shaw (2013: 25, table 4).
15. Himanshu (2011: 53–8) observes that there are fluctuations and reversible shifts
between self-employment and casual wage work among sections of the Indian
workforce, resulting from changes in economic conditions and policies.
16. Reviewing macro-level employment trends in the contemporary Indian economy,
Himanshu (2011: 53) notes that cultivating households faced with limits to land
are likely to either take up casual wage employment or “seek employment in the
non-agricultural sector where this can take the form of self-employment.”
17. The articulation of this argument by Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (38–40) is not very
clear and coherent. This is the best interpretation that I could make of the text.
18. Historically, resistance to primitive accumulation by peasants and other non-
worker classes have also resulted in indirect opposition to capitalism. I am indebted
to Amiya Bagchi for comments elucidating this point.

References

Adas, M. 1986. “From Footdragging to Flight: the Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance
Protest in South and South-East Asia.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 13(2): 64–86.
Adnan, S. 1985. “Classical and Contemporary Approaches to Agrarian Capitalism.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 20(30): PE–53–64.
Adnan, S. 2007. “Departures from Everyday Resistance and Flexible Strategies of Dom-
ination: The Making and Unmaking of a Poor Peasant Mobilization in Bangladesh.”
The Journal of Agrarian Change, 7(2): 183–224.

96
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

Adnan, S. 2013. “Land Grabs and Primitive Accumulation in Deltaic Bangladesh:

Interactions between Neoliberal Globalization, State Interventions, Power Relations
and Peasant Resistance.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1): 87–128.
Adnan, S. 2014. “Primitive Accumulation and the ‘Transition to Capitalism’ in
Neoliberal India: Mechanisms, Resistance, and the Persistence of Self-Employed
Labour.” In Indian Capitalism in Development, edited by Barbara Harriss-White and
Judith Heyer, London: Routledge, pp. 23–45.
Adnan, S. 2016. “Alienation in Neoliberal India and Bangladesh: Diversity of Mechan-
isms and Theoretical Implications.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal
(SAMAJ) (online), 13: 1–20. Available at: <http://samaj.revues.org/4130> (accessed
September 9, 2016).
Akram-Lodhi, H. 2012. “Contextualizing Land Grabbing: Contemporary Land Deals,
the Global Subsistence Crisis and the World Food System.” Canadian Journal of
Development Studies, 33(2): 119–42.
Ashman, S. and Callinicos, A. 2006. “Capital Accumulation and the State System:
Assessing David Harvey’s The New Imperialism.” Historical Materialism, 14(4): 107–31.
Banerjee, P. S. 2014. “Orissa and West Bengal: The SEZ Imbroglio.” In Power, Policy and
Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones, edited by R. Jenkins, L. Kennedy,
and P. Mukhopadhyay, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 273–304.
Basu, P. K. 2007. “Political Economy of Land Grab.” Economic and Political Weekly,
42(14): 1281–7.
Basu, D. and Das, D. 2009. “Political Economy of Contemporary India: Some Com-
ments.” Economic and Political Weekly, 44(22): 157–9.
Baviskar, A. and Sundar, N. 2008. “Democracy versus Economic Transformation?”
Economic and Political Weekly, 43(46): 87–9.
Bhaduri, A. 2008. “Predatory Growth.” Economic and Political Weekly, 43(16): 10–14.
Bharadwaj, S. 2009. “Gravest Displacement, Bravest Resistance: The Struggle of Adivasis
of Bastar, Chhattisgarh against Imperialist Corporate Landgrab.” Sanhati, June 1: 1–39.
Available at: <http://sanhati.com/excerpted/1545/> (accessed February 19, 2013).
Borras, S. M. Jr. and Franco, J. 2010. “Towards a Broader View of the Politics of Global
Land Grab: Rethinking Land Issues: Reframing Resistance.” Initiatives in Critical
Agrarian Studies (ICAS), Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI), and Transnational Insti-
tute (TNI). ICAS Working Paper Series No. 001.
Brenner, R. 1976. “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe.” Past and Present, 70: 30–75.
Brenner, R. 1977. “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian
Marxism.” New Left Review, 104: 25–92.
Brenner, R. 2006. “What Is, and What Is Not, Imperialism?” Historical Materialism, 14(4):
79–105.
Burawoy, M. 1985. The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and
Socialism. London: Verso Books.
Chandrasekhar, C. P. and Ghosh, J. 2002. The Market That Failed. New Delhi: LeftWord
Books.
Chandrasekhar, C. P. and Ghosh, J. 2011. “Latest Employment Trends from the NSSO.”
Business Line, July 12.

97
The Land Question in India

Chatterjee, P. 2008. “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India.” Economic

and Political Weekly, 43(16): 53–62.
Chowdhury, S. 2011. “Employment in India: What Does the Latest Data Show?”
Economic and Political Weekly, 46(32): 23–6.
D’Costa, A. P. 2014. “Compressed Capitalism and Development: Primitive Accumula-
tion, Petty Commodity Production, and Capitalist Maturity in India and China.”
Critical Asian Studies, 46(2): 317–44.
Das, B. 2012. “Resisting Development, Theorizing Resistance.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 47(33) (August 18): 33–7 (Review of Alf Gunvald Nilsen. 2010. Dispossession
and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage, London and New York: Routledge).
De Angelis, M. 2001. “Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of
Capital’s ‘Enclosures’.” The Commoner, No. 2 (September). Available at: <http://www.
rebelnet.gr/files/De_Angelis,_M.,_2001._Marx_and_primitive_accumulation_The_con
tinuous_character_of_capital%5C's_enclosures,.pdf> (accessed September 16, 2016).
De Angelis, M. 2004. “Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous
Character of Enclosures.” Historical Materialism, 12(2): 57–87.
Fine, B. 2006. “Debating the ‘New’ Imperialism.” Historical Materialism, 14(4): 133–56.
Hall, D. 2013. “Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Global
Land Grab.” Third World Quarterly, 34(9): 1582–604.
Harriss-White, B. 2012. “Capitalism and the Common Man: Peasants and Petty Pro-
duction in Africa and South Asia.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1(2):
109–60.
Harvey, D. 2005. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. 2006. “Comment on Commentaries.” Historical Materialism, 14(4): 157–66.
Himanshu. 2011. “Employment Trends in India: A Re-Examination.” Economic and
Political Weekly, 46(37): 43–59.
Hirway, I. 2002. “Employment and Unemployment Situation in 1990s: How Good Are
NSS Data?” Economic and Political Weekly, 37(21): 2027–36.
Hirway, I. 2012. “Missing Labour Force: An Explanation.” Economic and Political Weekly,
47(37): 67–72.
Jenkins, R., Kennedy, L., and Mukhopadhyay, P. (eds) 2014. Power, Policy and Protest:
The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Jha, P. S. 2013. “Mr PM Think Twice before Jumping the Gun.” Tehelka, 24(10) (June
15). Available at: <http://tehelka.com/mr-pm-think-twice-before-jumping-the-gun/>
(accessed September 9, 2016).
Kannan, K. P. and Raveendran, G. 2012. “Counting and Profiling the Missing Labour
Force.” Economic and Political Weekly, 47(6): 77–80.
Kunnath, G. 2012. Rebels from the Mud Houses: Dalits and the Making of the Maoist
Revolution in Bihar. New Delhi: Social Science Press.
Levien, M. 2012. “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political
Economy of Dispossession in India.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4): 933–69.
Levien, M. 2013. “Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic
Zones.” Development and Change, (44)2: 381–407.
Marx, K. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books in association with New Left Review.

98
 Land Grabs, Primitive Accumulation, and Resistance

Marx, K. 1981. Capital: A Critique Of Political Economy, vol. 3. Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books in association with New Left Review.
Moore, B. Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Nigam, A. 2007. “NAPM Report: To Nandigram via Singur: A Preliminary Report on the
Struggle and Violence in Nandigram.” Available at: <http://kafila.org/2007/02/
27/napm-report-to-nandigram-via-singur/> (accessed September 9, 2016).
Patnaik, P. 2008. “The Accumulation Process in the Period of Globalisation.” Economic
and Political Weekly, 43(26–7): 108–13.
Patnaik, P. 2011. “Things, Not People.” Frontline, 28: 21. Available at: <http://www.
frontline.in/navigation/?type=static&page=archive> (accessed February 9, 2013).
Patnaik, P. 2012. “The Peasant Question and Contemporary Capitalism: Some Reflec-
tions with Reference to India.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1(1): 27–42.
Patnaik, U. 1979. “Neo-Populism and Marxism: The Chayanovian View of the Agrarian
Question and Its Fundamental Fallacy.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 6(4): 375–420.
Patnaik, U. (ed) 1990. Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The Mode of Production Debate
in India. Mumbai: Oxford University Press.
Patnaik, U. 2012. “Some Aspects of the Contemporary Agrarian Question.” Agrarian
South: Journal of Political Economy, 1(3): 233–54.
Perelman, M. 1984. Classical Political Economy: Primitive Accumulation and the Social
Division of Labour. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld.
Rangarajan, C., Iyer Kaul, P., and Seema. 2011. “Where Is the Missing Labour Force?”
Economic and Political Weekly, 46(39): 68–72.
Rangarajan, C., Seema, and Vibeesh, E. M. 2014. “Developments in the Workforce
between 2009–10 and 2011–12.” Economic and Political Weekly, 49(23): 117–21.
Sampat, P. 2008. “Special Economic Zones in India.” Economic and Political Weekly,
43(28): 25–9.
Sampat, P. 2015. “The ‘Goan Impasse’: Land Rights and Resistance to SEZs in Goa,
India.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 42(3–4): 765–90.
Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality
and Post-Colonial Capitalism. London, New York, and New Delhi: Routledge.
Sanyal, K. and Bhattacharyya, R. 2009. “Beyond the Factory: Globalisation, Informalisation
of Production and the New Locations of Labour.” Economic and Political Weekly, 44(22):
35–44.
Scott, J. C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven,
CT and London: Yale University Press.
Scott, J. C. 1986. “Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance.” Journal of Peasant Studies,
13(2): 5–35.
Sebastian, G. 2012. “The Big U-Turn: New Forms of Primitive Accumulation and the
Shift in Patriotic Sensibilities in India.” Paper Presented at Seminar on “Parliamentary
Democracy and Neoliberalism in India,” October 18–19, 2012, organized by Institute
of Parliamentary Affairs, Government of Kerala, in association with Department of
Economics, University College, Thiruvananthapuram (mimeo).
Shah, M. 2008. “Structures of Power in Indian Society: A Response.” Economic and
Political Weekly, 43(46): 78–83.

99
The Land Question in India

Shaw, A. 2013. “Employment Trends in India: An Overview of NSSO’s 68th Round.”

Economic and Political Weekly, 48(42): 23–5.
Thomas, J. J. 2012. “India’s Labour Market during the 2000s: Surveying the Changes.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 47(51): 39–51.
Tilly, C. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company.
Vasudevan, R. 2008. “Accumulation by Dispossession in India.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 43(11): 41–3 (Review of The Perspectives Team. 2007. Abandoned:
Development and Displacement, New Delhi: Perspectives).
Vijayabaskar, M. 2014. “The Politics of Silence.” In Power, Policy and Protest: The Politics of
India’s Special Economic Zones, edited by R. Jenkins, L. Kennedy, and P. Mukhopadhyay,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 305–30.
Walker, K. Le Mons. 2008. “Neoliberalism on the Ground in Rural India: Predatory
Growth, Agrarian Crisis, Internal Colonization, and the Intensification of Class
Struggle.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 35(4): 557–620.

100
4

Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

in Rural India

Locating the Land Question within

the Agrarian Question

Arindam Banerjee

4.1 Introduction

Historically, in global experiences of the development of capitalism, the “land

question” has been intricately linked with the resolution of the “agrarian
question.” The emergence of capitalism within the old structures of feudalism,
originally in Western Europe and later in other advanced capitalist countries,
has also been a process of structural transformation of economies from a
largely land-dependent mass of agricultural producers to the emergence of
an industrial workforce, and subsequently to a sizeable service sector. This
process of transition to capitalism has clearly not been a linear and homogenous
one even within the developed world and it is crucially shaped by the manner
in which the agrarian question was resolved in different times and spaces (Byres
2003a). The heterogeneity of this transition is underscored further when one
looks at the experience of late developers (D’Costa 2014).
The agrarian question (AQ) has evolved historically based on the experience
of different regions with capitalism. In that sense, AQ is a continually devel-
oping concept and one need not deem the classical versions as unchangeable
or universally applicable. Undoubtedly, the classical AQ ideas regarding class
alliances, development of productive forces, and mobilization of surplus for
industrialization that were held as necessary conditions and outcomes of a
successful resolution of the AQ have some relevance in contemporary developing
The Land Question in India

countries. However, for a realistic understanding of the challenges before capit-

alist transition, these ideas should be applied in a manner that is amenable to
accommodating the historical and regional specificities within which developing
countries are situated.
In the context of developing countries, including India, there has been
new thinking whether the classical agrarian question, whereby agricultural
surplus is mobilized for industrialization, remains relevant under conditions
of globalization or is bypassed without its resolution (Bernstein 1996; Lerche
2013). The AQ is held to be closed without its resolution in the classical sense
because the role of agrarian accumulation of capital in structural transform-
ation is supposedly undermined. However, the adoption of this position
makes it difficult to answer some questions that recent development experi-
ences have prompted. The increasing demand for land in rural areas to extend
urbanization and industrialization has led to significant contradictions that
rural communities face vis-à-vis land acquisition. A major question that needs
to be answered is why, even under conditions where income from agricultural
land increasingly fails to sustain livelihoods, the resistance of rural communi-
ties to land acquisition has intensified over the last few years.
Is the agrarian question passé for developing countries today? If so, then the
historical role of the peasantry is reduced to simply abdicating claims on land
and other natural resources for the purpose of industrialization. Should then
one categorize peasant resistance to land acquisitions as a Luddite, anti-
progressive, and anti-capitalist position? Will such a corporate-led growth
process form a feasible path to development? The answer to these questions
will help us comprehend the land question in India, which in turn, requires an
examination of the patterns of contemporary agrarian accumulation in India
and the status of the agrarian question. Both land acquisition, and the resist-
ance to it, are intricately linked with the changed production conditions in
Indian agriculture under neoliberal reforms.
In this chapter, I examine the relevance of the agrarian question in contem-
porary developing countries such as India and the feasibility and contradic-
tions of a neoliberal corporate-led growth process, which is necessarily
accompanied by significant displacement of petty producers from land
and large-scale livelihood destruction. The chapter is organized as follows.
In Section 4.2, I briefly discuss the broad evolution of India’s agrarian question
as it pertains to land. Section 4.3 analyzes the conditions of agriculture and
the symptoms of the agrarian crisis based on primary data and secondary
evidence. Based on an understanding of the agrarian crisis, Section 4.4 delves
into some recent hypotheses on the agrarian question in developing countries
under globalization and outlines the current juncture of the agrarian question
in India. Section 4.5 locates the land question within the agrarian question
and presents the conclusions.

102
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

4.2 Historical Prelude to the Agrarian Question

The role of colonialism in the early capitalist transitions is significant, to a

large extent primary, in more than one way. The external sources of accumu-
lation via the colonial drain of wealth and direct (European out-migration)
and indirect (via export of manufactured commodities and colonial deindus-
trialization) export of unemployment to the colonies played a crucial role in
the capitalist transition. The land question was often settled beyond the
national boundaries through the forcible eviction of natives in America or
Australia, in the “New World,” from the best agricultural lands (Bagchi 1982:
ch. 3; Magdoff 1978). No country striving for development in the postcolonial
world has the advantage of accessing such momentous advantages, specific to
the history of colonialism.
The agrarian question in developing countries, and the land question
located within it, have always been different, both qualitatively and in terms
of dimensions. The colonial experiences, which mostly preserved feudal eco-
nomic institutions and sometimes established and ossified them, also added
new dimensions to the agrarian question in the Global South. The integration
of colonies such as India into the circuits of world trade without any signifi-
cant transformation of the modes of production toward capitalism led to
situations where the surplus was often accumulated in the hands of local
ruling classes, subordinated by the metropolis, and mostly in precapitalist
form (Patnaik 1999).
In the case of colonial India, there was a significant export orientation of
agriculture where large masses of peasants were producing for the world
market but under onerous tenancy conditions coupled with extra-economic
control of their labor by a landlord class. The latter, while accumulating
surplus, lacked the incentive to invest in agriculture and improve the pro-
ductive capacities of land, since there were always other precapitalist ways of
stepping up surplus appropriation.1 Nevertheless, the landlord class, as the
agent of land revenue collection, was a critical agent for the mobilization
and transfer of tribute from the colony to the metropolis under British rule
(Bagchi 2010).
The colonial experience meant that after independence redistribution of
land emerged as the most important agrarian question that was crucial for
the emancipation of the Indian peasantry from the oppressive stranglehold of
the landlord class that also collaborated with imperialism. However, the
landlord–bourgeoisie alliance that came to dominate the Indian state after
1947 prevented any meaningful land reforms in most parts of the country,
except in a few pockets where protracted peasant struggles could not be
suppressed by the ruling classes (Harriss 2013). Rather, capitalist development
in agriculture was triggered more through the technological intervention of

103
The Land Question in India

the green revolution strategy in the mid-1960s, and not through a radical
transformation of the rural feudal society. Further helped by the development
of public interventions like the crop management system, credit provisioning,
seed research, and so on, and stepping up of public investment in agriculture,
capitalist landlords (transition from above) and rich peasants (transition from
below) emerged through a process of peasant differentiation.2
Land concentration remained high during this capitalist transition and the
barrier of ground rent restricting investments in agriculture (Patnaik 1983)
continued to prevail in most parts of the country. The unevenness of this
capitalist development of Indian agriculture was also well noted in the litera-
ture. The landmark study by Bhalla and Singh (1997) revealed that agricultural
growth in the 1960s and 1970s was mainly concentrated in the wheat-
growing northern states such as Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh,
though it later spread to the eastern and southern regions in the 1980s.
Institutional changes such as land redistribution and tenancy reforms in
West Bengal played a major role in a late green revolution in the state
(Saha and Swaminathan 1994).
A shift to neoliberal policies in the early 1990s led to the emergence of new
conditions for Indian agriculture and consequently the agrarian question.
Trade liberalization in agricultural commodities and reductions in public
expenditure in agriculture posed new constraints on Indian farmers, leading
to the precipitation of an agrarian crisis in many parts of the country (Patnaik
2002; Reddy and Mishra 2009; see also Chapter 9 in this volume). Since
around 2004, a high-growth regime in the Indian economy, accompanied
by a languishing agricultural sector, has also raised questions regarding the
disjunction between the agricultural sector and the rest of the economy.

4.3 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation under Neoliberalism

The agrarian crisis and stagnation is predominant now in different parts of the
country, largely as a result over the last two decades of an export-oriented
strategy, state withdrawal from agricultural investments, institutions, and
services, and an overall neoliberal outlook toward small-scale petty produc-
tion. Driven by fiscal fundamentalism, there was a veritable withdrawal of the
state from economic operations, especially from agriculture (Banerjee 2009;
Patnaik 2002). A host of policies adopted, such as the rationalization of input
subsidies, the downsizing of public interventions including incentive pricing,
a further decline in public investments, and the contraction of institutional credit
availability in rural areas, all contributed to a deflation in real farm incomes
and the emergence of indebtedness among the peasantry (Ramachandran and
Swaminathan 2005; Reddy and Mishra 2009).

104
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

Further, the push for export-oriented agriculture implied that millions of

small and marginal farmers in the country were exposed to global competition
from other developing country farmers, particularly in certain export crops
such as cotton and palm oil. This resulted in declining crop prices in the late
1990s and significant income deflation for petty producers in agriculture
(Patnaik 2002). The enhanced volatility of crop prices in the world markets
and rising food prices meant that the effects of higher export crop prices in the
new century were not always unambiguously positive, in real terms, for the
Indian farmers, resulting in a prolonged agricultural stagnation. The resultant
agrarian crisis is primarily a crisis of accumulation among sections of the
upper peasantry and a crisis of simple reproduction for large sections of
the peasantry. A rich rural elite comprised of capitalist landlords, thin sections
of the rich peasants, and other collaborative agents of organized capital within
the rural areas may have found ways and means for continued accumulation
even within this larger crisis. The primary data analysis later in the section
substantiates this situation in agriculture.
To understand the various facets of this crisis, it is useful to examine the
patterns of accumulation within the peasantry under the neoliberal economic
regime. Based on a rural field study in the states of West Bengal and Telengana
(Andhra Pradesh at the time of the survey) in 2006, we will look at some
characteristics of the recent accumulation processes in rural areas and their
implications for the land question. Of the two states studied, one is a food-
growing region and the other a cultivator of commercial crops. This helps us
to understand the accumulation question under two different conditions.
Major results of this study have already been published (Banerjee 2009),
where various dimensions of the agrarian crisis have been outlined. Here, we
look at specific results from the study, which is relevant for our inquiry into
the agrarian question.

4.3.1 Setting and Methodology

The question of accumulation is approached with the assumption of a het-
erogeneous peasantry, comprising various classes. The peasant classification is
based on the capacity of farm households to appropriate surplus directly
through use of hired labor and indirectly through secondary means of exploit-
ation in land or credit markets. Among several methods of studying peasant
classes (see Thorner 1982), this classification method based on hired labor
use helps us to separate accumulation occurring in the “sphere of production”
and the “sphere of exchange,” allowing us to gain certain insights on the
agrarian question.
In the rural areas, the landless labor and the landlord classes do not perform
manual labor on their own farms; for the former this is involuntary, as they do

105
The Land Question in India

not have any access to land, whereas for the latter it is voluntary. Between
these two classes there is a heterogeneous peasantry comprising the upper and
lower peasantry. The upper peasantry is made up of net labor-exploiting
classes, within which the rich peasants are expected to be more dynamic in
terms of accumulation and depend primarily on hired labor for cultivation.
The accumulation of capital historically in the hands of these classes increases
the capital stock on their farms and enables them to appropriate increasing
volumes of surplus produced by the farm labor. We have used the labor-
exploitation criterion developed by Patnaik (1976) to identify and study the
various peasant classes in these areas.3
The survey covered seventy-seven households in two villages in the Raina-2
Block, Bardhhaman district in West Bengal. These villages had an agro-
climactic characteristic akin to the fertile alluvial Indo-Gangetic plains. The
abundance of groundwater and high levels of irrigation allowed multiple
cropping; usually two crops of rice and potato are sown but farmers with
greater access to money capital could go for a third crop of boro (winter) rice
or vegetables. The region in Telengana is located in the Saidapur Block in
Karimnagar district in Andhra Pradesh. The three villages surveyed in the
Saidapur consist of sixty households, primarily cotton growers. Around half
of their operated area is irrigated. The black soil in the region produces notably
high yields of cotton when cultivated under irrigated conditions.

4.3.2 Peasant Classes and Labor Exploitation

The survey results organized in accordance with our peasant class framework
and land-size classes reveal the agrarian structure in these two regions. In the
West Bengal region, a large proportion of the households (89.6 percent) had
small holdings within 5 acres. The most notable feature of this region is the
predominance of a rich peasant class, which forms the largest economic class,
with around 39 percent. This is primarily due to the high demand for hired
labor for the multiple cropping practiced in this region. Significant migration
of labor from other parts of the state and also from neighboring Jharkhand
state meets this high demand. The rich peasant households are distributed
across all land-size classes, implying that the high labor demand is generated
from both small and large landholdings. This reflects the relatively more
broad-based capital accumulation experienced in West Bengal after the land
reform measures of the 1980s (also see Bhalla and Singh 1997).4
In Telengana, the distribution of the households across land-size classes
is more spread out. One-quarter of the households operate more than 5 acres
(2 hectares). Unlike in West Bengal, the rich peasant class is not only thinner
(13.33 percent) but is also confined to the two highest size-class brackets
(5 acres and above). The small and middle peasant classes jointly comprise

106
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

Table 4.1. Labor hiring-in and hiring-out: West Bengal (WB) and Telengana (TL) (in
labor-days)

Class F per hh Hi per hh 100*[Hi/(F + Hi)] Ho per hh 100*[Ho/(F + Ho)] 100*[Hi/(F + Ho)]

West Bengal, Raina

RL 0.00 0.00 0.00 190.00 100.00 0.00
PP 24.04 28.72 54.44 228.52 90.48 11.37
SP 154.25 113.76 42.45 180.00 53.85 34.04
MP 106.00 102.88 49.25 21.31 16.74 80.81
RP 121.70 448.57 78.66 11.17 8.40 337.61
LLD 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Total 85.26 211.38 71.26 97.26 53.29 115.81
Telengana, Saidapur
RL 0.00 0.00 0.00 258.57 100.00 0.00
PP 201.43 62.29 23.62 160.00 44.27 17.23
SP 292.00 91.30 23.82 181.44 38.32 19.28
MP 298.33 169.96 36.29 5.00 1.65 56.03
RP 265.00 613.51 69.84 0.00 0.00 231.51
LLD 0.00 1919.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Total 240.17 193.09 44.57 125.43 34.31 52.81

Notes: RL: Rural labor; PP: Poor Peasants; SP: Small Peasants; MP: Middle Peasants; RP: Rich Peasants; LLD: Landlords; hh:
household; F: Family labor; Hi: Labor days hired-in; Ho: Labor days hired-out.
Source: Primary Field Survey

more than 60 percent of the households, indicating that the use of family
labor is at least as important as hired labor for a majority of households in this
irrigated cotton-cultivating region.
The class-differentiated character of the peasantry is amply reflected by the
patterns of exploitation of hired labor and self-exploitation of family labor.
In both regions, the methodology of categorizing peasant households into
economic classes is validated by the wide differences in the hiring-in and
hiring-out of labor and their relative importance vis-à-vis the use of family
labor. The upper peasantry classes in both regions, particularly the rich peas-
ant households are much more dependent on hired labor for cultivation. This
differentiation within the peasantry is well reflected by Table 4.1.
The percentage of labor days hired-out (Ho) within the total labor days
(family labor and labor days sold to others) worked by a household (F + Ho)
drops sharply as we move from the lower to the upper peasantry. Similarly, the
total labor days hired-in (Hi) as a percentage of total labor days (F + Ho) worked
by a household multiplies many times as we move up the hierarchy of peasant
classes. The latter variable theoretically implies the ratio of surplus appropri-
ated from employing others’ labor by a peasant household relative to the
surplus created by their own labor (partly appropriated by themselves and
partly exchanged for wages in the labor market). This ratio [Hi/(F + Ho)] for the
rich peasant class in West Bengal is around thirty times that for the poor

107
The Land Question in India

peasant class and nearly ten times that for the small peasants. Similarly, in
Telengana, this ratio for the rich peasants is more than that for the poor
peasants by a multiple of more than 13.
The upper peasantry classes are in a position to appropriate and accumu-
late the surplus produced within agriculture purely on the basis of their
historically evolved production techniques. The specific capital–labor
relations that their production system embodies due to the historical
accumulation of capital marks these classes as the more dynamic ones in
the context of any agrarian transition.

4.3.3 Asset Ownership and Incomes

The distribution of assets within the peasant household reflects the historical
process of capital accumulation within the peasantry, which is crucial for any
capitalist transition of agriculture to occur. The ownership of physical assets,
more specifically the control over the means of production by a peasant class,
determines the production technique that a peasant household employs in
cultivation, capacity to exploit labor on their farms, and consequently, the
volume of surplus/deficit generated. The investment of that surplus back
into agriculture remains crucial for capital accumulation in the hands of the
dynamic peasant classes.
Table 4.2 indicates the near monopoly of the rich peasants over assets in
West Bengal. This class, which forms 39 percent of the households in this
region, owns 80.5 percent of the assets. The concentration of productive assets
is also high. They control 69.2 percent of livestock and 87.3 percent of
machinery and implements. A deeper inspection of the field data reveals
that the topmost land-size class, with an operated area of 10 acres or more
(3.9 percent of the sample and all rich peasant households), owns 44.1 percent
of the assets. High levels of inequality in asset ownership exist even within the
rich peasant class, implying an intraclass differentiation, the source of which
we elaborate later in this discussion.
In Telengana, the concentration of assets is relatively more diffused com-
pared to West Bengal, as the middle peasant class also has a significant share in
the assets relative to their economic class size. The only landlord household in
this region, the rich peasants, and the middle peasants together own 73.4
percent of livestock and 80.3 percent of machinery and implements, indicat-
ing strong control over productive capital by all the labor-exploiting classes.
The concentration of productive assets in both regions is compatible with
the higher exploitation of hired labor by the upper peasantry classes. Does
this translate into higher surplus appropriation and capital accumulation by
these classes? For this purpose, we look at different indicators of income: farm
labor income (FLI), farm disposable incomes (FDI), and the total household

108
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

Table 4.2. Distribution of assets across peasant classes (in %)

Class Distribution of households Total assets Livestock Implements and machinery

WB
RL 2.6 0.2 0.7 0.0
PP 32.5 8.5 8.9 1.0
SP 5.2 1.3 1.6 4.2
MP 20.8 9.4 19.6 7.6
RP 39.0 80.5 69.2 87.3
LLD 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
TL
RL 11.7 2.2 0.0 0.1
PP 11.7 4.6 6.5 1.4
SP 41.7 22.5 20.1 18.1
MP 20.0 21.3 41.0 9.9
RP 13.3 33.2 29.2 28.5
LLD 1.7 16.3 3.2 41.9
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

Notes: RL: Rural labor; PP: Poor Peasants; SP: Small Peasants; MP: Middle Peasants; RP: Rich Peasants; LLD: Landlords; WB:
West Bengal; TL: Telengana.
Source: Primary Field Survey

income (THI).5 This sheds light on the constraints facing different peasant
classes as far as the realization and re-investment of surpluses in their farms
are concerned.
The FLI represents the income of farm households from cultivation, prior to
the payment of rent and interest, depicting the hypothetical economic situ-
ation where land and credit monopoly are absent. Correspondingly, FDI is the
farm income after ground rent and interest is paid out. A peasant household
has to reproduce family labor, save, and undertake farm investments from
this disposable income. The divergence between the FLI and FDI represents
the dimensions of secondary exploitation relations, that is, extraction of
farm surplus through rent and usury, which exist in Indian agriculture in
various degrees.
In West Bengal, the FLI of the rich peasants is more than twenty times that
of the poor peasant class (Table 4.3). The thin, small peasant class in this
region generates a negative FLI primarily due to very low yields of potato.
This can be held as an exceptional case, although even with normal yields,
their FLI would have still been much lower than the middle or rich peasants.
In Telengana, the rich peasants and the landlord household have markedly
higher incomes than the other three peasant classes. The average FLI for the
rich peasants is as much as 45.1 percent of the gross value of output (GVO);
the sole landlord household has an FLI more than 40 percent of the GVO. The
direct surplus appropriation through labor exploitation by the topmost classes

109
The Land Question in India

Table 4.3. Income situation across peasant classes (in INR)

Class FLI FLI as % of GVO Interest payment* Rent* FDI

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5=(1
(3 + 4)]

WB
RL 400 10.3 400 (100) 0 (0) 0
PP 1253 10.4 1264 (100.9) 154 (12.3)
165
SP
4146
14.2 8669 (
) 750 (
)
13,565
MP 12,990 27.5 3014 (23.2) 1759 (13.5) 8218
RP 28,964 21.5 8980 (31.0) 1057 (3.6) 18,928
LLD 0 0.0 0 (
) 0 (
) 0
Total 14,186 20.9 4996 (35.2) 866 (6.1) 8324
TL
RL
65 0.0 7336 (
) 0 (
)
7401
PP 8330 31.1 5449 (65.4) 6157 (73.9)
3275
SP 2776 9.0 4354 (156.8) 3792 (136.6)
5369
MP 10,411 17.2 12,764 (122.6) 1483 (14.2)
3837
RP 106,968 45.1 76,431 (71.5) 500 (0.5) 30,037
LLD 246,497 41.8 38,000 (15.4) 8000 (3.3) 200,497
Total 22,574 32.5 16,683 (73.9) 2795 (12.4) 3097

* The figures in parentheses in Columns 3 and 4 are interest payments and rent expressed as a percentage of FLI
Notes: FLI: Farm Labor Income; GVO: Gross Value Output; FDI: Farm Disposable Income; RL: Rural labor; PP: Poor
Peasants; SP: Small Peasants; MP: Middle Peasants; RP: Rich Peasants; LLD: Landlords; WB: West Bengal; TL: Telengana.
Source: Primary Field Survey

is definitely way ahead of the remaining peasant households, as expected in a

peasantry with capitalist differentiation.
When we look at the FDI, the income situation drastically worsens. All lower
peasantry classes and the middle peasants in Telengana generate a negative
FDI, signifying the difficulty of mere simple reproduction of most peasant
farms (see also Chapter 9, this volume). Of more significance is the volumin-
ous drain of the farm incomes of the upper peasant classes, primarily by
interest payments. For rich peasants in West Bengal, 31.0 percent of the FLI
was required to service interest payments and in Telengana, the same figure
was a massive 71.5 percent. Relatively, land rents do not bleed a major portion
of the farm incomes, except for poor and small peasants in Telengana.
What emerges from the above analysis of farm incomes is the stranglehold
of usury and indebtedness over the peasant classes that produce significant
surplus from cultivation and livestock. A further detailed inquiry into the
sample data results reveals that the sole capitalist landlord household in
Telengana and the three rich peasant households in West Bengal who culti-
vated the largest landholdings (some of them also owning the rice mills in the
locality and doubled up as crop commission agents or intermediaries) were the
rare households that did not experience any significant depletion of their

110
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

surpluses through secondary channels of exploitation like usury. This also

explains the intraclass differentiation within the West Bengal rich peasants.
Most rich peasant households, while appropriating surplus produced by
wage labor on their farms, lost that surplus to various usurious interests in
the village. The field enquiry also revealed that the informal credit sources
were mostly seed and input dealers or village residents who had formal jobs in
the service sector and less commonly the old landlord–moneylender that were
earlier observed (Bhaduri 1973; Chandra 1974) in the 1970s in some parts of
the country.
This escalated importance of usury in the study regions is not exceptional
but is a more prevalent phenomenon in Indian agriculture in the reforms
period. Rising indebtedness has become both a cause and effect of the
pervasive agrarian crisis since the late 1990s. The Situation Assessment
Survey of Farmers conducted by the National Sample Survey in 2002–3
revealed that more than 48 percent of farm households were indebted.
Agricultural and professional moneylenders had gained importance as a
source of credit to rural households during the reforms period, accompanied
by a corresponding withdrawal of commercial banks from rural areas as part
of the banking reforms in the 1990s (Banerjee 2008; Ramachandran and
Swaminathan 2005).
Table 4.4 further underscores the fact that without any secondary appro-
priation of surplus and nonagricultural incomes, it is not possible to carry
out either a simple reproduction of peasant farms or investments in agricul-
ture. In West Bengal, while the FDI does not allow most households to meet
a calorie-norm-based consumption poverty line,6 the income from service
charges and self-employment enables a thin section within the rich peasant
class to supplement their incomes considerably. Three rich peasant house-
holds cultivating land between 5 and 10 acres are classified as non-poor
mainly due to their nonfarm income. Another three rich peasant households
cultivating more than 10 acres and also the major rice mill owners of the
region actually end up with considerable investable surplus. However, the
average rich peasant households barely meet the poverty line, implying
that the remaining twenty-four households within this class have serious
problems in even a simple reproduction of their farms. In Telengana, the
landlord household has some nonfarm income due to other formal
service employment while all other classes cannot meet the poverty line
consumption levels.7
These findings are to a large extent corroborated by the Situation Assessment
Survey of Agricultural Households in 2012–13. Table 4.5 (see Column 12)
reveals that more than 86 percent of agricultural households in India have
negative or paltry investments; their farm and nonfarm incomes taken together
mostly fall short of the required consumption expenses.

111
The Land Question in India

Table 4.4. Total household income and poverty line per household by economic and land
size-classes: West Bengal advanced region (in INR)

Class FDI Income from Income from service Total Annual household
paid charges, self- household poverty line (2200
employment employment, etc. income Kcal)
(annual)
[1] [2] [3] [4=1+2+3] [5]

RL 0 11,400 0 11,400 30,942

PP
165 14,150 401 14,385 34,380
SP
13,565 10,200 600
2765 41,256
MP 8218 1279 0 9496 30,512
RP 18,928 670 17,933 37,531 48,361
LLD 0 0 0 0 0
Total 8324 5947 7148 21,419 39,291
0 0 11,400 0 11,400 30,942
0.01–1.0
684 9200 244 8760 31,697
1.01–2.5 10,706 2100 126 12,932 31,485
2.51–5.0 12,505 2000 2222 16,727 64,176
5.1–10.0 47,362 0 11,333 58,695 48,132
10.1 and above 70,309 0 161,333 231,643 114,600
Total 8324 5947 7148 21,419 39,291

Note: Land size-classes are in acres; RL: Rural Labor; PP: Poor Peasants; SP: Small Peasants; MP: Middle Peasants; RP: Rich
Peasants; LLD: Landlords.
Source: Primary Field Survey, Column 5 estimated by author

What the above assessment implies is that even the labor-exploiting rich
peasants are unable to achieve social reproduction; undertaking productivity-
enhancing farm investments is beyond their means. Reducing consumption
levels, taking out consumption loans from informal sources, or defaulting on
existing credit liabilities are the only ways in which they can drag themselves
into the next production cycle. Indebtedness and immiserization has pene-
trated the upper peasantry under neoliberal conditions. Capitalist landlords
and thin sections of the rich peasants who have established extended control
over the value chain in cultivation, both on input and output ends, continue
the accumulation process more vigorously within the conditions of agrarian
crisis. It is evident that the base of capital accumulation has also shrunk in
the process.
This transformation in the process of surplus appropriation in agriculture
under the neoliberal policy regime has important implications for the agrarian
question in the country. The new pattern of accumulation that has accom-
panied the agrarian crisis has hinged on secondary relations of exploitation
through myriad exchange relations rather than primary labor relations
within the sphere of production. Based on these findings, we discuss the
classical agrarian question and how that changes under the twin conditions
of neoliberalism and globalization in developing countries such as India.

112
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

4.4 Is the Agrarian Question Relevant under Globalization?

The conceptualization of the agrarian question within Marxist scholarship has

evolved greatly over time and yet remains as contentious as ever. The classic
agrarian question broadly has three different yet interrelated aspects
(Bernstein 1996; Byres 2003a). Bernstein (1996) identifies these various facets
respectively as AQ1, AQ2, and AQ3. The classical debates have progressively
engaged with the issue of political class alliances (primarily between the
working class and the peasantry) for a transition to socialism (AQ1; Marx/
Engels), the development of productive forces by a dynamic rich peasantry
that challenges landlord-dominated feudalism (AQ2; Lenin/Kautsky), and
finally, on the question of accumulation of surplus and capital necessary for
industrialization in backward economies (AQ3; Preobrazhensky debates, for-
malized by Byres). Byres (2003b) cautions that such a dissection of the agrarian
question, while correct, cannot be applied mechanically given that the three
components are necessarily interconnected during any transition experience.
Recently, scholars from the South (Moyo, Jha, and Yeros 2013) have pointed
out that an overemphasis of AQ2 and AQ3 in the discourse has led to a
reductionist view of the agrarian question, particularly when it concerns devel-
oping countries that were ex-colonies. According to this view, this reductionism
largely occurs due to the fact that the agrarian question is often primarily
informed by the conditions under which different paths of capitalist develop-
ment traversed in the North (W. Europe, Japan, and the USA), accompanied by a
certain degree of obfuscation of the role of colonial exploitation in the process.
In contrast, in most ex-colonies8 often in collaboration with local landed
classes, the emancipation of the peasantry was an integral part of national
liberation movements and constituted the primary component of the agrarian
question (Moyo, Jha, and Yeros 2013). This argument assumes significance in
the context of contemporary globalization, which increasingly re-incorporates
developing country peasantries within the network of global capitalism, often
on unequal terms.
The growing dominance of global finance capital since the 1980s, leading to
the hegemony of the twin paradigm of free trade and free markets, has neces-
sitated a rethinking of the agrarian question and its relevance in developing
countries. Within this re-engagement, Bernstein’s (1996, 2006) hypothesis of
the bypassing of the agrarian question is a particularly strong and widely
accepted formulation.
Bernstein argues that under the globalization regime, with freer flows of
capital, it is not necessary for the agrarian question to be resolved within
national boundaries. The AQ gets bifurcated into the AQ of capital and the
AQ of labor. The former is resolved through the inflow of capital into a
developing nation as foreign direct investment. Bernstein argues that while

113
Table 4.5. Rural India: Agricultural household monthly income from all sources, consumption expenditure, and investment in productive assets
(in INR), 2012–2013

Size-class (ha.) Net income receipts CE Balance IA Surplus/deficit % of HHs Cum. % of HHs

W C AF NFB Total

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8=(6–7) 9 10=(8–9) 11 12
<0.01 2902 30 1181 447 4561 5108
547 55
602 2.6 2.6
0.01–0.4 2386 687 621 459 4152 5401
1249 251
1500 31.9 34.5
0.41–1.00 2011 2145 629 462 5247 6020
773 540
1313 34.9 69.4
1.01–2.00 1728 4209 818 593 7348 6457 891 422 469 17.2 86.6
2.01–4.00 1657 7359 1161 554 10,730 7786 2944 746 2198 9.3 95.9
4.01–10.00 2031 15,243 1501 861 19,637 10,104 9533 1975 7558 3.7 99.6
>10.00 1311 35,685 2622 1770 41,388 14,447 26,941 6987 19,954 0.4 100
All sizes 2071 3081 763 512 6426 6223 203 513
310 100

Note: W=wage income; C=Income from cultivation; AF=Income from animal farming; NFB=Non-farm business income; CE=Consumption expenditure; IA=Investments in productive assets;
HH is Households.
Source: NSSO (2014)
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

developing countries at the moment of decolonization did not have any

access to external sources of accumulation, globalization of capital opens up
such opportunities in the form of foreign investment. Simultaneously, this
diminishes the importance of historically accumulated agrarian capital for
industrialization. Consequently, the AQ2 and AQ3 need not be resolved
within rural class dynamics but are determined by the agency of foreign
capital. The question of structural transformation of the workforce, or the
AQ of labor, may not get addressed under globalization due to competition
leading to rising capital intensity, efficiency, and scale requirements.
This liquidation of the national–historical agrarian question seems inappro-
priate from the perspective of developing countries on at least three grounds.
First, the bypassing of the agrarian question in developing countries is premised
heavily on assuming a typified path of development akin to advanced country
industrialization. Most developing countries have not experienced structural
transformation similar to the advanced capitalist countries. The “death of the
peasantry” that was predicted (Hobsbawm 1973, 1994) has clearly not hap-
pened in large parts of Asia and Africa. This obstinacy of the peasants to not
disappear, lack of adequate industrial jobs, and the proliferation of the informal
economy are held as an indication that the agrarian question cannot be
resolved within developing countries. The globalized accumulation of capital,
according to Bernstein, is therefore a way this transition can progress.
This line of reasoning is untenable when we read the history of capitalism
not independent of the history of labor. The significant out-migration of
population from the early industrializers of Western Europe into the
“New World” led to a re-population of white colonies, where land and other
productive resources were grabbed from the indigenous populations; the latter
often concentrated into reserves or exterminated (Bagchi 1982; Frank 1967).
This out-migration was further intensified during the nineteenth century,
which witnessed the fastest strides of capitalism in Western Europe. Estimates
of migration from Europe between 1821 and 1915 (based on Kenwood and
Lougheed 1971) stand at nearly 44 million. The population of Europe
increased by 129 million in this period: from 134 million in 1821 to 263
million in 1915 (Maddison 2007). For every two persons in Western Europe
who were born and stayed back during this period, one had to emigrate from
the continent in search of jobs and a livelihood. The international out-
migration from developing countries in contemporary times is of relatively
miniscule dimensions compared to the above.
Apart from this “direct” export of unemployment, early industrializers such
as Britain also had the advantage of “indirectly” exporting the unemployed
through the forcible imposition of “free trade” on colonies and the export of
machine-made manufactures, causing deindustrialization and job losses in the
latter (Bagchi 2010). Additionally, colonial transfer of “tribute” from colonies

115
The Land Question in India

buttressed capital accumulation and financed industrialization both in Britain

and the “New World” (Habib 1995; Mukherjee 2010). The sustained resettle-
ment of labor in the “New World,” indirect export of unemployment, and the
“drain of wealth” from colonies form important linkages between colonialism
and the “very specific” path of capitalist development in advanced countries.
Since such options were never available in relatively labor-abundant devel-
oping countries after their de-colonization, capitalist transformation cannot
be expected to replicate that of the early industrializers. Such an expectation
can lead to erroneous positions on the status of the agrarian question in
developing countries. This is not to argue that the transition in developing
countries is complete but to underscore that it is an ongoing process whose
coordinates are at wide variance with that of earlier capitalist experiences.
Secondly, under liberalization, the entry of foreign investment is definitely
freer with reforms of capital-control legislation. However, such foreign
investment mostly comes with a price for poor developing countries. The
subsequent repatriation of capital back to the metropolis mostly imposes an
additional burden on the receiver of such capital. Further, freer capital mobil-
ity also opens up the possibility of “capital flight” from these countries,
engulfing the latter in financial crises. At any cost, foreign investment does
not substitute for colonial tribute,9 which added to capital accumulation in core
economies without any additional cost.
Finally, any foreign capital that enters, for example, agribusiness capital,
must still negotiate the political economy of agrarian class structures in spe-
cific countries, unless there is an absolute corporate takeover of agriculture.
The historical peasant differentiation will determine which classes of peasants
can get incorporated within the global value chains, which demand high-
quality production for world markets. The terms and conditions under which
such incorporation/subordination takes place through institutions like con-
tract farming, will also differ across peasant classes. Undoubtedly, with global
capital incorporating local/national capital from different countries/regions
through mergers and joint ventures, this negotiation between organized
capital (not always foreign) and petty producers assumes a complex form; at no
point, however, can it be said that local agrarian class structures are irrelevant.
In fact, with the growing dominance of global capital, a section of the
erstwhile ruling classes discovers new modes of surplus appropriation. The
modes of exploitation in upstream and downstream activities in agriculture
that have gained prominence with the agrarian crisis in India reflect the
collaboration of agrarian ruling classes with organized capital in direct and
indirect ways. Even as international capital emerges stronger than ever, it may
still not be plausible that Bernstein’s agrarian question of capital gets entirely
resolved outside the national boundaries. Bernstein’s position would amount
to “determinism of global capital” as termed by Byres (2003b).

116
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

Recently, Lerche (2013) has put forward a nuanced argument that India has
bypassed the “classical agrarian transition” under the influence of neoliberal
policies. He stops short of adopting Bernstein’s argument of the agrarian
question being entirely bypassed on the grounds of continuing accumulation
in Indian agriculture: “ . . . surplus value created in agriculture does feed into
accumulation of traders-cum-moneylenders, agro industries and multi-
national companies operating in the up- and downstream agriculturally
related industries . . . ” (Lerche 2013: 400).
This observation is similar to our findings wherein secondary means of
exploitation determine the volume of accumulation (or dissipation) of capital
by capitalist landlords/farmers or sections of rich peasants. Lerche, however,
argues that this capital accumulation does not play the historic role of develop-
ing productive forces in agriculture (AQ2) or fueling the process of industrial-
ization (AQ3): “agriculture does not appear to significantly support growth in
Indian non-agricultural sectors, neither through capital transfers nor through
the creation of a major rural market for industrial produce” (Lerche 2013: 400).
This hypothesis can only be partially correct since even during the agrarian
crisis the agricultural input industries or crop marketing/retailing companies
have not faced any significant strain. Rather, the agrarian crisis has evolved as
a phenomenon where accumulation for more organized capital and their
agents has proceeded at the expense of petty producers whose incomes
are squeezed. One cannot argue that the rural capital accumulation is
entirely delinked from the growth process in the country. There is evidence
of investment by rural ruling classes in real estate, hospitality sector, financial
instruments, and so on. This diversion of the accumulated agrarian surplus to
profitable sectors of the economy may still fuel the neoliberal growth pattern
in the country, although it does not lead to industrialization, the latter being
contingent also on factors external to the agrarian question, such as specific
industrial and trade policies or competing speculative bubbles.
Although Lerche does not adopt Bernstein’s position regarding the agrarian
question, he remains skeptical regarding political alliances (AQ1) between
workers and peasants that can restore centrality to the agrarian transition.
For him, the dividing line in the agrarian structure in India is between the
“labor-exploiting and accumulating classes” and the rest of the agrarian popu-
lation. Pitting the landless and semi-proletarian classes against all dynamic
accumulating rural classes is difficult and thereby the resistance to neoliberal
policies will necessarily be rendered weak. Citing the estimates of ceiling
surplus land in India (Rawal 2008), he argues that redistributive land reforms
would mean meager benefits (0.35 acres per landless household) for the
laboring classes, although it is a novel idea.
There are two reasons why this argument needs to be revisited. First, while it
is true that the average land size is far too small to harness economies of scale,

117
The Land Question in India

it does not automatically nullify the case for redistributive land reforms.
While one cannot escape the challenge of structural transformation by
reverting to neopopulist reforms, alternative paradigms of agricultural organ-
ization like cooperatives, need to be explored through alliances of rural
labor and poor and small peasants. This can potentially address the labor
question and the state must be forced to respond to such aspects of the
agrarian question.
Secondly, accumulation and labor exploitation in agriculture are not iden-
tical under neoliberal conditions. Our data analysis in the previous section
strongly illustrates such patterns of accumulation. The exploitation of labor
alone does not ensure accumulation, the latter depending crucially on sec-
ondary relations like rent/usury/commissions, which Lerche also refers to.
This implies a possibility of broader resistance against neoliberal globalization
by including sections of middle/rich peasants. Needless to say, capitalist
landlords/farmers and small sections of rich peasants, who have accelerated
their accumulation during the agrarian crisis using secondary exploitative
relations, will be outside this alliance. The prominent dividing line between
small-scale petty capital and large organized capital (and their rural agents)
assumes importance and is identical to the dividing line of accumulation.
The incorporation of rich/middle peasants in the alliance for the emanci-
pation of the peasantry from the stranglehold of neoliberalism is an integral
part of the agrarian question in India. However, with some degree of capital
accumulation in the hands of middle/rich peasants under the earlier dirigiste
regime, the latter are also significant employers of rural labor. This can create a
possible contradiction in the agenda for redistributive land reforms and resist-
ing neoliberalism. This is where we need to examine the land question and its
relation with the agrarian question in India.

4.5 Locating the Land Question and Conclusions

The agrarian crisis and depression in farm incomes have complex implications
for the value of agricultural land. There is no doubt that the productive value
of agricultural land diminishes with declining farm incomes. This creates the
appropriate context for grabbing farmland at low prices by a variety of inter-
ests such as real estate developers, service providers, or industrial/mining
companies. Also, agricultural land at low value can be bought out by landed
ruling classes, furthering the accumulation of social and economic power.
Increasing land concentration and land acquisition in rural India can be
viewed as a continuous process of primitive accumulation that accompanies
the contemporary, corporate-led neoliberal growth process, although not
necessarily leading to a structural transformation of the workforce.

118
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

Table 4.6. Share of rural households in operated area

1993–4 2011–12

Bottom 70% 18.9 14.6

Middle 20% 33.2 35.3
Top 10% 47.9 50.2

Source: Based on Rawal 2013: table 6

Landlessness in rural India has notably increased in recent decades. Rawal

(2013), using the NSS (National Sample Survey) Employment–Unemployment
Surveys shows that landlessness in terms of proportion of rural households
having no access to operated areas increased from 38.7 percent in 1993–4 to
48.5 percent in 2011–12. From Rawal’s findings, it is evident that the share of
the bottom 70 percent of households (including the landless) in the total
operated area declined from 18.9 percent in 1993–4 to 14.5 percent in
2011–12 (Table 4.6).
The middle households gained in terms of operated area during this period
largely through leasing-in. The distribution of owned area in rural areas is
more concentrated and has worsened for the middle, too. Based on NSS data
on land and livestock surveys, we have estimated that the share of both the
bottom 60 percent and the middle 30 percent of rural households decreased to
8.3 percent and 36.5 percent of total owned area by 2002–3. The share of the
top 10 percent of households was historically high in the post-independence
period, at 55.2 percent (Nair and Banerjee 2012). The larger point is that while
the bottom 60 percent of rural population is virtually landless, the rural
middle classes also find it increasingly difficult to maintain ownership rights
on agricultural land under the pressure of the ensuing agrarian crisis.
Income deflation in agriculture creates common ground between rural
workers, semi-workers with marginal land holdings, and sections of middle/
rich peasants as far as land is concerned. Unless there is a successful struggle to
increase profitability in agriculture, the value of agricultural land will remain
low with much less incentive for the rural poor to wage any struggle for land.
While resistance to land acquisition, often led by middle peasants, has been
spontaneous and frequent in recent times, movements for redistribution of
agricultural land has not been so vigorous, not discounting ongoing land
movements led by Ekta Parishad/Left parties in some parts of the country.
The change of land use from agricultural to nonagricultural is marked by
drastic changes in the value of land. When there is an immediate change in
land use with acquisition, under influences of speculative real-estate interests,
the escalation in land values is momentous. The dimensions of these changes
are difficult to fathom in advance when compensation for acquisition
is determined. Changes in land prices due to speculation inevitably lead to

119
The Land Question in India

ex-landowners feeling that the compensation is grossly inadequate, a negli-

gible fraction of post-acquisition land values. This leads to one stream of
resistance to land acquisition led by rural middle/upper-middle landowning
classes, with the latter feeling excluded from the massive accumulation pro-
cess. The land-poor rural masses have no common interest in these concerns.
A qualitatively different stream of resistance to land acquisition originates
from small/middle peasants, who stand to lose their modest livelihoods. The
lack of a meaningful alternative livelihood and the absence of state support in
that regard makes the land owned and cultivated by them an indispensable and
non-alienable asset. The market land prices used for determining compensation
rarely capture the costs of livelihood transformations or possible future
unemployment. Apart from these landowners, land acquisition for large devel-
opment/industrialization projects, livelihoods of tenants/agrarian labor and
non-agricultural petty producers is also affected. Even within complex socio-
economic structures, this presents another situation where a broad political
alliance of rural workers, agrarian and non-agrarian petty producers can be
forged to oppose land takeovers and protect livelihoods; Singur in West Bengal
and Kalinganagar in Odisha show that this is already happening in the country.
It is erroneous to conclude that either the agrarian question or agrarian
transition has been bypassed in India. Rather, the resolution of the agrarian
question has been arrested under neoliberalism. The agrarian question, primar-
ily its political aspects (AQ1), is emerging as a conflict in the countryside
between rural workers and petty producers on one hand and the thin accumu-
lating classes and big capital on the other. The vast masses of informal labor in
urban areas, often with rural linkages, and the urban working class, constitute
natural allies in the resistance against neoliberalism. Defending the claims of
millions of petty producers in rural India on land, natural resources, and liveli-
hoods emerges as the primary focus of the contemporary agrarian question. The
resolution of this fundamental political aspect will determine the development
of productive forces in agriculture (AQ2) and the path of industrialization (AQ3).
In this context, the role of the state in protecting agrarian petty producers
and employment-generating domestic industries from global competition
assumes critical importance. Continued pursuance with neoliberal policies
will narrow the base of capital accumulation in agriculture but also intensify
agrarian struggles against such policies. Although the state is presently under
neoliberal hegemony, it is clear that any capitalist development accompanied
by large-scale alienation of peasant masses from land and employment
destruction will be counterproductive and wrought with an intensifying
crisis of livelihoods. What happens to the agrarian question and the embed-
ded land question will depend primarily on political struggles of potential
multiclass alliances against neoliberalism in rural India and its consequent
impact on the state.

120
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

Appendix 1

Various categories of income of peasant households:

Farm labor Income ðFLIÞ¼ Gross Value of Output ðGVOÞ
½Total Material Input
ð1Þ
costs þ Paid-out labor costs
Farm Disposable Income ðFDIÞ¼ FLI
Rent Payments
Interest
ð2Þ
payments
Total Household Income ðTHIÞ¼ FDI þ Income from Paid-employment þ
ð3Þ
Income from non-farm Self-employment
The GVO is the sum of Crop Output, By-Product and Livestock Product. The Total
Material Input costs is determined by the following relation-
Total Material Input Costs ¼ ½Sf þ Livestock Feedf þ Mf  þ ½Sp þ Livestock Feedp þ
Livestock Maintenancep þ Mp þ Fp þ Fuelsp þ
Irrigation chargesp þ Pp þ Service chargesp  þ
Amortization cost:

where “S,” “M,” “F,” and “P” denotes seed, manure, fertilizers, and pesticides respect-
ively. The suffixes “f and p denote farm-produced inputs and purchased inputs respect-
ively. The total paid-out labor costs comprise wages paid in both cash and kind. The
yearly amortization cost for productive assets has been derived by a straight-line
depreciation exercise based on the data on expected life of these assets.
The household data was collected in the survey for each farm operation for labor and
non-labor inputs and price and quantity for sales in order to arrive at money estimates
for input and output.

Appendix 2

Table 4.A1. Percentage distribution of households across classes in

the three regions

Class WB-rn TL-sdp

RL 2.6 11.7
PP 32.5 11.7
SP 5.2 41.7
MP 20.8 20.0
RP 39.0 13.3
LLD 0.0 1.7
Total 100.0 100.0
0 2.6 10.0
0.01–1.0 53.2 18.3
1.01–2.5 24.7 16.7
2.51–5.0 11.7 30.0
5.1–10.0 3.9 16.7
10.1 and above 3.9 8.3
Total 100.0 100.0

Notes: RL: Rural labor; PP: Poor Peasants; SP: Small Peasants; MP: Middle Peasants; RP: Rich
Peasants; LLD: Landlords; WB-rn: West Bengal, Raina; TL-sdp: Telengana, Saidapur.
Source: Primary Field Enquiry
121
The Land Question in India

Table 4.A2. Total household income and poverty line income per household by economic
and land size-classes (in acres): Telengana advanced region (in INR)

Class FDI Income from paid Income from service Total household Annual household
employment charges, self- income (annual) poverty line (2200
employment, etc. Kcal)
[1] [2] [3] [4=1+2+3] [5]

RL
7401 12,493 0 5092 27,758

PP
3275 6414 0 3139 33,792
SP
5369 8672 0 3303 35,482
MP
3837 150 3200
487 33,792
RP 30,037 0 1350 31,387 40,128
LLD 200,497 0 40,000 240,497 59,136
Total 3097 5849 1487 10,432 35,059
0
8409 12,400 0 3991 26,752
0.01–1.0
6836 7733 0 896 33,024
1.01–2.5
10,047 6290 0
3757 32,947
2.51–5.0
319 5094 2133 6909 34,731
5.1–10.0
6693 3689 0
3004 41,395
10.1 and 96,916 0 10,160 107,076 42,240
above
Total 3097 5849 1487 10,432 35,059

Notes: RL: Rural labor; PP: Poor Peasants; SP: Small Peasants; MP: Middle Peasants; RP: Rich Peasants; LLD: Landlords.
Source: Primary Field Survey, Column 5 estimated by author

Notes

1. The grand Land Revenue Settlements during colonial rule recognized the “right over
land” of the landlords without any countervailing protection of tenancy rights for a
long time. This rendered unrestricted power to the landlords whereby they could
enhance the burden of surplus appropriation on the tenants using the credible
threat of eviction. Landlords also enjoyed control over the labor of tenants and
their families in the context of such a lopsided legal framework.
2. See Byres (2003a) for the conception of “transition from above and below.”
3. The calculation of the Labor Exploitation Index (E) for each household has been
done considering both direct labor exploitation through hiring-in and hiring-out as
well as indirect exploitation of labor through leasing-out and leasing-in of land
using the following equation- E = X/F = [(Hi – Ho) + (Lo – Li)]/F, where, Hi, Ho are
labor days hired-in and hired-out respectively, Lo, Li are the total labor days on land
leased-out and land leased-in respectively and F is the family labor on the operated
farm. Apart from the landless labor and landlords, the four peasant classes are
poor peasants (E<
1), small peasants (
1<E<0), middle peasants (0<E<1) and rich
peasants (E>1).
4. See Appendix 2, Table 4.A1 for the class structure in the two regions.
5. See Appendix 1 for definitions of the various income indicators and the computing
methodology.

122
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

6. The AHPLi for the ith peasant class is estimated using the poverty line “monthly per
capita expenditure” and the average family size for the ith peasant class using the
following relation:
AHPLI ¼ 12 * ½Poverty line MPCE * Average Family Sizei 
Based on the 61st round of NSS data from the Consumption Expenditure Survey
(Report No. 508) and the Nutritional Intake in India (Report No. 513) for 2004–5, we
estimate that the MPCE required for attaining a consumption basket that embodies
a nutritional intake of 2200 KCal per capita per day is Rs. 704 and Rs. 573 for
Telengana and West Bengal respectively.
7. See Appendix 2, Table 4.A2.
8. There are rare exceptions such as South Korea and Taiwan that could transcend this
trend and achieve a structural transformation similar to early industrializers.
9. Irfan Habib (1995) estimated that as early as 1801, the tribute to Britain from
India alone constituted 30 percent of the former’s domestic savings. Again in
the late nineteenth century, the Indian tribute covered 40 percent of Britain’s
balance of payment (BoP) deficit with the rest of the world (Hobsbawm 1968).
The BoP deficit maintained by Britain at this juncture was crucial for its financial
hegemony over the world.

References

Bagchi, A. K. 1982. The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. Cambridge University Press.

Bagchi, A. K. 2010. Colonialism and Indian Economy. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
Banerjee, A. 2008. “Trends in the Growth of Capitalist Relations and Investment in
Indian Agriculture (1970 to the present).” PhD Dissertation Submitted to Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi.
Banerjee, A. 2009. “Peasant Classes under Neo-Liberalism: A Class Analysis of Two
States.” Economic and Political Weekly, 44(15): 49–57.
Bernstein, H. 1996. “Agrarian Questions Then and Now.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 24
(1–2): 22–59.
Bernstein, H. 2006. “Is There an Agrarian Question in the 20th Century?” Canadian
Journal of Development Studies, 27(4): 449–60.
Bhaduri, A. 1973. “A Study of Agricultural Backwardness under Conditions of Semi-
Feudalism.” Economic Journal, 86: 120–37.
Bhalla, G. S. and Singh, G. 1997. “Recent Developments in Indian Agriculture: A State
Level Analysis.” Economic and Political Weekly (Review of Agriculture), 32(13): A2–A18.
Byres, T. J. 2003a. “Paths of Capitalist Agrarian Transition in the Past and in the Con-
temporary World.” In Agrarian Studies: Essays on Agrarian Relations in Less-Developed
Countries, edited by V. K. Ramachandran and M. Swaminathan, New Delhi: Tulika
Books, pp. 54–83.
Byres, T. J. 2003b. “Structural Change, the Agrarian Question and the Possible Impact of
Globalization.” In Work and Well-Being in the Age of Finance, edited by J. Ghosh and
C. P. Chandrasekhar, New Delhi: Tulika Books, pp. 171–211.

123
The Land Question in India

Chandra, N. K. 1974. “Farm Efficiency under Semi-Feudalism: A Critique of Marginalist

Theories and Some Marxist Formulations.” Economic and Political Weekly, 9(32, 33,
and 34): 1309–32.
D’Costa, A. P. 2014. “Compressed Capitalism and Development: Primitive Accumula-
tion, Petty Commodity Production, and Capitalist Maturity in India and China.”
Critical Asian Studies, 46(2): 317–44.
Frank, A. G. 1967. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Habib, I. 1995. “Colonisation of the Indian Economy.” In Essays in Indian History:
towards a Marxist Perception, New Delhi: Tulika, pp. 304–46.
Harriss, J. 2013. “Does ‘Landlordism’ Still Matter? Reflections on Agrarian Change in
India.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3): 351–64.
Hobsbawm, E. 1968. Industry and Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hobsbawm, E. 1973. “Peasants and Politics.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 1(1): 3–22.
Hobsbawm, E. 1994. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1941–1991, London:
Abacus.
Kenwood, A. G. and Lougheed, L. 1971. The Growth of the International Economy
1820–1960. London: Allen and Unwin.
Lerche, J. 2013. “The Agrarian Question in Neo-liberal India: Agrarian Transition
Bypassed?” Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3): 383–404.
Maddison, A. 2007. Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic
History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Magdoff, H. 1978. Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present. New Delhi: Aakar Books.
Moyo, S., Jha, P., and Yeros, P. 2013. “The Classical Agrarian Question: Myth, Reality
and Relevance Today.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 2(1): 93–119.
Mukherjee, A. 2010. “Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain.” Economic and
Political Weekly, 45(50): 73–82.
Nair, K. N. and Banerjee, A. 2012. “Structural Changes in Land Distribution and Its
Implications for Improving Access to Land.” In Shaping India: Economic Change in
Historical Perspective, edited by D. Narayana and Raman Mahadevan, New Delhi:
Routledge, pp. 46–66.
NSSO (National Sample Survey Organization). 2014. “Key Indicators of Situation of
Agricultural Households in India, 2012–13,” NSS Seventieth Round, Government of
India, New Delhi.
Patnaik, U. 1976. “Class Differentiation within the Peasantry: An Approach to Analysis
of Indian Agriculture.” Economic and Political Weekly (Review of Agriculture),
11(39): 82–101.
Patnaik, U. 1983. “Classical Theory of Rent and Its Application to India: Some Prelim-
inary Propositions, with Some Thoughts on Sharecropping.” Journal of Peasant
Studies, 10(2 and 3): 71–87.
Patnaik, U. 1999. “The Process of Commercialization under Colonial Conditions.”
In The Long Transition: Essays on Political Economy, New Delhi: Tulika, pp. 252–304.
Patnaik, U. 2002. “Deflation and Déjà vu: Indian Agriculture in the World Economy.”
In Agrarian Studies: Essays on Agrarian Relations in Less-Developed Countries, edited by
V. K. Ramachandran and M. Swaminathan, New Delhi: Tulika, pp. 111–43.

124
 Agrarian Crisis and Accumulation

Ramachandran, V. K. and Swaminathan, M. 2005. Financial Liberalization and Rural

Credit in India. New Delhi: Tulika.
Rawal, V. 2008. “Ownership Holdings of Land in Rural India: Putting the Record
Straight.” Economic and Political Weekly, 43(10): 43–7.
Rawal, V. 2013. “Changes in the Distribution of Operational Landholdings in
Rural India: A Study of National Sample Survey Data.” Review of Agrarian Studies,
3(2): 73–104.
Reddy, D. N. and Mishra, S. 2009. Agrarian Crisis in India. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Saha, A. and Swaminathan, M. 1994. “Agricultural Growth in West Bengal in the 1980s:
A Disaggregation by Districts and Crops.” Economic and Political Weekly, 29(13): A2–A11.
Thorner, A. 1982. “Semi-Feudalism or Capitalism? Contemporary Debate on Classes
and Modes of Production in India, Part 2.” Economic and Political Weekly, 17(50):
1993–9.

125
Part II
Legal-Institutional Dimensions of
“Regimes of Dispossession”
5

Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics

of Hegemony in Neoliberal India

Toward a Critical Perspective on the 2013

Land Acquisition Act

Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Alf Gunvald Nilsen

5.1 Introduction

The liberalization of the Indian economy since the early 1990s has ushered
in a new phase of conflict over land acquisition, where land is increasingly
being acquired by state governments for private investors (Bedi 2013; Levien
2013; Sud 2014).1 As a result, since the mid-2000s India has witnessed
thousands of small “land wars” (Levien 2012, 2013) that have centered
crucially on the forcible transfer of land from small and marginal farmers
or indigenous groups to industrial or residential use, or to special economic
zones (SEZ) (Jenkins, Kennedy, and Mukhopadhyay 2014).2 The resulting new
“multiscalar geopolitics of popular resistance” (Banerjee-Guha 2013: 167)
is often seen pitting marginal rural populations against a “neoliberal”
(Kapoor 2011) Indian “land-broker state” (Levien 2013) whose actions and
policies point to certain fundamental changes in the political economy and
structure of the Indian state in the context of economic reform (Chatterjee
2008; Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011). In the current situation, the balance
of power has ostensibly decisively shifted in favor of corporate capital, which
now sets “the terms to which other political formations can only respond”
(Chatterjee 2008: 61). Yet, as several (partially) successful land struggles testify,
Indian politicians and state governments are not “immune to popular pressure”
(Sampat 2013: 19) emanating from social movements resisting new forms of
displacement and dispossession.
The Land Question in India

In this chapter we are specifically concerned with analyzing how law medi-
ates India’s current land struggles and to what effect. As Nandini Sundar (2011)
has succinctly observed, many of India’s land struggles have relied considerably
on a relatively new form of activism, which Sundar calls “law-struggles,” in
which collective action is increasingly geared toward achieving the introduc-
tion of laws that safeguard the rights, entitlements, and needs of subaltern
groups, including those threatened by displacement and dispossession. As a
sign of the increasing politicization of “the masses” and the maturation of
liberal democracy in India, “legal mobilization” by subaltern groups has, to
Sundar, never before been as important as it is today (Sundar 2011: 177).
As several of the chapters in this volume show, the significance of
“law struggles” is related to the state’s blatant misuse of the prior existing
land acquisition legislation, the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, which was in
effect until January 1, 2014. This act has been a major source of agitation for
civil society and subaltern movements over the past decade (Palit 2012: 6).
One key grievance has been that, whereas the Indian state has arrogated to
itself substantial legal powers to exercise the right of eminent domain, there
has been a consistent failure to put in place a legal regime that protects the
interests of marginal rural populations and that guarantees the right to
resettlement and rehabilitation for displaced groups (Levien 2011: 69).
Demands for modifications in the legal framework underpinning the exercise
of eminent domain has thus been high on the agenda of the many grassroots
organizations working to put a stop to the large-scale acquisition of land
for the benefit of private sector enterprises.3 These efforts were seemingly
crowned with success when, after a prolonged law-making process, the Lok
Sabha finally passed a new act in 2013, the Right to Fair Compensation and
Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act
(LARR), which claimed to rectify this. According to its preamble, the new act
would ensure:

A humane, participative, informed and transparent process for land acquisition for
industrialisation, development of essential infrastructural facilities and urbanisa-
tion with the least disturbance to the owners of the land . . . and provide just and
fair compensation to the affected families whose land has been acquired . . . and
[ensure] that the cumulative outcomes of compulsory acquisition should be that
affected persons become partners in development. (Government of India 2013: 1)

Put in these terms, the aims of the act appear irreproachable. Yet, as we discuss
later, and as Malabika Pal’s contribution to this volume similarly brings out,
the preamble may well be seen to promise a good deal more than what the
letter of the law is capable of delivering.
In this chapter we map the emergence of this act to argue that, in the context
of mushrooming and often violent ongoing conflicts over land acquisition,

130
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

“law struggles” and lawmaking need to be understood dialectically. On the one

hand, social movements mobilize to advance or implement legal frameworks
in order to oppose the marginalizing ramifications of neoliberalization; on
the other hand, political authorities design and introduce legal frameworks in
order to contain opposition and construct “the material basis for consent to a
regime of dispossession” (Levien 2013: 400) in a context of neoliberal economic
and social restructuring. Drawing on Gramsci (1998: 161), we suggest that
for political authorities, lawmaking serves as a modality through which a
“compromise equilibrium” (see Section 5.2) can be established between dom-
inant and subaltern groups, which ultimately enables the long-term advance of
neoliberal restructuring. In other words, while the state via lawmaking offers
concessions to the demands of social movements, and thus compels private
investors to agree to a set of concessions that in some ways might militate
against their immediate short-term interests, it also establishes foundations
for a “compromise” that might provide a firmer basis for the onward march of
neoliberalization of the Indian economy in the context of advanced global
capitalism.
We proceed by first briefly clarifying the Gramscian underpinnings of our
approach. To ground our analysis we then introduce the case of one of India’s
most talked-about land struggles as our empirical point of entry, namely, the
movement in Singur, West Bengal, from 2006 onwards against the acquisition
of 997 acres of agricultural land for a Tata Motors small-car factory. To shed
light on how the dynamics of law struggle and lawmaking can be seen to
produce compromise equilibria, we then devote the major part of the chapter
to map the process—from mobilization to legislation—through which
the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition,
Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, came into being. We also offer a
close reading of its final contents to further substantiate our argument about
the links between law struggle, lawmaking, and compromise equilibria as
outlined earlier. We then briefly examine the more recent (failed) attempt
by the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government to amend the
act, before, in the conclusion, we summarize the implications of our analysis
for understanding how capitalism is unfolding in India today.

5.2 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and Neoliberal

Hegemony in India

The power of dominant groups, Gramsci (1998: 12) famously argued, finds its
manifestation in two ways: on the one hand in “the spontaneous consent
given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed
on social life by the dominant fundamental group” and, on the other hand, in

131
The Land Question in India

“the apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on

those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively” to an extant
social order. Consent was of course at the heart of his theorization of hegem-
ony, and the construction of hegemony, in turn, was mediated through what
Gramsci refers to as “the integral state” (Gramsci 1998: 239)—that is, the
fusion of political and civil society—and the way in which it imbricates its
institutions, discourses, and technologies of rule into the fabric of the every-
day life of subaltern groups. However, the construction of hegemony should
not be conceived of as a one-way and top-down process in which dominant
groups simply impose ideologies of dominance upon subaltern groups. Rather,
the process is a gradual and contentious one, which proceeds through an
ongoing churning in which “unstable equilibria . . . between the interests of
the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups” (Gramsci 1998:
182) are continually formed and superseded. In other words, actually existing
hegemony will never assume the form of a “monolithic ideological formation.”
To the contrary, it will only ever be manifest as “a problematic, contested,
political process of struggle” (Roseberry 1995: 77; see also Mallon 1995: ch. 1).
Gramsci’s keen awareness of how dominant groups were compelled to
concede to subaltern demands in order to entrench and reproduce their
hegemonic position was combined with an emphatic insistence that “subal-
tern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they
rebel and rise up” (Gramsci 1998: 55). What this means is that when subaltern
groups develop oppositional projects to protest or resist the rule of dominant
groups, they do not do so at a distance from the institutional and symbolic
modalities through which hegemony is constructed, but rather in and
through these modalities (Green 2002). There are two implications that follow
from this. First, the institutions, discourses, and technologies of rule that
attach to the state are not just sites in which hegemonic power is exercised,
but also nodes of contention where subaltern resistance can be articulated and
pursued; second, given that these are modalities that are intended to maintain
“unstable equilibria” of compromise “in which the interest of the dominant
social groups prevail” (Gramsci 1998: 182), they will also tend to constrain the
forms of subaltern collective action in ways that can be reconciled with the
imperative of reproducing a given hegemonic formation.
Gramsci’s comments on law are, as Alan Hunt (1990: 316) has put it,
“suggestive but tantalizingly underdeveloped” (see also Litowitz 2000;
Cutler 2005). What we intend to do here is to offer some tentative reflections
on how lawmaking “participates in the organization of consent” (Cutler 2005:
536) in the context of land acquisitions in neoliberal India, and what impli-
cations this has for law struggles as a form of subaltern politics. We are
particularly interested in the implications of the fact that the law is integral
to the hegemonic imperative of “securing an equilibrium” (Hunt 1990: 316)

132
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

between dominant and subaltern groups by incorporating “some aspects of

the aspirations, interests, and ideology of subordinate groups” (Hunt 1990:
311). We thus propose that when the Indian state responds to the land
struggles and law struggles of grassroots social movements and their advocacy
networks by initiating lawmaking processes regulating land transfers, this
cannot be reduced to an unequivocal expression of democratic accountability,
or to an outright stratagem of co-optation on the part of the state. Rather,
what we are confronted with is a complex and at times contradictory practice
that is aimed at negotiating the oppositional claims of subaltern groups and
the economic interests of dominant groups, which are intimately linked to the
exploitation of the spaces of accumulation that are currently being pried open
by market-oriented reforms. The resultant compromise equilibrium, we argue,
is intended to facilitate India’s process of neoliberalization; but it remains
unstable and frangible due to the fragile public legitimacy of the current
regime of dispossession, as the proliferation of anti-dispossession movements
in India in recent years testifies. Below we turn our attention to one such
movement, in Singur.

5.3 Land Struggle and Law Struggle in Singur

The controversy over the transfer of 997 acres of agricultural land from farmers
in West Bengal’s Singur block to Indian multinational Tata Motors in 2006 is
surely one of the most talked-about land struggles in India over the past
decade.4 The planned Tata Motors factory would produce the company’s
new flagship car, an affordable Indian version of the “people’s car” known
as Tata Nano and priced at only Rs. 100,000 (approximately USD 2,500 in
2006). The project itself was widely promoted as a concerted effort at rejuven-
ating industrial growth in West Bengal, a state that has over the past many
decades witnessed an accelerating relative decline in industrial production.
Yet, when local farmers learned that their land had been targeted for expro-
priation, a prolonged resistance erupted that raged throughout the latter half
of 2006 as villagers—under the aegis of its organizing committee, the Singur
Krishi Jomi Raksha Committee (Committee to Save the Farmland of Singur)—
staged rallies and demonstrations, and repeatedly blocked roads and railway
tracks. The protesters also clashed with the police on several occasions and
hundreds were badly injured or taken into custody (Nielsen 2008, 2010; Roy
2014: 160–7). In the process, the Singur movement attracted the support of a
large number of political parties, most notably the Trinamul Congress, the
leading opposition party in the state at the time, and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), activist groups, and organizations such as the Associ-
ation for the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR), the Institute for

133
The Land Question in India

Motivating Self-Employment, the Food First Information and Action Network

(FIAN), and the Medha Patkar-led National Alliance of People’s Movements
(NAPM). But the fierce resistance notwithstanding, the land in Singur was
acquired under heavy police cover and amidst much violence in December
2006, and by early 2007 construction work was already well under way.5
The Singur movement rose to regional and national fame for several
reasons. Occurring in the immediate wake of the violent standoffs over land
acquisitions in Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur in Odisha, Singur was one of
the earliest of India’s new “land wars.” As such, it was, as one perceptive
observer (Bidwai 2007) put it, widely believed to be “paradigmatic” of the
ways in which Indian state governments would go about attracting invest-
ments and facilitating industrial development in the future. In a context in
which the ability of state governments to furnish land was rapidly becoming
perhaps “the most important factor in inter-state competition for investment”
(Levien 2012: 944; see also Sud 2014: 51), there was a very real fear among
social activists and concerned citizens that the modus operandi of future land
acquisitions would imply little or no consultation with key stakeholders;
involve force, violence and coercion, if necessary; and be based on inadequate
compensation and no rehabilitation,6 but rather considerable state subsidies,
cheap loans, and favorable tax regimes for investors. Indeed, in the case of
Singur, estimates suggest direct and indirect state support for Tata Motors to
the tune of a whopping INR 8.5 billion (Mitra 2007). In addition, the fact that
a land acquisition was carried out in this manner in a state that was governed
by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a party with a long history of
agrarian struggle and a proven track record of pro-poor redistributive agrarian
reform, made the events in Singur appear even more dramatic.
As part of their struggle to retain—and later, to reclaim—their land, Singur’s
unwilling farmers have raised a series of counterclaims. These concerned
principally the need for:

Deliberation, careful planning, necessity to ensure the consent of the peasantry

and hence, the need for discussion with various peasant associations, the necessity
of a wider dialogue on the roadmap to industrialisation, modernisation and
prosperity and finally, the need to balance the industrial drive with agricultural
stability and growth. (Samaddar 2009: 159)

Yet when the state government, given its firm commitment to bringing about
a quick march towards industrialization (Nielsen 2014: 85–90), showed no
interest in renegotiating the terms under which the land acquisition in Singur
stood to be carried out, the Singur movement increasingly judicialized as it
shifted its politics of resistance from the streets to the court in a strategic
attempt at “reading the law back to the state” (Chandra 2013: 55). In late
2006 and early 2007, a total of eleven petitions were brought before the

134
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

Calcutta High Court challenging the legality of the land acquisition. Some of
these were filed by the unwilling farmers themselves, while several others were
forwarded by some of the supportive organizations and activist networks,
including the APDR and FIAN. The ensuing law struggle would center crucially
on the legitimacy and meaning of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act (Nielsen
2015). It is therefore instructive to cast a quick look at some of the central
tenets of this act.

5.4 The Land Acquisition Act of 1894

The Land Acquisition Act of 1894—essentially a colonial measure intended

to ensure a smooth acquisition of land for roads, railways, bridges, forts,
cantonments, or irrigation works—empowered the state government to
acquire land in any locality where such land is likely to be needed for any
“public purpose” or for a “company” (Sarkar 2007: 5). The act suggests what
may qualify as a “public purpose” but, perhaps unsurprisingly, does not offer
any exhaustive definition. With regards to the notion of “company” there are
some restrictions attached to acquiring land for a government company,
while the acquisition of land for a private company is very restricted.
The acquisition begins when the District Collector issues a public notice to
that effect. Those affected by the acquisition have the right to object to the
District Collector, who is obliged to consider any such objections before
forwarding his final recommendations to the government. Once a final deci-
sion on the acquisition has been arrived at, the District Collector begins
marking out and measuring the land, and announces that claims for compen-
sation (known as the award) may be made to him (Sarkar 2007: 6–11). The act
specifies that the market value of the land at the time of the publication of the
notification “shall be taken into account” when the award is fixed. Those
affected by the acquisition can challenge it on several accounts. They can,
for example, dispute the size of their award and the District Collector’s meas-
urement of their land by going to court (Sarkar 2007: 17–27). They can also
refuse to accept the award altogether. In such cases, the award is deposited
with the court. Singur’s unwilling farmers had chosen this option as a means
through which to register their opposition to the acquisition of their land. But
in reality there is no provision in the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 that allows
the affected population to challenge the acquisition per se since their consent
is not mandatory under law (Samaddar 2009: 154).
In the wake of the land acquisition in Singur, the act was criticized by social
activists, commentators, and politicians on many counts: for example, for
being designed for subjecthood and not for citizenship (Kannabiran as cited
in Sundar 2011: 177); for facilitating land transfers at a nominal rate of

135
The Land Question in India

compensation and without rehabilitation; for not recognizing community

rights over land; and for not compensating those who tilled the land without
having legal title (Guha 2007: 49–52). However, it was the notion of “public
purpose” that emerged as the focal point of legal contestation when the
petitions of the unwilling farmers were heard in the Calcutta High Court.
According to the “notifications for acquisition of land” issued by the Office
of the Land Acquisition Collector and District Magistrate and Collector in
Hooghly, the land acquired in Singur was indeed acquired for just such a
purpose. The key question that animated the debate in the High Court was
therefore: Does a car factory constitute a public purpose or not?
When the state’s Industries Minister, Nirupam Sen, had earlier been con-
fronted with this question by the media, he had replied: “Of course it is a
public purpose, industrialization means employment generation, it means
development of society. The entire people of the state will be benefited”
(quoted in Chattopadhyay 2006).7 In the High Court, the state government’s
legal team echoed the minister’s point of view: industrial projects like the one
in Singur would generate socioeconomic development for the benefit of soci-
ety at large. This was true, they maintained, even if one (wrongly) assumed
that the acquisition was carried out for the benefit of a private company, in
this case Tata Motors.
Understandably, the unwilling farmers and their legal team saw things
differently. To them, acquiring agricultural land by force only to lease it out
with considerable state subsidies to a private multinational could not be
justified as a public purpose. Thousands of farmers would lose their livelihood,
but only a couple of hundred highly educated and skilled engineers could
hope to find employment in Tata Motors’ high-tech factory.8 And the profits
would go to Tata Motors. This, they argued, could not qualify as a public
purpose.
When the court delivered its verdict in January 2008 it ruled against the
unwilling farmers. The court found that the state government could not
successfully be challenged “on the ground that the object of the acquisition
is not to carry out a public purpose” (Calcutta High Court 2008: 11). And it
further maintained that “public purpose does not cease to be so merely
because the acquisition facilitates the setting up of industry by a private
enterprise and benefits it to that extent” (Calcutta High Court 2008: 10).
In this respect, the court’s ruling was far from unique. As several scholars
have pointed out, the dominant recent trend in the Indian judiciary has been
to virtually adopt a “hands-off attitude” in land acquisition cases, thereby
more or less directly giving a green light to “all kinds of land acquisitions,”
including for private companies (Desai 2011: 96–7). In doing so, the courts have
concomitantly come to apply a very wide, or diluted, definition of “public
purpose,” in effect supporting the neoliberal policies of state governments

136
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

over the rights of vulnerable sections of society (Desai 2011; Deva 2009;
Sundar 2011).
Yet Singur’s law struggle had not been entirely in vain. The fact that the
nature and functioning of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act had been subject to
intense scrutiny and a long public debate that had involved dispossessed
populations, activist groups, NGOs, advocacy networks, and political parties
soon led to a broad call to change the legal framework under which land
acquisitions are carried out in India.
There were, however, other voices that also clamored for modification in
the legal framework underpinning the exercise of eminent domain, albeit
in a very different direction. As Sundar (2011: 175) writes, both “the dominant
capitalist class and ‘people’s movements’ . . . have an interest in working on
the state to change existing laws, but often to quite different ends.” Under the
old legal regime, and unlike what had been the case in Singur, industrialists
and business houses had often found land acquisitions to be a cumbersome
and slow affair. They had routinely been bogged down in court cases that
lasted for years if not decades, and which prevented the timely progress of
cost-intensive projects. In what Levien (2011: 67) aptly describes as a moment
of “political ju-jitsu,” when the “opponent’s momentum is used to your own
advantage,” investors and capitalist developers sought to use the momentum
generated by the many popular land struggles that occurred in the wake of
Singur to press for legal and policy changes that, while appearing to respond to
the critics of land dispossession, would in fact make it easier to acquire land for
private accumulation. And their voices carry weight. According to Chatterjee
(2008), the corporate capitalist class has emerged as the dominant group within
the state apparatus after 1991, increasingly displacing other formerly influential
groups, particularly the rich farmers and the salariat (see Bardhan 1998). There
were, in other words, several competing and not readily reconcilable aspir-
ations, interests, and ideologies that had to be balanced in order to construct a
compromise equilibrium.

5.5 Toward a New Law

The contours of this compromise first became visible when the incumbent
United Progressive Alliance government began the process of amending the
Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (Palit 2012: 3). The Union Ministry of Rural
Development had in fact embarked on this process already back in 1998, but
work only gathered pace in 2007, that is, in the immediate wake of Singur
(Ramesh and Khan 2015: 10–11). In December 2007, the Land Acquisition
(Amendment) Bill, 2007, was introduced in the Lok Sabha; it was later amended
and rechristened the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill, 2009, and was tabled

137
The Land Question in India

in the Lok Sabha along with the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill in that
year. In combination, the two bills sought to modify the exercise of eminent
domain; redefine the notion of public purpose; and improve the resettlement
and rehabilitation of the displaced.
In redefining public purpose, the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill intro-
duced the category of “useful to the general public,” under which state gov-
ernments retained the right to acquire any land it saw fit.9 Subsumed under
this category was, most importantly, “the provision of land for infrastructure
projects of the appropriate government, where the benefits accrue to the
general public.” “Infrastructure projects” in turn included power generation
and transmission; construction of roads, highways, bridges, airports, ports, or
rail systems; mining activities, educational, sports, healthcare, tourism, trans-
portation, space program, housing, water supply projects, irrigation projects,
sanitation and sewerage systems. For all intents and purposes, the inclusion of
all these activities in the category of “useful to the general public” constituted
a considerable broadening of the notion of public purpose as articulated in the
act of 1894.
In contrast, the draft bill eliminated the ability of state governments to
acquire 100 percent of the land required for a private company for a “public
purpose.” Instead, it introduced a clause that specified that only when a
private company had already directly acquired 70 percent of the land neces-
sary for a project deemed “useful to the general public” could the government
intervene to acquire the remaining 30 percent through eminent domain. This
so-called 70:30 clause seemingly reduced the state’s controversial role in land
acquisitions by making it mandatory that a private company ensure the
consent of the majority of the project-affected population. But at the same
time it diluted the crucial public–private distinction that critics of the draft
argued should be central to any use of eminent domain.
While the amended land acquisition draft bill could thus in key respects be
seen to expand the scope for state intervention in land transfers, the draft
Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill contained progressive measures for the
dispossessed and displaced. The bill recognized the rights of the landless and
artisans to compensation, and not just the landowners. And it mandated that
those who had their land expropriated be given a house plot and money for
construction, compensation for cattle sheds, moving costs, a monthly subsist-
ence allowance at minimum agricultural wages, and a pension of INR 500 per
month. Given the absence of any mention of rehabilitation in the act of 1894,
this constituted a clear improvement.
The fact that the draft bills were thus strong on rehabilitation but weak
on limiting the exercise of eminent domain points to the contours of an
emerging compromise equilibrium on land acquisitions in India under which
state-led land transfers to private investors could continue and potentially even

138
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

accelerate, albeit at a considerably higher cost. However, the two bills lapsed
with the expiry of the term of the fourteenth Lok Sabha and the subsequent
constitution of the fifteenth Lok Sabha in 2009. After that, the idea of simply
amending the existing act was abandoned and a complete rewriting of the law
initiated (Ramesh and Khan 2015: 11), eventually resulting in the Land Acqui-
sition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011. This bill was, in turn,
redrafted between 2011 and 2013 until it was, in its final avatar, the Right to
Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and
Resettlement Act, 2013, passed by the Lok Sabha in August 2013. It received the
assent of the president of India the following month and came into effect on
January 1, 2014.

5.6 Mediating the Law Struggle: Treading the Middle Path?

The journey toward a passable new law on land acquisitions had apparently
been a bumpy one from the point of view of those entrusted with the respon-
sibility of drafting it. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in
Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act would be based on its
draft predecessors, the drafting of which had over time come to involve a
multitude of stakeholders espousing radically different goals. These included
different government ministries; the National Advisory Council chaired by
Sonia Gandhi; various national and regional political parties; state govern-
ments; NGOs; the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry
(FICCI); the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII); the Confederation of Real
Estate Developers Associations of India; and some multinational corporations,
to name just a few (Sud 2014: 45). The difficulties involved in treading a middle
path between these many different agendas was highlighted by Union Minister
for Rural Development, Jairam Ramesh, in two successive interviews with the
Indian magazine Frontline in 2013 (Rajalakshmi 2013b; Srinivasan 2013). Both
interviews focused on a publicly circulated penultimate draft of the Right to Fair
Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and
Resettlement, and Ramesh spoke vividly of the tightrope that his ministry
had had to walk while drafting the bill:

Industry associations are very apprehensive that it will jack up [the] costs [of
acquiring land for private industries]. Vocal sections of civil society feel that
I have not gone far enough [to protect land owners]. I have to find a middle path.
I have struck a balance . . . I feel satisfied that civil society is unhappy with the bill
for not being progressive enough; industry is unhappy with the bill for being
too progressive. If everyone is unhappy, then I think it is a good bill (Rajalakshmi
2013b: 34) . . . If I have succeeded in displeasing Medha Patkar on the one side and CII
/ FICCI on the other, it means I have done something right. (Srinivasan 2013: 105)

139
The Land Question in India

Chalking out a compromise equilibrium that reconciled, in particular, the

demands of industry with the demands of social movements for greater
protection of the rights of the individual landowner within a single legal
framework had evidently not been easy. The process was ostensibly made all
the more challenging because different ministries apparently entertained
different views on what the new act should first and foremost work to achieve.
While the Ministry of Commerce and Industry ostensibly championed ideas
that would have made acquiring land for industries easier, Ramesh’s Ministry
of Rural Development as well as the Standing Committee on Rural Develop-
ment appear to have argued for a considerably narrower definition of “public
purpose” that would have limited the exercise of eminent domain (Rajalakshmi
2013a: 33–4). Simultaneously, the Ministry of Urban Development wanted
lower compensation rates in urban areas, ostensibly to not hamper efforts at
carrying out urban development projects (Ramesh and Khan 2015: 51). Mul-
tiple sets of voices had thus found their way into the draft bill, but to very
different effect.
Both the draft Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011
and the final Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisi-
tion, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, broke new ground by expli-
citly linking land acquisition to rehabilitation and resettlement (rather than
simply “compensation”). According to Chakravorty (2011: 29), the four main
positives in the 2011 draft Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement
Bill thus all pointed in the same, important direction: more benefits and rights
for the dispossessed. First, landowners of record would be paid much more
than they used to; the compensation due would be no less than four times the
market price in rural areas and twice the market price in urban areas; second,
the approval of 80 percent of landowners would be required when the private
sector was involved in projects larger than 100 acres; third, the affected
landless population would be compensated with income for twenty years,
plus other immediate benefits, and would be included in the rehabilitation
and resettlement package; and fourth, any acquisition of 100 acres or more
(50 acres in urban areas) would automatically require a rehabilitation and
resettlement package.
Although thus increasing both the amount of compensation payable as well
as the total pool of beneficiaries, the notion of “public purpose” as defined
in the 2011 draft bill gave critics less cause for optimism. As Chakravorty
(2011: 30) writes:

The definition of “public purpose” in the Bill begins with state projects: Two
clauses on defence, transportation, irrigation, power, etc., and three clauses on
project-affected people, weaker sections, displaced persons, and persons affected
by natural calamities. Clause (vi) brings in “Public Private Partnership projects”.

140
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

And finally in clause (vii) comes this: “The provision of land in the public interest
for private companies for the production of goods for public or provision of public
services”. This could mean almost anything. Certainly the entire manufacturing
sector can be included in this, possibly much of the service sector too. This is
business as usual.
To staunch critics, however, it was business worse than usual. Rather than truly
safeguarding the rights and interests of vulnerable sections of society, they
saw the bill in effect making the process of acquiring land easier by further
diluting the notion of public purpose; and facilitating rather than checking
the transfer of resources to the private sector (Desai 2011). This, they argued,
reflected the persistence of a misleading belief that the solution to the
conflict over land acquisitions could be found within the logic of the market
(Sarkar 2011: 36).
Between 2011 and 2013, the 2011 draft bill was subject to further revisions
and proposed amendments until it was finally passed in August 2013. While
the rehabilitation and resettlement clauses were, as we show later, carried over
into the final version of the act in only slightly modified form, Frontline
claimed that attempts had been made between 2011 and 2013 to:

Water down the present draft . . . under pressure from industry. Comments
received from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and the Ministry of Urban
Development . . . indicate that there is considerable pressure to dilute the consent,
compensation and rehabilitation features. Two rounds of meetings of the GoM
[Group of Ministers] have taken place, and by all standards, it appears that the
consensus is on making the final version of the Bill investor-friendly.
(Rajalakshmi 2013a: 32)

Frontline claimed that the tendency had been to amend the bill:

More in response to protests from those representing the interests of the corporate
sector rather than taking into account the serious criticisms that have come from
organisations representing the interests of farmers and others whose livelihood is
linked to land. (Rajalakshmi 2013a: 35)
This consolidates the view that the definition of public purpose has been
widened to further the government’s objectives relating to foreign direct invest-
ment (FDI) in multi-brand retail and other policies. Public purpose also includes
acquisition of land for use by public–private partnership (PPP) projects where the
ownership of the land will continue to be vested in the government.
(Rajalakshmi 2013c: 32)

Fears that the bill would once again prove to be strong on rehabilitation and
resettlement, but weak in terms of limiting the potential for the overt misuse
of eminent domain were not unfounded. In the final version of the act,
“public purpose” included inter alia infrastructure projects relating to agricul-
ture, agro-processing, cold-storage facilities; industrial corridors and mining

141
The Land Question in India

activities, national investment, and manufacturing zones; and projects for

sport, health care, and tourism. A state government could acquire land “for
its own use” for any of these very broadly defined “public purposes.” Yet it
would be wrong to conclude that the 2013 act therefore ignored landowners’
interests. Land for public–private partnerships could only be acquired under a
70:30 clause; and land “for private companies for public purpose” only under
an 80:20 clause. Both clauses provide considerable protection to landowners
in cases where private enterprises are involved. In addition, the act specifies
that irrigated multi-crop land—akin to that which was acquired in Singur—
could only be acquired as a last resort, or under exceptional circumstances.
And it makes it compulsory to conduct a broad social impact assessment to
determine whether a proposed acquisition in fact serves a public purpose;
the social impact assessment is then to be evaluated by an expert group to
determine whether the social costs and adverse social impacts outweigh the
benefits; if so, the project is to be abandoned.
The clauses on rehabilitation and resettlement are also extensive. The com-
pensation due to the land losers in rural areas is based on the market value of
the land, multiplied by a factor between one and two, depending on the
distance to an urban area. To this is added a solatium of 100 percent, in
addition to the value of buildings and attached assets similarly acquired. The
rehabilitation scheme includes landowners, agricultural laborers, tenants,
sharecroppers, and artisans working in the affected area for three years prior
to the acquisition and whose primary sources of livelihood stand to be
affected. Rehabilitation includes provision of housing in case of displacement;
provisions for land for land rehabilitation; a choice between an annuity,
a one-time payment, or employment in any industry coming up on the
acquired land; subsistence grants for displaced families; one-time grants to
artisans and small traders; and a one-time resettlement allowance. Included in
the Third Schedule of the act is also a very long list of infrastructure facilities
and basic minimum amenities to be provided to the displaced to ensure that
the resettled population can “secure for themselves a reasonable standard
community life.”
In spite of these safeguards, the act’s Fourth Schedule constituted a grave
cause for concern. This schedule lists and exempts from purview thirteen
pieces of legislation under which land can also be acquired, including the
Land Acquisition (Mines) Act, 1885 and the Coal Bearing Areas Acquisition
and Development Act, 1957, which have inflicted huge misery on tribal
populations in mineral-rich states.10 When land is acquired under any of
these thirteen acts, the extensive rehabilitation and resettlement clauses in
the act are not activated. Since the bulk of land acquisitions in India have in
fact historically taken place under one or the other of these thirteen acts, the
new act would in practice apply to only a fraction of the land acquisitions

142
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

occurring in India, even if clause 105(3) in the act specified that the exempted
thirteen acts should be brought within its full ambit within one year. As we
suggest in our conclusion, it is precisely this combination of seemingly gen-
erous provisions for resettlement and rehabilitation with a widening of the
definition of public purpose that constitutes the locus of the attempt to
negotiate a compromise between dominant and subaltern groups that will
enable land acquisitions—and more generally, the project of neoliberal
restructuring—to proceed in the long run.

5.7 The Modi Regime and Attempted Amendments

Barely six months after the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in
Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act came into effect, India
had a new BJP-led government that was committed to further liberalizing and
economically “enabling” reforms as perhaps no other Indian government in
the past had ever been. When the current prime minister, Narendra Modi,
campaigned in 2014, he framed his campaign around the trope of acche din, or
“good times,” promising that he would do for India what he had done for his
home state of Gujarat over more than a decade, namely generate high eco-
nomic growth rates that would, or so it was projected, translate into “good
times” for most Indians, and not least the “neo-middle class” (Jaffrelot 2015)
who aspire for upward mobility and an improved quality of life. The means to
this end was to “expand modern infrastructure amenities and mass employ-
ment opportunities through rapid industrial growth across the country”
(Ruparelia 2015: 755). One of the first signs of this policy emphasis was the
government’s attempt to amend the Right to Fair Compensation and Trans-
parency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, a move
that followed intense lobbying and pressure by industry groups in the wake
of Modi’s electoral win (Verma 2015). This was done by introducing an
ordinance in late December 2014 that modified several key provisions in the
2013 act. Among the provisions that were modified were the elimination of
the earlier mentioned 80:20 and 70:30 clauses (for private and public–private
projects respectively) for five categories of projects: defense, rural infrastruc-
ture, affordable housing, industrial corridors, and infrastructure projects.
Moreover, while the 2013 act had made social impact assessments mandatory
for all projects except irrigation, the ordinance did away with this provision
for projects falling into the five abovementioned categories. Several other
protective clauses were also done away with; for example, the definition of
public purpose was expanded to allow governments to acquire land for private
hospitals and educational institutions; the definition of the kind of private
entities for whom land can be acquired was widened; and the stipulation that

143
The Land Question in India

acquired land lying unused for five years must be returned was removed
(Ramesh and Khan 2015: 124–30). At the same time, the government brought
the thirteen hitherto exempted acts in Schedule Four under the purview of the
act (and issued a limited job guarantee to affected families), as indeed it was
compelled to do as per “safeguards” built into the 2013 act (Ramesh and Khan
2015: 125).
As may be expected, industry was delighted with this turn of events.
Both CII and the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India
(ASSOCHAM) announced that they “wholeheartedly” welcomed the ordin-
ance, and the CII—in a statement that testifies to the importance of business
lobbying for changes to the 2013 act—declared that it was particularly pleased
that the government had “incorporated our suggestion to exempt important
sectors like defense, rural electrification, rural housing, and industrial corridors
from the mandatory 80 percent consent from affected families” (cited in
Rajalakshmi 2015).
Because ordinances lapse after some time and cannot be repromulgated
endlessly, the government sought to turn it into law by passing the Right to
Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and
Resettlement (Amendment) Bill, 2015, in the Lok Sabha (where it holds a
majority) in March 2015. However, the bill met with strong opposition both
inside and outside parliament. Social movements and farmers’ organizations—
including the BJP’s own farmers’ front, the Kisan Sangathan—protested the bill
as an infringement on their rights and hard-won victories in the making of the
2013 act. The proposed new bill ultimately foundered in the Rajya Sabha where
the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) does not have a majority. For that
reason, the ordinance was repromulgated three times between December 2014
and May 2015 until it was finally allowed to lapse in August 2015. At the time,
Modi blamed “so many rumors” for derailing the passing of the bill, while also
reassuring concerned farmers that “every voice in the nation is important and
the voice of farmers has a special place” (cited in The Assam Tribune, August 30,
2015). At this point, a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) was set up to
deliberate on the proposed changes to the 2013 act, but at the time of writing
this it is still unclear what the outcome of the JPC will be.

5.8 Conclusion

The trajectory of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land

Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, is an unfinished one,
and there is much to suggest that we are likely to see renewed struggles over
land and law in the not too distant future. Given this prospect, it is interesting
to note that, as Chandra (2015: 50) has recently pointed out, whereas “business”

144
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

has increasingly acquired the ideological dominance to define what “develop-

ment” means in India today, effectively equating it to “a package of vaguely
defined terms including ‘urbanisation,’ ‘industrialisation,’ and ‘infrastructure
creation,’ in which it is assumed that the private sector will take the lead,”
business has not yet fully acquired a matching political dominance that allows
it to pursue this agenda with full consent or compliance—not even with a
Modi-led government in place in Delhi. This runs contrary to Chatterjee’s
reading of the unbridled power of capital in contemporary India. When we
consider, further, that the failure, so far, at least, to water down the provisions
of the 2013 act was paralleled by the BJP’s electoral debacle in Bihar and clear
setbacks on Modi’s home ground in Gujarat, it is evident that the struggles yet to
come will be subject to political equations and social forces that make their
outcome less of a foregone conclusion than what much of the post-election
hype of 2014 would have us believe.
Whatever the eventual outcome of future amendment processes, what we
have tried to do in this chapter is to sketch out a perspective that might enable
us to approach more generally the study of law struggles and lawmaking on
the deeply conflictual terrain of land acquisitions in a way that is both
nuanced and critical, and—most importantly—oriented toward deciphering
the complex equations of enablement and constraint that social movements
are confronted with as they mobilize in and through the legal domain to
contest dispossession.
Viewed through such a perspective, the Right to Fair Compensation and
Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013,
seeks to carve out a “middle path” that, in our view, seeks to construct a
compromise equilibrium between the interests and claims of dominant and
subaltern groups along two axes. First, as a concession to the long-standing
demands of social movements that have challenged forced displacement, the
act puts forward a series of progressive propositions on compensation and
rehabilitation. It proposes an inclusive definition of project-affected people;
seeks to entrench legally enforceable rights to rehabilitation; and raises the
rates of compensation for land and labor lost. Arguably, this amounts to what
Gramsci (1998: 161) labeled a sacrifice “of an economic-corporate kind” that
is made by dominant groups in the interest of eliciting the consent of subal-
tern groups. In this context it may thus make it easier for the state to turn
“barricaders” into “bargainers” (Levien 2013: 358) when land is acquired.
Second, the act also illustrates how the construction of a compromise
equilibrium through the making of such concessions operates within certain
limits, and ultimately has to bolster “the decisive function exercised by the
leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity” (Gramsci 1998:
161). This is manifest, above all, in the remarkably wide definition of public
purpose contained in the act, which, in our reading, serves two crucial

145
The Land Question in India

purposes. On the one hand, it makes it possible for the Indian state to
consolidate the restructuring of India’s political economy in a direction that
creates spaces of accumulation for private and globalized capital, and thus to
emerge as a more fully-fledged “neoliberal state” (Harvey 2006). On the other
hand, the fact that public purpose has been defined in such wide terms might
work to constrain the political space in which social movements can articulate
political projects that challenge the form and direction of development in
contemporary India; and in particular in terms of the role of the state and its
obligation to be accountable to those groups who have lost the most and
gained the least from neoliberalization.

Notes

1. This chapter draws extensively on arguments we have made elsewhere (Nielsen and
Nilsen 2015). We thank Achin Chakraborty and Anthony D’Costa for their con-
structive comments.
2. Neither land dispossession and displacement, nor the popular resistance to it are
phenomena exclusively associated with economic liberalization and the ascent of
market forces, even if popular resistance has certainly proliferated over the past ten
years when compared to, for instance, the early Nehruvian period (Pedersen 2017).
Indeed, Chakravorty (2013: xxiii) estimates that more than 90 percent of all land
“converted” since 1947 was taken by the state for state infrastructure projects.
3. See Pal (Chapter 6, this volume) for an overview of economic arguments around
eminent domain.
4. While no comprehensive survey of the social composition of Singur’s unwilling
farmers exists, an average land holding in Hooghly district where Singur is located
is 1.63 acres (Government of West Bengal 2007: 36). The average landholding in
Hooghly is thus “marginal” (i.e., less than 2.5 acres) in the official system of
classification. More generally, in Hooghly district, a full 97.18 percent of all
holdings are either “marginal” or “small” ’ (2.5–5.0 acres). A survey conducted by
Nielsen in Singur in 2009 covering more than 140 affected households revealed an
average landholding of less than one acre per household prior to the land
acquisition.
5. In late 2008, however, Tata Motors decided to abandon their plant in Singur. But the
land remains in their possession and it has been impossible to carry out a legally
valid process of land restitution.
6. In accordance with the provisions of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act, each land loser
in Singur was offered a cash compensation based on the estimated market value of
the land at the time of the acquisition (approximately INR 600,000 per acre for
mono-crop land; INR 900,000 per acre for multi-crop land) in addition to a 30
percent solatium (i.e., compensation for inured feelings as distinct from financial
loss or physical suffering), a 12 percent per annum interest (calculated for the
period between the issuing of the notification and the actual acquisition and

146
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

payable as a one-time amount), and a 10 percent incentive payable to those

landowners who voluntarily handed over their land to the state and agreed not
to contest the acquisition through the legal system (Nielsen 2008: 236).
7. Syntax in the original.
8. To D’Costa (2014), this form of relatively “jobless,” or “job-poor” growth is a more
general feature of what he calls “compressed capitalism,” that is, the coexistence of
different phases of capitalism, such as primitive accumulation and advanced
forms of accumulation embedded in innovation-led economic expansion in a
global setting.
9. This section is based on Levien’s (2011) analysis of the two drafts.
10. It bears mention that the SEZ Act which was included in the Fourth Schedule in an
earlier draft of the bill was removed in the final version. This may be an indication
of how SEZs have come to be more widely regarded as first and foremost “enclaves
for transnational capital to flourish” (Sampat 2010: 172) that are not easily justified
as serving a public purpose.

References

Banerjee-Guha, S. 2013. “Accumulation and Dispossession: Contradictions of Growth

and Development in Contemporary India.” South Asia, 36(2): 165–79.
Bardhan, P. 1998 (1984). The Political Economy of Development in India. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Bedi, H. P. 2013. “Special Economic Zones: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest.”
Contemporary South Asia, 21(1): 38–51.
Bidwai, P. 2007. “West Bengal on the Wrong Track? The Singur Syndrome.” In Singur
and Nandigram and . . . —The Untold Story of Capitalised Marxism, edited by D. Sen and
D. Bhattacharya, Kolkata: Kanoria Jute and Industries Limited Sangrami Shramik
Union, pp. 36–7.
Calcutta High Court. 2008. “Ordering Portion of the Judgment Dated 18th January,
2008,” Calcutta High Court, Kolkata.
Chakravorty, S. 2011. “A Lot of Scepticism and Some Hope.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 46(41): 29–31.
Chakravorty, S. 2013. The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Chandra, K. 2015. “The New Indian State.” Economic and Political Weekly, 50(41):
46–58.
Chandra, U. 2013. “Beyond Subalternity: Land, Community, and the State in Contem-
porary Jharkhand.” Contemporary South Asia, 21(1): 52–61.
Chatterjee, P. 2008. “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India.” Economic
and Political Weekly, 42(16): 53–62.
Chattopadhyay, S. S. 2006. “Land Reform Not an End in Itself.” Frontline, 23(25). Available
at: <http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2325/stories/20061229001903600.htm>
(accessed February 1, 2016).

147
The Land Question in India

Cutler, A. C. 2005. “Gramsci, Law, and the Culture of Global Capitalism.” Critical
Review of International and Political Philosophy, 8(4): 527–42.
D’Costa, A. P. 2014. “Compressed Capitalism and Development: Primitive Accumula-
tion, Petty Commodity Production, and Capitalist Maturity in India and China.”
Critical Asian Studies, 46(2): 317–44.
Desai, M. 2011. “Land Acquisition Law and the Proposed Changes.” Economic and
Political Weekly, 46(26–7): 95–100.
Deva, S. 2009. “Public Interest Litigation in India: A Critical Review.” Civil Justice
Quarterly, 28: 19–40.
Government of India. 2013. “The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in
Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2013.” New Delhi: Govern-
ment of India.
Government of West Bengal. 2007. District Statistical Handbook Hooghly, 2006. Kolkata:
Bureau of Applied Economics and Statistics, Government of West Bengal.
Gramsci, A. 1998. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Green, M. 2002. Gramsci Cannot Speak: Presentations and Interpretations of Gramsci’s
Concept of the Subaltern. Rethinking Marxism, 14(3): 1–24.
Guha, A. 2007. Land, Law and the Left: The Saga of Disempowerment of the Peasantry in the
Era of Globalization. New Delhi: Concept Publishing.
Gupta, A. and Sivaramakrishnan, K. 2011. “Introduction: The State in India after
Liberalization.” In The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,
edited by A. Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan, London: Routledge, pp. 1–27.
Harvey, D. 2006. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. London: Oxford University Press.
Hunt, A. 1990. “Rights and Social Movements: Counter-Hegemonic Strategies.” Journal
of Law and Society, 17(3): 309–28.
Jaffrelot, C. 2015. “What ‘Gujarat Model’?—Growth without Development—and with
Socio-Political Polarisation.” South Asia, 38(4): 820–38.
Jenkins, R., Kennedy, L., and Mukhopadhyay, P. (eds). 2014. Power, Policy and Protest:
The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kapoor, D. 2011. “Subaltern Social Movement (SSM) Post-Mortems of Development in
India: Locating Trans-Local Activism and Radicalism.” Journal of Asian and African
Studies, 46(2): 130–48.
Levien, M. 2011. “Rationalising Dispossession: The Land Acquisition and Resettlement
Bills.” Economic and Political Weekly, 46(11): 66–71.
Levien, M. 2012. “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political
Economy of Dispossession in India.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4): 933–69.
Levien, M. 2013. “Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic
Zones.” Development and Change, 43: 381–407.
Litowitz, D. 2000. “Gramsci, Hegemony, and the Law.” Brigham Young University Law
Review, 515: 515–51.
Mallon, F. 1995. Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.

148
 Law Struggles, Lawmaking, and the Politics of Hegemony

Mitra, A. 2007. “Santa Claus visits the Tatas—Freebies from a Debt-ridden Government.”
The Telegraph, March 30. Available at: <http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070330/asp/
opinion/story_7580979.asp> (accessed February 2, 2016).
Nielsen, K. B. 2008. “ ‘Not on Our Land!’ Peasants’ Struggle against Forced Land
Acquisition in India’s West Bengal.” In Rights and Legal Empowerment in Eradicating
Poverty, edited by D. Banik, Farnham: Ashgate, 217–46.
Nielsen, K. B. 2010. “Contesting India’s Development? Industrialisation, Land Acqui-
sition and Protest in West Bengal.” Forum for Development Studies, 37(2): 145–70.
Nielsen, K. B. 2014. “Saving the Farmland: The Making of Popular Anti-Land Acquisi-
tion Politics in Singur, West Bengal.” PhD Dissertation, University of Oslo.
Nielsen, K. B. 2015. “Law and Larai: The (De)Judicialisation of Subaltern Resistance in
West Bengal.” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45(4): 618–39.
Nielsen, K. B. and Nilsen, A. G. 2015. “Law-Struggles and Hegemonic Processes
in Neoliberal India: Gramscian Reflections on Land Acquisition Legislation.”
Globalizations, 12(2): 203–16.
Palit, A. 2012. “The Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation (LARR) Bill
2011: Providing Solutions or Raising Questions?” Journal of Emerging Knowledge on
Emerging Markets, 4: 1–14.
Pedersen, J. D. 2017. “ ‘The Dog That Didn’t Bark’ (Very Loudly)—Large-scale Develop-
ment Projects with Little Protest in Nehru’s India.” In Industrialising Rural India: Land,
Policy and Resistance, edited by K. B. Nielsen and P. Oskarsson, London: Routledge,
pp. 21–39.
Rajalakshmi, T. K. 2013a. “A Law and Its Losers.” Frontline, 29(26): 31–5.
Rajalakshmi, T. K. 2013b. “We Have to Strike a Balance.” Frontline, 29(26): 34–5.
Rajalakshmi, T. K. 2013c. “No Meeting Ground.” Frontline, 30(7): 32–4.
Rajalakshmi, T. K. 2015. “Ordinance Raj.” Frontline. Available at: <http://www.frontline.
in/the-nation/ordinance-raj/article6852240.ece> (accessed March 28, 2016).
Ramesh, J. and Khan, M. A. 2015. Legislating for Justice: The Making of the 2013 Land
Acquisition Act. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Roseberry, W. 1995. “Hegemony and the Language of Contention.” In Everyday Forms
of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, edited by
G. Joseph and D. Nugent, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 356–66.
Roy, D. 2014. Rural Politics in India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press.
Ruparelia, S. 2015. “Minimum Government, Maximum Governance: The Restructuring
of Power in Modi’s India.” South Asia, 38(4): 755–75.
Samaddar, R. 2009. “Prescribed, Tolerated and Forbidden Forms of Claim Making.”
In Social Justice and Enlightenment: West Bengal, edited by P. K. Bose and S. K. Das,
New Delhi: Sage, pp. 153–79.
Sampat, P. 2010. “Special Economic Zones in India: Reconfiguring Displacement in a
Neoliberal Order?” City & Society, 22(2): 166–82.
Sampat, P. 2013. “The ‘Goan Impasse’: Land Rights and Resistance to SEZs in
Goa, India.” LDPI Working Paper no. 53, The Land Deal Politics Initiative, The
Hague.

149
The Land Question in India

Sarkar, P. (ed) 2007. The Land Acquisition Act, 1894 with Short Notes along with West
Bengal Amendments. Kolkata: Books-n-books.
Sarkar, S. 2011. “The Impossibility of Just Land Acquisition.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 46(41): 35–8.
Srinivasan, G. 2013. “Seeking Consensus.” Frontline, 30(8): 105.
Sud, N. 2014. “Governing India’s Land.” World Development, 60: 43–56.
Sundar, N. 2011. “The Rule of Law and the Rule of Property: Law-Struggles and the
Neo-Liberal State in India.” In The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives, edited by A. Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan, London: Routledge,
pp. 175–93.
The Assam Tribune. 2015. “Won’t Renew Ordinance on Land Acquisition: Modi.”
August 30. Available at: <http://www.assamtribune.com/scripts/detailsnew.asp?id=
aug3015/at043> (accessed March 10, 2016).
Verma, S. 2015. “Subverting the Land Acquisition Act, 2013.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 50(37): 18–21.

150
6

Land Acquisition and “Fair Compensation”

of the “Project Affected”

Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

Malabika Pal

6.1 Introduction

It is important to be fair but more important to “appear” fair. This principle

seems to have influenced the decision to change the title of the Land Acqui-
sition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 of the Government of India
to the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition,
Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (hereafter the New Land Act, also
known by its acronym LARR).1 It is clear that there is an effort to take into
account public perceptions of the acquisition and rehabilitation process car-
ried out by the state by the use of its power of eminent domain.2 This act came
in the wake of widespread protests over several years against the Land Acqui-
sition Act, 1894.3 For almost a decade already, the government had been
trying to work out a national rehabilitation policy that would be legally
enforceable. This legislation subsumes both the acquisition and rehabilitation
aspects, giving a signal to people that the government has finally worked out
the rehabilitation package and hence is in a position to provide an assurance
of “fair” compensation.4
The land question in India has been fraught with controversies since inde-
pendent India sought to embark on a path of industrialization. For example,
the colonial government used eminent domain to acquire land for many
government projects, in particular, railways and irrigation. The continued
use of these powers even in independent India was justified on the grounds
that an enormous amount of land was needed for public sector projects.
The Land Question in India

Constitutional amendments repealed the provisions relating to property

rights, namely Articles 19(1)(f) and 31(2), so that they no longer acted as
hindrances to the acquisition process. In the 1962 and 1984 amendments to
the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, a procedure for land acquisition for private
companies was specified. Over the years, the power of eminent domain has
been used to acquire land on behalf of the private sector, suggesting the
growing influence of Indian big business and a perceptible shift in the state–
capital relationship. Consequently, the resort to eminent domain on behalf of
capital has intensified in the post-1991 liberalization period. With millions of
people awaiting proper resettlement and rehabilitation, resentment against
the process of acquisition and the use of the justification of “public purpose”
has been growing in India. In recent years, the “social consent to operate
[which] means securing the free, prior and informed consent of affected com-
munities to part with their resources and also the consent to do business in their
community” (Chakravorty 2013: 8; Kakani, Raghu Ram, and Tigga 2009: 135)
has become imperative for any project to be successful.
The change of title in the New Land Act can be seen as an attempt to shift
the focus from the event of land acquisition to the compensation process for
those dispossessed and displaced. By doing that, the government has in effect
legitimized the inevitability of acquisition of large tracts of land by the state
for industrialization. The real question that has concerned analysts studying
India’s struggle with this issue is whether the law has provisions that would
ensure greater fairness than the earlier legislation or this is just window
dressing in an attempt to give a semblance of fairness before the May 2014
general elections. Has the democratic polity been able to exert pressure
to achieve “real” fairness or has there been mere tokenism to appease the
vociferous voices?
To answer this question, an attempt must be made to reach a clearer under-
standing of the meaning of the term “fair” in this context. To do this, in
Section 6.2 I examine the compensation to the “project affected,” which
includes those whose land has been acquired as well as those who did not
own land but were dependent on the land that was acquired.5 Background is
provided to identify the circumstances when the use of eminent domain should
be considered justified. We study the path followed by the interpretational
debate on the takings law in the United States in order to draw upon the
principles arrived at regarding what constitutes “fair compensation.” We find
that the ethical perspective given by Frank Michelman has been dominant.
In fact, Michelman has been described as one of the most influential cons-
titutional scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Underkuffler
2006; see also Wenar 1997). We also discuss his utilitarian framework in
which he showed that incorporation of demoralization costs into the cost–
benefit analysis helps in choosing only those projects that are socially

152
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

beneficial. Section 6.3 examines the New Land Act or LARR to find out whether
the claim of “fairness” is a legitimate one and briefly outlines the legislative
changes in the New Land Act that the central government sought to introduce.
Section 6.4 examines the role of the judiciary in interpreting the Land Acquisi-
tion Act, 1894. This is done because judicial interpretation affects morale in a
significant way. Also, one needs to see whether the judiciary is taking public
perceptions into account while arriving at the verdicts. The concluding section
examines the relevance of Michelman’s framework in the context of the land
question in India today. It highlights the even greater need to take account of
social discontent for policy formulation because the land acquisition and
rehabilitation issues have resulted in widespread protests and have also become
an area of intense research and public scrutiny.

6.2 The Compensation Question

Compulsory acquisition of land through the use of the power of eminent

domain has long been a subject of debate, particularly in the two largest
democracies of the world, the United States and India.6 The reason for this is
the inherent contradiction between the democratic process and the state’s
power to take land without consent. As the needs of economic and social
development intensify in India and the demand for land grows, the tensions
seem to magnify and threaten the very basis of the democratic polity. In this
section I cover the rationale behind eminent domain, the takings law in the
USA, and fair compensation to subsequently analyze India’s New Land Act.

6.2.1 Rationale for the Power of Eminent Domain

The origin of the term “eminent domain” can be traced to the jurisprudential
writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars. Hugo Grotius,7 the
earliest and most important of the writers, wrote of this power (quoted in
Chakravorty 2013: 112):

The property of subjects is under the eminent domain of the state, so that the state
or he who acts for it may use or even alienate and destroy such property, not only
in the case of extreme necessity, in which even private persons have a right over
the property of others, but for ends of public utility, to which ends those who
founded civil society must be supposed to have intended that private ends should
give way. But it is to be added that when this is done the State is bound to make
good the loss to those who lose their property.

The rationale for the power of eminent domain has been traced to the reasons
for the formation of the state. Epstein (1985), in his analysis of the takings

153
The Land Question in India

question in the United States, provides the philosophical background to the

political development that forms the basis of an expanding economy. Epstein
argued that according to the natural rights tradition, each individual is
endowed with certain rights to life, liberty, and property, which must be
protected by the state. Since the resources required for the formation and
operation of the state would not come voluntarily from the people, the state
must be vested with powers to take private property. Specifically, two major
restraints—that eminent domain be permitted only for public use and just
compensation be paid—were meant to prevent the creation of the Hobbesian
sovereign. Epstein goes on to elaborate that Thomas Hobbes had emphasized
the dangers of unconstrained self-interest and had argued for a comprehensive
contract by which all individuals surrender their liberty and property to a
sovereign. However, he points out a problem in this Hobbesian idea by citing
Max Weber’s argument regarding the state’s monopoly of the use of physical
force to argue that a legal monopolist would profit like any other monopolist
(Epstein 1985: 8). He further brings in John Locke’s counterview that although
all men were not driven by self-interest, there would be many such people and
therefore a representative government was needed (Epstein 1985: 9). Epstein
argues that although Locke categorically prohibited the taking of private prop-
erty by the “supreme power” of the state, the Lockean conception has been
made workable by the provision that property may be taken upon payment of
just compensation (Epstein 1985: 12). The eminent domain clause can be seen
as a specific protection for individuals against the state. When applied in the
context of the land question today in developing countries such as India, it can
be seen as a protection against capital in the interest of the larger good.8
In examining the economic rationale for endowing the state with powers to
acquire property without the owners’ consent, the question arises when a
property needs to be acquired for public use, why should the state not pur-
chase it. Ronald Coase identified three conditions under which bargaining
among private parties will lead to the efficient outcome irrespective of the
initial assignment of rights: the existence of well-defined property rights, the
absence of transactions costs, and symmetrical wealth effects.9 However,
Coase argued that to suppose that transacting is costless is “a very unrealistic
assumption” and in its absence governmental regulation may “lead to an
improvement in economic efficiency” (Coase 1960: 18). State intervention is
often upheld when contiguous parcels of land held by several owners need to
be assembled. This entails high transactions costs and the problem of specu-
lative hold-outs arises, particularly in cases of strategically located properties.
Some may delay in entering the bargain because buyers would be willing to
pay more for the subsequent plots rather than abandon the project altogether.
In an assembly problem in which plots owned by different people must be
combined for a single project, the purchase of one lot depends on the others,

154
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

that is, the transactions are interconnected. Holding out in the form of pure
and mixed strategy equilibria always occurs when complementarity is suffi-
ciently high. The existence of complementarity means that the value of the
combined plot is greater than the stand-alone value of the individual plots.
The owner of a plot or owners of two or more separate plots find it in their
interest to hold out and thereby delay the negotiations to capture a large share
of the residual surplus (Menezes and Pitchford 2004; see also Roychowdhury
and Sengupta 2012).
Another possibility is that the existing owners could wait and not enter the
bargaining process in order to capture the external benefits such as the rise in
price of the adjoining land resulting from the completion of the project
(Grossman and Hart 1980). Further, a situation could arise where the owners
may not want to sell for any price that the state is willing to offer (Alpern and
Durst 1984). It has been suggested, therefore, that eminent domain does not
have many close substitutes for resolving multiparty strategic bargaining.
As justification for the use of eminent domain, the means–ends distinction
has been made (Merrill 1986). “Means” refers to the need for land assembly
and “ends” refers to the objective of providing public goods. Four possible
cases can be identified. The one that involves a public good with an assembly
problem is the one in which the use of eminent domain is justified by both
approaches. Since the government can finance public goods through taxation,
there is no need to use the eminent domain power when an assembly problem
is not there. In the case where a private good requires land assembly, as occurs
when a car manufacturer wants to set up a plant,10 the means approach
justifies the use of eminent domain but the ends approach does not.11
Munch (1976) examined the prices paid for land acquired for three large
projects by the Chicago Department of Urban Renewal and concluded that
prices paid under eminent domain differ systematically from the “fair market
value” standard. Higher-valued properties tended to get proportionately larger
settlements (about one-third more than market value) because they hired better
lawyers, and low-valued properties received less than market value. She could
not obtain a comparable set of data for free-market assemblies and concluded
that her results “leave unproved” the superiority of eminent domain to market
acquisition (Munch 1976: 495).
We can say that the eminent domain clause with the two limitations of public
purpose and just compensation was meant to be a protection for individuals
against the state. The economic justification lies in huge costs of assembling
plots of land since individual owners could delay the bargaining process to
obtain higher gain for themselves. In case of a private good the use of the
eminent domain route has often been justified on the grounds of ends. However,
there is no unequivocal evidence that eminent domain is superior to the free
market for land assemblies.

155
The Land Question in India

6.2.2 Takings Scrutiny in the United States

Takings have been defined as “constitutional law’s expression for any sort of
publicly inflicted private injury for which the Constitution requires payment
of compensation” (Michelman 1967: 1165). The United States Constitution
provides an eminent domain (or takings) clause: “nor shall private property
be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The debate regarding
takings of property is centered primarily on the following questions: what
constitutes a taking requiring compensation, whether it is legitimate, and
what constitutes just compensation. In this, two kinds of inquiry have contrib-
uted to what has been called a clearing of the confusion that was typical of
this field.12 One is the interpretational debate regarding the meanings of four
terms in the eminent domain clause: “private property,” “taken,” “public use,”
and “just compensation.” In the second type of inquiry, some court cases are
considered landmarks in the sense of establishing certain important principles
regarding the takings question. In India, the issue of what constitutes taking has
been largely neglected. Although the question of legitimacy of acquisition is an
oft-litigated issue, it is the compensation question that has become the focus in
recent times. In what follows, we summarize the terminological debate in the
United States to get a better understanding of the term “fair.”
In deciding whether a particular government activity requires compensa-
tion, courts and scholars have used a number of tests. The dominant
nineteenth-century physical invasion test, which received its classic concep-
tualization from Justice Harlan,13 was based on the layman’s idea of property as
things—property is a thing over which the owner has rights of free use,
enjoyment, and disposal. A taking occurs when the government takes phys-
ical possession of some privately owned thing. However, the government can
use various means to try to reduce the value or inhibit the development of the
property through regulation so that it has a much reduced market value when
the government buys it. Often the government can “regulate” certain activ-
ities out of business without physical invasion and thus get away without
paying compensation.14
The concept of property underlying the physical invasion test came under
strong scrutiny during the twentieth century in Wesley Hohfeld’s writings
(Hohfeld 1919). According to him, property cannot be things; property can
only be property rights. If one regards property as “things” then intellectual
property and divided legal control over things would remain unexplained.
Bruce Ackerman (1977) argued that each resource owner can be viewed as
holding a bundle of rights vis-à-vis other potential users. Thus the takings
clause would be viewed as follows:
Whenever the state takes any user right out of Jones’s bundle and puts it in any
other bundle, private property should be understood to have been taken ... Even if

156
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

Jones’s bundle contains but a single user right, it is nonetheless protected against a
taking by the clause. (Ackerman 1977: 28)

Another important approach to the taking problem is the diminution of value

test, which arose from Justice Holmes’ decision in Pennsylvania Coal Co. v
Mahon.15 He laid emphasis on economic value, thus shifting the focus of the
interpretation to the second term of the clause: “taken.” According to this test,
the government might invade or property rights might be interfered with,
but a taking occurs only if economic values are diminished by a significant
percentage because of the government’s action. There is the problem of
setting the percentage that draws the line between a taking and a regulation.
It was argued that the provision was more a guard against unfairness rather
than against mere value diminution (Sax 1964). The focus of the discourse
shifted to the “public use” term with the decision in Berman v Parker.16
A privately owned department store was taken and transferred using the
eminent domain power as part of a neighborhood redevelopment scheme
that would add to the orderliness and beauty of the district. The “public use”
term was interpreted to mean “public purpose” (order and beautification)
even though the state did not intend to manage or occupy the building. This
aspect has often come up in Indian court judgments while deciding whether
a particular land acquisition serves public purpose.17 For example, in the
Singur case where the West Bengal state government claimed public purpose
by acquiring land on behalf of a large, profit-making, private auto manufac-
turer, the Tatas, the farmers, and their supporters rejected this notion. To this
the government responded that if land acquisition led to industrial invest-
ments and thus jobs then the outcome serves a public purpose (see also
Chapter 5 of this volume).
The aspect of the takings debate that is most relevant to India is that
elaborated in the influential work of Frank Michelman and Joseph Sax. They
took the interpretational attempt forward by emphasizing the justice aspect
of the term “just compensation.” Sax (1964) argued that once property
is thought of as economic value the question becomes to what kind of com-
petition should existing values be exposed. Michelman (1967) argued that
diversion of resources would alter the personal welfare situation of a person
and will have the impact of redistribution of welfare. What constitutes a
taking would depend on whether the correct theory of justice requires that
the act be compensated. The central concept of the takings clause was not
property but “economic values” or “welfare.” His utilitarian standard required
the balancing of the welfare gains of a proposed redistribution and the welfare
costs borne by the “losers” and the cost incurred by the government as
compensation. Epstein (1985) argued that a state action triggers takings scru-
tiny if it alters any incident of any private party’s property bundle. Such an act

157
The Land Question in India

must be for “public use” if it is to be legitimate at all: it must protect existing

property entitlements or create a net social gain that must be distributed in
proportion to pre-existing property entitlements. This would reduce “rent
seeking,” which arises when groups devote resources to manipulate property
rights in their favor. This aspect is particularly relevant for India, where there
is a rampant practice of procuring agricultural land at throw-away prices and
then changing the land use to nonagricultural. The subsequent sale and resale
is often done at exorbitant prices, many times the original price. The gains
from this process are not shared with the original owners.18
One American case that has had an influence on the Supreme Court of India
in recent times is the landmark case of Kelo v City of New London.19 In this case,
the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the pharmaceutical giant
Pfizer and against the middle-class people who were living in the 90-acre Fort
Trumball neighborhood of New London, Connecticut, which was acquired
and significantly expanded the scope of public purpose. Upholding the tak-
ing, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority that the city’s economic
development plan, which will provide appreciable benefits to the community
including increased tax revenue and new jobs, “unquestionably serves a
public purpose.” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the dissenters that
the decision means that “the sovereign may take private property currently in
ordinary private use, and give it over for new ordinary private use.” The
residents had rejected the city’s compensation package saying no amount of
money could compensate them. The decision made every home, church,
corner store vulnerable to being replaced by commercial development since
the latter increases tax revenue and every region needs more tax revenue.
Somin (2015), in a book-length analysis of the case, argued that the close
5–4 verdict in this case was an error, which the Supreme Court should reverse.
In the United States, there has been a scrutiny of each of the terms of the
takings clause and landmark judgments have had an impact on how the
interpretational debate has progressed. The aspect of the takings debate that
is most relevant to any analysis of India’s land acquisition process is the
insight provided by Michelman (1967), who argued that diversion of
resources changes the personal welfare of individuals and thus affects morale.
This is magnified when the justification of economic development widens
the scope of eminent domain so that every plot of land becomes vulnerable
to acquisition.

6.2.3 The Constraint of “Fair” Compensation

Michelman (1967) argues that the only “test” for the requirement of compen-
sation is the test of fairness: is it fair to put into effect a particular social
measure without compensating for the private loss inflicted in the process?

158
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

He drew upon the utilitarian property theory of Bentham and argued that
collective allocational decisions that are accompanied by particular distribu-
tions are compensable or not depending on whether they are “critically
demoralizing.” According to Bentham, property is a collection of rules that
govern the exploitation of resources and therefore form the basis of expect-
ations. Unpredictable redistributions would therefore destroy the security of
future enjoyment of the product and would affect the morale. However, not
all redistributions are totally demoralizing and a line can be drawn between
compensable and non-compensable collective impositions.
According to Michelman’s utilitarian standard, in deciding whether a gov-
ernment action was a taking that requires compensation, three factors need to
be considered: efficiency gains, demoralizing costs, and settlement costs.
Efficiency gains are “the excess of benefits produced by a measure over losses
inflicted by it, where benefits are measured by the total number of dollars
which prospective gainers would be willing to pay to secure adoption,
and losses are measured by the total number of dollars which prospective
losers would insist on as the price of agreeing to adoption” (Michelman
1967: 1214). This can be denoted by B (benefits) C (costs). Demoralization
costs (D) consist of “the total of (1) the dollar value necessary to offset
disutilities which accrue to losers and their sympathizers specifically from
the realization that no compensation is offered,20 and (2) the present capital-
ized value of lost future production (reflecting either impaired incentives or
social unrest) caused by demoralization of uncompensated losers, their sym-
pathizers, and other observers disturbed by the thought that they themselves
may be subjected to similar treatment on some other occasion.” (Michelman
1967: 1214). Settlement Costs (S) are “measured by the dollar value of time,
effort, and resources which would be required in order to reach compensation
settlements adequate to avoid demoralization costs” (Michelman 1967: 1214).
In other words, demoralization costs are those that arise when there is no
compensation, settlement costs arise when compensation is paid. Accor-
ding to Michelman, a government measure whose dollar benefits exceed
costs should nevertheless not be adopted if the net benefit is exceeded by
both demoralization costs and settlement costs. Symbolically, a utilitarian
does not undertake the project if (B C) < min (D, S). If net benefits are
positive and greater than either settlement or demoralization costs (or
both), the lower S or D should be incurred. That is, the government should
pay if (B C) > S and S < D. On the other hand, the government need not pay
if (B C) > D and D < S.
We note that per the framework proposed by Michelman, an acquisition
should not occur even if the monetary benefits exceed costs, when the demor-
alization and settlement costs exceed the benefits. He identified certain
“sources” of these costs; one such source is in the distinction between

159
The Land Question in India

strategically determined losses and natural hazards such as earthquakes,

cyclones, floods, and so on. Michelman elaborates that demoralization costs
would also arise in case of uncompensated government actions, where the
efficiency gains are doubtful, where there is uncertainty about reciprocal
benefits, where there is a lack of political will to extract mitigating concessions
for the losers, and other situations where there is a feeling that similar situ-
ations will occur in the future. Michelman’s framework has been subjected to
intense scrutiny.21 In this chapter, the focus is on the significance of public
perceptions because there was an effort to hold consultations with the public
before the enactment of the New Land Act. That this was indeed the case is
evident from the fact that a book on the making of the New Land Act has been
titled Legislating for Justice (see Ramesh and Khan 2015).
Fisher (1988) argues that there are two types of “demoralization costs” that
would be substantial in many contexts. First, what Michelman calls the
“dollar value [of] outrage” (Michelman 1967: 1215),22 in which people uncon-
vinced by government actions may view them as immoral.23 Fisher argues
that this would result in “a kind of discomfort that a judge who wishes to
maximize efficiency must take into account in deciding whether to classify the
actions in question as ‘takings’.” The second type is “search” costs, which
result when a judicial decision denies compensation in defiance of popular
perceptions that compensation must be paid and thereby undermines
people’s faith that by and large the law is in conformity with their sense of
justice. People would be unwilling to make decisions without “looking up”
the rules and this would entail deadweight losses that must be taken into
account by economists. Also, there is the possibility that judicial decisions
may in turn have an impact on popular views regarding the circumstances in
which compensation is appropriate.
In the context of land acquisition in India today, incorporation of demor-
alization costs is extremely important. This is because since the process of
economic liberalization began, the need by industry for land has increased
by leaps and bounds. The government’s role in the process has changed to
becoming an agent for the private sector to facilitate land availability. The
purpose of the acquisition is stated to be public purpose but the land losers, as
alluded to earlier in the Singur case, know the dubious nature of such claims.
Despite the backlog of millions of people yet to be rehabilitated, the pace of
acquisition has continued unabated. All these have meant that demoraliza-
tion costs have increased significantly in the last three decades. India needs to
choose only those projects that will be socially beneficial. Use of Michelman’s
standard gives a framework to filter out economically efficient projects that
have very high demoralization costs. In a democracy, one must find a way
of recognizing these costs and factoring them into the analysis to achieve
true fairness.

160
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

6.3 The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in the

Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013

The Indian government was forced to take into account the discontent over
the land acquisition process carried out over the decades since independ-
ence. This is evident from the various attempts made to formulate a legally
enforceable national rehabilitation policy, since the Land Acquisition Act,
1894 only dealt with the process of acquisition and determination of mon-
etary compensation. The latest notified version was the National Rehabili-
tation and Resettlement Policy (NRRP), 2007, which was abandoned after it
came in for sharp criticism.24 After taking suggestions from the Standing
Committee on Rural Development (2007–8/2012) and the National Advis-
ory Council, a new bill was proposed in 2011 titled the Land Acquisition
and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill. The final version is the latest
Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in LARR, 2013. This section
analyzes the background to the enactment of this New Land Act and the
pressures that compelled the government to attempt a semblance of fair-
ness. It then examines the new legislation to find out whether the claim of
fairness is a legitimate one. This is done by a scrutiny of the provisions to
see if an attempt is made to actually take into account the demoralization
costs discussed earlier. The provisions of the land Ordinance will also be
discussed briefly.

6.3.1 Discourse on the Compensation Question prior to the New Land Act
Land acquisitions had been going on both prior to and after independence
without any uniform and enforceable compensation framework. Millions of
people have been displaced and protests have taken place in various parts of
the country.25 There had been a steady demand for amendment of the colo-
nial Land Acquisition Act, 1894 and its replacement by new legislation. Prior
to the recent enactment of the New Land Act, there have been seventeen
amendments to the prevailing Land Acquisition Act, 1894, with two import-
ant ones being in 1962 and 1984. When plans to amend the archaic act were
initiated and a bill circulated for public response in 1998, it came in for sharp
criticism (Asif 1999; Pinto 1998). Asif (1999) noted that the government
has acknowledged that land acquisition and displacement have resulted in
protest movements marked by growing militancy and argued that the
absence of transparency makes the act one of the most misused civil laws
in the country.26 Since the district collector’s role is decisive in the entire
process of acquiring land and awarding compensation, he criticized this
collector-centric procedure and called for a paradigm shift to democratize
the acquisition process. He argued that land should be made available for

161
The Land Question in India

genuine public purposes and that the land losers should not be impoverished
in the process. Pinto (1998) echoed the same viewpoint calling for a national
debate on the issue.
A national debate started in 2007 with the violence in Nandigram and
Singur in West Bengal and the relocation of the Tatas to Gujarat. The poll
debacle of the left-front government placed the land and rehabilitation issues
in the forefront of discussion and debate. In fact, Guha (2007; also Chapter 12
in this volume) while examining the case of the pig-iron manufacturing plant,
Tata Metaliks, which was set up in Kharagpur in 1992, argues that the acqui-
sition case did not see any of the popular opposition witnessed in Singur and
Nandigram.27 Apart from Singur, many cases have been documented and
scrutinized by researchers. For instance, specific case studies have been analyzed
for land acquisition in Assam (Gohain 2006), Hyderabad (Reddy and Reddy
2007), Andhra Pradesh (Balagopal 2007), Bhatta-Parsaul in Uttar Pradesh
(Kumar 2011), Rajasthan (Levien 2011), Jharkhand (Lahiri-Dutt, Krishnan,
and Ahmad 2012), and in Pune, Maharashtra (Sathe 2014), among others.
We categorize the discourse on the land question around the three issues:
whether acquisition should take place at all, when compensation should be
paid, and what constitutes “fair” compensation. Regarding the first issue,
Sampat (2013) examines the eminent domain power in the Indian context
and like Iyer (2007) argues: “acquisition needs to be made contestable not
merely in regard to compensation, but also in relation to the public purpose”
(Sampat 2013: 43). She further argues: “Given the expanded scope and the
conflation of private interest with public purpose, the power of eminent
domain now seems set to engender large scale ‘accumulation by dispossession’
(Harvey 2005); its only counter being popular resistance to dispossession”
(Sampat 2013: 46). It has been emphasized that it is not imperfect land
markets that have resulted in resistance to acquisition but the nonexistence
of land markets: there are often no “willing sellers” for a particular land,
although there are buyers. Chakravorty (2013) calls these lands “priceless”
and advocates that they should be kept out of the purview of acquisition.
The second issue relates to the question of when compensation should be
paid. In India, when consent has not been forthcoming, the legal owners have
been forced out of their lands and compensation denied. For instance, when
mining projects face resistance, residents have been forced to leave the area
through blasting operations in adjacent plots. There are instances when
ponds, which are the mainstay of villagers, have been polluted or work on
dams started so that the people residing in adjacent areas may be moved out
on grounds of threat of subsidence. It is only when land is acquired using the
Land Acquisition Act that one can make a claim for compensation. Unlike in
the United States, where the question of what constitutes a “taking” has been
subject to intense scrutiny, this has not been done in India. Only in the case of

162
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

those people who do not directly own land but are dependent for their
livelihoods on the land being acquired that the question arises whether
compensation should be paid at all.
The question of what constitutes “fair” compensation has been the focus
of public discourse in India. Numerous suggestions have been given with
the view to making the people partners in the process of development.
The Land Acquisition Act, 1894 took the market value as the bench mark
and a solatium was awarded over and above that to factor in the compulsory
nature of the transaction. However, this method came in for severe criticism
(see, for instance, Morris and Pandey 2007). Various suggestions have been
made, including an option pricing method (Marjit 2010) and land auctions
(Ghatak and Ghosh 2011), among others. The crux of the arguments is that in
cases of compulsory acquisition there is no willing seller–willing buyer market
scenario, so market prices cannot be used as an indicator of value for the parties
involved.28 It is against the backdrop of this kind of discourse that the New Land
Act came into force.

6.3.2 The “Fairness” Claim of the New Land Act

The New Land Act seems to shout out loud its intention of being “fair.” This
emphasis is quite understandable given the context in which it is being
enacted; it is clear that public perceptions are of utmost importance. The
question, however, is: when the very foundation of eminent domain as
understood in the theoretical literature is that it must be accompanied by
just compensation, is it at all required that a thing so obvious must be
separately emphasized? Is the title making a statement that an unfair practice
is being rectified?29 That India had for long deviated from the views as put
forth by the natural rights tradition and it is only now that continued pressure
from the voting public has forced the state to reconsider its position? The
preamble is full of words that attempt to emphasize justice: “a humane,
participative, informed and transparent process of land acquisition,” “provide
just and fair compensation,” and “that affected persons become partners in
development.”
An examination of the provisions of the act show that regarding the issue
of when acquisition should take place, consent is needed only in the cases of
private companies [at least 80 percent of the affected families; 2(2)(b)(i)] and
of public–private partnerships [at least 70 percent of the affected families;
2(2)(b)(ii)].30 This has been done to circumvent the hold-out problem.
Further, it is specified that:

The appropriate Government shall ensure that (a) there is a legitimate and bona
fide public purpose for the proposed acquisition which necessitates the acquisition

163
The Land Question in India

of the land identified; (b) the potential benefits and the public purpose referred
to in clause (a) shall outweigh the social costs and adverse social impact as
determined by the Social Impact Assessment that has been carried out; . . . . [8(1)]

Using Michelman’s framework, the phrase “adverse social impact” would

include the demoralization costs. The challenge lies in factoring in what has
also been referred to as the “psychic externalities” (Kennedy 1981). This refers
to a kind of discomfort that people experience when they regard certain
government acts as immoral. It has been argued that a judge while deciding
whether a particular action is a taking requiring compensation must take these
kinds of externalities into account. In recent times, these have threatened
to outweigh all benefits. The increase in compensation mandated by the
New Land Act could help reduce demoralization; but it still continues to be
based on market value. We note that where land is acquired using the urgency
clause [17(1) in the old act and 40(1) in the New Land Act],31 no social impact
assessment is required. In the New Land Act, the specific reasons cited are land
acquisition for national defense and emergencies arising out of natural calam-
ities or any other emergency with the approval of Parliament. This implies that
the costs and benefits associated with the acquisition will not be calculated but
the compensation amount will be determined by the collector.32
The collector-centric approach of the old act has been retained. While
determining the compensation amount, the seventh point specified in
Section 28 states that the collector must take into account: “any other ground
which may be in the interest of equity, justice and beneficial to the affected
families.” This is an open-ended provision subject to different interpretations.
A novel aspect of the act is the provision for setting up a National Monitoring
Committee for Rehabilitation and Resettlement, but it is to be set up only
“whenever necessary.” There is a provision for establishment of a Land Acqui-
sition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Authority, but it would consist of just
one person, called the “presiding officer.” We further note that the settlement
costs associated with compensation, if calculated, would be quite high in India
since land records are not up to the mark. Section 3(i) gives the costs associated
with acquisition. These consist of the amount of compensation including
solatium, costs of damages caused to the land and standing crops in the
process of acquisition, cost of acquisition of land and buildings, infrastructure
cost for resettlement, and administrative cost. According to Michelman’s
framework, the settlement costs are vital to any ex-ante decision making. In
the Indian context, in an attempt to get on with “industrialisation, develop-
ment of essential infrastructural facilities and urbanization,” the settlement
costs cannot be ignored in the cost–benefit calculation. In fact, the urgency
clause permits the collector to take possession of land even before the award
of compensation has been made. The widespread misuse of this clause was

164
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

regarded as one of the major flaws of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. Also, the
delay in getting compensation could turn out to be disastrous for the families
who subsist on the produce of the land. An interest rate of 12 percent [30(3)]
would be nominal considering the usurious rates charged in rural areas. This
difference itself could lead land losers into a debt trap. On the whole, we find
that there are no provisions in the New Land Act that make the claim of
“fairness,” “humane,” or “transparent” justified. The collector is the all-
powerful entity and this colonial construct would continue to “rule”; in fact,
by bringing in public–private partnerships, this power has only expanded.
An Ordinance was promulgated on December 31, 2014, which made such
draconian changes to the provisions of the New Land Act that the latter
appeared humane by comparison. The most significant change was the
removal of the three important restraints introduced by the New Land Act:
social impact assessment, consent requirements, and restriction on acquisi-
tion of multicrop land for four additional categories of projects apart from
national defense. These were rural infrastructure including electrification,
affordable housing and housing for the poor, industrial corridors, and infra-
structure including projects under public–private partnership where the
ownership of land continues to vest with the government. Although this
provision specified four categories, they covered most of the cases for which
land is required. Moreover, in both the old and new land acts, it was the
urgency clause that exempted projects from cost–benefit analysis and courts
had often struck down attempts to use it. The Ordinance sought to legitimize
the urgency provision for a whole range of projects. The other change that
significantly expanded the scope of eminent domain was the substitution
through clause (yy) in Section 3 of the New Land Act: the term “private entity”
in place of “private company,” where the former would include “any entity
other than a Government entity or undertaking and includes a proprietorship,
partnership, company, corporation, non-profit organisation or other entity
under any law for the time being in force.” Further, in Section 101 the period
for return of unutilized land was changed from five years to “a period specified
for setting up of any project or for five years, whichever is later.” The time
required for setting up the project could be increased so much that the
provision would be nullified. The New Land Act had increased the account-
ability of officers who were entrusted to implement the law. The Ordinance
diluted this by mandating that prior consent was needed from the govern-
ment before the officers could be penalized.
The Ordinance met with severe criticism from across the board. The central
government, however, only retreated from its position after several months
when the Ordinance, which was re-promulgated for the third time, was
allowed to lapse on August 31, 2015. A bill incorporating the changes was
passed in the Lok Sabha in March 2015 but failed to garner the requisite

165
The Land Question in India

numbers in the Rajya Sabha of the Indian Parliament. The resolve of the ruling
party (BJP) to continue to push through the draconian changes shows that
they had the confidence that these sweeping changes would be accepted in
the name of economic development. However, most of the other political
parties were not willing to face the wrath of the farmers and their concerted
resistance indicates that they did not want to risk an electoral debacle on this
highly contentious issue.

6.4 Role of the Judiciary in Interpretation

of the Land Acquisition Law in India

Judicial interpretation has a crucial role in a democracy not only in actual

implementation of the law but also in influencing the perceptions of the
people and therefore their morale. For an aggrieved land loser, the judiciary
is the only recourse to remedy. It has often been argued that courts have failed
to act as guardians of the rights of people (see, for instance, Gonsalves 2010)
and to ensure that the two restraints placed on the power of eminent domain,
namely that it be used for public purpose and that just compensation be paid,
are adhered to. The lack of clear directions regarding many of the contentious
issues and the continual expansion in the scope of public purpose has meant
that public discontent has risen. In this section, a preliminary attempt is made
to broadly examine the stance taken by the judiciary in India in interpreting
the land acquisition legislation.
There are conflicting opinions in India regarding the important question
of whether an acquisition serves a public purpose and whether it should be
undertaken at all. In the United States, the exercise of eminent domain can
be challenged on the grounds that it is not for a legitimate public purpose.
Section 6(3) of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 stated that a declaration of
the government that the land is being acquired for a public purpose was
conclusive evidence that the land is needed for public purpose and unless it
is shown that there has been a colorable exercise of power, the courts cannot
go on to examine whether it is a public purpose or not. The Supreme Court
observed in the case of Somawanti and Others v State of Punjab and Others
(And connected Petitions):

Now whether in a particular case the purpose for which land is needed is a public
purpose or not is for the State Government to be satisfied about. If the purpose for
which the land is being acquired by the State is within the legislative competence
of the State the declaration of the Government will be final subject, however, to
one exception. That exception is that if there is a colourable exercise of power the
declaration will be open to challenge at the instance of the aggrieved party.33

166
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

The exception pertains to situations in which it appears that the custodian of

power is influenced in its exercise by considerations or ends outside of those
for which the power is sanctioned. In such cases, one argues that there is a
pretention of achieving a legitimate goal.
In another landmark judgment, State of Bihar v Kameshwar Singh,34 it was
observed by Justice Mahajan that:

The right point to be determined in each case is whether the acquisition is in

general interest of the community as distinguished from the private interest of an
individual ...The sovereign power to acquire property compulsorily is a power to
acquire it only for a public purpose. There is no power in the sovereign to acquire
private property in order to give it to private persons. Public purpose is the content
of the power itself.

Justice Mahajan quoted from Willoghby’s Constitutional Law:

As between individuals, no necessity however great, no exigency however immi-

nent, no improvement, however valuable, no refusal, however unneighbourly, no
obstinacy, however unreasonable, no offers of compensation, however extrava-
gant, can compel or require any man to part with an inch of his estate.

In R L Arora v The State of Uttar Pradesh,35 which related to a case in which land
was acquired for an industrialist in Kanpur for a textile machinery parts
factory, the Supreme Court set aside the acquisition and concluded that the
intention of the legislature was that land should be acquired only when the
work constructed was directly useful to the public and the public would be
entitled to use the work for its own benefit. However, this stance was over-
turned in the case of Somawanti mentioned earlier.
The courts have also upheld the interest of the individual in some cases.
In the case of Gadigeppa Mahadevpa Chikkumbi v State of Karnataka,36 where the
acquisition deprived the petitioner of his sole means of livelihood as an
agriculturist, his fundamental right to pursue his occupation as assured
under Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution of India was taken away; it was
held that the acquisition of land in the garb of public interest was unsustain-
able.37 However, there have been instances in which the judiciary has upheld
acquisitions on behalf of the private companies as public purpose acquisition
as long as a part of the compensation cost was paid out of the state exche-
quer.38 In a more recent case,39 the Supreme Court extended the scope of
public purpose stating: “If the project taken as a whole is an attempt in the
direction of bringing foreign exchange, generating employment opportun-
ities and securing economic benefits to the State and the public at large, it will
serve public purpose.” However, within the first six months of 2011, the
Supreme Court quashed attempts by state governments to use emergency
provisions in the law to deny farmers their right to object to acquisition.

167
The Land Question in India

It set aside three land acquisition proceedings—one by the government of

Uttar Pradesh for a jail in Sahranpur, another for acquiring land in Greater
Noida in Uttar Pradesh for planned industrial development, and the acquisi-
tion of the Greater Noida Extension Area (GNEA) in Gautam Buddha Nagar
district of Uttar Pradesh. Widespread protests against the acquisitions may
have influenced the verdicts.
Another contentious issue relates to whether compensation should be paid
at all in case of compulsory acquisition. By the Constitution (forty-fourth
Amendment) Act, 1978, the property clauses of Articles 19(1)(f) and 31(2)
were omitted and the right to property ceased to be a fundamental right.
Article 300-A, which states that no person shall be deprived of his property
save by authority of law, was included in Part XII of the Constitution. The
obligation of the state to pay compensation for property acquired was obvi-
ated by this amendment. In the case of Jilubhai Nanbhai Khachar v State of
Gujarat,40 the Supreme Court explicitly stated that “Payment of market value
in lieu of acquired property is not sine qua non for acquisition.” Another
extreme view was put forth in State of Bihar v Kameshwar Singh,41 by Mahajan,
that ordinarily the government has no right to acquire private property to give
it to private persons even on payment of compensation. However, it is mostly
agreed that acquisition must be accompanied by compensation.
The most contentious aspect has been the amount of compensation.
In Jilubhai Nanbhai Khachar v State of Gujarat it was stated that the adequacy
of the amount of compensation cannot be questioned in a court of law.
However, the validity of irrelevant principles used in the determination of
the amount is amenable to judicial scrutiny. The general principles determin-
ing compensation in India were laid down in Sections 23 and 24 of the Land
Acquisition Act, 1894. These have been elaborated and expanded by the
judiciary42 following a case-by-case adjudication practice.43 Some of the inter-
pretations of the act with respect to the principles regarding estimation of
market value and the final award have been discussed in Pal (2013). Innumer-
able cases have been filed in the context of the earlier act. Singh (2012) argues
that the old act was inherently prone to litigation over compensation and that
the use of eminent domain “can guarantee neither efficiency nor fairness of
the outcome.”44
We find that although for an aggrieved land loser the judiciary is the only
recourse to remedy, courts have not put forth a clear and consistent stand on
whether an acquisition serves a public purpose, and regarding payment and
the amount of compensation. This has led to confusion and discontent rather
than contributing to building a basis for an understanding of the key issues
of public purpose and fair compensation like that in the United States, where,
as was mentioned earlier in the chapter, detailed judicial reasoning has
contributed immensely to the interpretational debate.

168
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

6.5 Relevance of Michelman’s Framework in the Indian Context

We find that the discourse on land acquisition in India is mainly around the
two restraints: public purpose and just compensation. In recent times, acqui-
sition of land by the government on behalf of companies has become highly
contentious. While some argue for voluntary transactions, others call for some
regulation of these voluntary transactions; still others argue that in the case of
large-scale land acquisition for industry, the state’s participation is essential
(Banerjee et al. 2007; Ghatak and Ghosh 2011). In fact, Ghatak and Ghosh
(2011: 71) argue:

The market often works well in arranging bilateral transactions, but its effective-
ness drops exponentially as the number of parties to the transaction grows large,
especially in a country like India where property rights are poorly defined, land
records are fuzzy and courts work at a glacial pace.

In Singur itself, the 1,000 acres of land acquired belonged to 12,000 owners,
indicating that transaction costs are high due to negotiations with innumer-
able owners for a particular plot of land.45 As the last decade has shown, land
acquisitions under the old act had taken place for private companies purport-
edly for public purpose but almost all the surplus created went to the new
owners.46
In the Indian context, it would be useful to calculate the settlement costs
involved in compensation in addition to the usual cost–benefit analysis. It is
only right that the gains from the land transfer should be shared with the owners
of the asset to make them partners in development.47 Using Michelman’s
framework, one can say that incorporating both settlement and demoralization
costs in the utilitarian standard on an ex-ante basis would mean that not every
project that serves a public purpose and has positive efficiency gains should be
undertaken, that is, many projects would not be cost effective. This would reduce
the scope of using eminent domain and also make the land transfer less prone to
social unrest. The more doubtful the “public purpose,” the higher the demoral-
ization costs associated with the project. It has been documented how the stated
public purpose has not materialized in numerous projects and those affected
have often faced multiple displacements without any compensation (see
Hardikar 2013). The solatium of 100 percent that the New Land Act stipulates
would not be able to capture these costs since many may not be willing to part
with land at any price.
India is at a crucial juncture in its development path and the need for land
for purposes of industrialization will only grow. The New Land Act has been
called pro-peasant and anti-corporate and it has been argued that the costs
of projects would escalate, the latter used as justification for the Ordinance.
Our analysis of the provisions show that using Michelman’s framework to

169
The Land Question in India

understand the takings conundrum, neither efficiency nor equity consider-

ations would be met if settlement and demoralization costs were not con-
sidered explicitly before a project is undertaken. The failure of the state
apparatus to explicitly take account of demoralization costs resulted in the
democratic process taking over and voting the three-decade-old left-front
government in West Bengal out of one of its strongest bastions following
the incidents of Nandigram and Singur. This can be considered a watershed
in India’s struggle with the issues of land acquisition and rehabilitation,
forcing some state governments to review their own rehabilitation policies.
Any claim of “fairness” in the national legislation must be backed by provi-
sions that substantially alter the process that has been adopted so far. Only
when people are secure that their property and livelihood would be protected
would they have faith and become true “partners in development.” Thus,
even if some projects which have positive benefits (B) – costs (C) are rejected
due to high settlement costs (S) and demoralization costs (D), the economy
will not be worse off since ultimately development is meant to be inclusive
and for the benefit of all.
To conclude, this chapter has attempted to place the Indian land acquisition
issue in the context of the conception of eminent domain and the two
restraints of public purpose and just compensation. It is argued in the chapter
that once we analyze the issues using the utilitarian standard of Michelman,
all three issues of whether acquisition should take place at all, whether com-
pensation should be paid, and the amount of compensation can be brought in
so that the scope of the state’s power to acquire land is curtailed. This will
benefit the economy by channeling scarce resources to their most socially
beneficial purposes. Also, by making the landowners partners in a develop-
ment process that encompasses both agriculture and industry, the goal of
equity can be better served.

Acknowledgments

I thank Anthony D’Costa for his incisive comments at various stages in the revision
process.

Notes

1. This was done on the insistence of Rahul Gandhi, the vice-president of the All India
Congress Party and a contender for the post of prime minister in the Parliamentary
elections in May 2014. An alternative title suggested by the National Alliance of
People’s Movements (NAPM) was “Development Planning, Resettlement and

170
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

Rehabilitation Bill.” There is a clear indication that the ruling government wanted
to emphasize the “fairness” part, rather than “development.”
2. These protests have intensified into militant opposition in some parts of India.
3. Fisher (1988) highlights the significance of public perceptions of the takings
doctrine.
4. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in May 2014, attempted to
alter the legislative framework. However, it failed to garner support from other
political parties and had to retreat from its position. The changes that were sought
to be introduced were drastic and will be discussed subsequently.
5. Section 3 of Chapter I of the New Land Act provides the categories of people who
would be considered “project affected.”
6. Singh (2012) notes that the use of eminent domain for private projects has been
more controversial in land-abundant United States than in relatively land-scarce
England. This is because the power to grant permission rests with the office of the
deputy prime minister, which ensures that there is no competition by local author-
ities to give away land to the private companies at cheap rates. Chandra (2008)
shows in his analysis of the Singur case in West Bengal how the states were
competing with each other in offering the “best package” of subsidies to industry.
7. De Jure Belli Et Pacis (1625).
8. We note that this protection is effective only when the acquisition is accompanied
by just compensation.
9. In two articles, Coase (1959, 1960) propounded what has become the celebrated
Coase Theorem.
10. Two instances are used of eminent domain for acquisition of land for General
Motors in Poletown, Detroit, USA, and for Tata Motors in Singur, West Bengal,
India.
11. The recent land acquisition for the private sector shows that often land of a specific
nature is not required, although there is a land assembly problem. Justification in
terms of the ends approach gives rise to strained reasoning triggering protests all
over the country.
12. In India, as elaborated later, this area is fraught with confusing rules and judgments.
13. In Mugler v Kansas 123 U.S. 623 (1887).
14. See Fischel (1995) for a detailed study of what is called regulatory takings in the
USA.
15. 260 US 393, 412–16 (1922).
16. 348 US 26, 32–4 (1954).
17. For instance, in R L Arora v The State of Uttar Pradesh [AIR 1962 SC 764], it was stated
that land should be acquired only when the work constructed would be used
directly by the public for its own benefit. See Section 6.4 of this chapter.
18. For instance, Pune Divisional Commissioner Prabhakar Deshmukh was accused in
this connection. Available at: <http://www.moneylife.in/article/how-rti-activist-
exposed-pune-div-commissioner-prabhakar-deshmukhs-landscam/36456.html?
utm_source=PoweRelayEDM&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=Subscriber%
2361608&utm_campaign=Today%27s%20Exclusives%2020%20feb%202014>
(accessed February 20, 2014).

171
The Land Question in India

19. 545 U.S. 469 (2005).

20. This means that these costs do not overlap with the cost term C in the calculation
of efficiency gains. They arise due to the lack of compensation and disappear if
compensation is paid.
21. The economic critique of Michelman’s approach has been given in Blume and
Rubinfeld (1984), Kaplow (1986), Fischel and Shapiro (1988). A summary of the
critique is given in Pal (2013). Fisher (1988) argues that although economists’ well-
taken point mandates a substantial modification of the second and third terms of
Michelman’s formula, that does not deprive it of its significance.
22. Fisher (1988: fn. 26, 1779) quoting Ackerman (1977: 46–7), referred to this as “the
outrage and demoralization of good citizens who believe themselves [or others]
victims of unprincipled behaviour” and “the long-run disutility of citizen disaffec-
tion with the state’s decision making processes.”
23. (Michelman 1967: 1217–18) considers some reasons for such perceptions of
immorality.
24. Pal (2013) argues, using Michelman’s framework, that the predetermined act of
using eminent domain was taken at par with random natural disasters. None of the
provisions of the NRRP (2007) tried to address the demoralization costs.
25. Estimates of displacement vary, for example, from 60 million (Fernandes 2008) to
100 million (NAPM). A White Paper on the number of displaced would help in
proper assessment.
26. One wonders whether it is to combat this kind of criticism that the word “trans-
parency” has also been added to the title of the New Land Act.
27. Guha (2004), in his detailed research of Paschim Medinipur district in West Bengal,
had revealed the policy failure of the left-front government.
28. Chakravorty (2013) focuses on the price of land in his book on land acquisition,
conflict, and consequence.
29. Ramesh and Khan (2015: 3) also allude to this when they argue: “Few countries
employ the same unbridled use of acquiring authority that Indian authorities
have had.”
30. We note that acquisition for public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been inserted
into the Act.
31. This route has been used far too often to transfer land to companies.
32. The Supreme Court of India strongly warned against the use of this power arbitrar-
ily against poor farmers, emphasizing that depriving him of property without a
hearing is “constitutional anathema.” See State of Punjab and another v Gurdial Singh
AIR 1980 SC 319.
33. AIR 1963 SC 151.
34. 1952 SCR 1056: AIR 1952 SC 252.
35. AIR 1962 SC 764.
36. AIR 1990 Kant 2.
37. See also Bamandas Mukherjee v State of West Bengal AIR 1985 Cal 159.
38. Singh (2012) cites the case of Indrajit C Parekh v State of Gujarat [AIR 1975 SC 1182]
in which the Supreme Court upheld the contention of the Gujarat government
that a contribution of even one rupee from the exchequer is sufficient to validate

172
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

the acquisition for the companies under Part II of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894.
See also Pratibha Nema v State of MP, AIR 2003 SC 3140.
39. [1] Sooraram Pratap Reddy and Others; [2] Suraram Krishna Reddy And Another;
[3] V. Krishna Prasad; [4] A.L. Sadanand; [5] Malla Reddy And Others; [2] District
Collector, Land Acquisition And Others; [3] Government of Andhra Pradesh and Others;
[4] District Collector and Others 2008 (9) SCC 552.
40. AIR 1995 SC 142; Supp (1) SCC 596; (1994) Supp 1 SCR 807.
41. AIR 1952 SC 252.
42. In State of West Bengal v Arun Kumar (1984) CLJ 220 (DB), it was held that Section 23
is not exhaustive.
43. Union of India v Pramod Gupta, 2005 AIR SCW 4645; JT 2005 (8) SC 203; 2005 (7)
scale 187; AIR 2005 SC 3708; (2005) 12 SCC 1.
44. Singh’s analysis (2012: 48) of 325 High Court Cases in Punjab and Haryana
revealed that litigation benefits high value properties more because the burden to
prove the market value is on the owner although all the relevant information
regarding land records is possessed by the government and richer farmers have
more resources for litigation.
45. Levien (2011) has argued: “The law only requires that a majority of land be
purchased, not a majority of land-holders agree to surrender their land.”
46. Chandra (2008) shows that the claim of fulfilling the public purpose of “generating
employment” does not stand the test of scrutiny.
47. Levien’s (2012) study of Mahindra World City (MWC) on the outskirts of Rajasthan,
on whose behalf the Rajasthan State Industrial and Investment Corporation
(RIICO) acquired land, revealed that even if four times the price had been paid,
MWC would still have been left with a large profit.

References

Ackerman, B. A. 1977. Private Property and the Constitution. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Alpern, A. and Durst, S. 1984. Holdouts! New York: McGraw-Hill.
Asif, M. 1999. “Land Acquisition Act—Need for an Alternative Paradigm.” Economic and
Political Weekly, 34(25): 1564–6.
Balagopal, K. 2007. “Illegal Acquisition in Tribal Areas.” Economic and Political Weekly,
42(40): 4029–34.
Banerjee, A., Bardhan, P., Basu, K., Chaudhury, M. D., Ghatak, M., Guha, A. S.,
Majumdar, M., Mookherjee, D., and Ray, D. 2007. “Beyond Nandigram: Industrial-
isation in West Bengal.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17): 1487–9.
Blume, L. and Rubinfeld, D. L. 1984. “Compensation for Takings: An Economic
Analysis.” California Law Review, 72: 569–628.
Chakravorty, S. 2013. The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict and Consequence. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Chandra, N. K. 2008. “Tata Motors in Singur: A Step towards Industrialisation or
Pauperisation.” Economic and Political Weekly, 43(50): 36–51.

173
The Land Question in India

Coase, R. H. 1959. “The Federal Communications Commission.” Journal of Law and

Economics, 2: 1–40.
Coase, R. H. 1960. “The Problem of Social Cost.” Journal of Law and Economics, 3: 1–44.
Epstein, R. A. 1985. Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fernandes, W. 2008. “Paying the Price for Someone Else’s Displacement.” Available at:
Council for Social Justice and Peace—Goa, <http://www.csjpgoa.org/ecology-and-
environment/forests-and-tribal-issues/paying-the-price-for-someone-else%E2%80%
99s-displacement/> (accessed February 20, 2014).
Fischel, W. A. 1995. Regulatory Takings: Law, Economics and Politics. Cambridge, MA.:
Harvard University Press.
Fischel, W. A. and Shapiro, P. 1988. “Takings, Insurance and Michelman: Comments
on Economic Interpretations of ‘Just Compensation’ Law.” Journal of Legal Studies,
17(2): 269–93.
Fisher, W. W., III. 1988. “The Significance of Public Perceptions of the Takings Doctrine.”
Columbia Law Review, 88(8): 1774–94.
Ghatak, M. and Ghosh, P. 2011. “The Land Acquisition Bill: A Critique and a Proposal.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 46(41): 65–72.
Gohain, H. 2006. “Land Question in Assam—A Short Note.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 41(32): 3459–60.
Gonsalves, C. 2010. “Judicial Failure and Land Acquisition for Corporates.” Economic
and Political Weekly, 45(52): 37–42.
Grossman, S. J. and Hart, O. D. 1980. “Takeover Bids, the Free Rider Problem and the
Theory of the Corporation.” Bell Journal of Economics, 11: 42–64.
Guha, A. 2004. “Land Acquisition in a West Bengal District.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 39(42): 4620.
Guha, A. 2007. “Peasant Resistance in West Bengal a Decade before Singur and
Nandigram.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42(37): 3706–11.
Hardikar, J. 2013. A Village Awaits Doomsday. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hohfeld, W. N. 1978 [1919]. Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial
Reasoning. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Iyer, R. 2007. “Towards a Just Displacement and Rehabilitation Policy.” Economic and
Political Weekly, 42(30): 3103–7.
Kakani, R. K., Raghu Ram, T. L., and Tigga, N. S. 2009. “Insights into Land Acquisition
Experiences of Private Businesses in India.” In Land—A Critical Resource for Infrastruc-
ture, edited by R. Lall, India Infrastructure Report series of the 3iNetwork and
the Infrastructure Development Finance Company (IDFC). New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, pp. 135–42.
Kaplow, L. 1986. “An Economic Analysis of Legal Transitions.” Harvard Law Review,
99(3): 509–617.
Kennedy, D. 1981. “Cost-Benefit Analysis of Entitlement Problems: A Critique.” Stanford
Law Review, 33: 387.
Kumar, A. 2011. “The Battle for Land: Unaddressed Issues.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 46(25): 20–3.

174
 Scrutiny of the Law and Its Interpretation

Lahiri-Dutt, K., Krishnan, R., and Ahmad, N. 2012. “Land Acquisition and
Dispossession—Private Coal Companies in Jharkhand.” Economic and Political Weekly,
46(6): 39–45.
Levien, M. 2011. “Rationalising Dispossession: The Land Acquisition and Resettlement
Bills.” Economic and Political Weekly, 46(11): 66–71.
Levien, M. 2012. “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Econ-
omy of Dispossession in India.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4): 933–69.
Marjit, S. 2010. “Guaranteeing Future Claims of Farmers in Land Acquisition:
An Option Pricing Approach.” Economic and Political Weekly, (45)52: 80–2.
Menezes, F. and Pitchford, R. 2004. “A Model of Seller Holdout.” Economic Theory,
24: 231–53.
Merrill, T. W. 1986. “The Economics of Public Use.” Cornell Law Review, 72: 61–116.
Michelman, F. I. 1967. “Property, Utility, and Fairness: Comments on the Ethical
Foundations of ‘Just Compensation’ Law.” Harvard Law Review, 80(6): 1165–258.
Morris, S. and Pandey, A. 2007. “Towards Reform of Land Acquisition Framework in
India.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42(22): 2083–90.
Munch, P. 1976. “An Economic Analysis of Eminent Domain.” Journal of Political
Economy, 84(3): 473–97.
Pal, M. 2013. “Rehabilitation of the ‘Project Affected’: Eminent Domain and Just Com-
pensation.” In Law and Economics, edited by S. Gangopadhyay and V. Santhakumar,
vol. 2: Practice. New Delhi: Sage, pp. 1–18.
Pinto, A. 1998. “Fillip to Land Transfers—Land Acquisition Bill, 1998.” Economic and
Political Weekly, 33(49): 3107–9.
Ramesh, J. and Khan, M. A. 2015. Legislating for Justice—The Making of the 2013 Land
Acquisition Law. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Reddy, R. V. and Reddy, B. S. 2007. “Land Alienation and Local Communities. Case
Studies in Hyderabad-Secunderabad.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42(31): 3233.
Roychowdhury, P. and Sengupta, K. 2012. “Transparency, Complementarity and
Holdout.” Games and Economic Behaviour, 75: 598–612.
Sampat, P. 2013. “Limits to Absolute Power: Eminent Domain and the Right to Land in
India.” Economic and Political Weekly, 48(19): 40–2.
Sathe, D. 2014. “Vicissitudes in the Acquisition of Land: A Case Study.” Economic and
Political Weekly, 49(7): 74–7.
Sax, J. L. 1964. “Takings and the Police Power.” The Yale Law Journal, 74: 36–76.
Singh, R. 2012. Inefficiency and Abuse of Compulsory Land Acquisition: An Enquiry
into the Way Forward.” Economic and Political Weekly, 47(19): 46–53.
Somin, I. 2015. The Grasping Hand: Kelo v City of New London and the Limits of Eminent
Domain. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Underkuffler, L. S. 2006. “Frank I. Michelman: Kelo’s Moral Failure.” William and Mary
Bill of Rights Journal, 15: 377.
Wenar, L. 1997. “The Concept of Property and the Takings Clause.” Columbia Law
Review, 97: 1923–46.

175
7

The Adivasi Land Question in

the Neoliberal Era
Rajesh Bhattacharya, Snehashish Bhattacharya,
and Kaveri Gill

7.1 Introduction

The high rate of economic growth in India since the mid-1980s has led to a
sharp increase in the demand for land and other natural resources by capital.
This has resulted in widespread dispossession of peasants and other commu-
nities from their traditional habitats, loss of control over their means of
production and subsistence and access to common property resources. Con-
sequently, in recent times there has been a huge upsurge in conflicts between
the state and private capital on one side and the dispossessed communities on
the other, with various political and civil society groups often joining the
latter in their resistance to the former.
This is particularly salient in the context of tribal communities (adivasis)
due to their multiple and intimate connections with land and natural
resources, particularly forest resources in the case of forest-dependent com-
munities.1 The significance of the “land question” in adivasi areas becomes
evident from the fact that as per the census of India, 2011, the Scheduled
Tribes, with more than 100 million people constituting over 8 percent of the
total population, are heavily concentrated in states that are rich in forest and
mineral resources.2 The dispossession of adivasis of their customary and trad-
itional rights to land and forest resources looms large across modern Indian
history, both colonial and postcolonial. The adivasis have been brought to the
heart of political economy in India in the current conjuncture by, first, the
political resistance of the adivasis to their forcible dispossession by the state
and private capital (Dandekar and Choudhury 2010), and second, largely in
response to these movements, a series of radical legislation actions such as the
 The Adivasi Land Question

Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA) and the Scheduled
Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act,
2006 (FRA).3 These acts seek to significantly decentralize the governance struc-
ture of the areas that are densely populated by the adivasi communities (i.e., the
Fifth Schedule areas as defined by the Constitution) by enabling self-
governance mechanisms, as well as to provide constitutional recognition of a
wide range of traditional rights of the adivasis over forest lands and resources.
Together, PESA and FRA could alter the relation between the adivasis and the
state in a more fundamental way than any other legislation in independent
India.4 These legislative acts not only seek to grant autonomy to adivasi com-
munities defined at the local level, but also make it mandatory to obtain their
consent before any acquisition of the resources can take place.
However, despite this legislation, dispossession of the adivasis has
continued—and even intensified—in recent times. Further, since their prom-
ulgation, PESA and FRA have faced continuous opposition to their implemen-
tation, including attempts to dilute those provisions in the acts that protect
adivasi autonomy and rights over land and forest resources. The dual processes
of recognition and violation of adivasi rights present a specific conundrum. In
legislating PESA and FRA, the Indian state comes through as an empowering
agency that recognizes the rights of the adivasis and enables them to exercise
these rights (even if pressured into doing so by popular movements); in
forcible acquisition of adivasi land, through violation and/or dilution of the
same legislative acts, the state comes across as a predatory force robbing
people of their rights and dislocating them at will (often coerced by corporate
capital into abrogating its responsibilities to people). It appears that the state
gives with one hand what it takes away with the other.
One resolution of the conundrum that has been advanced in the existing
literature privileges the role of political movements and civil society organiza-
tions in pressurizing the reluctant state—captive to powerful economic inter-
ests within and outside—to pass progressive legislation. In such circumstances,
it is not surprising that the state often reneges on its own commitments to the
people by violating or not implementing the legislation in their true spirit,
unless otherwise forced to by popular pressure.5 While being sympathetic to
this position, we, however, argue that insofar as the state is seen to operate
within the neoliberal discourse of governance, there is a need to problematize
the latter itself in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of the nature
and implications of state interventions.
While the neoliberal economic discourse insists on well-defined property
rights and free markets as instruments of good governance, the use of extra-
market force, in the form of forcible acquisition of land, constitutes a violation
of the same principles. In this chapter, we argue that the framing of laws such
as PESA and FRA need not necessarily represent the forced hand of the state;

177
The Land Question in India

rather, it might inaugurate a space of rights-based negotiation/consultation as

part of a neoliberal governance structure that seeks to replace discretionary
violence by mandatory “construction of consent” (Harvey 2005) as supple-
ments to the market. Thus PESA and FRA could also be used to universalize
neoliberal principles and deepen their hegemonic reach.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. In Section 7.2, we point to the
problematic character of land as a commodity, in general, and in the presence
of an “outside” of capital, in particular. Specifically, we emphasize the consti-
tutive role of violence in sustaining land as private property and commodity
through an erasure of community. Section 7.3 traces the long history of
dispossession of adivasis from their land in colonial as well as in independent
India. In Section 7.4, we discuss the new mode of governance of adivasi land
inaugurated by PESA and FRA as a potentially sharp break from the past.
We discuss how failures in implementation of PESA and FRA, and the con-
tinued salience of violence in acquiring adivasi land, present a particularly
rigid face of neoliberalism bent on securing the free flow of land for capital.
In Section 7.5, however, we argue that by adopting an expansive notion of
property rights and by instituting mandatory consent-seeking from the
adivasis for any acquisition of their resources, the new governance structure
inscribed in PESA and FRA points to a more protean face of neoliberal order,
which can instrumentally deploy adivasi “rights” and “autonomy” to facilitate
access to resources for expansion of capital. Section 7.6 concludes.

7.2 Land, Property, and Community

The “land question” has traditionally been central to the narrative of transition
from precapitalist to capitalist economies. At the heart of the “land question”
lies the processes of dispossession of direct producers from independent access
to means of production (and subsistence), most importantly, land and natural
resources. Marx (1977) used the term “primitive accumulation” to refer to the
destruction of noncapitalist social spaces for commoditization of labor power,
means of production and means of subsistence, that is, for the creation of the
conditions of existence of capitalist production. Central to Marx’s discussion of
primitive accumulation is the emphasis on violence, most prominently, in
instituting private property in land as an instrument of dispossession. The
term “primitive accumulation” has gained new currency in contemporary
India in the context of land acquisition for industrial, infrastructural, and
developmental projects, which often see a violent encounter between corporate
capital and the state on one hand, and resistant people on the other.6
In this chapter, we depart from the traditional use of the concept of primi-
tive accumulation within the narrative of transition from precapitalism to

178
 The Adivasi Land Question

capitalism. Our chapter is theoretically informed by a range of recent works

that argue that primitive accumulation does not constitute the prehistory of
capitalism, but is rather one of the conditions of existence of capitalist produc-
tion (see Bhattacharya 2010; Harvey 2003; Sanyal 2007, among others). The
central idea that informs these works is that capital must continuously engage
with its (noncapitalist) “outside” for access to resources for its expanded
reproduction (Chatterjee 2008; Sanyal 2007).
Land is a peculiar “commodity.” It is bought and sold in the market just like
any other commodity. Yet, as Polanyi (2001) reminds us, land is simply a gift
of nature. It is not socially produced, and hence, it cannot be a “commodity”
in the true sense, that is, an object socially produced for sale. Polanyi refers to
land as a “fictitious” commodity; land becomes a commodity by virtue of the
legal system that allows it to be monopolizable and alienable. Under the laws
of private property, the globe can be parceled among individuals with exclu-
sive property rights over their parcels.
In the liberal theory of property—for example, in Locke’s (1988) labor
theory of property—rights to life, liberty, and property are natural rights.
While all land belonged originally to humanity in common, what Locke refers
to as the “state of nature,” right to life necessitates some individual possession
of nature’s resources for securing food, shelter, clothing, and so on. An indi-
vidual has a right to apply her labor to land to secure her necessities, and
thereby create private property in land. In Locke, private property in land
follows from private property in labor power, and therefore, from individuated
human beings. The reality or possibility of communal reproduction of life
based on communal labor on common land is elided. The transition from
common land to private property in land via application of private labor is
justified by potential private benefits of enclosures, which, in turn, act as
incentives for individuals to increase productivity of enclosed land. Thus,
land as private property came to be justified by deservingness grounded in a
social discourse on productivity.
It is a short step from the productive use of land to the productive character
of the people using the land. In colonial discourse, the Indian subjects were
categorized in a racially hierarchical order into “superior” castes, that is, semi-
civilized population groups engaged in settled agriculture, and “inferior”
tribes, that is, uncivilized people who were engaged in hunting-gathering,
slash-and-burn agriculture, or pastoralism. This characterization justified
right by conquest on productivist grounds, for example, taking away of tribal
land, as was stated in the official debates during the period of emergence of
colonial Indian Forest Acts (Guha 2000).7
Private or public property (as opposed to commons) is predicated on the
violent erasure of the community. Property, in turn, creates commodities and
markets. In a community that relies on nature for useful objects for their

179
The Land Question in India

collective survival, nature is a bundle of use-values. On the contrary, in a

society of private individuals, that is, private property-owning individuals,
reproduction of life requires consumption of products of private labor
exchanged in the market as commodities (which have exchange-values, in
addition to use-values). In Locke’s “state of nature,” collective human exist-
ence is structured around use-values, where the communities collectively
appropriate use-values. Use-values belong to, and acquire their significance,
in the space of social interaction and not private consumption. In contrast, in
a commodity economy, social relations between individuals are mediated by
commodities such that use-values of commodities become a matter of private
consumption, and exchange-values become the medium of social interaction
(Basu 2012).8
In a commodity economy, the meanings of commodities—including land
as the fictitious commodity—are derived from the socially constructed notion
of the “self” rather than the community. In a community economy, on the
other hand, the meaning of land—as the “repository of a seemingly infinite
variety of potential use-values ‘spontaneously provided by Nature’ ” (Harvey
1982: 334)—is derived from connection of community to commons, which
privileges the “unique,” non-homogenizable and non-substitutable character
of land. When such a community economy encounters the commodity econ-
omy, land fails to circulate between them as a commodity since use-values in
a community resist homogenization in terms of (exchange-) values in the
commodity space.
In such a context, homogenization of land in the commodity space is
premised on the destruction of the community. The replacement of commu-
nity by a society of private-property-owning individuals entails violence,
because two very different (wo)man–nature relations are counterposed to
each other. In the context of contemporary acquisition of adivasi land in
India by the government for industrial or mining projects, Basu (2012: 224)
argues, “violence signifies the absence of communication, the presence of
difference in language, ethics, values or law.” The fiction of land as property
arising out of the application of individual labor is sustained by suppressing
the history of violence involved in destruction of the community.
The flip side of commodification of land is the commodification of labor
power—the labor power of those who do not deserve property, and are hence
dispossessed of land through primitive accumulation. With both labor power
and land emerging as commodities, we have not just an economy character-
ized by private property and commodity production, but specifically a capit-
alist economy, where the circulation of land as commodity is driven by the
logic of capital. The owner of land has a claim to rent, that is, a cut of the
surplus value produced on land. Any stream of revenue (such as an annual
rent) can be considered interest on some imaginary, fictitious capital. Land

180
 The Adivasi Land Question

becomes a pure financial asset, which is bought and sold according to the rent
it yields. Capital circulates through land markets promoting activities on the
land that conform to the production of the highest (surplus) value. Thus land,
which is an infinite bundle of use-values in the “state of nature,” takes its most
“civilized” form in capitalism, that is, a pure financial asset indistinguishable
from other speculative forms of capital.
It must be noted here that even though private property is the quintessen-
tial form of property in capitalism, it often masquerades as “public” property,
for example, when nationalized resources like forests, minerals, and so on, are
leased to private capitalists for profit-making activities. This is particularly true
in the adivasi context, where resources from which adivasis are dispossessed
(forest lands, farmland, etc.) are not converted into private property per se, but
are nationalized before being made available for use by capitalists.
In contemporary India, the encounter between the state and corporate capital
on one hand, and the adivasis on the other, exemplifies the clash between the
commodity and the noncommodity character of land. When the tribal people of
Niyamgiri hills in Odisha rejected the multinational company Vedanta’s pro-
posal to mine bauxite in those hills, they asserted the “uniqueness” of their land
and rejected the value-calculus that sought to homogenize lands in the com-
modity space.9 Incidents like this, and they are far from rare in contemporary
India, signal the limits of commodification of land and the circulation of capital
in land markets. Given that neoliberal policies focus on well-defined property
rights and well-functioning markets, our intervention in this chapter thus
constitutes a problematization of the contemporary neoliberal governance of
land in India.

7.3 The Dispossession of Adivasis in India

The long history of systematic and continuous dispossession of tribal popula-

tions from their natural habitats began in the colonial period. The Indian
Forest Act of 1878, by one stroke of the pen, erased customary rights of the rural
population to forest products and declared the forests, covering one-fourth of
the land area, to be the property of the state. The act made a clear distinction
between “rights” and “privileges” over forest resources, stating that “customary
usage” of forest resources by villagers was not their right, but “merely [a]
privilege” accorded to them by the state (Sivaramakrishnan 1995: 14).
The independent Indian state carried this endeavor further by replacing
“privileges” with “concessions.” National interests trumped all other claims
of forest-dependent communities (Kulkarni 1987). The National Forest Policy
of 1952 stated that while communities residing in the neighborhood of forests

181
The Land Question in India

may naturally make use of forest products, “[s]uch use, however, should in no
event be permitted at the cost of national interests. The accident of village
being situated close to a forest does not prejudice the right of the country as a
whole to receive the benefits of a national asset” (Government of India 1952).
Since national interests were identified with industrialization, the disposses-
sion of tribal population groups due to mining, construction of dams, roads,
factories, and other development projects accelerated with the big push for
industrialization after independence.
At present, 80 percent of the tribal population of India is concentrated in
an almost contiguous belt that spans the states of Andhra Pradesh, Odisha,
Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat
(Fernandes 2008). A significant part of this belt is forestland on which the
adivasi population is dependent for resources, while other lands are common
property resources. Such areas with a preponderance of adivasi populations are
identified by the government as the Fifth Schedule Areas and are accorded
protection under the constitution (Government of India 2002), while tribal
lands in the Northeast are accorded protection under the Sixth Schedule.
Despite the constitutional protection, the tribal population in these regions
has been regularly displaced for development projects through “legalized”
land alienation by using colonial-era acts such as the Land Acquisition Act
of 1894 (Fernandes 2008). While, in the absence of proper national-level data,
it is extremely difficult to determine the exact figure for development-induced
displacement, reliable yet conservative estimates put the number between 21
million and 60 million (Fernandes 2007; Mahapatra 1999: 5). Estimates rec-
ognized by the Planning Commission say that 55 percent of all displaced
persons up to the year 2001 were tribal people (Government of India 2002),
while among the total number of people displaced due to development pro-
jects, 47 percent are from the tribal population (Government of India 2014).
As Roy (1999: 19) puts it, “[t]he ethnic ‘otherness’ of their victims [the tribal
people] takes some of the pressure off the nation-builders. It’s like having an
expense account. Someone else pays the bills.”
Interestingly, it is not only the “productivist” paradigm (valorizing the
“commodity” form of land) that has provided the artillery against the adivasis.
There is an entire discourse that has taken shape over a long time focusing on
the uniqueness of land, and hence, as argued earlier, its noncommodity
character. This is the discourse on wilderness, wildlife, biodiversity, climate
change and so on, which can be broadly categorized as the “conservationist”
argument. In this discourse, land is unique, nonreproducible, and nonsubsti-
tutable and thus must be protected from market transactions in property
through legislation cordoning off land from the reach of the market.
The Indian Forest Conservation Act, 1980, by subordinating the tribal com-
munities to conservation objectives and by viewing them as the “encroachers,”

182
 The Adivasi Land Question

dealt a blow to tribal rights over forest resources (Kumar and Kerr 2012).
The forest-dependent communities came to be seen as exploiting nature for
narrow material interests of subsistence, and thus being incapable of greater
ecological concerns. In 2002, the Ministry of Environment and Forests, fol-
lowing a Supreme Court ruling, ordered the eviction of all forest encroachers
within a period of six months. Almost 150,000 hectares of land were “cleared,”
leading to eviction of an estimated 300,000 tribal and nontribal forest-dwelling
families (Kumar and Kerr 2012). The public outcry following this, coupled with
intense pressure from social movements (Vaidya 2016), led to the enactment
of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA). Yet, according to a Ministry of Rural
Development report, forest degradation rather than encroachment remains
the main problem (Government of India 2009: 111–12).
For accelerated economic growth, land needs to be drawn into the com-
modity space so that it can freely flow from low-value to high-value uses. But
adivasis often look at their natural habitat as “unique” because of their specific
material and cultural connection to land premised on community-
conditioned use-values procured from nature. This creates a barrier to com-
moditization of adivasi land. Given these limits to circulation of land as
commodity in adivasi areas, forcible acquisition by the state is often called
forth to supplement the market. However, in the neoliberal era, the state itself
is subjected to powerful critiques for its interventions in the market. Thus, the
neoliberal order needs a new governance structure to deal with limits of the
land market in adivasi areas.

7.4 State Recognition of Tribal Rights and the Political

Economy of Capitalism

In postindependence India, the governance of the tribal areas (or the Fifth
Schedule Areas) deliberately privileged the Union executive (the governor of
the state) over individual state legislatures, ostensibly to protect the adivasis
from onslaughts on their economic, cultural, and political life by the majority
communities (Kurup 2008). However, in the actual governance of such areas,
the objective of nation building often trumped the goal of tribal welfare or
autonomy, as we have noted in the previous section. Given the general trend
toward decentralization in the last three decades (premised on the neoliberal
critique of the centralized state) and the emphasis on market-led as opposed to
state-led development, governance of tribal areas had to move away from the
“trusteeship” model around the figure of the governor in Fifth Schedule Areas
to a “self-government” model based on decentralized institutions.
This was accomplished by the seventy-third amendment to the constitution
in 1992, which created a decentralized governance structure across rural India,

183
The Land Question in India

including the Scheduled Areas (Pal 2000). In the tribal areas, it replaced the
traditional authority structures of the adivasis by uniform, administratively
defined, and decentralized institutions called the Panchayati Raj institutions
(PRIs). Unlike the rest of India, where these structures filled a vacuum of
democratic local governance, in the Scheduled Areas they actually set up
dual authorities of the adivasis and the state. After the adivasis mobilized to
protest this backdoor attempt to dilute their autonomy—invested in their own
traditional bodies of authority and governance—and the courts deemed the
extension of PRIs to Scheduled Areas unconstitutional (namely, the ruling of
the Andhra Pradesh High Court in 1995), the government enacted the PESA in
1996 (Pal 2000).
At its core, PESA recognizes “customary law, social and religious practices
and traditional management practices of community resources” (Government
of India 1996: 1) prevalent in Fifth Schedule Areas, and aims to devolve power
to local adivasi populations to allow them to genuinely self-govern in certain
critical spheres. In the act, provisions are made for a definition of a Gram Sabha
(village assembly), the basic village-based unit of governance in rural India
that is appropriate to adivasi areas, and is not just an extension of the PRIs as it
operates in the rest of the country.
[T]he Gram Sabha-centric PESA system cannot function unless the Gram Sabha is
located in a habitation, the natural living unit of the community . . . It is only thus
that the Gram Sabha, comprising all adult members of the habitation, can play
the pre-eminent role in all consultative stages and in final decision-making, as
provided for in PESA. (Government of India 2013: 289)

The Forest Rights Act of 2006 (FRA) further complemented the fundamental
focus of the PESA on autonomy of adivasis. The FRA, in letter and spirit, is
perhaps even more pathbreaking in many ways. In its preamble, it acknow-
ledged that
the forest rights on ancestral lands and their [Scheduled Tribes and other
traditional forest dwellers’] habitat were not adequately recognized in the consoli-
dation of State forests during the colonial period as well as in independent India
resulting in historical injustice to the forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other
traditional forest dwellers who are integral to the very survival and sustainability
of the forest system. (Government of India 2006: 1)

Moreover, in justifying why this law was being enacted, it argued “it has
become necessary to address the long-standing insecurity of tenure and access
rights of forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers
including those who were forced to relocate their dwelling due to State devel-
opment interventions” (Government of India 2006: 1).
Under the FRA, adivasi and other communities were given no less than
thirteen rights, including right of ownership over minor forest produce,

184
 The Adivasi Land Question

community rights of entitlements to resources, rights for conversion of pattas

or leases on forest lands to titles, adivasi rights which are accepted as rights of
tribals under any traditional or customary law of the concerned tribes, and
right to in situ rehabilitation in cases where traditional forest dwellers have
been illegally displaced from forestland without rehabilitation prior to 2006
(Government of India 2006: 3–4). In terms of institutional procedures for
determining forest rights, FRA vests the key authority and power with the
Gram Sabhas (Government of India 2006: 7).
Thus both PESA and FRA ostensibly recognize the community mode of
existence and the centrality of common land in adivasi communities. The
emphasis on custom and tradition in these acts is also recognition of adivasi
beings and doings that may be different from those in societies where social
reproduction of life is market-based to a significant extent. This accentuates
the problematic character of land, discussed in the previous section. While the
neoliberal order seeks to “ ‘rigidly oppose’ any centralization of market-
inhibiting policy competencies” (Harmes 2006: 741) by weakening the central
state, decentralization itself may support market-inhibiting forces in certain
areas, for example, in adivasi areas due to the specificities of these communi-
ties discussed before. Further, in adivasi areas, the problem of compensation
for the dispossessed people based on any monetary evaluation of costs and
benefits faces a “language” barrier, so to speak:

Market valuation of rights, which are trampled, to bring water and forest resources
within the ambit of market transactions is impossible. Community life, nature,
and culture—which the adivasis lose—are not purchased in the market. Nor does
there exist any alternative against which their opportunity cost can be calculated.
All these are unique to the forest dwellers, so how can one calculate their market
value? (Basu 2012: 224; emphasis added)

Given these vexing problems, it is no wonder that implementation of

PESA and FRA, in spirit, has been a highly contested process. In the neoliberal
model of governance, the emphasis is on “market-preserving federalism” to
constrain the central government in its “market-inhibiting” interventions
by “locking-in inter-jurisdictional competition” (Harmes 2006: 727). In the
context of India, federalism has been instrumentally used by investors to
involve the states in a race to the bottom. It is only to be expected that state
governments would be reluctant to implement central legislative acts like
PESA and FRA for fear of losing out on investment because of the land
problem.
Hence, it is no wonder that numerous issues plague the operationaliza-
tion and implementation of PESA and FRA across all nine states where
adivasis are concentrated.10 It has been recommended that the Gram Sabhas
should be reconfigured on the basis of adivasi habitations, so that “the

185
The Land Question in India

reconstituted village reflects tribal homogeneity and conforms to the territorial-

cum-habitation boundaries of traditional tribal Sabhas” (Government of
India 2013: 291). However, state governments often disregarded or bypassed
this definition of Gram Sabha in the PESA regulations in defining local admin-
istrative units.
Similarly, the FRA is found to be poorly implemented across the states, as
the forest bureaucracy has not ceded control in most cases (Government of
India 2010). Moreover, individual rights to forest resources continue to be
given priority over community rights by the implementing government
authorities. The distribution of power between the adivasi communities and
frontline officials from the state government is so asymmetrical that it works
against the letter and spirit of the acts, and there are reports of continued
violence by Forest Department officials against adivasis and forest dwellers
(Kumar and Kerr 2012).11
As should be evident from this discussion, PESA and FRA, at least in letter
and spirit, constitute a radical transformation of the state’s approach to gov-
erning the adivasis—from a mode of centralized trusteeship to devolution of
power to the communities and recognition of their community rights. The
resistance to effective implementation of these legislative acts is evidence of a
rigid face of neoliberalism, insensitive to differences and bent on battering
down all barriers to the free flow of land and natural resources to capital.
However, in Section 7.5, we argue that neoliberalism is also capable of a more
flexible stance: more protean and more capable of accommodating differences
in terms of social, economic, and legal structures.

7.5 Of Rights and Consultation: A New Mode of Neoliberal

Governance?

The response of the state in the form of PESA and FRA can be understood as a
reaction to the spread, depth, and scale of adivasi resistance to the corporate
takeover of such resources aided by the government over the last couple of
decades. This, to our mind, is indeed a valid—albeit partial—explanation of
the seemingly paradoxical enactment of PESA and FRA in the neoliberal era.
A regime of capitalist accumulation requires a stable social order, more so
when such accumulation is driven primarily by private capital as in the
neoliberal era. When an intensification of people’s movements threatens
to disrupt such stability, the state may be forced to yield some concessions to
maintain the regime and to minimize costs involved in applying force to
contain the unrest.
However, a deeper probing of the neoliberal mode of governance reveals
another, more fundamental, reason for the recent expansion of a rights-based

186
 The Adivasi Land Question

approach to the adivasi land question, which is often missed by the existing
critiques of neoliberalism. The neoliberal goal of creating a self-regulating
market economy is predicated on a forced separation between economic and
political spheres (Polanyi 2001), where the processes of social reproduction are
subjugated to the logic of the market. Such a separation, which Polanyi
referred to as the dis-embedding of the economy from the society is, in turn,
based on the existence of a generalized commodity relation in all aspects of
production, including land. However, as we have argued before, commodifi-
cation of land is often contested on the ground by communities, which relate
to it in terms of community-conditioned use-values. This signals the limits of
the market and the mobility of capital in land markets. Therefore, market
forces have to be supplemented by force—applied by the state and backed by
the legal system—in breaking down barriers to land markets. In the neoliberal
model of a self-regulating market economy, violence is a nonmarket and,
hence, political intervention. Violence shatters the myth of the strict separ-
ation between the economic and the political spheres that grounds the neo-
liberal order. Violence thus appears to be both essential to and disruptive of
the neoliberal order. The problem with violence is that it resuscitates the
prehistory of property and confirms the presence of community.
Dispossession by force, when it becomes a political issue, has two unsavory
consequences. First, resistance to such dispossession often puts into question
the sanctity of the existing property rights by invoking the history of conquest
behind the existing property rights and by foregrounding the ethics of alter-
native relations to land. Second, resistance to forcible dispossession often
leads to insurgency and rebellion, which presents a law and order problem
that negatively affects the security of property. The sanctity and security of
property is best preserved when the separation between the political and the
economic is sustained, that is, property is not politicized, which is of course
what the utopian neoliberal project is all about.
In our understanding, the rule of property and markets, which together
constitute the core of the very sparse and elegant neoliberal policy prescrip-
tion, requires a mode of governance that directly addresses the question of
dispossession, that is, negotiates the limits of the market in land beyond the
realm of violence. In fact, it should be obvious that a generalized rule of
property rights requires rules to address “dispossession” of property rights.
If the rule of law has to have a nonarbitrary and universal premise (including
the specified domain of exceptions), then that rule of law must be sophisti-
cated enough to recognize diversity of property rights on the ground and the
diverse modes of exchange of property rights in order to fill up a legal void
where dispossession thrives. We do not seek to de-emphasize the persistence
of violence in supplementing market forces when it comes to the acquisition
of adivasi land in the neoliberal era. However, we understand PESA and FRA,

187
The Land Question in India

despite the many problems of their implementation we have noted before, as

constituting a new modality of negotiation with the adivasis over land. This
new modality is premised on the valorization of community, captured through
the recognition of nonstandard rights, that is, traditional and community
rights, as well as nonmarket communication, that is, consultation and consent.
The intimate connection of adivasis to land—based as it is to a significant
extent on “commons” and non-market exchanges—resists integration of the
adivasis by the state on the plane of individual property rights and social
interactions primarily through market exchange. Both property rights and
markets need to be supplemented if the adivasis need to be integrated under
a uniform order of governance. It may be instructive to take an example from
outside the Indian context. At the height of the “land grab” in African coun-
tries following the global commodity price spike in 2008, and facing/fearing
popular resistance, a World Bank report made the following point:

Failure to map and record land rights, even if only at the community level, makes
it difficult to identify boundaries and legitimate owners as a basis for engaging in
mutually agreed to land transfers. Recording rights provides outside investors
with “somebody to talk to,” a legitimate and authorized partner to negotiate on the
nature of investments and on compensation.
(Deininger and Byerlee 2011: 98, emphasis added)

It is interesting to note the emphasis on “talking,” on face-to-face interaction.

In ideal markets, people do not talk to each other, commodities do. If individ-
uals do not want to sell their land, the market ends right there. The “rule” of
markets also recognizes the boundary of the market, that is, where individuals
refuse to participate in the market. The space of negotiation/consultation/
conversation appears as an anomaly in an ideal market. In our understanding,
however, negotiation/consultation/conversation is a supplement that must
address not the absence of the market per se, but the presence of a limit to the
market ordained by its own liberal logic, a limit that must, however, be crossed
somehow, to gain access to resources that cannot be secured within the domain
of capital. Consultation, or “construction of consent” (Harvey 2005), emerges
as a necessary mode of engagement of capital with its “outside,” particularly
when violence (as the alternative mode of engagement) works against the
hegemony of the neoliberal order.
The importance of consent in the context of the adivasi land question is
easily seen if we look at the implications of FRA for transfer of tribal land.
We have already seen that FRA recognizes a variety of rights vested in the
individual or the community, making forceful taking of adivasi land more
difficult. For example, no transfer of tribal land is allowed unless FRA has been
implemented in the concerned area, that is, the rights of forest dwellers have
to be settled before any land transfer can be made. Moreover, under FRA, the

188
 The Adivasi Land Question

Gram Sabha has to give consent to any transfer of land. At the same time,
through delineation and registration of individual or community rights, FRA
defines the parties who must give consent and the extent of resources over
which their consent is required.
With the institutionalization of such a legal–administrative order, dispos-
session can now be addressed within a new paradigm of resettlement/rehabili-
tation. However, resettlement/rehabilitation, being based on a cost–benefit
analysis, is ultimately based on the calculation of exchange-values. In place of
impersonal market prices, we now have negotiated rehabilitation/resettle-
ment packages. The purpose of consultation is to communicate the costs
and benefits of giving up land for industrial or mining projects. The loss of
use-values to the adivasis giving up land is reduced to a monetary measure
of cost (evaluated at market prices), while the gain in use-values or values
(if those use-values are to be secured through the market as commodities)
is aggregated in a monetary measure of benefit. Thus, “community” and
“autonomy” can be instrumentally used, in and through the consultative
process governed by PESA and FRA, to extend the logic of market valuation
into the space of community use-values.
The possibility of expansion of the neoliberal order through PESA and
FRA has been noted before (Naidu 2011; Savyasaachi 2011). On the unique
connection between human beings and nature that is not premised on
ownership, as seen in significant degree among the adivasis, Savyasaachi
(2011: 59) argues that

it is not possible to belong to a place and own it as well, because belonging comes
with mutuality, which is premised on the acceptance, that there is no legitimate
ground for ownership of the “right to disposal” over that which has not been
created with human work.

In general, individual titles have been preferred over community rights in

cases of implementation of FRA in India, as we have noted before. This has
been an instrument for drawing adivasi communities into the ambit of private
property rights commensurate with the culture of commodities and the logic
of capital. A World Bank (2006) report argues that secure and efficient tenure
over natural resources, such as forests, provides communities with the incen-
tives to invest as ownership offers opportunities for capitalizing of forest
resources (Ramdas 2009). There is evidence that some state governments
may actively promote export/urban market-oriented agriculture on individual
titles granted under FRA, tying the FRA in to employment programs such as
the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS):

Now tribals can cultivate their lands with dignity without any fear. Tribals can
plant rubber plants, mango, cashewnut, orange, lime or palm oil as per the local

189
The Land Question in India

conditions. The State Government would also develop lands in tribal areas and the
tribals will be paid daily wages under NREGS programme though they are working
in their own land. (News report quoted in Ramdas 2009: 69)

On the other hand, the delineation and recording of rights can be used for
“invisible” dispossession. At one extreme, the provisions of PESA and FRA can
be manipulated to cheat adivasis of their resources. There is ample evidence
that communities can be manipulated into supporting a corporate takeover of
land; sometimes fake documents proving consent of the Gram Sabhas are
produced to get clearances from the government (Yadav 2014).12 It has been
argued that, for corporate projects in areas of indigenous habitation across the
world, consultative processes are often manipulated.

[A] frequent indigenous criticism is that World Bank-sponsored consultation

meetings are used primarily by project officials and consultants to give legitimacy
to the project, gain access to communities, divide opinion and pressure local
indigenous communities to accept the external agendas of governments, devel-
opment agencies, big business and NGOs. (Griffiths 2005: 15)

But, in a subtler sense, the recording of rights has often meant a contraction,
rather than an expansion of access to resources for the adivasis, as the follow-
ing account by a Savara woman from Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh
suggests:

I don’t know whether I was (more) free before the act or after the act. Earlier I was a
“thief” in the eyes of the law, but learnt to survive. Now I am “legal” and have
legally lost my land as the government took all and gave me nothing. We have
“legally” been granted “two acres” of community land, whereas all this is ours
(pointing to the hills beyond). We reject these titles. (Quoted in Ramdas 2009: 72)

It has been widely noted that the settlement of rights under FRA has predom-
inantly been restricted to individual rights. The settlement of community
rights has not only faced resistance from the forest bureaucracy but has
received a lukewarm response from the communities themselves. Often, this
is because “[p]eople did not feel the need to claim community rights because
they had never faced any problem in accessing community resources in forest
areas” (Samarthan 2012: 32). Recording and delineation of rights (de jure) is
most commonly seen as an expansion of rights, but from the point of adivasis
with traditional access to nature (de facto), this often means just the opposite:
exclusion from a world to which (s)he always belonged.
The current focus on dispossession and rights is as much a prerogative of
the neoliberal capitalist order as it is the outcome of consciousness born out
of historic and ongoing struggles against dispossession. This is not to deny the
importance of struggles against dispossession, but rather to highlight the
specific response in the neoliberal era to such struggles. A generalized regime

190
 The Adivasi Land Question

for property rights can harbor different modes of social exchanges, market as
well as nonmarket. The neoliberal universalism is not based on homogeneity,
but ordered differences. While not denying the importance of FRA, PESA, and
so on, to the tribal population and protection of their concerns, one must also
be attentive to the possibility of differentiated integration of resistant groups,
of assimilation of the “outside” as “difference.”

7.6 Conclusion

In this chapter we have sought to deflect the existing debate on policies related
to adivasis away from violence, even when recognizing that violence is every-
where, and unimaginably destructive in its consequences for adivasis, toward
consultation/consent as the new mode in which the state seeks to address the
adivasis. We trace this transformation to the emergence of a protean regime of
property and market, willing to accept its limits even as it seeks to extend
inexorably beyond it.
We argue that legislation such as PESA and FRA represent a radical departure
in the mode of governance of tribal population in India in terms of the
institutionalization of autonomy of adivasi communities and recognition of
traditional, customary rights, particularly in the context of forest lands and
other natural resources. The land question in the adivasi areas is more complex
than in other places as the adivasis have historically remained outside the
private property relations and their community ethics often resist inclusion
within the generalized commodity space. Thus a new mode of governance
recognizing nonstandard rights (community, traditional, customary) and insti-
tutionalizing consultation in lieu of or as a supplement to market exchange
was called for. The significance of the emergence of PESA and FRA should be
understood in this context.
This is not to argue that under the neoliberal regime, the adivasi land
question can be satisfactorily resolved within the PESA–FRA governance struc-
ture. The widespread failure of implementation of the laws and the
continued—even increased—dispossession of the tribal population over the
last two decades paint a completely different picture. To our mind, such
failures are symptomatic of the friction between the rigid face of the neoliberal
order, which seeks unfettered flow of land and resources for impatient capital,
and the emergent governance structure, which supposedly seeks to
“empower” the adivasi communities. We argue that the neoliberal order can
be flexible enough to make the new governance structure an instrument in
advancing its hegemonic reach. The quest for a completely unregulated mar-
ket and supreme freedom of capital—a quest that attempts to undermine the
rights-based legal framework—on one hand, and the thrust for an idealized

191
The Land Question in India

institutional governance mechanism—based on legal recognition of hetero-

geneity and the limits of property and markets—on the other, mark the
contradictory utopian pursuits of capitalist development in India in the
current conjuncture.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Amit Basole, Pranab Basu, Suraj Jacob, Priya Sangameswaran,
both the editors of this volume, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on
earlier drafts of this chapter. We would also like to thank the participants in the
conference on “The Return of the Land Question: Dispossession, Livelihoods, and
Contestation in India’s Capitalist Transition” on March 4–6, 2014, sponsored by
University of Melbourne, IDSK Kolkata, and IIM Calcutta.

Notes

1. The word adivasis means original inhabitants or indigenous people. In India, they
are referred to as Scheduled Tribes as defined in the Indian Constitution. In this
chapter, we have used the words adivasis, tribal people, and Scheduled Tribes
interchangeably.
2. More than 90 million adivasis live in forested and mineral resource-rich areas.
Almost 60 percent of forest cover of the country is found in tribal areas. The states
with the largest forest cover in terms of absolute area are also states with substantial
tribal populations: Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Maharashtra, and
Madhya Pradesh. With regard to mineral resources, three states with substantial
tribal populations—Odisha (22.1 percent), Chhattisgarh (31.8 percent) and Jhark-
hand (26.3 percent)—account for 70 percent of India’s coal reserves, 80 percent of its
high-grade iron ore, 60 percent of its bauxite, and almost 100 percent of its chromite
reserves.
3. The resistance to the dispossession is often linked to armed insurgencies against the
Indian state in many of the adivasi-dominated areas, led by the Communist Party of
India (Maoist) and some other similar organizations. More than eighty districts in
the heartland of India, most of them with a concentrated adivasi population, have
been declared Left Wing Extremism (LWE)-affected areas by the government of
India. See the website of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India (avail-
able at: <http://mha.nic.in/naxal_new> (accessed March 27, 2016)) for updated
information on policies with respect to LWE-affected areas. This has prompted the
government to undertake special “developmental” policies in these areas, including
prioritization of the implementation of PESA and FRA. Panchayats represent a
decentralized form of governance by a committee at the village level.

192
 The Adivasi Land Question

4. For a fascinating account of the state’s maneuvering in drafting the FRA in its most
expansive ideal, see Vaidya (2016).
5. For example, the architects of the FRA foresaw that a mere promulgation of
legal rights has no bearing on their actual implementation, and the latter
would only happen “through struggle, it will not be through the state” (Vaidya
2016).
6. Acquisition of land by the state is not a new phenomenon in India. Under British
rule, the colonial state acquired land for “public” purposes using the clause of
“eminent domain” under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Post-independence,
this framework remained the basis for land acquisition by the Indian state, till the
enactment of a new act in 2013, which continues to be a contested legislation.
We briefly trace the evolution of land acquisition in the adivasi areas by the state,
during the colonial era as well as in independent India (both before and after the
onset of economic reforms in 1991), in Section 7.3 of this chapter.
7. Through the equation between states of nature, common lands, nonsettled culti-
vation and “wilde wastelands,” the doctrine of enclosure trumped the rights of pre-
existing inhabitants (Whitehead 2012: 2).
8. Sweezy (1942) argued that Marx dropped use-value as the object of analysis of
political economy because he was looking at social relations, whereas use-values
belong to private relations between individuals and goods. Our understanding
of use-value is informed rather by Basu (2012), who has argued that in the
absence of private property rights and individuation in society, that is, in the
context of communities and commons, use-values do not refer to private con-
sumption and subjective relations between individuals and goods, but rather to
the community-given meaning to relations between human beings and want-
satisfying characteristics of nature held in common. Thus our use of use-value,
following Basu, is a departure from its dominant use in the traditional Marxian
literature.
9. See Sethi (2016b) on the legal battles surrounding this issue, and the Odisha state’s
arguments asking the Supreme Court to squash or to revisit the twelve Gram
Sabhas’ unanimous resolutions against mining in the area.
10. It lies beyond the purview of this chapter to discuss in detail the vast empirical
literature documenting poor implementation of both PESA and FRA across the
states. Inter alia, see chapter 8 of Government of India (2013) for a succinct
discussion of implementation of PESA and the minutes of the review meeting
conducted by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs with the Secretaries of various states
on the status of implementation of FRA (Government of India 2015).
11. For example, the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs recently succumbed to pressure to
re-interpret the FRA and allow the Maharashtra forest department to regain control
over the lucrative trade in forest produce such as tendu leaves and bamboo (see
Sethi 2016a).
12. See Choudhury (2016) for an example of a more blatant illustration of such
instances, in the context of iron mining in the tribal forest lands of Keonjhar
district in Odisha.

193
The Land Question in India

References

Basu, P. K. 2012. “Rethinking the values of the Left.” Rethinking Marxism, 24(2): 221–39.
Bhattacharya, R. 2010. “Capitalism in Post-Colonial India: Primitive Accumulation
Under Dirigiste and Laissez Faire Regimes.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. Available at: <http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcon-
tent.cgi?article=1204&context=open_access_dissertations> (accessed March 31, 2016).
Chatterjee, P. 2008. “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India.” Economic
and Political Weekly, 43(16): 53–62.
Choudhury, C. 2016. “The Keonjhar Takeover.” Outlook, February 8. Available at: <http://
www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/the-keonjhar-take-over/296512> (accessed
March 26, 2016).
Dandekar, A. and Choudhury, C. 2010. “PESA, Left-Wing Extremism and Governance:
Concerns and Challenges in India’s Tribal Districts.” Report of a Study Commissioned
by Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Government of India, Institute of Rural Management,
Anand.
Deininger, K. W. and Byerlee, D. 2011. Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it Yield
Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? Washington, D.C.: World Bank Publications.
Fernandes, W. 2007. “Mines, Mining and Displacement in India.” In Proceedings of 1st
International Conference on Managing the Social and Environmental Consequences of Coal
Mining in India, edited by G. Singh, D. Laurence, and K. Lahiri-Dutt, New Delhi and
Dhanbad: Indian School of Mines University, pp. 333–44.
Fernandes, W. 2008. “Indian Tribes after Sixty Years—A Study.”Sanhati. Available at:
<http://sanhati.com/articles/1094/> (accessed March 31, 2016).
Government of India. 1952. “National Forest Policy.” Government of India, New Delhi.
Government of India. 1996. “The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the
Scheduled Areas) Act.” Government of India, New Delhi.
Government of India. 2002. “Tenth Five Year Plan (2002–2007).” Planning Commis-
sion, Government of India, New Delhi.
Government of India. 2006. “The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers
(Recognition of Forest Rights) Act.” Government of India, New Delhi.
Government of India. 2009. “Draft report of the Committee on State Agrarian Relations
and Unfinished Task of Land Reforms.” Ministry of Rural Development, Government
of India, New Delhi.
Government of India. 2010. “Report of the National Committee on Forest Rights.”
Ministry of Environment and Forest, Government of India, New Delhi.
Government of India. 2013. “Towards Holistic Panchayat Raj—Twentieth Anniversary
Report of the Expert Committee on Leveraging Panchayats for Efficient Delivery
of Public Goods and Services.” Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Government of India,
New Delhi.
Government of India. 2014. “Report of the High Level Committee on Socio-Economic,
Health and Educational Status of Tribal Communities in India.” Ministry of Tribal
Affairs, Government of India, New Delhi.
Government of India. 2015. Minutes of the Review Meeting on the Implementation of Forest
Rights Act, 2006. Ministry of Tribal Affairs. Available at: <http://www.tribal.nic.in/

194
 The Adivasi Land Question

WriteReadData/CMS/Documents/201507301119105175071merged_document.pdf>,
accessed September 21, 2016.
Griffiths, T. 2005. “Indigenous Peoples and the Global Environment Facility: Indigenous
Peoples Experiences of GEF-Funded Biodiversity Conservation – A Critical Study.”
Forest Peoples Programme, Moreton-in-Marsh. Available at: <http://www.fore
stpeoples.org/documents/ifi_igo/gef/gef_study_jan05_eng.pdf>, accessed March 31,
2016.
Guha, R. 2000. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the
Himalaya. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Harmes, A. 2006. “Neoliberalism and Multilevel Governance.” Review of International
Political Economy, 13(5): 725–49.
Harvey, D. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kulkarni, S. 1987. “Forest Legislation and Tribals: Comments on Forest Policy
Resolution.” Economic and Political Weekly, 22(12): 2143–8.
Kumar, K. and Kerr, K. 2012. “Democratic Assertions: The Making of India’s Recogni-
tion of Forest Rights Act.” Development and Change, 43(3): 751–71.
Kurup, A. 2008. “Tribal Law in India: How Decentralized Administration Is Extinguish-
ing Tribal Rights and Why Autonomous Tribal Governments Are Better.” Indigenous
Law Journal, 7(1): 87–126.
Locke, J. 1988 (1689). Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Mahapatra, L. K. 1999. Resettlement, Impoverishment, and Reconstruction in India:
Development for the Deprived. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House.
Marx, K. 1977 (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. New York: Vintage
Books.
Naidu, S. 2011. “The Potential of Forest Rights Act.” Sanhati, January 29. Available at:
<http://sanhati.com/excerpted/3197/> (accessed March 31, 2016).
Pal, M. 2000. “Panchayats in Fifth Scheduled Areas.” Economic and Political Weekly,
35(19): 1602–6.
Polanyi, K. [1944] 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Ramdas, S. R. 2009. “Women, Forest Spaces and the Law: Transgressing the Boundaries.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 44(44): 65–73.
Roy, A. 1999. The Cost of Living. London: Flamingo.
Samarthan. 2012. “Recognition of Community Rights under Forest Rights Act in Madhya
Pradesh and Chhattisgarh: Challenges and Way Forward.” UNDP 2012. Available at:
<http://www.undp.org/content/dam/india/docs/DG/recognition-of-community-
rights-under-forest-rights-act-in-madhya-pradesh-and-chhattisgarh-challenges-and-
way-forward.pdf> (accessed March 31, 2016).
Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmen-
tality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. New Delhi and Abingdon: Routledge.
Savyasaachi. 2011. “Forest Rights Act 2006: Undermining the Foundational Position of
the Forest.” Economic and Political Weekly, 46(15): 55–62.

195
The Land Question in India

Sethi, N. 2016a. “Tribal Ministry Relents Over Forest Rights Act.” Business Standard,
January 2016. Available at: <http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-
policy/tribal-ministry-relents-over-forest-rights-act-116010700071_1.html> (accessed
March 26, 2016).
Sethi, N. 2016b. “Odisha Says Tribals Had No Power to Reject Vendanta Bauxite
Mining.” Business Standard, March 2016. Available at: <http://www.business-
standard.com/article/current-affairs/odisha-says-tribals-had-no-power-to-reject-vedanta-
bauxite-mining-116030101027_1.html> (accessed March 26, 2016).
Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1995. “Colonialism and Forestry in India: Imagining the Past in
Present Politics.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37(1): 3–40.
Sweezy, P. 1942. The Theory of Capitalist Development. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Vaidya, A. 2016. “ ‘Word Traps’ and the Drafting of India’s Forest Rights Act.” In Staking
Claims: The Politics of Social Movements in Contemporary Rural India, edited by
U. Chandra and D. Taghioff, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
Whitehead, J. 2012. “John Locke, Accumulation by Dispossession, and the Governance
of Colonial India.” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 42(1): 1–21.
World Bank. 2006. “Unlocking Opportunities for Forest-Dependent People in India.”
Main Report, vol. 1. Report Number 34481-IN. Agriculture and Rural Development
Sector Unit, South Asian Region.
Yadav, A. 2014. “As Coal Blocks Face De-Allocation, a Rush for Environmental Clearance.”
The Hindu, March 2014. Available at: <http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/
as-coalblocks-face-deallocation-a-rush-for-environment-clearance/article5756721.ece>
(accessed March 31, 2016).

196
Part III
Regional Perspectives
8

Noncultivating Households Owning

Land in an Agrarian Economy

Some Observations from Andhra Pradesh

R. Vijay

8.1 Introduction

India’s rural economic structure has been undergoing changes, largely due to
various public policies such as land reform measures, a green revolution
package, and recently, land acquisition for nonagricultural use. Consequently,
there are changes in the decision-making process of the individual economic
agents. One aspect of the structural change is the growing importance of
households owning land but not cultivating the land themselves (Vijay
2012a). Vijay (2012a) shows that the share of these households is increasing
and the share of land owned by them is also increasing; they are the “new
landlords” in the rural areas. An increase in the share of households who own
land but do not cultivate it can have major implications for the growth of the
agrarian sector as these households do not have any incentive to invest in
agriculture. In addition, if these households lease out the land, extraction of
ground rent from the peasantry is a major form of surplus extraction in the
economy, creating constraints to agrarian transformation. In the postinde-
pendence period, there were various attempts to reduce the importance of
these noncultivating, landowning households (NCHs) in the rural areas. One
of the early attempts in public policy was to transform the agrarian structure
through a series of land reform measures, to eliminate the influence of agents
who were not cultivators and who were perceived to have adverse effects on
the cultivating agents. These measures were able to reduce the role of NCHs
who were identified as intermediaries. However, in the new liberal phase there
The Land Question in India

has been a revival of households who own land but do not self-cultivate it, in
other words, a revival of a new class of landlords in the economy. A question
that arises in this context is, why do these households want to hold on to land
in the general context of unviability of agriculture?
An increase in the share of NCHs implies that, over time, households
who were previously cultivators are becoming NCHs but continuing their
interest in their land. If one assumes that a decrease in the share of cultiva-
tors implies diversification of households from cultivation to noncultivation
occupations, why do these households continue to hold on to land? Does
land represent “cultural” value? Or is land seen as a source of “political
power” for the upper class, like the traditional landlords in rural areas?
Or is ownership of land seen as a store of value as well as a productive
asset? In other words, does the idea of downwardly rigid land prices and
lack of alternative sources of income for agricultural labor households
induce them to enter the tenancy market and because of rental income induce
NCHs to hold on to land?
The analysis in this chapter is conducted on two levels: using secondary data
sets and substantiating the claims by presenting information from village
surveys. Three different rounds of the National Sample Survey Organization
(NSSO) (37th, 48th and 59th) on “Assets and Liabilities” have been used to
identify the relative importance of noncultivating households. This source
can provide broad generalizations but the actual process generating these
households might not be captured in these surveys. To substantiate, the
present analysis uses a detailed village survey conducted in nine villages in
erstwhile Andhra Pradesh conducted by Rao and Bharathi as part of a project
“Land and Rural Poverty” in 2003–4.1 There is no claim that these villages are
representative, but what is happening in them is likely to provide information
on trends that may be occurring in other villages.
The rest of this chapter is divided into five sections. In Section 8.2, I analyze
the different rounds of “Assets and Liabilities” of NSSO data to bring out the
importance of NCHs owning land. In Section 8.3, I present information of the
location of the nine villages and the main sources of irrigation. In Section 8.4,
I group the household data into classes based on labor and land relations. This
class-based analysis is used to describe the structure of the village economy
and the importance of NCHs in the rural economy. In this section, farm sector
households are classified and a basic structure of the village economy obtained.
In addition, land market transactions are analyzed to see whether the market
is transferring land to NCHs. In Section 8.5, two conditions for the sustenance
of NCHs owning land is presented. In this section, the role of increasing land
prices and tenancy as potential income sources for NCHs owning land is
discussed. A combination of these two streams of income may explain the
sustenance of the NCHs. The final section concludes.

200
 Noncultivating Households Owning Land

8.2 Noncultivating Households in Rural Areas:

A View from NSSO Rounds

The NSS (National Sample Survey) reports on “Households Assets and Liabil-
ities in India” (1986, 1998, 2005) give some indicators of the changing rural
structure. The survey was conducted for rural as well as urban areas but this
chapter concentrates only on the rural sector. In all these data collection
rounds, rural households are classified into two major groups. One is the
cultivators who are identified as households operating at least 0.002 hectares
of land,2 and the second, the noncultivators who operate no land or operate
less than 0.002 hectares. The noncultivators are further classified into
“agricultural laborers,” “artisans,” and “other” households. In this classification,
the cultivators have a relation with the agricultural labor households as well as
with the artisans, and in turn, the artisans have a relation with noncultivators
and also the cultivators. This relation facilitates current or future production.
But the “other” is a nondescriptive category that could include different types
of agents. They could be traditional landlords, input and output traders, money-
lenders, commission agents, or urban workers staying in villages. The farm sector
consists of individuals who take part in the agricultural production process and
the nonfarm sector consists of individuals who might facilitate production
(artisanal community or input traders) or facilitate transfer of goods from rural
to urban or urban to rural or within the rural sector (output traders), or might be
rentiers (landlords).
The structural changes witnessed in India show a decline in the farm
sector, predominantly due to a decrease in the share of cultivator households
and an increase in the share of “other” households in the rural sector
(Table 8.1). The “other” households are increasing their share to total house-
holds and their impact on the production structure is also growing. During
the period 1971–81 there was an increase in households reporting cultiva-
tion. A declining proportion of agricultural labor households accompany
this. For the rest of the groups, there are marginal changes. In other words,
the farm–non-farm composition remained more or less the same between
1971 and 1981. However, there are drastic changes between 1981 and 2002.
For example, there is a sharp decline in households depending on the farm
sector. This decline is mostly due to the decline in cultivating households.
The cultivating households declined from 76.3 percent to 59.7 percent,
while agricultural labor households remained more or less the same. In
nonfarm activities, the increase is sharp: from 10.8 percent to 20.7 percent
(Vijay 2012a).
At the structural level, it would be interesting to see whether an increase in
households in the nonfarm sector is also accompanied by an increase in land
owned by them but which is not cultivated by them. At the national level, the

201
The Land Question in India

Table 8.1. Percentage distribution of rural households by occupational category at the

national level (1971, 1981, 1991, and 2002)

Household occupational group Percentage of households

1971 (26th) 1981 (37th) 1991 (48th) 2002 (59th)

Cultivators 72.4 76.3 66.1 59.7

Agricultural labor 14.6 11.3 14.2 14.4
Total farm sector 87.0 87.6 80.3 74.1
Artisans 2.4 1.6 3.8 5.2
Others 10.6 10.8 15.8 20.7
All noncultivators 27.6 23.7 33.9 40.3
All households 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

Source: National Sample Survey Organization (2005): “Households Assets and Liabilities in India,” NSS 59th Round,
Report number 500, June 30, 2002

Table 8.2. Relative importance of households owning land but not cultivating land in the
rural areas at the national level

% of NCH % of NCH owning land % of NCH owning land to total Value of land
rural households owning land owned by NCHs

1981 23.0 19.1 4.5 3.8

1991 34.0 29.6 10.0 7.5
2002 40.3 36.7 14.7 9.8

Note: NCH refers to noncultivating households.

Source: Calculated by authors using 37th, 48th, and 59th rounds of NSSO reports on “Assets and Liabilities in India”

share of noncultivating households owning land to total noncultivating

households is increasing, from 19.1 percent to 36.7 percent from 1981 to
2002. The share in the value of land owned by these households has also
increased, from a mere 4 percent to around 10 percent in the corresponding
period (Table 8.2).
The NSS report (No. 500) also gives the value of assets and their distribution
for cultivators and noncultivators. The cultivating households predominate
in asset distribution. On average, they hold Rs. 372,000 worth of assets. The
noncultivating households on the average hold Rs. 107,000 worth of assets
(Table 8.3). The predominance of agricultural labor households in the non-
cultivating households, whose asset position is likely to be very poor, must
have pulled down the average for the noncultivating households. However,
the noncultivators show 38.2 percent of their assets in the form of land
(Table 8.3). In asset composition, noncultivating households show a differ-
ence from cultivators with a substantial share in financial assets, household
durables, and buildings, while the cultivators show a predominance of land

202
 Noncultivating Households Owning Land

Table 8.3. Value and composition of assets owned by cultivators and noncultivators (2002)

Cultivators Noncultivators All rural households

Average value of asset Rs. 372,632 Rs. 107,230 Rs. 265,606

Share of asset in total asset 83.71 16.28 100
Composition of assets
Land 68.1 38.2 63.2
Buildings 20.1 41.4 23.5
Livestock and poultry 2.3 1.3 2.1
Machinery and equipment 3.8 3.4 3.7
Household durables 4.2 10.0 5.1
Financial assets 1.6 5.4 2.2
Dues recoverable 0.1 0.2 0.1
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0

Source: National Sample Survey Organization (2005): “Households Assets and Liabilities in India,” NSS 59th Round,
Report Number 500, June 30, 2002

in their asset base. The widely different portfolio of the noncultivating

households possibly indicates their similar economic behavior as elsewhere
in diversifying their assets when compared to cultivating households. Thus
the noncultivating households show certain linkages with India’s growth,
which also indicates the diversification of the rural sector into nonfarm
activities. Their interest in land seems to be important. To the extent
these households own land and do not self-cultivate it, they continue to
exert influence on the land market, lease market, and thus the production
structure of agriculture, which has implications for the process of agrarian
transformation.
The NCHs, as defined in the NSS “Asset and Liabilities” round, is a het-
erogeneous group consisting of agricultural laborers, artisans, and “other”
households. “Other” households can be either labor-supplying households
or households owning land but not cultivating it themselves. It was shown
by Vijay and Sreenivasulu (2013) that the percentage value of land owned by
NCHs owning land in the highest two class groups is a meager 4.7 percent of
households in the NCHs, but they own 45 percent of the value of land
owned by NCHs. The three lowest asset class groups, which could be iden-
tified as predominantly “too poor to farm” households, make up 51 percent
of households in the NCH category, while they own a meager 10 percent of
the value of land owned by NCHs. Given this, it follows that in the evolving
structure of the rural economy, households that are “too busy to farm” are
significant in terms of the share of value of land owned by these groups.
Based on the NSS report 500, one can arrive at the share of households who
own land but do not cultivate, but not whether they lease it out, keep it
fallow, or use other contractual arrangements to access land. This lacuna can
be filled when one uses primary data collected from villages.

203
The Land Question in India

8.3 Structure of the Village Economy and the Importance

of Noncultivating Households

Next only to Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh witnessed the highest shift in
occupation from cultivators to noncultivators. Based on different NSS rounds
on “Assets and Liabilities,” the number of noncultivating households was 57
percent and the proportion of NCH owning land to total noncultivating
households was 50.8 percent in 2002. They owned about 16.2 percent of the
total value of land (Vijay 2012b). The presence of agricultural labor is high and
it is also a state that has a high incidence of pure tenancy. Between 1991 and
2001, the number of cultivators declined from an already low level of 27.74
percent to 25.47 percent (Directorate of Economics and Statistics 2006). Inter-
estingly, districts considered to be the most developed in the state, namely the
Godavari districts, with a hundred-year history of canal irrigation and a pro-
vision of double crops has the lowest proportion of cultivating households.
The East Godavari and West Godavari districts recorded 14.90 and 15.06
percent of households as cultivators; this proportion decreased to 12.92 and
14.20 percent respectively by 2001 (Directorate of Economics and Statistics
2006). At the other extreme, there are districts such as Warangal and Adilabad,
which have witnessed an increase in the proportion of cultivators. Given the
extreme diversity, an attempt was made to study the agrarian structure by Rao
and Bharathi (2010). This chapter draws on that survey.
Erstwhile Andhra Pradesh (which now comprises two states: Andhra
Pradesh and Telengana) has basically three regions based on the level of
development. This section introduces the villages in terms of their location
based on their region and gives general information on the nature of irrigation
and the crops cultivated.
Agrarian institutions, including the market institutions, have a tendency
to undergo changes and transform themselves, and these changes are associ-
ated with the level of development of the region and/or subregion. However,
using levels of development, the state is sometimes grouped into five regions
(Rao and Subrahmanyam 2002). The top place in the scale of development,
with a high index of output per hectare, is South Coastal Andhra comprising the
Krishna Godavari delta regions, namely the districts of East Godavari,
West Godavari, Krishna, Guntur, Prakasam, and Nellore. Next in importance
comes the region of North Telangana, comprising the districts of Nizamabad,
Adilabad, Karimnagar, and Khammam. North Coastal Andhra, comprising
Srikakulam, Vizianagaram, and Visakhapatnam occupies third place. Rayalaseema
is fourth, comprising Cuddapah, Kurnool, Ananthpur, and Chittoor. Fifth is
South Telangana, comprising Rangareddy, Hyderabad, Mahaboobnagar, Medak,
and Nalgonda. The regional differences are partly historical and partly due to
differential public investments and complimentary private investments. As the

204
 Noncultivating Households Owning Land

Table 8.4. Location, number of households, and sources of irrigation in the surveyed
villages

District Mandal* Village Number of Percentage of land irrigated by

households different sources
surveyed in
village Canal Tank Wells Rainfall

West Godavari Veravasaram Mentipudi 90 100

Ganapavaram Kothapalli 208 100
Koyyalagudem Seethampet 170 54.77 46.22
Mahaboobnagar Atmakur Arepalli 338 53.26 18.86 18.23 9.65
Bhootpur Tatiparthy 216 12.42 32.34 55.25
Karimnagar Dharmapuri Chinnapur 216 61.47 16.69 21.85
Dharmapuri Nagaram 171 29.26 65.7 5.05
Srikakulam Jalumuru Jonanki 151 92.22 7.78
Elcherla BantalaKoduru 177 58.09 41.91

Notes: *A district in a state is divided into mandals, which were earlier identified as talukas.
Source: Vijay and Sreenivasulu (2013)

institutions are likely to undergo changes with levels of investment and conse-
quent levels of development, the attempt in the village survey was to distribute
the ten sample villages across the five regions. The attempt to cover at least
two villages in each region succeeded in all regions except Rayalaseema, where
even one village could not be covered. In total nine villages were covered, three in
South Coastal Andhra and two villages each in North Coastal Andhra, North
Telengana, and South Telengana.
Table 8.4 provides information on the mandal (sub-districts or administra-
tive divisions under districts) from which the villages are selected, the number
of households surveyed, and sources of irrigation in the surveyed villages.
Three villages were surveyed in the West Godavari district, two of the villages
(Mentipudi and Kothapalli) are irrigated from canal water and one village
(Seethampet), which is not part of the irrigation command area, is in the dry
zone in the district with nearly 54 percent of the land irrigated by wells. Two
villages were selected from Mahaboobnagar district, a district known as a
drought prone district, which witnesses large-scale labor migration to urban
areas. One of the villages is rain fed and the second uses canal water as a source
of irrigation. Karimnagar district, which is part of Telengana area has had
significant intervention by the Communist Party of India (People’s War
Group), now called the CPI (Maoist) Party. The party had a presence in the
two villages surveyed in this area in the past but not in the present period. One
of the villages surveyed was predominantly irrigated by canal water while in
the second village wells form the main source of irrigation. The two villages
selected in north coastal Andhra are Jonanki and Bantalakoduru. Jonanki is a
village with significant presence of tanks as a source of irrigation while the
other village uses a well as the principal source of irrigation (Vijay 2012a).

205
The Land Question in India

In Godavari district, the two canal-irrigated villages grow mostly paddy, while
the third village, Seethampet, has nearly 52 percent of the land under tobacco,
followed by 22 percent under paddy, 9 percent under sugarcane, and 4 percent
under maize, which is mostly for chicken feed. Seethampet has a diversified
cropping pattern and the crops cultivated are inputs to agroindustry. Arepalli,
the village in Mahaboobnagar district with a significant proportion of land
irrigated by canal, also has a high proportion of land assigned to paddy cultiva-
tion (53 percent). In the dry village of Tatiparty in Mahaboobnagar district,
the principal crop is the inferior cereal, jowar (40 percent), followed by castor
(28 percent). In the two villages in Karimnagar district paddy is the main crop
(Chinnapur at 45 percent and Nagaram at 37 percent). In Chinnapur, maize is
the second main crop (11 percent), which is partly consumed and partly sold in
the market. In Nagaram, in addition to paddy, turmeric is grown for the market
and forms a significant proportion of the crops cultivated (17 percent). In the
case of the two villages surveyed in Srikakulam district, the tank-irrigated
village, Jonanki, has a dominance of paddy crop (72 percent); in the second
village, Bantalakoduru, paddy is the important crop (45 percent) followed by
pulses and chilies (Vijay and Sreenivasulu 2013).

8.4 Classification of Households in the Farm Sector

Given the extreme diversity in the farm sector in the rural economy, an attempt
was made to study the agrarian structure by Rao and Bharathi (2010). This
chapter depends heavily on that survey and the methodology they used in
classifying households. The surveyed villages represent different regions and
the method of classification of households chosen by the authors was a five-
class analysis. Presenting agriculture in terms of class analysis was in vogue
during the late 1960s and 1970s and recently again used by Ramchandran,
Rawal, and Swaminathan (2010). In a sense, the report by Rao and Bharathi
(2010), and by implication this chapter, revisits such a framework and pre-
sents a different understanding compared to the land-based classification used
in identifying structures by Vyas (2003). In our survey a complete enumer-
ation of all households residing in the village was conducted. A detailed
questionnaire was canvassed to all the households in the village to capture
the characteristics of the households (members of the households, caste,
migrations, etc.), the resource position of the households (land owned,
operated, type of land, instruments owned, number of working family mem-
bers, etc.), and the exchanges the households enter into in the land, labor, and
credit markets. Those households directly related to agricultural production
were classified into five classes based on their interaction in the labor market.

206
 Noncultivating Households Owning Land

They are: noncultivating households, rich peasantry, middle peasantry, poor

peasantry, and agricultural labor households.

8.4.1 Class Composition of the Surveyed Villages

The total number of households in the farm sector in the nine villages is 1,737
and they own 3,795.56 acres. The average size owned works out to be 2.18
acres per household; if agricultural labor households are excluded, it works out
to be 3.02 acres per household. At the aggregate level, the economy is dom-
inated by the poor peasantry. They form 43.87 percent of the households and
own 35.43 percent of the land. In terms of numbers, the agricultural labor
households form the second largest group in the villages and constitute 27.63
percent of the households. The poor peasantry and agricultural labor house-
holds together are 70.5 percent of the rural households. At the other extreme
are the labor-demanding households: the rich peasantry and noncultivating
households. The rich peasants form 4.37 percent of the households and
operate 16.90 percent of the land. But the noncultivating households are
numerically larger and constitute 5.58 percent of rural households, which is
larger than the share of rich peasant households. These noncultivating house-
holds own 20.10 percent of the land. The middle peasantry constitutes 18.53
percent of households and owns 26.41 percent of the land (Table 8.5).
In the nine villages surveyed it was found that 5.5 percent of households are
NCHs and they own approximately 20 percent of the land. There are two
issues that arise in this context. One is the distribution of the NCHs over
villages: are there some villages with a higher share of NCHs and a higher
share of land owned by this class? Second, the surveys were conducted among
rural households; but are there households who reside in urban areas that may
own land in rural areas? Can one provide a “guesstimate” on the extent of
land owned by nonresident households who by implication are also NCHs?
The villages show marked heterogeneity in terms of number and share of
land owned by NCHs. In terms of numbers, Chinnapur village has the highest

Table 8.5. Distribution of households and land owned across class groups

Number of households (%) Area owned, in acres (%)

Agricultural laborer (AGL) 480 (27.63) 43.62 (1.15)

Poor peasants (PP) 762 (43.86) 1,344.64 (35.42)
Middle peasants (MP) 322 (18.53) 1,002.54 (26.41)
Rich peasants (RP) 76 (4.37) 641.5 (16.90)
Noncultivating households (NCH) 97 (5.58) 763.2 (20.10)
Total 1,737 (100) 3,795.56 (100)

Source: Field survey

207
The Land Question in India

Table 8.6. Land-based importance of NCHs in the surveyed villages

Village No. of NCHs Share of NCHs to Share of land owned Share of land owned by
total households (%) by NCHs (%) NCHs and nonresident
households (%)

Mentipudi 9 10 38.1 65.4

Kothapalli 6 2.8 15.8 67.8
Seethampet 12 7.1 24.1 24.1
Arepalli 14 4.1 11.5 11.5
Tatiparthy 0 0 0 0
Chinnapur 36 16.7 26.5 26.5
Nagaram 4 2.3 5.8 11.8
Jonanki 13 8.6 49.4 49.4
Bantalakoduru 3 1.6 60.3 60.3
Total 97 5.5 20.1 25.2

Source: Field survey

share of NCHs followed by Mentipudi. The dry village in Mahaboobnager

(Tatiparthy) does not have NCH households. But if one analyzes the data on
land owned by NCHs, the villages from Srikakulam have the highest share of
land owned by NCHs. The village of Bantalakoduru is the only village with a
traditional landlord from a landlord family. They owned nearly 175 acres of
land in the village. The villages of Chinnapur and Mentipudi have a higher
share of land owned by NCHs (Table 8.6).
A particular feature of the survey was that it enumerated all households who
had stayed in the village. So if nonresident households own land in the village
they would not be captured in the survey. In Mentipudi and Kothapalli
villages, there is a major difference between land owned and land operated.
This difference is also expressed in the difference between land leased in and
land leased out only in these two villages. So one can assume that the differ-
ence between land owned and land operated is due to the presence of non-
resident households and these households are leasing out. Given that they are
not resident households and leasing out the land one can identify them as
NCHs. If this line of thinking is correct, then the share of land owned by NCHs
and nonresident households in the developed coastal districts is much higher
and comparable to land owned by NCHs in the traditional landlord-dominated
districts (Table 8.6).3
In a static sense, one is witnessing an important role for noncultivating
households in the surveyed villages. But in the long run, what also needs to be
analyzed is whether the noncultivating households are both purchasing and
selling land from and to peasant classes. The survey collected data on land
market transactions by all households for a period of five years (1999–2003)
preceding the survey. The data is presented in Table 8.7. Assuming that the
data is reasonably representative, the area of land sold is more than the area of
land purchased. While 175 acres are sold, the purchases total only 106 acres.

208
 Noncultivating Households Owning Land

Table 8.7. Distribution of land transacted in land market across classes between 1999 and
2003

Sale Purchase Net purchase

(area purchased-
No. of Area transacted No of Area transacted area sold)
transactions (in acres) transactions (in acres)

Agricultural labor
households (AGL)
Poor peasantry (PP) 41 (37.27) 43.64 (24.94) 24 (38.70) 19.79 (18.67) 23.85
Middle peasantry (MP) 44 (40.00) 62.30 (35.61) 24 (38.70) 27.55 (26.01) 34.75
Rich peasantry (RP) 14 (12.72) 23.48 (13.42) 3 (4.83) 6.4 (6.03) 17.08
Noncultivating 11 (11.00) 45.53 (26.02) 11 (17.74) 52.25 (49.29) +6.72
households (NCH)
Total 110 (100) 174.95 (100) 62 (100) 105.99 (100) 68.96

Notes: Net purchase = Area purchased-area sold; figures in brackets are proportion to totals.
Source: Vijay (2012)

It may not be farfetched if one presumes that the difference between the sales
and purchases is accounted for by nonresident households. If one takes the
net purchases, all classes record a negative net purchase, while NCHs record a
positive net purchase. In other words, during the five-year period, NCHs are
accumulating additional land while other classes are experiencing disposses-
sion of their land. Thus, the market is facilitating land transfers to the NCH
from the other cultivating households.

8.5 Why NCHs Avoid Selling Land

One of the important tendencies seen in the Indian economy is the reduction
in the share of rural households and a decrease in the share of cultivator
households. A decrease in the share of cultivators would imply that cultivators
in earlier periods are shifting out of agriculture and becoming noncultivators
but continue to have an interest in land. A question that arises in this context
is why do households who have diversified out of agriculture not sell their
land? This section provides an explanation of one potential source of income
in the future for NCHs (in the short and long run) due to owning land.

8.5.1 Land as a Secure Asset

If one assumes that erstwhile cultivating households are converting to NCHs,
these households have three options: to sell land, to lease out land, or keep the
land fallow. Let us consider the first option. Land as an asset has two compo-
nents, as a store of value and a productive asset. In the Indian context, the
land market is an inactive market and the extent of land entering the land

209
The Land Question in India

market is dependent on supply-side factors, that is, distress conditions faced

by landholding households in the rural areas. On the demand side there is an
excess demand for land, which is leading to consistent increases in price of
land over time. According to Vakulabharanam et al. (2011) writing on the crop
holiday in West Godavari district, the price of land “has risen tremendously
over the last 15 years, with prices going up more than 10–20 times. This has
created a rebirth of absentee landlordism and tenancy” (2011: 14). At the
national level, Chakravorty (2013: 52) shows that “productivity is not the
primary determinant of prices of agricultural land.” He maintains that prices
of agricultural land in Punjab are twenty times higher or more than what can
be explained by productivity alone. This trend is true for large areas of Hary-
ana, and large parts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which are proximate to urban
areas (Chakravorty 2013).
Chakravorty (2013) and Vakulabharanam et al. (2011) do not consider this
price rise a bubble, but a permanent feature. For Chakravorty, increasing land
prices are due to the easing of credit, while for Vakulabharanam, the increase
in prices may be structural. If one considers a structural explanation, it could
be that the excess demand for land is related to its feature as a “secure” asset
with low probability of a decrease in prices of land implying low levels of
uncertainty in prices. The feature of land prices, that is, downwardly rigid
prices and low variability in land prices leading to low uncertainty, makes this
a secure asset compared to other assets in the economy. In the context of a
changing rural sector, where NCHs are increasing, the NCHs might sell land if
there were entry barriers to enter the non-farm sector (NFS), such as the need for
cash income to enter the NFS. If one wants to be a fertilizer dealer or commis-
sion agent, households would need some income to establish this venture
and therefore might want to sell part of their land. So in the long term land is
a secure source of income for households but in the short term it could be a
“dead investment” if it does not generate any income. One option for NCHs to
earn income in the short run is through productive use of land by leasing it out.

8.5.2 Tenancy as a Source of Yearly Income

If households want to hold on to land but do not want to cultivate the land
themselves, they can keep it fallow or lease it out. If the owner believes that
land is also a productive asset, they might want to derive income by leasing
out the land.
Tenancy is important in the surveyed villages. The total leased in land is
651 acres (Table 8.8), which is 16.66 percent of the total operated land.
If one takes the leased out land, the total is 331.5 acres, or 11.27 percent of
the total owned land. The difference between the extent of land leased in

210
 Noncultivating Households Owning Land

Table 8.8. Distribution of area leased in and leased out across classes

Leasing in Leasing out Net lease in area

No. of Area leased in No. of Area leased out

transactions (in acres) transactions (in acres)

AGL 7 (5.73) 8.75 (2.64) 6.5

PP 167 (60.37) 331.5 (50.98) 30 (25.40) 35.24 (10.63) +296.26
MP 81 (30.00) 190.00 (29.13) 8 (5.73) 30.2 (9.11) +159.8
RP 20 (7.41) 97.5 (14.97) 5 (4.09) 23.00 (6.93) +74.5
NCH 2 (0.74) 32 (4.91) 72 (59.01) 230.59 (69.56) 198.59
Total 270 (100) 651.1 (100) 122 (100) 331.5 (100) +319.6

Notes: Net lease in area is defined as (area leased in–area leased out); figures in brackets are proportion to totals.
Source: Vijay (2012)

and leased out can be attributed to nonresident households owning land in

the villages, who were not covered by the survey. The villages with the
highest share of land under tenancy are in the irrigated paddy-growing
districts of the delta region. The two villages in the Godavari delta region
had approximately 45 percent of both the land leased-in transactions and
the total leased-in area. The distribution of land leased in and leased out is
presented in Table 8.7. While NCHs are the only net suppliers of land in the
lease market, the poor peasants and middle peasants are the net demanders
of land in the lease market. While all classes participate in the leasing in and
out of land, poor peasants dominate leasing in, with 60 percent of the land
leased in. On the leasing-out dimension, the NCH predominate, with 70
percent of the land leased out.
A tenant can be a landless labor household who may be a poor peasant
entering the land lease market for subsistence, while a rich peasant leasing in
land may have a market orientation. In the surveyed villages, 605 families do
not own any land, and they normally would have been recorded as agricul-
tural labor households. However, 115 of the 605 households (19 percent),
lease in land and operate as pure tenant cultivators; 81.63 percent of pure
tenant households are poor peasant households. Another 16.52 percent of
the pure tenants are middle peasants, while 1.73 percent are rich peasants.
The amount of land operated under pure tenancy by poor peasant house-
holds is almost 74 percent of the total land operated. In the two delta
villages, 52.68 percent of the households do not own any land. Among the
non-landowning households, 38.85 percent of the households operate as pure
tenant cultivators and most of them are poor peasants. The non-landowning
potential agricultural labor households join the production structure as pure
tenants; a path households choose to hedge against uncertainties in income.

211
The Land Question in India

8.5.3 Options Open to Poor Peasantry and Agricultural Labor Households

For an NCH to derive “secure” yearly income, the demand for land for tenancy
should be inelastic. In other words, if the agricultural laborer and poor peas-
antry do not have many options to earn income outside tenancy, the tenancy
rates would be relatively stable and NCHs could derive a secure yearly income.
This section provides information on options available to labor-supplying
households to earn income.
In aggregate, nearly 70 percent of the rural households are agricultural labor
households and poor peasantry. But if one sees the options available to these
labor-supplying households to meet their livelihood, there are some interest-
ing trends. Here I analyze three options: to lease in land, migrate to urban
areas, or having long-term labor market contracts. The option of entering the
nonfarm sector in rural areas was not presented in the table as few agricultural
households reported this option. (Table 8.9). In the case of canal-irrigated
villages, entry into the land lease market looks to be the most important
option to these households. In Mentipudi and Kothapalli villages, around
35 percent of the agricultural labor households and poor peasantry households
enter the land lease market. In both the villages nearly 28 percent of agricultural
labor households and poor peasantry households leasing in land are pure
tenants. There were thirty-four households reporting long-term contracts and
they were pre-dominantly in two villages: Seethampet village (ten households)
and Nagaram village (eight contracts). In these villages, potential labor-supplying

Table 8.9. Options open to agricultural labor households and poor peasantry in the
surveyed villages

Villages % of AGL % of PP % of Options open to AGL and PP households

AGL and
PP Share of PP Share of PP Share of PP No. of
and AGL in and AGL as and AGL households
tenancy pure tenants households with
experiencing long-term
migrations labor market
contracts

Mentipudi 17.78 36.67 54.44 34.69 28.57 6.12 1

Kothapalli 47.12 33.65 80.77 35.12 28.57 20.83 0
Seethampet 53.53 12.94 66.47 8.85 4.42 1.77 10
Arepalli 16.57 59.47 76.04 5.06 1.56 35.41 7
Tatiparthy 13.43 71.76 85.19 5.43 0.54 22.83 0
Chinnapur 22.69 27.78 50.46 12.84 1.83 14.68 3
Nagaram 22.22 45.03 67.25 6.09 0.87 20.00 8
Jonanki 21.19 50.33 71.52 29.63 14.81 37.96 2
B.Koduru 40.11 38.42 78.53 4.32 1.44 2.88 3
Total 27.63 43.87 71.50 13.53 7.49 20.69 34

Note: AGL refers to agricultural labor households and PP refers to poor peasantry.
Source: Field survey

212
 Noncultivating Households Owning Land

households are entering into the land lease market. In the rest of the villages,
tenancy is not an important feature of livelihood but migration is. In these villages
the proportion of land owned by noncultivating households is relatively smaller
when compared to the irrigated villages (Vijay 2012a), which restricts the supply of
land in the land lease market.
Land in the land lease market is predominantly supplied by nonresident
and/or noncultivating households staying in the village. If we assume that the
supply of land is inelastic, the rental rates in the market would be defined by
the demand-side factors. The households demanding land in the land lease
market are rich peasantry, middle peasantry, and the poor peasantry. Individ-
uals in these classes would compete to get access to land in the land lease
market. If one assumes that the nonresident and/or noncultivating house-
holds are only interested in maximizing rental income, individuals who
provide the highest rent would get access to land. A rich peasantry is by nature
market oriented and also wants access to land in the land lease market to
derive scale advantages. A poor peasant, on the other hand, has “surplus
labor.” The market is not able to provide sustained employment to these
households. So poor peasants self-exploit by using the “surplus” labor from
their own farm. These households without any options would keep increasing
the demand for land lease for subsistence and by implication the rental value
of land. In the surveyed villages it was found that the poor peasants/pure
tenants are pricing out the rich peasant in the land lease market and are the
main demanders of land in the land lease market (Vijay 2012a). The higher
rent provides the economic basis for sustenance of the noncultivating house-
holds and does not appear to be a driver for higher accumulation in rural areas.

8.6 Conclusion

The agrarian structure is undergoing changes due to the important role played
by NCHs owning land at one end of the spectrum, and the stability of the
proportion of agricultural laborers at the other end. The tremendous increase
in land prices is influencing the portfolio of erstwhile cultivators. In other
words, higher returns with a higher uncertainty in nonfarm sector investment
compared to lower levels of returns and lower uncertainty in agriculture
influences the portfolio choices of the cultivator. This possibly is the source
that generates the noncultivating peasant household that chooses a mix of
higher returns in the nonfarm sector and a lower risk in the farm sector. The
certainty in the income of NCH in farm activity is made possible by the
demand for land in the agricultural sector, particularly from the agricultural
labor households. The land hunger of these households and the need to hedge
against the uncertainties of life make the land lease market a very active

213
The Land Question in India

market. In all possibility, since the demand for land is reasonably high from
this segment, the rent is also likely to be high, ensuring that the income of
NCHs from agriculture is not unreasonable. This explains the decline in
cultivators and the concomitant increase in NCHs owning land and the stable
proportion of agricultural labor households.
The evolving rural economic structure is witnessing the emergence of a new
class of landlords in the sense that they own land but do not cultivate the land
themselves; rather they derive a ground rent. Unlike the earlier landlords who
are from “landlord” families and own large tracks of land, these new landlords
could be erstwhile cultivators who have diversified out of agriculture but
continue their interest in land. At least in the case of Andhra Pradesh, and
specifically in the case of West Godavari district, one is witnessing a revival of
absentee landlords of the second category and revival of tenancy.
If this hypothesis on the increasing importance of noncultivating house-
holds owning land in rural areas is reasonably true, then the land question
comes back to the center stage. On the one hand, NCHs own land but are not
cultivating it themselves and deriving ground rent. On the other hand, there
is a large segment of land-hungry agricultural laborers and the poor peasantry
without any viable option for their livelihood. Instead they enter tenancy
relations. Restructuring agriculture with an emphasis on land reforms appears
to be a necessary policy intervention to solve the agrarian crisis.

Notes

1. I was assisting the late R. S. Rao and Dr. Mudunuri Bharathi as an associate in the
project. The data is used with the permission of Dr. Bharathi.
2. One hectare is equal to 2.47 acres.
3. The relative strength of the absentee landlords/noncultivating nonresident house-
holds in the irrigated areas of Godavari district can be seen in terms of decisions
taken by landowners to declare that they would not cultivate any kharif crop on
their land in the year 2011 as they maintained that prices were not remunerative for
paddy. Interestingly, this area is known to have nearly 60 percent of the land under
tenancy. In addition to remunerative prices being one of the reasons for a crop
holiday, another reason was a policy initiative to give identity cards to tenants and
give tenant legal status. The absentee landlords felt that legalizing tenancy status
would weaken their position and so they had used a crop holiday as an instrument
to discipline the laborers/tenants (Vakulabharanam et al. 2011).

References

Chakravorty, S. 2013. “A New Price Regime: Land Market in Urban and Rural India.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 48(17): 45–54.

214
 Noncultivating Households Owning Land

Directorate of Economics and Statistics. 2006. “Statistical Abstract of Andhra Pradesh—

2006,” Hyderabad.
NSSO (National Sample Survey Organization) 1986. “Households Assets and Liabilities
in India,” 37th Round, June 30, 1982.
NSSO (National Sample Survey Organization) 1998. “Households Assets and Liabilities
in India,” 48th Round, Report No. 419, June 30, 1991.
NSSO (National Sample Survey Organization) 2005. “Households Assets and Liabilities
in India,” 59th Round, Report No. 500, June 30, 2002.
Ramachandran, V. K, Rawal, V., and Swaminathan, M. 2010. Socio-Economic Surveys of
Three Villages in Andhra Pradesh. New Delhi: Tulika Books.
Rao, R. S. and Bharathi, M. 2010. “Comprehensive Study on Land and Poverty in Andhra
Pradesh: A Preliminary Report.” In In Search of Method, edited by M. Bharathi, Hyderabad:
B-1, Collective and Centre for Documentation, Research and Communication,
pp. 323–67.
Rao, Y. V. K. and Subrahmanyan, S. 2002. “Development of Andhra Pradesh 1956–2001:
A Study of Regional Disparities.” N.R.R. Research Centre, Hyderabad.
Vakulabharanam, V., Purendra Prasad, N., Laxminarayana, K., and Kilaru, S. 2011.
“Understanding Andhra Crop Holiday Movement.” Economic and Political Weekly,
42(50): 13–16.
Vijay. R. 2012a. “Structural Retrogression and the Rise of ‘New Landlords’ in Indian
Agriculture: An Empirical Exercise.” Economic and Political Weekly, 47(5): 37–45.
Vijay, R. 2012b. “Rise of ‘New Landlords: A Response.” Economic and Political Weekly,
47(40): 82–3.
Vijay, R. and Sreenivasulu, Y. 2013. “Agrarian Structure and Land Lease Arrangements:
An Investigation in Nine Villages in Andhra Pradesh.” Economic and Political Weekly,
48(26–7): 42–9.
Vyas, V. S. 2003. Indian Agrarian Structure, Economic Policies and Sustainable Development:
Variation on a Theme. New Delhi: Academic Foundation.

215
9

Land and/or Labor? Predicament of Petty

Commodity Producers among South
Indian Villages
R. V. Ramana Murthy

9.1 Introduction

Historically, agrarian transformation has been necessary for capitalist develop-

ment. It entailed monetizing agriculture, development of wage labor, and pro-
duction of market surplus. However, current Marxist discourse takes a clear view
on the issue of capitalist transition in postcolonial nations, arguing that it
is significantly different from the European experience (Sanyal 2007: 20). Capital
may change relations of production in agriculture and eschew the resolution
of the agrarian question by not discharging petty commodity producers from
agriculture and absorbing them into the modern capitalist sector (Bernstein
2010). There are convincing reasons why transformations at work in post-
twentieth-century capitalism could be significantly different in postcolonial
countries such as India. A large share of the workforce locked in the agricultural
sector, the dominance of a self-employed workforce, and a growing informal
sector inside and outside agriculture are some of the peculiar manifestations of
the transformation. The land question, besides the population factor, is obviously
complicated by a large chunk of the workforce being unable to quit agriculture.
The peasantry is transformed from the subsistence stage to petty commodity
production under the compelling influence of the market. Land concentration in
agriculture is declining in India and the share of smallholdings, in number as
well as in share of land, is growing steadily. It is natural that nonfarm needs
compel some diversion of agricultural land in the course of urbanization and
industrialization. Land acquisition in such a context is resisted aggressively
in some places, while it is accepted reluctantly in others. The centrality of land
 Land and/or Labor?

to the lives of farmers is also a matter of how much they depend on it. The
gradual diversification of rural households to nonfarm activities can alter the
centrality of land for different classes of farmers. Thus far, the land question
depends on the nature of the agrarian transition.
In parts of South India, landless, marginal, and small farmers are acquiring
land, either through sale or lease, in smaller parcels, forming a majority in the
agrarian structure. It is an intriguing phenomenon to observe farming in the
country being brought under petty commodity production. How well petty
commodity production sits with capitalist development is an important ques-
tion, both as a development question and a land question. This chapter seeks
to answer the following questions: Why is the share of petty commodity
producers increasing in the agrarian structure? How extensive is petty com-
modity production as the source of livelihood? Does the state make the
capitalist transition less harsh through social welfare transfers that outweigh
the effects of pauperization imposed by capitalist development? I shall pro-
vide an explanation, albeit partial, of these issues from evidence drawn from
household data from a study conducted in rural Andhra Pradesh.
The rest of the chapter is divided into three sections. Section 9.2 discusses
perspectives on the agrarian question. It begins with a discussion of petty
commodity production (PCP) and its relationship to capitalist development in
India. Section 9.3 presents the findings of field observations obtained from
three village surveys in Andhra Pradesh on the profile and nature of PCP.
It begins with the agrarian distress in the state covering patterns in land
distribution, access to agricultural credit, and rural incomes, and ends with a
brief discussion of state-disbursed benefits to the rural poor. Section 9.3 revisits
the process of proletarianization and marginalization of petty producers.

9.2 The Agrarian Question

9.2.1 Petty Commodity Production and the Agrarian Transition
Marxist literature has traditionally treated petty commodity producers as a
class progressively diminished by the logic of capitalist development, turning
them into a proletariat in the larger course of transformation, referred to as
the resolution of the agrarian question (Byres 1977). However, alternative
courses of transition are possible, as outlined by Bernstein (2010), where
dissolution of petty commodity producers may not be a necessary condition
for capitalist transformation under globalization of capital. PCP has also
survived for several historical reasons such as political space gained in anti-
colonial movements, anti-feudal land reforms, and postcolonial conditions of
capitalist development. PCP in agriculture can not only persist in developing

217
The Land Question in India

economies but may grow in the share in production as nonfarm capitalist

sectors clearly benefit in terms of accumulation from copious flows of market
surplus at lower prices. The petty commodity producers’ bid to survive
through over-self-exploitation conveys that they are labor in disguise.
Pauperization and poverty continue to be endemic features of their existence.
However, unlike the way they were wiped out in the past, their transform-
ation could be much harsher in the age of liberal democracy and hegemony of
capitalist development.
Forms of precapitalist production relations persist in most parts of the
world, including India. The uneven development of production forces and
penetration of capital across time and space have created complex modes of
production across the world. The renewed scholarship on the agrarian ques-
tion has produced an extremely rich literature that explains not only the
complexity of modes of production but also the persistence of PCP under
neoliberal globalization (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010; Bernstein 2010;
Lerche 2013). PCP denotes the existence of a substantial class of small farmers
involved in agricultural production primarily using family labor for subsistence.
Penetration of markets, generalized commodity production, rising pressure of
consumption needs, and inadequate nonfarm employment opportunities
often compel PCP households to cling to their small parcels of land while
participating in the market. Marx (1954) in Capital I, part III, while observing
the agrarian transition in England that displaced the free peasantry through the
twin processes of primitive accumulation and differentiation, sufficiently cau-
tioned against mechanical anticipation and repetition of such experiences.
Kautsky ([1889] 1988), while endorsing the view on the final exit of this class
in his classic piece The Agrarian Question, also vividly described the ability of PCP
households to survive under extreme competition through over-exploitation
of family labor and self-starvation. It is also now widely acknowledged that
the resolution to the agrarian question in advanced Western capitalist countries
occurred through colonialism, which facilitated the agrarian transition to cap-
italism through migration (Bagchi 2008: 85). Imperialism not only provided
cheap raw materials and commodity markets but also an ability to relieve their
surplus population, an option unavailable to most countries that are late
entrants to capitalism (Bernstein 2010). Hence, PCP persists as a default
response mechanism until a viable transition to the nonfarm sector becomes
possible. The petty commodity producers are integrated with capitalist markets
through production as well as consumption. Expansion of PCP is also unlikely
to create a contradiction with the capitalist transformation as long as it cheap-
ens agricultural production. What could be the implication of the preponder-
ance of such petty producers in agriculture to the land question? How central is
the land to the reproduction of petty commodity producers? These questions
are addressed in this chapter.

218
 Land and/or Labor?

Petty commodity producers stand hopelessly at the receiving end as markets

play havoc with prices that fail to cover the costs of production, leaving a bare
minimum of profit to meet the family’s consumption needs. In other words,
from simple reproduction it fails to graduate to expanded reproduction. The
logic of self-exploitation works through the hopes of earning profits by under-
cutting costs, but gets beaten by competitive and manipulative markets. To
survive, petty commodity producers tend to over-exploit themselves to make
up the deficit. The PCP household manages to reproduce itself because: 1) it
can survive with lower returns; 2) exploitation is internalized (it can accept
lower implicit wages in bad times); and 3) it maintains low consumption
levels. However, the independence of these households may be considerably
undermined by the terms and conditions of interlocked contracts and insuf-
ficient access to credit markets to raise required working capital. An increased
consumption culture and market orientation can also weaken its kinship
network and cooperation, which further tends to weaken its coping mechan-
isms (Harriss-White 2012).
From having gained access to small parcels of land, petty commodity pro-
ducers also benefit from the speculative prices of land. Land becomes the key
asset to play in keeping the class position of the household. Thereby, it plays a
vital role in reproduction of social relations of family, marriages, and social
value. Land remains an important store of wealth and a source of security in
old age. Thus, the PCP household strengthens the bourgeois property regime
through its participation, which makes its class position totally ambivalent.

9.2.2 Petty Commodity Production and Capitalist Development in India

Having described petty commodity producers in capitalist development, we
shall locate them in India’s capitalist transition. India’s path of capitalist
development has perhaps seven distinct aspects. First, India adopted a liberal
democratic political system well before it experienced substantial capitalist
development of the Western variety. Second, the Indian state played a major
role in shaping the nature of capitalist development and negotiating compet-
ing class interests for its growth. The property rights over land have evolved
from a long process ranging from Ryotwari settlements (where ownership
rights were given to peasants) to abolition of intermediaries and state distri-
bution of village commons. Market forces, aided by developmental policies
such as free electricity, fertilizer subsidies, procurement prices, market yards,
subsidized credit, and microcredit, encouraged commercial farming to extract
market surplus necessary for stable accumulation of capitalist sectors. Within
the space created by markets and the state, PCP in India survives, the shortfall
to subsistence and survival being provided through welfare transfers. Third,
India’s capitalist development is spearheaded by the state more through

219
The Land Question in India

forcible mobilization of small savings than through agrarian surplus (Sanyal

2007:159). Fourth, as a late entrant to industrial development in the twentieth
century, the technological conditions in India are unlikely to allow the
absorption of a substantial share of the surplus labor in agriculture into the
modern sector. Fifth, the option of large-scale international migration does
not exist for a populous country such as India. Therefore, the majority of the
workforce is locked in the space of PCP. Sixth, large-scale primitive accumu-
lation, which could have eliminated PCP, is pre-empted by liberal democratic
spaces and human rights discourses in the dominant ideologies (Chatterjee
2008). Finally, the poverty of the masses, including petty producers, caused by
capitalist extraction is softened by the welfare populism of the state to the
point of political management of dissent (Chatterjee 2008). The liberal bour-
geois politics in its vast diversity provides incremental space for the common
masses. The comprehensive analysis of political economy of capitalist
development in India compels a synthesis of all these aspects.
A major lacuna in the debate on the mode of production in India that took
place in the 1970s, in all its richness in capturing the microfoundations of
capitalist transition,1 is the scant attention paid to the role played by the state
in resolving the agrarian question. Under postcolonial conditions of global
capitalism and electoral democracies, class hegemony is largely negotiated by
the state through its policies. A far more penetrating analysis on this aspect is
carried out by Sanyal (2007), who made a departure from the standard base–
superstructure model to a neo-Gramscian state–civil society model, which
brings in the politics of a developmental state under bourgeois democracy
much more explicitly while negotiating capitalist development. Sanyal argues
that the “state–civil society” dichotomy is much more useful to understand
the politics of the hegemonic state. Gramsci, in the Italian context, argues that
a weak bourgeoisie is compelled to compromise with the feudal classes, which
allows the alliance to form a hegemonic leadership over the masses. Hegem-
ony results from consent given by the masses in exchange for incremental
benefits provided by the state. This, by and large, becomes the model in most
countries where bourgeois revolutions did not succeed. Therefore, the bour-
geoisie could only use a gradualist strategy of progressively weakening the
power of feudal classes through what Gramsci called “passive revolution”
(Gramsci 1996: 202). Liberal democracies enabled such a transition and class
compromise characterizes most of the countries where bourgeois revolutions
have failed to take place.
Partha Chatterjee (2004, 2008), while taking this further, provides a caveat
for understanding the case of postcolonial states. In developing countries, the
civil society constitutes a minute share of the population, while a huge section
of the population owning no property lies outside civil society, in what he
terms “political society.” Political society is one which does not have all the

220
 Land and/or Labor?

rights of citizenship, but has the right to franchise. Squatters, street vendors,
urban slum dwellers, landless poor, and dalits (self-labeled untouchables of the
caste system) who may till assigned lands constitute this political society
(Chatterjee 2004: 27–47). Their means of survival does not often have legal
entitlements, but the state patronizes them by protecting their otherwise
illegal existence. Managing political society, for Chatterjee, is key to the
politics of developmental states such as India. The competitive electoral
politics gives some scope for the political society to negotiate incremental
benefits from the state. He further argues that the state, as in the West, uses
various governmental technologies such as statistics to indicate “develop-
ment” through various programs and engage the population. This is further
helped by international capital through funding various non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), which help the capacity building of the state and thus
extend governmentality.2 By extending Chatterjee’s logic, the small peasantry,
pauperized by the capitalist system, qualify as a political society. Alleviation of
the farmers’ plight often becomes part of the election agenda. In past elec-
tions, much against the ruling establishment, debt waivers, compensation for
families of farmers who commit suicide, occasional state procurement under
farm lobby pressures, and so on have been part of governmentality. In addition,
poor peasants become recipients of welfare in the form of employment pro-
grams, public distribution, pensions, housing loans, cash-transfers, and so on.
There is an impression that agriculture has lost its importance in the con-
temporary economic growth discourse. This view is taken further by suggest-
ing that agriculture has become decoupled from the larger economy. The issue
needs to be put into perspective. In India, the issue of agrarian constraint to
capitalist growth was recognized during the planning era, circa 1960. It was
held that the modern sector’s growth suffered an accumulation crisis during
the mid-1960s, when no palpable agrarian surplus was forthcoming. Worse,
the supply shortfalls in food grain production in the economy posed an
inflationary barrier to growth.3 Following the failure to achieve institutional
reforms, the Indian state resolved the production problem through the
technological means of the green revolution. Institutional interventions
ensured the necessary market surplus for the capitalist sector, which in turn
ensured the viability of the farmer and productivity growth for the sector.
In the neoliberal era, there are tendencies to withdraw the different forms of
intervention that involve subsidies and other public expenditures. The
absence of intervention tends to produce crisis for the petty producers, while
medium and big farmers are better placed to diversify and capitalize on new
opportunities. As production trends are unaffected so far, and agrarian distress
is internalized by the small peasantry, it makes neoliberal reformers feel they
have nothing much to worry about. Petty commodity producers of smaller
holdings are a proletariat in disguise, whose income portfolio gets distributed

221
The Land Question in India

between small profits from farming and allied activities and wage in farm and
nonfarm sectors. Proletarianization underlies the marginalization and pauper-
ization of PCP households. Social and kinship networks are often employed to
escape the severity and survive. While neoliberal policies push them to the
brink through withdrawal of subsidies and price supports, PCP households
have become below-poverty population subjects of the state. A slew of welfare
transfers began figuring in state policy.

9.3 Results of Three Village Surveys in Andhra Pradesh

9.3.1 Small Peasantry and Agrarian Distress in Andhra Pradesh
An important change that has occurred in the structure of operational land-
holdings in the last sixty years (1950–2010) is that the share of small and
marginal farmers has grown from 56 percent to 84 percent and the share of the
area under them has increased from 18 percent to 49 percent. The share of
medium farmers has gone down from 35 percent to 16 percent and the
share of their landholding has declined from 54 percent to 45 percent. The
share of big farmers has shrunk to less than 1 percent, with landholding of
around 6 percent (Table 9.1). Big farmers have divested 31 percent of their
land, which is acquired by the marginal and small farmers. Thus, the structure
is now overwhelmingly dominated by a class of “small/marginal-producer-
farmers,” a section that is the most vulnerable. Further, there is a growing
tenancy in canal-irrigated areas, as a section of medium farmers who played
a crucial role during the green revolution are leaving agriculture as their
principal occupation, and have begun leasing out their lands since the late
1980s (Parthasarathy 2002: 45). There has been a steady rise in noncultivating
households observed in the state of Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere (Vijay
2012: 37–45, and Chapter 8, this volume). They lease their land mostly to
landless laborers and marginal farmers. Tenancy, which usually takes place
through oral agreements, is unrecognizable under the law; hence, tenants do
not have access to institutional support. While there is no reliable official data
on the extent of tenancy, several primary studies have indicated that 70–80
percent of cultivators in coastal Andhra are tenant farmers cultivating more
than 50 percent of the land in each village (Vijay 2006; Ramachandran, Rawal,
and Swaminathan 2010). The large holdings of more than 50 acres have been
subdivided over the past sixty years due to property inheritance customs,
reducing most of the large landowners to medium farmers. While there is
large-scale diversification of erstwhile large farmers into allied activities such
as fisheries, poultry, dairy, orchards, and various nonfarm activities such as
finance, commission agents, rice milling, pesticide-fertilizer-seed dealerships,
and transport business, their progeny have largely become urbanized. Some of

222
 Land and/or Labor?

Table 9.1. Class-wise relative shares of operational holdings in Andhra Pradesh (in %)

1956–7 1980–1 2005–6

Farm holding Holding Area Holding Area Holding Area

Marginal 38 8 51 13 62 23
Small 18 10 22 17 22 26
Medium 33 44 25 50 16 45
Large 9 38 2 20 <1 6

Notes: Figures are in acres. The classification is taken from the NSS classification, which defines marginal farm holding as
owning or operating less than 2.5 acres (one hectare), a small farm operating 2.5–5 acres (1–2 hectares), medium as
5–20 acres (2–8 hectares), and large farms as operating more than 20 acres (8 hectares).
Source: Various National Sample Surveys (NSS)

those who remained in the village became rich/progressive farmers undertaking

investment-intensive farm activities.
Interestingly, increasing marginalization of the agrarian structure in the
state, however, did not reflect any decline in growth or productivity. When
we consider the last fifty years, there are four broad phases of food grain
growth in Andhra Pradesh, which has three major regions, namely, coastal
Andhra, Rayalaseema, and Telangana. The compound growth rates of area,
production, and yield in the three regions for different sub-periods is given in
Table 9.2. We can observe that first, during the period 1973–81, high yielding
variety (HYV) rice seeds were introduced, largely in coastal Andhra and to
some extent in Telangana. Rayalaseema experienced a shift away from food
grains to oil seeds. Then, in the second phase (1981–91), there is a decline of
area in the latter two regions of Rayalaseema and Telangana, while growth in
production was sustained through yield. Andhra Pradesh was a rice-deficit
state during this period (Ramanamurthy and Mishra 2012). In the third phase,
1991–2001, the area stabilized in Telangana. In the fourth phase, 2001–11, the
area and yield under food grains, mostly rice, increased. The expansion of rabi
(winter) crops under borewells contributed to growth in production. The
production of food grains in the state grew over 3 percent in the post-
liberalization period, which is not only higher than the national growth
rate, but higher compared to the pre-liberalization period in the state, includ-
ing the green revolution period. The yield growth stayed well over 3 percent
during 1983–2000, even though there was a slight decline in the last decade.
The expansion of borewell irrigation not only led to a rise in production of
food grains, but also a diversification of cropping patterns toward non-food
grain crops such as cotton in Telangana and groundnuts in Rayalaseema.
However, this agricultural growth since 1997 has been accompanied by the
phenomenon of unabated suicides among small and marginal farmers (Galab,
Revathi, and Reddy 2010), mostly among cotton farmers. Studies have noted a

223
The Land Question in India

Table 9.2. Area, production, and yield of food grains in Andhra Pradesh (in %)

Area

Coastal Andhra Rayala Seema Telangana Andhra Pradesh

1973–4 to 1982–3 0.14 2.68 0.76 0.77

1983–4 to 1990–1 0.44 7.18 2.86 2.43
1991–2 to 2000–1 0.39 0.23 0.35 0.36
2001–2 to 2010–11 0.38 1.53 1.12 1.13
1973–4 to 2010–11 0.07 1.95 0.88 0.67
Production
1973–4 to 1982–3 3.78 1.12 3.22 2.86
1983–4 to 1990–1 0.33 4.15 2.29 0.53
1991–2 to 2000–1 3.22 1.18 4.58 3.55
2001–2 to 2010–11 3.99 3.50 5.87 3.08
1973–4 to 2010–11 2.81 0.52 2.68 2.11
Yield
1973–4 to 1982–3 3.63 1.60 4.01 3.66
1983–4 to 1990–1 0.77 3.26 5.30 3.04
1991–2 to 2000–1 2.83 0.95 4.21 3.19
2001–2 to 2010–11 3.59 1.94 4.84 1.93
1973–4 to 2010–11 2.74 2.52 3.59 2.73

Source: Estimated from Department of Economics and Statistics data

general crisis of viability of farmers in the state growing food grains as well as
non-food grains (Ramanamurthy and Mishra 2012).4 The state shows a pecu-
liar situation of immiserization that calls for a careful examination.5 In spite of
a preponderance of studies on agrarian distress, which have all singularly
focused on neoliberal policies of deflation, decline of institutional credit,
increased input costs, decline in public investment, and import competition
as responsible for the agrarian distress (Deshpande 2010; Patnaik 2007; Reddy
and Mishra 2010), there is not much engagement from an agrarian studies
perspective. It is not possible to explain the crisis of the bottom of the agrarian
structure without a nuanced analysis of agrarian classes.

9.3.2 The Three Villages in the Sample

In light of the above discussion of PCP, we shall now examine the empirical
aspects of its reproduction from the study of three villages in rural Andhra
Pradesh.6 A primary survey was conducted in three villages in the state of Andhra
Pradesh, namely, Achampet, Pulimaddi, and Kalavapamula, which are located
in the three regions of the state, Telangana, Rayalaseema, and coastal Andhra.
While this regional classification is based more on the cultural-historical back-
ground, each is also different in terms of irrigation by source, ownership struc-
ture, and economic development. While Telangana and Rayalaseema are
dominated by borewell irrigation, the coastal region has predominantly canal

224
 Land and/or Labor?

irrigation (in use for more than a century). The basic objective of the survey was
to focus on the conditions of petty commodity producers in agriculture. We give
a brief description of conditions in the three villages in the following.
Achampet is a smaller Telangana village in Medak district with about 250
households and population of 1,100 people. It has 560 acres of arable land,
most of which is irrigated through borewells. The traditional landlords,
belonging to the Reddy community, have sold off all their land, which has
been acquired by marginal and small farmers belonging to backward castes
and dalits. The government has given small pieces of land to dalits as a land
redistribution measure. Thus the village is an example of the rise of a new class
of farmers from lower castes as owner-cultivators from “below,” most whom
were previously farm laborers.
Pulimaddi is a dry village in Kurnool district of the Rayalaseema region of the
state. The village has an arable land of 1,500 acres, one-third of which is owned
by the Reddy community. The rest is owned by backward caste and dalit
farmers. The village has a history of factional feuds, which ended two decades
ago.7 The main landlord family that had once dominated the village has
suffered a huge economic decline; since then others in the Reddy community
began focusing on children’s education and diversification of cropping patterns
using tractors, which also promoted them to rich farmers from a status of big
farmers. The foot soldiers of these warring factions, mostly dalits, won some
social space in the process and managed to acquire land through wage labor.
While a few big landed households still exist, the majority of households have
turned into small, semi-medium, and medium farmers. The village grows dry
crops such as chickpea under extreme water scarcity. The small peasantry in the
village can be said to have emerged from “above” and “below.”
Kaluvapamula is an irrigated village in the developed Krishna district. The
village has a population of 1,780 with 448 households and 1,900 acres of
cultivated land. The village has more than a hundred-year history of irriga-
tion, with capitalist farming after the green revolution. Sugarcane and paddy
are the principal crops. The traditionally dominant Kamma farmers own more
than 80 percent of the agricultural land. After being the beneficiaries of the
green revolution in 1970–85 they began to diversify into nonagricultural
professions without giving up their land ownership. They lease their lands
to tenants from backward castes and dalits, who are either mostly landless or
marginal farmers.8 Thus, the landless in the village have emerged as the petty
commodity producing tenant farmers in the village.

9.3.2.1 THE SAMPLE HOUSEHOLDS

Primary information on farm size, crops grown, costs and returns, employ-
ment, allied activities, nonagricultural employment and income, credit, and
welfare transfers were collected from 454 households, distributed as 145, 154,

225
The Land Question in India

and 155 households in Achampet, Pulimaddi, and Kalavapamula respectively.

The data was collected February through April 2013. The sample, identified on
a stratified random basis, covered 35 percent of the households, where 35
percent of caste households as well as all farm size classes were covered. Indian
village society consists of a social hierarchy of castes and a class hierarchy.
Economic class power is concentrated in upper castes and declines steadily
down the caste hierarchy. This approach helps to examine the cross section of
class and caste in the study villages.

9.3.2.2 LAND OWNERSHIP

In terms of land ownership, there are some crucial differences among the
villages. There is a visible decline of landlordism in the three villages.9
In Telangana and Rayalaseem villages, namely Achampet and Pulimaddi,
which are both largely unirrigated, the traditional dominant landlord castes
have sold off a considerable share of their land in the last three decades, which
was purchased by dalits and backward caste farmers. Now landed households
constitute 91 and 69 percent respectively (Table 9.3). In Achampet, the gov-
ernment has distributed completely uncultivable wasteland of 2 acres per
head; in Pulimaddi some poor households belonging to dalits and backward
castes managed to buy small patches of land in the 1980s and 1990s. In the third
village, Kaluvapamula, which is in the coastal heartland Krishna district, landed
households constitute only 31 percent and landless 69 percent, as traditional
landlords have retained almost all their land and they lease it (because agricul-
tural land is very expensive in this village compared to the other two villages).
In irrigation-rich villages like Kaluvapamula, one does not hear about any land
distributed, as observed for backward dry land villages where common lands or
uncultivable wastelands were available for distribution.
Our study sample, when seen in terms of class distribution, has about
74 percent marginal, small, and semi-medium farmers, who constitute the
petty commodity producers in agriculture (Table 9.3), characterized not only
by the smallness of their landholding, but also their dependence on family
labor for cultivation and simultaneously hiring out as wage labor within the
agricultural and nonagricultural sectors. The petty commodity producer class
constitutes 70–80 percent in each of the villages in the form of owner-
cultivators, owner-cultivator-tenants, and landless tenants. In Achampet and
Pulimaddi, the majority of farmers are owner-cultivators and owner-tenants,
whereas in Kalavapamula, a majority of farmers are landless tenants and
owner-tenants.
While depeasantization commonly happens through pauperization, migra-
tion, and proletarianization, a process of peasantization of landless also occurred
in different ways in these three villages. In Achampet it occurred through a
combination of land purchases by landless labor and the distribution of

226
 Land and/or Labor?

Table 9.3. Agrarian structure in sample villages in Andhra Pradesh

Achampet Pulimaddi Kalavapamula Total

Land ownership (in %)

Landed households 91 69 31 67
Landless households 9 31 69 33
Size classification (in %)
Marginal 58.9 17.9 45.3 42.6
Small 28.8 23.6 12.8 23.1
Semi-medium 10.3 27.4 20.9 18.3
Medium 2.1 25.5 18.6 13.6
Large 0.0 5.7 2.3 2.4
100 100 100 100
Type of farm household (%)
Owner cultivators 65.0 33.8 13.2 32
Landless tenants 4.5 7.1 45.5 25
Owner tenants 13.0 27.9 12.4 18
Noncultivator households 13.0 7.8 5.0 11
Landless 4.5 23.4 24.0 14
Total 100 100 100 100

Source: Field study

wasteland by the government. In Pulimaddi, some of the landless households

managed to purchase land through wage incomes in the 1980s and 1990s,
when land prices were within their reach.10 As Table 9.3 demonstrates, 30
percent of small and marginal households were landless agricultural labor two
generations ago. Such purchases have become less frequent due to soaring land
prices in the recent period. In Kalavapamula, which is a canal-irrigated village,
peasantization occurred through tenancy when the upper caste farmers from
medium and large households left farming for better paying nonfarm activities.
Except for a few sales to those within their own caste within and outside the
village, they continue to own and control the land. Dalits and backward castes
now cultivate this land as tenants.
The majority of current land owners in all three villages reported that they
obtained the land through inheritance (Table 9.4). Some marginal farmers
received land during the previous generation. Roughly one-tenth of land
was inherited through dowry, although many refused to divulge actual fig-
ures. Land ownership through distribution of wasteland by the government is
observed in Achampet, which formed a small share, about 3–4 percent in
ownership. No such land distribution was seen in the other two villages.
The caste-wise distribution of land in the three villages conveys that while
dalits and backward castes own land to some extent in the two villages of
Achampet and Pulimaddi due to the dilution of the share held by the trad-
itional upper caste (Table 9.5), the Kamma dominance in land ownership
continues in the coastal village of Kalavapamula. The land price in the village

227
The Land Question in India

Table 9.4. Sources for land acquisition (in %)

Achampet Pulimaddi Kalavapamula

Inherited 76.8 69.4 80.0

Dowry 10.8 10.3 12.2
Purchased 10.3 16.8 7.8
Government 3.1 4.5 0.0
Total 100 100 100

Source: Field study

Table 9.5. Caste–class distribution of households (in %)

Owner cultivators Tenants Non-cultivators Landless

Achampet
Upper castes 67 0 27 6
Backward castes 65 19 13 3
Scheduled castes 65 19 10 6
Pulimaddi
Upper castes 33 33 15 19
Backward castes 32 36 10 22
Scheduled castes 40 41 0 19
Muslims 25 12 13 50
Kalavapamula
Upper castes 18 53 24 6
Backward castes 20 49 4 27
Scheduled castes 6 79 0 15
Scheduled tribes 10 10 0 80
Muslims 0 50 0 50

Source: Field study

is between Rs. 150,000 and Rs. 250,000 per acre, and has become a major
speculative asset. At these prices there is no possibility of dalits and backward
castes buying land to become even marginal or small farmers in this village.
The average holding of land is highly skewed in all the three villages, where
upper castes hold two to eight times more land than scheduled caste and
backward caste households. The peasant differentiation in the village has a
history of more than a century, as canal irrigation has continued since the
colonial period. The emergence of the rich peasantry, whose surplus financed
professional education of children and even sent a couple of dozen abroad.
Compared to the other two villages, the coastal Andhra village of Kalavapamula
has the highest inequality in land distribution. Land concentration in the upper
caste is stark compared to backward castes and scheduled castes (Table 9.6).
Thus, upper castes are likely to urbanize faster and dalits and backward castes
may stick to the land for a longer time.

228
 Land and/or Labor?

Table 9.6. Average size of landholding across castes (in acres)

Achampet Pulimaddi Kalavapamula

Upper castes 5.9 12.19 9.68

Backward castes 2.8 5.0 1.78
Scheduled castes (Dalits) 3.2 4.5 1.38
Scheduled tribes 1.0
Muslims 3.0 0

Source: Field study

9.3.2.3 AGRICULTURAL CREDIT

A decade ago, there was great concern about declining institutional credit to
the farm sector (Reddy and Mishra 2010). However, a recent Planning Com-
mission Report suggested a manifold increase in agricultural credit at the
aggregate level.11 Our sample study also confirmed this increase in credit
flow. However, the credit flow continues to be extremely unequal. The lion’s
share of institutional credit goes to medium and large farmers.
We found that there is a substantial coverage of formal credit in all three
villages. Further, substantial self-help group (SHG) credit also flows though
disbursal of loans to women’s groups, which marks a huge change in terms
of politics of organizing the poor by the state. The institutional credit
reaches farmers in the form of crop loans from banks (commercial and
cooperative banks), loans from mortgaging family gold, and SHG loans to
women. From the data (Table 9.7), considerable improvement can be seen
over the last six years. The total institutional credit in the three villages now
stands at 68.6 percent while non-institutional credit is around 37.4 percent.
The shares of institutional credit in Achampet, Pulimaddi, and Kalavapamula
are 53.5, 73.4, and 68.6 percent respectively. Such inter-village differences are
quite possible as far as bank credit is concerned. Why? In all three villages,
credit distribution appears to be highly unequal among different classes. In
Achampet, marginal and small farmers, who constitute 86 percent, received
only 37 percent share in bank credit, 8.5 percent in Pulimaddi, and 24 percent
in Kalavapamula. In Kalavapamula, 80 percent of farmers belong to one caste,
namely kammas and most of them are noncultivating landlords who take
the bank loans and re-lend to tenant farmers. Tenant farmers, denied bank
credit, are forced to depend on commission agents and private moneylenders
for credit.
For marginal and small farmers, SHG loans now constitute 40–50 percent of
their total loans. Even though it is not known whether they use them only for
agricultural purposes, there is a considerable amount of money being pumped
into poor households through these loans. For tenant farmers, these loans
matter a lot. Further, for tenant farmers in Kalavapamula, the cooperative

229
The Land Question in India

Table 9.7. Institutional and non-institutional credit (in %)

Institutional Non-institutional

Pulimaddi
Landless 88 12
Marginal 34 66
Small 44 56
Semi-medium 58 42
Medium 70 30
Large 76 24
Noncultivators 78 22
Achampet
Landless 47 53
Marginal 56 44
Small 38 62
Semi-medium 56 44
Medium 57 43
Noncultivators 50 50
Kalavapamula
Landless 51 49
Marginal 58 42
Small 65 35
Semi-medium 40 60
Medium 48 52
Large 100 0
Noncultivators 43 57

Source: Field study

bank in the village has distributed Joint Liability Group (JLG) loans up to Rs.
5,000 per farmer, which is insufficient to meet cultivation costs. Having no
access to bank credit, tenant farmers continue to borrow from moneylenders
at high interest rates. The other aspect that dries up the small farmers is the
private irrigation cost in dry land areas. In Achampet, we found that of the 250
borewells dug so far, over 200 went dry, leaving debts for the small farmers.

9.3.2.4 FARM COSTS AND RETURNS

To understand the distress of petty producers, an examination of the data on
farm costs and returns is necessary. We examined nine principal crops grown
in these three villages: paddy, cotton, maize, groundnut, horse gram, sor-
ghum, sunflower, tobacco, black gram, and sugarcane. The returns on paddy
cultivation have slightly improved after a five-year run of poor returns during
2007–12.12 We observed that in the surveyed year, paddy market prices and
procurement prices barely covered Cost A1 (which is only paid-out costs) and
not Cost A2 (which includes rental cost). Except in Pulimaddi, where super-
fine rice is grown, in the other two villages, returns over Cost A1 are too
meager and returns over Cost A2 are negative.13 Similarly, for cotton, maize,
sunflower, tobacco, rabi paddy,14 and sorghum, the returns over Cost A1 are

230
 Land and/or Labor?

Table 9.8. Farm costs and returns in Andhra Pradesh, 2012–2013 (in INR)

Village/Crop Price Yield Cost of Return per Quintal

(Rs. /Quintal) (Quintal/acre) production

Achampet (Medak Cost A1 Cost A2 Over cost A1 Over Cost A2

District)
Paddy Kharif 1,018 19.4 788 1,149 230 130
Paddy Rabi 1,025 17.8 1,014 1,407 11 382
Maize 1,189 14.3 803 1,293 385 103
Pulimaddi (Karnool
District)
Bengal Gram 3,537 6 2,338 3,536 1,199 1
Cotton 3,777 4.7 3,316 4,835 461 1,057
Groundnut 3,426 7.1 2,076 3,081 1,350 345
Sorghum 1,324 15.8 677 1,129 647 195
Paddy Kharif 1,600 20.6 816 1,162 783 437
Sunflower 3,264 5.6 2,888 4,163 375 899
Tobacco 5,425 7 3,766 4,786 1,658 638
Kalavapamula
(Krishna District)
Paddy Kharif 1,081 24.5 840 1,093 241 12
Paddy Rabi 926 26 857 1,096 68 169
Sugarcane 2,157 42.7 1,428 1,912 729 245
Black Gram 3,562 4 1,774 1,774 1,787 1,787

Source: Field study

too meager and returns over Cost A2 are negative in most cases (Table 9.8).
Thus it is clear from this table that farming in the state has become largely
unviable. Except for large farmers in the irrigation-endowed regions who still
cultivate on their own, the income from farming of most crops is either barely
enough to sustain consumption or even negative depending on the market
and production conditions. Higher investment on private irrigation, when
coinciding with successive dry spells of monsoons, often prove to be cata-
strophic, resulting in suicides of petty producers. Such lack of viability of
farming in the state has been noted by several other scholars since 1999
(see Ramachandran, Rawal, and Swaminathan 2010; and Ramanamurthy
and Mishra 2012).

9.3.2.5 RURAL HOUSEHOLD INCOMES

An examination of the income portfolios of households across the farm-size
classes throws light on the nature of the transition. We suggest two important
trends, namely petty commodity producers are diversifying their incomes
from farm to nonfarm sources; second, they diversify more toward wage
employment. In contrast, medium/big farmers also diversify, but proportion-
ately less and more toward business/regular salaried sources, suggesting a
growing class differentiation. Farm income, here, constitutes direct income

231
The Land Question in India

Table 9.9. Average net agricultural, nonagricultural, and total incomes of rural households
(in INR and %)

Agriculture and Allied Activities Nonagriculture Total

Rs. % Rs. % Rs. %

Landless 18,946 23 62,863 77 81,809 100

Marginal 29,833 33 60,710 67 905,402 100
Small 26,616 13 184,606 87 211,221 100
Semi-medium 49,580 35 92,214 65 141,794 100
Medium 122,113 22 423,497 78 545,609 100
Large 266,558 34 497,845 66 764,403 100
Noncultivators 34,416 19 148,064 81 182,479 100

Source: Field study

from selling agricultural and allied produce, wages, and rental incomes. Farm
business income refers to the income that comes directly from selling agricul-
tural products. According to our survey data, there is little differentiation
between the class of marginal, small, and semi-medium households (all own-
ing less than 10 acres/4 hectares), while business income is distinctly high for
medium and large farmers (above 10 acres and 20 acres respectively). These
two broad groups suggest the increasing differentiation between capitalist
farmers and petty commodity producers. This is visible in terms of the sources
of income of the households. The average annual farm income for marginal,
small, and semi-medium farmers is Rs. 7,341, Rs. 12,171, and Rs. 25,135
respectively. For medium and large farmers, it is Rs. 99,353 and Rs. 226,813
respectively, which are four to six times higher than the income earned by the
PCP households. Marginal, small, semi-medium, and medium households
draw only 33, 13, 35, and 22 percent of their family income from agriculture
and allied activities, while large farmers draw 79 percent (Table 9.9). However,
the PCP households, landless, marginal, and small, while deriving a major
portion of their incomes from nonfarm activities, draw this more from wage
labor, while medium farm households are able to diversify into regular employ-
ment, trading, and self-employment. Thus, petty producers in agriculture hang
on to agriculture but it is not their principal source of income. This means that
there is a considerable growth of nonfarm wage employment within and out-
side the village where petty commodity producers and the landless proletarian
class participate, indicating a visible process of proletarianization.

Farm business income. Within the farm income of marginal, small, and semi-
medium farmers, we found that 30–40 percent of income is earned through
animal husbandry while agricultural wage income constitutes 74–82 percent
(Table 9.10). The farm business income for PCP households ranges from

232
 Land and/or Labor?

Table 9.10. Average household net income from agricultural activities (in INR and %)

Farm business income Animal husbandry Rental Wage Total

In Rs.
Landless 0 4,667 0 14,278 18,946
Marginal 7,341 10,880 0 11,611 29,833
Small 12,171 6,377 0 8,067 26,616
Semi-medium 25,135 8,998 870 14,578 49,580
Medium 99,353 13,480 0 9,281 122,113
Large 265,813 409 0 337 266,558
Noncultivators 0 2,835 21,861 9,720 34,416
In %
Landless 0 25 0 75 100
Marginal 25 36 0 39 100
Small 46 24 0 30 100
Semi-medium 51 18 2 29 100
Medium 81 11 0 8 100
Large 99.7 0.2 0.0 0.1 100
Noncultivators 0 8 64 28 100

Source: Field study

Rs. 7,000 to Rs. 25,000, whereas for medium and large farmers it is between
Rs. 99,000 and 265,800. However, the productivity differences are not much
because the cost factor for big farmers is nullified by higher costs. Their higher
incomes are simply due to larger scale of operations in agriculture and diver-
sification into nonagricultural activities. For noncultivating landowning
classes, rental income constitutes a major source of income in the village (see
Chapter 8 in this volume). Thus, for the petty producer class of tenants, their
farm income is negative, while their principal livelihood is derived from wage
labor, supplemented by dairy and animal husbandry. The tiny pieces of land,
despite generating occasional losses and low incomes, still remain important
for the PCP households since land as an asset supports the allied activities such
as dairy, in addition to contributing to social prestige for the rural poor.

Nonfarm incomes. There is a marked decline of traditional nonfarm activities

(basically traditional services such as pottery, handlooms, laundry, arts,
leatherwork, etc.) in the villages,15 replaced by a range of new nonfarm wage
and self-employment activities that require circulation between the village
and other villages/town/city. Business opportunities are realized by those who
can invest the capital. They are mostly upper castes who are medium and large
farmers and some farmers from backward castes of similar class standing.
Dalits are still unable to access this business sphere. This is the reason that
they want to become farmers, for the social prestige it had historically that
they never enjoyed, even if it does not give adequate income. They supple-
ment income from animal husbandry and wage labor. Trading, regular

233
The Land Question in India

Table 9.11. Net income from nonagricultural activities (in INR and %)

Trade Casual Regular Self-employment Other* Total

In Rs.
Landless 5,295 7,898 16,465 13,097 20,108 62,863
Marginal 18,967 1,953 5,869 19,190 14,731 60,710
Small 47,865 2,194 8,892 14,460 51,196 124,607
Semi-medium 23,970 3,919 43,598 11,534 9,194 92,215
Medium 53,591 118 15,616 6,625 347,546 423,496
Large 0 0 245,839 252,006 0 497,845
Noncultivators 15,006 6,469 74,132 1,778 50,679 148,064
In %
Landless 8 13 26 21 32 100
Marginal 31 3 10 32 24 100
Small 37 1 5 8 49 100
Semi-medium 26 4 47 13 10 100
Medium 13 0 4 2 81 100
Large 0 0 25 75 0 100
Noncultivators 10 4 50 1 35 100

Note: * Includes income through traditional activities, wage income from migration, and National Rural Employment
Guarantee Act (NREGA).
Source: Field study

employment, profitable self-employment activities, and long-term migration

are generally monopolized by the landed and upper caste households, which
enable them to diversify their activities.
The average annual net non-farm income for marginal, small, and semi-
medium households in the sample villages is Rs. 60,710, Rs. 124,607, and
Rs. 92,215 respectively (Table 9.11). For medium and large households, it is
Rs. 423,496 and Rs. 497,845 respectively, four times that of PCP households.
Therefore, nonfarm incomes are clearly differentiating the rural residents.
Overall, there is a huge increase in nonfarm income sources and a decline of
farm incomes for petty producers. Even in farm income it is the allied activities
that fetch them a little more money than farming, where much of the surplus
is squeezed out by moneylenders, traders, landlords, and input suppliers.

9.3.2.6 SOCIAL WELFARE TRANSFER

Rural distress became an important political agenda of the Congress-led
United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in parliamentary elections in 2004, much
to the discredit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic
Alliance. Backed by several NGO activists, the UPA government mulled several
programs for different population groups, such as farmers, agricultural labor,
rural women, students, the old, and the handicapped. The civil society groups
campaigned for action addressing falling employment levels and rising
malnutrition after the directives of the Supreme Court on rotting stocks in

234
 Land and/or Labor?

Table 9.12. Average welfare transfers to households per annum in three villages (in INR)

Achampet Pulimaddi Kalavapamula Average

Public distribution system (PDS) 4,701 4,881 4,408 4,663

Pensions 2,612 4,306 3,088 3,335
Integrated child development services (ICDS) 587 924 748 753
Midday meals 2,599 2,693 2,131 2,474
Scholarships 1,600 1,875 1,600 1,692
Mahatma Gandhi national rural 5,739 9,975 3,315 6,343
employment guarantee scheme
(MGNREGS)
Total 17,838 24,654 15,290 19,261

Source: Field study

godowns (warehouses) of the Food Corporation of India.16 The political so-

ciety’s conditions are thus addressed by a slew of measures, hailed as pro-poor
by commentators. Further, an innovation is that some of these measures
became constitutional rights and a permanent feature of governance. There
are more than a dozen actively implemented schemes that involve in-kind
and cash transfers in Andhra Pradesh. These include the Public Distribution
System (PDS), Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(MNREGA or NREGA), old-age pensions, financial help for housing, student
scholarships, state medical insurance (Arogyashree), midday meal, Integrated
Child Development Services (ICDS), National Insurance and Family Benefit
Scheme, 3 percent interest farm loans, and agricultural loan waivers.17 These
schemes now form a major part of the electoral discourse through which
the parties seek to take credit for introducing social security to the poor.
We have collected data on six major welfare schemes covering in-kind and
cash transfers received by the households and computed the total average
annual welfare transfer to households. We found that almost all the poor
(even well-off) households in the villages are covered under major schemes.
The PDS and NREGA programs are implemented relatively better in South
India in general.
The average annual welfare transfer for the three villages is given in
Table 9.12. MNREGA tops the list of welfare transfers, conferring an average
annual wage income of Rs. 6,343, followed by Rs. 4,663 for PDS, and Rs. 3,335
for pensions. Midday meals and scholarships rank next. The total average
annual welfare transfer for households in the three villages is about
Rs. 19,261, which constitutes 24 percent and 15 percent of the annual income
of the landless and marginal farmers respectively. Thus welfare transfer con-
stitutes an important share, if not the principal share, of petty commodity
producers’ subsistence reproduction. The extent of legitimacy that the state
can derive is telling by the fact that UPA assumed power for a second time.

235
The Land Question in India

Further, the legitimacy that it gained is enormous, as the causes of distress are
no longer blamed on the state, but are relegated to the personal sphere of
stakeholders who are mostly farmers. The distress of petty commodity produ-
cers is addressed through the politics of welfare. However, any reduction of
welfare measures could have expected outcomes.

9.4 Concluding Remarks

The agrarian question in a postcolonial context presents a complex trajectory

in capitalist transformation. The small peasantry, in spite of adverse condi-
tions of production, may persist in farming. Suicides, pauperization,
unemployment, and the precariousness of the class are all the outcomes of
conditions of PCP. PCP can coexist with a capitalist system, as long as PCP
households manage to produce the market surplus needed for the system.
Until alternative opportunities to migrate arise, these households are com-
pelled to hang on. Diversification into nonfarm activities is inevitable in the
course of capitalist development; it is already happening with gradually
increasing participation in nonfarm activities, widening the income portfolio.
Our evidence suggests that for the majority of farm households, who are
essentially petty commodity producers, the share of agricultural income is
less than what is earned from nonfarm sources. Their diversification is also
proceeding toward more wage labor. Yet, the ambiguous family labor-based
petty commodity production can persist until the final resolution. Until then,
one still finds a preference for land ownership, with the added reasons of
speculative holding and reproduction of social status. The precariousness
that stems from lower returns, high risk, lack of access to institutional support
in credit, technology, and marketing is matched somewhere by rising wages
and alternative opportunities. Meanwhile, the precariousness is addressed by
the state in terms of welfare transfers. Thus, diverse processes enable the
existence of petty commodity producer households. As these changes take
place, land is becoming less central to their lives.

Notes

1. The issue of agrarian transition and mode of production in India was debated
vigorously in various issues of Economic and Political Weekly and Social Scientist in
the 1970s. Characterization of the mode of production in Indian agriculture got
pegged between two positions, that is, dominantly precapitalist and semi-feudal,
with emerging capitalist relations at one end (Bhadhuri 1973; Patnaik 1973) and
dominantly capitalist relations with persisting subtle semi-feudal relations (Desai

236
 Land and/or Labor?

1984; Rudra 1978). There were other equally compelling views that capitalist
relations had already entered under colonial rule (Banaji 1975; Frank 1996), while
some others held the opposite view, that colonial rule introduced feudal relations
and blunted growth of production forces by unequal exchange and drain of surplus
against formation of potential capitalist relations (Prasad 1987). The debate, as
stated by Alice Thorner (1982), remained inconclusive from the diverse positions
taken by the Marxist political economists and the practitioners.
2. “Governmentality” is a Foucauldian term that refers to a process of dividing
populations into groups that are amenable to statistical measurement, using census
and other methods, and fixing governmental programs to the targeted groups,
thereby gaining biopower over the groups. The participation of members in the
program gives the state a positive power over the population besides the sovereign
power it already has. This power over groups is a discursive power that keeps them
fractured (Foucault 2007).
3. Ashok Mitra (1977) argued that the kulak class prevails over the public policy by
influencing agricultural price policy, which caused the terms of trade to shift in
favor of agriculture, affecting industrial accumulation.
4. Andhra Pradesh stands second in India beside other states such as Maharashtra,
Karnataka, UP, Punjab, Haryana, and Kerala. Over two and half lakh (250,000)
farmers have committed suicide between 1995 and 2011. Most of the victims are
small and marginal farmers and many belong to backward classes and scheduled
castes (Sainath 2012). Several scholars who have analyzed the farmer suicides
contend that these suicides are the legacy of the economic reforms (Deshpande
2010; Mishra 2009; Nair and Menon 2009; Parthasarathy 2002; Revathi et al. 2009;
Singh 2010).
5. The contemporary agrarian crisis that began in the mid-1990s is much more than a
mere outcome of neoliberal policies adopted since 1991 as contemplated by some
scholars (Reddy and Mishra 2010). But the neoliberal reforms have certainly accen-
tuated the crisis. Ecological strain resulting from intensive monocropping and
extensive use of groundwater has imposed externalities (Reddy et al. 2001).
6. The study was done in 2012–13, during which Telangana state was not yet separ-
ated from Andhra Pradesh.
7. The history of factional fights in Rayalaseema villages dates back to pre-British times.
The village chieftains who were the warlords in the Vijayanagar Empire passed the
unfettered legacy into modern times. Thomas Munroe, the Collector of Bellary, had
suppressed these local warlords, called “poligars,” ruthlessly. Still, some of them
survived as factionists who dominate village politics. While much of the factionism
has died down, it survives in a small belt in Karnool-Cuddapah districts. A last active
phase saw the induction of these into the two bourgeois parties in the 1980s. Some of
them graduated into big time politicians, one of them became even became a chief
minister, to name Rajasekhar Reddy (see Balagopal 2005).
8. Kamma farmers managed low wage rates by shifting to piece rates in the 1980s, but
were unable to control them due to the 1989 Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes
Atrocities Prohibition Act. Then leasing became a better option, where risk could be
transferred to the tenant and the moral hazard problem avoided.

237
The Land Question in India

9. Landlordism here refers to dominance of big landlords over agricultural labor

toward submission for economic and other services, not necessarily feudal in
nature.
10. The actual stories of land purchase are tortuous ones, where dalit families remained
joint families, invested the surplus from the farming to acquire further land, while
wage incomes are used for maintaining consumption. It is difficult to differentiate
the source of savings, which can range from underconsumption to rising real wages
to state policy of public distribution.
11. Report of Working Group on Institutional Finance, Cooperatives and Risk
Management for twelfth Five-Year Plan (2012–17), Planning Commission (p. 13).
12. In 2013 the situation had slightly improved as both procurement prices as well as
market prices have gone up.
13. Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices provides six categories of prices,
according to different cost concepts: (i) Cost A1 (all fixed and variable paid out
costs excluding rent), (ii) Cost A2 (Cost A1+rent), (iii) Cost A2+ (FL), (iv) Cost B1
(Cost A1 + Interest on value of owned fixed assets excluding land), (v) Cost B2 (Cost
A2+imputed rent on own land), (vi) Cost C1 (Cost B1+ imputed family labor); (vii)
Cost C2 (Cost B2+imputed family labor); (viii) Cost C2* (Cost C2 using Minimum
Wages if they are higher than market wages); (ix) Cost C3 (cost C2*+10 percent
managerial input over C2*). Cost A2+FL that includes rent as well as family labor is
relevant cost for tenant farmer, Cost B1 and B2 is relevant for small and marginal
farmers, and cost C1 and C3 are relevant costs for supervisory landlord farmers. The
respective cost of cultivation is converted into cost of production per quintal by
applying the yield.
14. Rabi refers to the winter crop, which spans from January to April, while the
monsoon crop during June–November is called Kharif.
15. Activities such as pot-making, ironwork, carpentry, washing, and weaving are
mostly non-existent. There is a rise of new nonfarm sector activities such as
finance, commission agents, pesticide/seed dealers, trading, hotel, petty shops,
grocers, vegetable vending, cloth merchants, food vending, transport, photo-
graphers, motor mechanics, television mechanics, phone recharging, electricians,
winding works, plumbers, masons, construction workers, television cable oper-
ators, drinking water suppliers, photocopying centers, stationary shops, private
school teachers, bus/truck/van/auto/harvester/poclainer/tractor drivers, MNREGA
mate workers, technical assistants, SHG organizers, nurses, ANM (auxiliary nurse
midwife) workers, Anganwadi workers, mid-day meal workers, tailors, liquor shop,
medical shops, and so on, which are the new job activities emerging in the village
and outside.
16. See “Supreme Court Orders on the Right to Food: A Tool for Action,” available at:
<www.sccommissioners.org/CourtOrders/tool_for_action.pdf> (accessed September
12, 2016).
17. The various social welfare schemes and programs in the state are as follows: Under
Public Distribution System, 20 kg rice is given to below poverty line (BPL) families
at Rs.1 per kg; Congress government in the state also opened a fee reimbursement
scheme for the poor in all streams of higher education; Arogyashree is a medical

238
 Land and/or Labor?

reimbursement scheme under which every member of designated below-poverty

households is entitled to private medical care (the program later became a public–
private health insurance model); National Family Health Benefit Scheme is another
life insurance scheme for the poor whereby Rs. 50,000 is paid outright in every
accidental death of the rural poor; the Integrated Child Development Services
provides a nutrition supplement to infants up to five years and pregnant mothers,
providing an egg every day to each child; the mid-day meal scheme provides lunch
to school-going children; 1.3 percent loan scheme is an interest-subsidized loan
scheme against the usual bank interest of 7 percent; the SHG program is one of the
biggest in the country where 13 million women are covered under microcredit
(each receiving a loan ranging from Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 25,000 depending on the group
life); MNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act), launched in
2005, gives an average employment of sixty-seven days to one member of rural
families in Andhra Pradesh.

References

Akram-Lodhi, H. and Kay, C. 2010. “Surveying the Agrarian Question” (Part I and II).
Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(1–2): 177–202, 255–84.
Bagchi, A. 2008. Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital.
Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield.
Banaji, J. 1975. “India and the Colonial Mode of Production.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 10(49): 1887–92.
Bernstein, H. 2010. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press.
Bhaduri, A. 1973. “A Study in Agricultural Backwardness under Semi-Feudalism.”
Economic Journal, 83(329): 120–37.
Byres, T. J. 1977. “Agrarian Transition and Agrarian Question.” Journal of Peasant
Studies, 4(3): 258–74.
Chatterjee, P. 2004. Politics of the Governed: Reflection on Popular Politics in Most of the
World. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
Chatterjee, P. 2008. “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India.” Economic
and Political Weekly, 43(16): 53–62.
Desai, A. R. 1984. India’s Path of Development: A Marxist Approach. Mumbai: Popular
Prakasan.
Deshpande, R. S. 2010. “Agrarian Transition and Farmers’ Distress in Karnataka.”
In Agrarian Crisis in India, edited by D. N. Reddy and S. Mishra, New Delhi: Oxford,
pp. 199–229.
Foucault, M. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978,
edited by M. Senellart, translated by G. Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Frank, A. G. 1973. “On Feudal ‘Modes,’ Models and Methods of Escaping Capitalist
Reality.” Economic and Political Weekly, 8(1–26): 36–7.
Frank, A. G. 1996. “India in the World Economy, 1400–1750.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 31(30): PE50–PE64.

239
The Land Question in India

Galab, S., Revathi, E., and Reddy, R.P. 2010. “Farmer’s Suicides and an Unfolding
Agrarian Crisis in Andhra Pradesh.” In Agrarian Crisis in India, edited by N. Reddy
and S. Mishra, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 164–98.
Gramsci, A. 1996. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
Harriss-White, B. 2006. “Poverty and Capitalism.” Economic and Political Weekly, 41(13):
1241–6.
Harriss-White, B. 2012. “Capitalism and the Common Man: Peasants and Petty Com-
modity Production in Africa and South Asia.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political
Economy, 1(2): 109–60.
Kautsky, K. [1889] 1988. The Agrarian Question. London: Zwan Publications.
Lerche, J. 2013. “The Agrarian Question in Neoliberal India: Agrarian Transition
Bypassed?” Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3): 382–404.
Marx, K. 1954. Das Capital, vol.1, part III. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Mitra, A. 1977. Terms of Trade and Class Relations: An Essay in Political Economy, London:
Routledge.
Mishra, S. 2009. “Agrarian Distress and Farmers’ Suicides in Maharashtra.” In Agrarian
Crisis in India, edited by N. Reddy, D. Reddy, and S. Mishra. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, pp. 126–63.
Nair, K. N. and Menon, V. 2009. “Distress, Debt, and Suicides among Farmer
Households: Findings from Village Sudies in Kerala.” In Agrarian Crisis in India, edited
by N. Reddy, D. Reddy, and S. Mishra. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 230–60.
Parthasarathy, B. 2002. “Changing Agrarian Structure and Nature of Transition in Post-
Green Revolution Period.” In Development of Andhra Pradesh: 1956–2001. A Study
of Regional Disparities, edited by Y. Krishna Rao and S. Subrahmanyam. Hyderabad:
N.R.R Research Centre, pp. 25–59.
Patnaik, U. 1973, “Central Committee Resolutions on Certain Agrarian Issues.” Social
Scientist, 13: 65.
Patnaik, U. 2007. Republic of Hunger and Other Essays. New Delhi: Tulika Publications.
Prasad, P. H. 1987. “Towards a Theory of Transformation of Semi-Feudal Agriculture.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 22(31): 1287–90.
Ramachandran, V. K., Rawal, V., and Swaminathan, M. 2010. Socio-Economic Surveys of
Three Villages in Andhra Pradesh: a Study of Agrarian Relations. New Delhi: Tulika
Books.
Ramanamurthy, R. V. and Mishra, R. 2012. “Unremunerative Pricing of Paddy: A Case
of Andhra Pradesh.” Study No. 38, DRG Study Series, Reserve Bank of India. Available
at: <https://rbi.org.in/scripts/PublicationsView.aspx?id=14604> (accessed September
12, 2016).
Reddy, N. and Mishra, S. (eds) 2010. Agrarian Crisis in India. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Rudra, A. 1978. “Class Relations in Indian Agriculture–III.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 13(24): 994–1004.
Sainath, P. 2012. “Farm Suicides Rise in Maharashtra, State Still Leads the List.” The
Hindu, July 3.
Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmen-
tality, and Post-Colonial Capitalism. London: Routledge.

240
 Land and/or Labor?

Singh, K. 2010. “Agrarian Crisis in Punjab: High Indebtedness, Low Returns, and Farmers’
Suicides.” In Agrarian Crisis in India, edited by N. Reddy, D. Reddy, and S. Mishra.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 261–80.
Thorner, A. 1982. “Semi-Feudalism or Capitalism: Contemporary Debate on Classes
and Modes of Production in India.” Economic and Political Weekly, 17(51): 1993–2009.
Vijay, R. 2006. “Agrarian Structure and Agrarian Relations: Illustrations from Village
Studies.” Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, 2(1): 22–56.
Vijay, R. 2012. “Structural Retrogression and Rise of New Landlords in Indian Agriculture:
An Empirical Exercise.” Economic and Political Weekly, 46(5): 37–45.

241
10

Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

Two Stories of Left Reformism and Development

Anirban Dasgupta

10.1 Introduction

This chapter examines the extent to which land reforms created the condi-
tions of capital accumulation in West Bengal and Kerala, the two states in
postcolonial India that attempted to bring about major land-related institu-
tional change. The idea that land reforms can stimulate a process of relatively
egalitarian capitalist industrialization by increasing the productivity of agricul-
ture and equalizing the distribution of primary productive assets, has been
discussed frequently in the development literature (Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz
2002; Kay 2002). In India, West Bengal and Kerala are the only states where such
a process could have materialized in principle, as the initial condition of sig-
nificant land reforms was satisfied in these cases. At a time when land reforms
are no longer high on the development agenda, our study is a reminder of the
only attempts at serious redistribution of assets in independent India and how
that has affected the course of accumulation in their local contexts.
Land reforms in both Kerala and West Bengal were brought about through
progressive legislative acts that were the results of long-standing peasant move-
ments led by the left political forces. Although both the nature and impact of
these interventions have been different for the two states, they share common
ground in attempting an alternative model of development in the context of
postcolonial India. The claim here is not that the left governments had a clear
framework of capital accumulation for their states before them when they
brought about the land reform legislation in 1957 (reformulated in 1969 for
Kerala) and 1977. Political literature of the left parties indicates that the primary
driving force behind land reforms was to provide the peasantry with some relief
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

from the exploitative system of agricultural production they were part of.
Nevertheless, being unique for undertaking serious land-related interventions,
it would not have been unreasonable to expect the two states to follow a distinct
development trajectory in comparison to the other parts of India where land
reforms were mostly limited to the abolition of the colonial intermediaries in
the land revenue system.1
Given the above background, the specific aim of this chapter is to compare
the development paths of these two states from the vantage point of their
agricultural sector. In doing so, we want to understand if the process of capitalist
accumulation was strengthened or made more equitable in these two states
with the stimulus of land reform. We start by asking, how did changes in
agrarian relations brought about by the land reform legislation affect agricul-
tural production as well as the different classes of the agricultural population?
Further, in what ways did the outcome of the reforms in agriculture impact the
broader dynamics of capitalist accumulation in these states? Although serious
land reform is no longer considered a policy option or a political imperative in
the Indian context, this comparative study illustrates how important local
institutional factors can be in mediating the relationship between land tenure
systems, agricultural growth, and the extent of capitalist development in the
overall economy. Apart from the historical lessons from these specific experi-
ences for the Indian left, this chapter seeks to clarify the understanding of the
role of agriculture, and thus the place for land, in development in India.
We will engage with two distinct theoretical literatures in analyzing the
cases in question: the political economy literature of the Byres–Bernstein
school that has consistently tried to adapt the classical Marxian concepts to
contemporary realities of agrarian change (Bernstein 2004; Byres 1991) and
the more mainstream, policy-oriented literature on agriculture-led develop-
ment credited to John Mellor and others (Dunham 1991; Mellor 1995).
A political economy analysis is essential to understand the nature of accumu-
lation that had evolved in agriculture, starting from the land reforms and their
implications for the different agrarian classes. The framework of farm–nonfarm
linkages popularized by Mellor is useful to evaluate how the land reform pro-
grams affected changes in agricultural production and how this in turn
impacted the nature and pattern of growth across the rest of the economy.2
While there is a rich literature on land reform for both Kerala and West
Bengal individually, the present study differs significantly in its coverage as
well as conceptualization. First, it offers a comparative analysis of the two
cases and thus hopes to tease out important differences between the two states
in terms of the design, implementation, and impact of the reforms as well as
on the wider development pattern of the two states.3 Second, it uses the
insights from the comparative analysis to understand whether the demand
for land reform has any relevance in contemporary India in making capitalist

243
The Land Question in India

accumulation more robust as well as equitable. This can help clarify the often
muddled discourse on inclusive growth in India from an explicit political
economy position. Lastly, this chapter hopes to contribute indirectly to the
literature on the politics of the Indian left as a comparative analysis of two
major examples of left reformism attempted in postcolonial India. A critical
rethinking of left interventions in the past becomes even more relevant today
when the conventional left political formations have been weakened signifi-
cantly in their erstwhile strongholds of Kerala and West Bengal.
As for any other subnational analysis for India that involves policies imple-
mented at the state level, one has to remember that constituent states in the
Indian republic do not function as independent economic entities. While
agriculture and land are state subjects in the Indian constitution and state
governments do play a very important role in shaping the agricultural sector,
agricultural production takes place in a wider macroeconomic context includ-
ing the trade regime, which clearly constitutes a set of national-level variables.
Having said that, it remains a testament to India’s vibrant democracy that
different so-called “models” of development followed by different state gov-
ernments (often from different political persuasions) are hotly debated in
Indian public life.4 There is also clear evidence to show that state-level policies
and emphases significantly affect the real development experiences of ordin-
ary citizens in various ways (Kohli 1987).
The rest of the chapter is structured as follows: Section 10.2 reviews the
theoretical literature in order to present a conceptual framework for under-
standing how the agrarian reality in an economy shapes overall development
and what role land reforms can play in facilitating this function. Section 10.3
introduces the Kerala and West Bengal land reforms and provides the basic
data regarding implementation of reform measures. Section 10.4 analyzes the
post-land reform development trajectories in the two states. Section 10.5
attempts to evaluate the extent to which land reforms were able to bring
about a distinctive pattern of development by resolving the agrarian question,
especially in its accumulation dimension. The concluding section discusses
the limits of left reformism in the Indian context by highlighting how land
reforms were not sufficient to stimulate capitalist accumulation in these two
states. It argues that in both cases there was a disarticulation of the accumu-
lation dimension of the agrarian question, a conclusion that resonates with
developments in contemporary Indian capitalism.

10.2 Land and Capitalist Development: Some Theoretical Issues

The role of agriculture in the creation of value in the economy has been a
persistent theme in political economy since the writings of the Physiocrats in

244
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

the middle of the eighteenth century. Marx and Marxian writers following
him such as Engels, Lenin, and Kautsky, wrote extensively on the so-called
“agrarian question,” which relates broadly to the advent of capitalist produc-
tion in agriculture (and the changes in class structure that it brings about in
the countryside) as a precursor to the establishment of industrial capitalism.
For our purposes in this chapter, we will begin by discussing the contem-
porary reading of the agrarian question and its relevance in today’s globalized
world. Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2010) present a useful characterization of the
different “problematics of the agrarian question” based on writings of the
distinguished agrarian scholars Terry Byres and Henry Bernstein. According
to them, the three major problematics are those related to accumulation,
production, and politics. The central focus of the accumulation problematic
is the role agriculture plays in facilitating industrial accumulation by produ-
cing surplus in the form of food, nonfood commodities, as well as labor. The
production problematic is most clearly derived from the classic version of
the agrarian question (following Kautsky and Lenin) and concerns itself
with the development of capitalism as the dominant production system in
agriculture (from feudalism or other precapitalist forms) and analyzes the
factors that determine the speed at which this capitalist transition takes
place in a given context.5 The politics problematic seeks to understand the
changes in the rural class configuration that evolves through the class conflict
accompanying agrarian transition.
It is useful to pause and reflect on how forms of state-mandated institutional
changes in land relations, or what are called “land reforms” more generally,
may affect the resolution of the agrarian question in terms of accumulation,
production, or politics. Most progressive land reform legislation, whether a
result of sustained political struggle or that of administrative exigency, would
have a strong anti-landlord bias geared toward weakening the hold of trad-
itional landlords on agricultural production including their domination in the
credit, labor, and commodity markets. To the extent such reforms are imple-
mented with seriousness, they will clearly change the class configuration in
the agrarian landscape along with a shift in the dominant production systems
in agriculture. Depending on the specifics of the land reforms undertaken and
the historical context, the exact nature of agrarian transition will differ. For
example, in Punjab, the postindependence land reform in the early 1950s was
limited to the abolition of the revenue intermediaries that existed in the
colonial system. This led to a system of production dominated by large-scale
capitalist farmers who were invested in agriculture as a profitable enterprise to
the detriment of the smaller tenants or self-cultivators (Gill 1989). On the
contrary, in the case of both South Korea and Taiwan in the second half of the
last century, where land reforms came in the form of conferring long-term
cultivation rights to the tenants and eventually transferring ownership rights,

245
The Land Question in India

a system of small peasants using family labor emerged as the dominant form
of production in the process completely eliminating the erstwhile landlord
class (a significant section of these being Japanese) (Griffin, Khan, and Ick-
owitz 2002). Needless to say, the vast experience of actually implemented land
reforms across the world over the twentieth century can provide many other
examples of agrarian transition.
The key question for us in this chapter is to understand how the accumu-
lation dimension of the agrarian question is impacted by the advent of land
reforms. A slightly different way of raising the same question is to ask: How
does land reform change the trajectory of overall development in an economy
through its impact on the agrarian production process? At the outset it is
important to recognize that the accumulation process that we are interested
in analyzing is not detached from the dimensions of production and politics;
in fact it is only through a change in these latter dimensions that land reforms
will have an effect on the larger economy through accumulation.
A schematic representation of a so-called “virtuous path” that follows from
the logic of redistributive land reform may be the following (see Griffin, Khan,
and Ickowitz 2002; Storm 2015: 683): confiscatory land reform leads to the
weakening (or possible elimination) of the landlord class and gives rise to a
dynamic system of peasant-based agriculture, given a system of providing
complementary inputs such as credit, technology access, and so on is in
place. This change in the agrarian structure results in growth and surplus
generation in agriculture. A part of this surplus is transferred out of agriculture
for industrial accumulation (both in rural and urban areas) through either
state-directed taxation measures or some mode of incentivizing investment
outside agriculture. As a result, the nonagricultural sector (industry and ser-
vices) grows at a higher rate than agriculture (additionally supported by the
demand generated from a more prosperous agriculture) and labor moves out of
agriculture along a Lewisian path, completing the process of structural trans-
formation. Of course, the entire process can, in principle, happen without land
reforms as well but if we have land reform there is the added advantage of
starting with a more equitable distribution of resources that has the potential
of generating a more broad-based or “inclusive” growth process.
John Mellor and his associates had the above schema in mind when they
advocated an agriculture-led growth strategy (Mellor 1995). There were two
caveats, though. First, as mentioned before, land reform per se was not essen-
tial. As long as an economy could generate significant growth in agriculture
(even through technological means à la green revolution instead of institu-
tional changes), the process can work out. Growth thus generated may not be
particularly shared or inclusive but since its magnitude can potentially be
substantial, trickle-down effects can make a significant dent in poverty. Sec-
ond, there were crucial linkages between agriculture and the nonagricultural

246
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

sector that needed to be strong for this strategy to be successful. This included
demand-side consumption linkages as well as supply-side production linkages
both upstream and downstream.
It is worth repeating that land reforms that were instituted in Kerala and
West Bengal were not policy interventions with explicit development object-
ives in a conventional sense but were natural steps taken in culmination of
long-standing demands and struggles of the small peasants and landless
laborers who constituted an important support base of the left political move-
ments led by the mainstream communist parties. Rather than a longer-term
revolutionary move to further the cause of socialism, land reform was seen as a
means to provide short-term “relief” to the exploited peasantry in what was
characterized as a semi-feudal agrarian system (Bhaduri 1973). Left leaders
have repeatedly said that given the constraints of running a state government
within the larger national governance apparatus dominated by the interests
of big capital, no fundamental change in the economic or political system was
possible. The objective instead is to “provide relief to the people and strengthen
the democratic movements” (Karat 2007).
However, if one looks carefully, it is not difficult to detect an alternative
vision of development among enthusiasts of the left governments at the
initial stages. Take the case of Ashok Mitra, distinguished left-wing economist
and intellectual as well as the finance minister of the first left front govern-
ment from 1977. Introducing a set of articles in the journal Social Scientist in
early 1978 (Mitra 1978: 7) on the opportunities ahead of the new government,
he says:

The reconstruction albeit partial, of the income structure in the villages [brought
about by land reforms] should lead to an enlargement in the demand for goods
and services, which could immediately give rise to the possibility of a planned
expansion of cottage and small industries. This is an area where the Left Front
government would have to apply itself with drive, skill and imagination. The
prospect of a linkage between the demand newly emerging in the countryside
and some urban industries, supplying either inputs for agriculture or finished
commodities for rural consumption, would be equally relevant. True, this series
of additional demands by themselves could have but a marginal impact on the
overall industrial situation. But even were there to be a slight shift in demand for
the products of the organised industrial sector, to that extent a few thousands [sic]
could be additionally absorbed in jobs. This additional employment might in turn
lead to a further strengthening of demand across-the-board, thereby contributing,
howsoever modestly, to general industrial growth.

Ashok Mitra clearly indicates a framework of an industrial accumulation

process kick-started through the restructuring in agrarian relations brought
about by land reforms. In spite of important differences in the details, in its
basic tenets this “model” is not very dissimilar to the experience of Taiwanese

247
The Land Question in India

development through agriculture–industry linkages discussed in Mao and

Schive (1995).6 Chandra (1978a, 1978b) charts the possibilities of a new
form of industrialization in West Bengal not dependent on investment from
big capital, whether foreign or domestic (equally applicable for Kerala with
minor changes) with the advent of the new government in 1977. The strategy
presented is that of small-scale, labor-intensive industrialization including
rural industrialization that works in tandem with the interventions in land
tenure so as to exploit the possibilities of the linkages between agricultural
growth and industrial development to the fullest.7
This discussion highlighted the key role of the agricultural sector in enab-
ling industrial accumulation and the specific function of land reform in this
context in generating a more equitable growth outcome. With this theoretical
understanding we move on to the details of the land reform programs and
their implementation in Kerala and West Bengal.

10.3 Overview of the Land Reforms

In Kerala, the process of land reform started with the election of the first
Communist Party-led state government in 1957. One of the first policy
moves of this government was passage of the Kerala Agrarian Relations Bill
(KARB) in 1959. The KARB had relatively strict provisions of handing over
ownership rights to the actual tillers.8 There was also a land ceiling fixed at 15
acres of double-cropped paddy (or equivalent), going up to 25 acres for larger
families. The enactment of KARB led to political chaos with steep opposition
from all the non-left political parties including the Congress Party, which
represented the interest of the landed class. Although other issues against
the Communist government were raised in the sustained movement by the
opposition, it was essentially focused on the anti-land ownership provisions
of the KARB. Finally this movement led to the dismissal of the state govern-
ment by the central government in 1959, which invoked the controversial
Article 356 of the constitution (Raj and Tharakan 1983). The newly elected
coalition government by the Congress Party introduced the Kerala Agrarian
Relations Act (KARA) in 1960 with some minor changes to the earlier bill.
However, KARA could not be put into operation due to other legal obstacles
and was replaced with the Kerala Land Reforms Act in 1963. Subsequent
versions of the bill diluted the progressive provisions of the original bill.
The newly elected left government passed the Kerala Land Reforms
Amended Act (KLRAA) in 1969, which was ultimately implemented in 1970.
A ceiling limit of 20 acres for a family of five was declared in the act. However,
rubber, tea, and coffee plantations, private forest, nonagricultural land, and
land owned by religious, charitable, and public educational institutions were

248
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

excluded from the act. The act very importantly also made provisions for
abolishing tenancy. According to KLRAA, from the beginning of 1970, all
land under tenancy automatically accrued to the state as the de jure owner
while the de facto rights of such land were given to the sitting tenants (Raj
and Tharakan 1983). By the late 1970s, most tenants were issued purchase
certificates by the state government on verifying their status as genuine
lessees according to KLRAA. Lastly, there was also an important provision
for ownership rights of homestead plots given to the rural poor at subsidized
rates with the government paying half the purchase amount on behalf of the
beneficiaries.
In terms of land redistribution, by 2007, about 31,043 hectares of land had
been distributed among 165,149 individual beneficiaries accounting for
between 1–2 percent of the net cropped area, with merely 0.19 hectares per
beneficiary (Agravala 2010). The land to the tiller program was much more
successful, with almost 2.8 million tenants being conferred ownership rights
on roughly 600,000 hectares of land (Appu 1996, cited in Ramakumar 2006).
Up to 1996, 528,000 households also received ownership of homestead plots
(Ramakumar 2006).
The land reform program in West Bengal proceeded in two phases. The first
phase took place between 1967 and 1970 under two United Front govern-
ments, which was a coalition of different left parties including the CPI (M) and
a breakaway group of the Congress Party called the Bangla Congress. The CPI
(M) controlled the key ministry of land resources and played an active role in
land redistribution during this period. The ministry also passed an amend-
ment to the previous land reform clause with stricter provisions. Instead of
25 acres per person, the ceiling was revised to 12.3 acres of irrigated land and
17.3 acres of unirrigated land for households of up to 5 persons (Sengupta and
Gazdar 1997).9 The main focus of land reform in this phase was appropriation
of ceiling surplus land and its distribution among poor and landless peasants.
The left parties, especially the CPI (M) and the CPI (ML) (the Naxalite or the
ultra-left faction that was not a part of the government),10 were active in
identifying ceiling surplus land including benami land (land held under a
bogus name or name of relatives to avoid ceiling provisions) held by the richer
peasants and landlords as well as putting pressure on the local government
functionaries to use the provisions of land ceiling legislation and appropriate
the ceiling surplus land.
After the fall of the United Front government there was a lull in the imple-
mentation of land reform. The second phase started in 1977, when the CPI
(M)-led left front government (LFG) was voted to power. The main facets of
the LFG land reforms included a) land redistribution, and b) enforcing ten-
ancy rights and decreasing the rental share for sharecroppers through the
registration of tenants in the Operation Barga program.11 The registration

249
The Land Question in India

was carried out initially though state-wide camps organized by the state land
reform department where share-tenants or bargadars were encouraged to
register themselves. This bureaucratic exercise was actively supported by the
CPI (M) through their extensive networks in rural West Bengal.
Although roughly 205,444 hectares of land was supposed to have been
redistributed among 2,102,529 individuals between 1977 and 2011
(Government of West Bengal 2012), it constitutes only 4 percent of the net
cropped area with per capita land redistributed being a meager 0.1 hectare.
The tenancy reform program was relatively more successful than land redis-
tribution, with about 1.5 million sharecroppers constituting approximately
75 percent of the total number recorded by the state. There is mixed evidence
on the extent to which tenants managed to retain their crop share mandated by
Operation Barga. The security of tenure guaranteed to registered tenants has
also not been absolute, with a statewide survey carried out in 2000 reporting
that 14.4 percent of bargaders or share-tenants lost possession of their land,12
with this proportion going up to 30 percent in some districts (Dasgupta 2010).

10.4 Post-Land Reform Economies in Kerala and West Bengal

We next present the broad trajectory of growth and development in Kerala

and West Bengal over the last three decades to decipher how (and to what
extent) the land reforms, which were largely complete by the early 1980s,
shaped this trajectory. Instead of presenting a detailed account of the devel-
opment experience that is outside the scope of this chapter, we will start with
an analysis of agricultural performance following the land reforms. This allows
us to understand the direct impact of the reforms, if any, on economic
production. Subsequently we will discuss some other salient features of the
respective state economies that have evolved post-land reforms and are
important from the perspective of this chapter.
Any balanced account of Kerala’s land reform would admit that the agrarian
relations in the state were significantly impacted by the state’s land tenure
policies. The traditionally powerful landlord caste/classes such as the Nam-
boodiris and Nayars were weakened, while a large section of the tenants and
agricultural laborers gained ownership rights, albeit over small landholdings.
The agricultural laborers also gained in terms of increasing wages and better
social security provisions (Ramachandran 1997). However, this empowerment
of the peasantry and workers did not lead to agricultural growth in the
subsequent period. Kannan and Pushpangadan (1988) present a comprehen-
sive analysis of data on yield, area, and production for both food and nonfood
crops to show that the period contemporaneous with the land reform process
(as well as the next few years) 1975–6 to 1985–6, witnessed stagnation in

250
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

agriculture with negative rates of growth in output. The main factor explain-
ing this stagnation is the rapid rise in real wages of agricultural labor through
unionization, which in the absence of any major technological breakthrough
outweighed any increase in labor productivity. This study also contains an
important finding that the growth in tertiary sector service activities, which
was the main growth sector in the economy in the ten years under question,
was being driven by external remittance income mainly from the Gulf region
and was thus not related to the working of the primary and secondary sectors.
This disjuncture continued to be a pattern of the Kerala economy for years
to come.
Kerala, as an exemplary case of advances in social development among
Indian states, is well known in the development literature. Its success in
achieving human development indicators comparable to advanced Western
economies on some fronts despite modest economic performance is justifiably
heralded for the effectiveness of public action in bringing about progressive
development outcomes (Dreze and Sen 1995, 1997). In some accounts, the
policies of the subsequent left governments are identified as the major deter-
minants of this remarkable record, along with historical factors. While it is
true that the presence of left political movements as well as left-induced
policies have had a far-reaching impact on the social landscape by empower-
ing the poor and marginalized, when it comes to land reform in particular, its
economic impact on the growth process in the Kerala economy is ambiguous.
Kannan (1998) makes an important contribution analyzing the Kerala
development pattern from the perspective of labor. The presence of powerful
labor organizations in the state since the early 1980s, due to the predomin-
ance of left politics, shaped the pattern of Kerala’s development. Wage rates
for various categories of labor increased well beyond the cost of living adjust-
ments as well as increases in labor productivity and were accompanied by
nonwage benefits related to pensions and health care. Kannan (1998) shows
that the bargaining power of labor was also bolstered by the phenomenon of
labor migration to the booming Gulf economies from the late 1970s. This
relative advantage that labor as a class started to enjoy, led them to oppose
technological change in industrial production due to the apprehension of job
loss. However, such tactics resulted in a profit squeeze for employers and
ultimately in loss of employment due to capital flight out of the state. The
case of agriculture was no different, with major resistance by organized labor
associations to modern technology, forcing landowners (often small farmers
themselves) to shift to less labor-intensive crops. Kannan (1998: 64) explains
the problem succinctly:

Between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, the area under paddy registered a decline
of nearly 30 percent and by the mid-1990s of 40 percent! This decline in area

251
The Land Question in India

aggravated an already deteriorating situation of employment of agricultural

labourers. On a conservative estimate the decline in employment (excluding
harvesting and post-harvesting operations), due to a decline in area, was around
35 million man days between the mid-1970s and early 1980s and around 50
million man days by the mid-1990s. Moreover, the crop cultivating agricultural
sector stagnated since the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s thereby imposing an
additional constraint in enhancing employment in the economy as a whole.

While from the demand side, employment was being curtailed due to the
relatively high price of labor, the high quality of public infrastructure in
health and education as well as the social empowerment of the traditionally
marginal sections also meant that the supply of labor was being qualitatively
changed. An educated group of young job-seekers emerged whose expectations
regarding employment were very different from the previous generation. There
was thus a mismatch in the labor market resulting in open unemployment
rates that were consistently much higher than in other parts of India. Notwith-
standing warnings that the remittances from abroad cannot be relied upon in
the long term, the Kerala economy has continued to depend critically on
remittances and has shown itself to be remarkably resilient to the impact of
the recent financial crisis. Detailed studies indicate that the loss of foreign
employment for Kerala workers had been minimal during 2008–9 (Zachariah
and Rajan 2010). The buoyant service sector, which currently contributes about
78–79 percent of state domestic product (Reserve Bank of India, 2015: table 7) is
largely financed and sustained by this remittance income, making the economy
vulnerable to external conditions.
A recent analysis characterizes Kerala as an “emerging nonagricultural econ-
omy” (Kannan 2011: 64) with barely 14 percent of state domestic product
being contributed by agriculture. In recent years the secondary sector, led by
construction, has recorded robust growth rates along with the service sector.
Agriculture is largely stagnant, growing at merely 0.5 percent annually in the
decade 1997–8 to 2007–8. Interestingly, agriculture still provides employment
to about 33 percent of the labor force in 2009–10, indicating that the process
of structural transformation is far from complete.
Unlike Kerala, there was a spurt in agricultural production in West Bengal
from the early 1980s, after a long period of stagnation that goes back to the
preindependence period. Several authors have credited the land reforms with
this turnaround although there are dissenting voices (Rawal and Swaminathan
1998; Sen and Sengupta 1995) that identify the role of technological changes
including better irrigation facilities for this success. Notwithstanding the
reason, this period of high growth in agriculture has been tapering off from
the 1990s and the agrarian economy in West Bengal has been in a constant
crisis ever since. This crisis is clearly evidenced in the cost of cultivation data
reported in Khasnabis (2008), which shows a clear deterioration of net income

252
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

in paddy cultivation (still the major crop in the state) from the early 1990s to the
middle of the 2000s.
There have been significant changes in the agrarian structure of West Bengal
over the three decades since the land reform program started. While the
inequality of land distribution has remained largely unchanged (with a slight
increase in some periods), there has been a significant decrease in tenancy
from 1971–2 to 2002–3 with a significant increase in the last decade ending in
2013. In keeping with the overall trends in the country, the percentage of
employment in agriculture has fallen in West Bengal as well but the latest data
from 2011–12, still shows 56 percent of workers, according to their usual
status, engaged in agriculture and related activities (National Sample Survey
Organization (NSSO) 2013). The corresponding share of agriculture in the
state domestic product is between 17 and 18 percent. Another significant
change concerns the relative decline of self-employed workers in agriculture
(i.e., owner cultivators) in comparison to agricultural laborers. In the 2001
census, the agricultural workers as a group outnumbered cultivators for the
first time in West Bengal. In the latest 2011 census, this trend is expected to
continue and be reinforced further (distribution of workers by occupation
from the 2011 Census is not available yet). This implies that contrary to the
original objective of creating a small peasant-based economy with most agrar-
ian workers having access to cultivable land, we have a situation of significant
proletarianization emerging in the economy without dynamic accumulation.
Industrial development in West Bengal has been stalled since the 1960s due
to a series of structural factors including regional development policies of the
central government such as inadequate issuance of industrial licenses and
bank credit (see Mitra 2007). The LFG has not been successful in reversing
this stagnation during its rule with the situation worsening in the last three
decades (Bag 2011; D’Costa 2005). Organized manufacturing has been woe-
fully inadequate in providing productive employment to the labor that is
rendered surplus in the agrarian sector. The slack has been picked up largely
by the unorganized sector (manufacturing and services) with its well-known
vulnerabilities. According to a recent estimate, more than 90 percent of total
employment generated in the nonfarm sector in 2007 was in the unorganized
sector (Government of India 2010: 91).
It is in this context that the LFG made a desperate attempt toward indus-
trialization beginning in 2006. This industrialization drive depended primar-
ily on attracting corporate capital by offering incentives, including (but not
limited to) land. This move led to violent protests (most prominently in
Singur and Nandigram) where the government made efforts to acquire
farmland for industrial production. It is perhaps not an overstatement to
say that in spite of many other sources of discontent with the LFG during its
long tenure in West Bengal, it was the state’s land acquisition drive for

253
The Land Question in India

industrialization that crystalized the discontent against the LFG and even-
tually led to its defeat in the 2011 elections. The political leaders of the Left
Front and its supporters have come up with their own justification for the
current move toward industrialization. One of the main points emphasized
in this respect is that industrialization is the obvious next step to the
government’s intervention in agriculture, building on the benefits of land
reforms. Thus, land acquisition was justified merely as a continuation of the
earlier policy of land redistribution of the state rather than a major change in
course (Bhattacharya 2007).

10.5 Land Reform and the Agrarian Question in the Long Run

For both Kerala and West Bengal, more than three decades have passed since
the implementation of the land reforms.13 It is reasonable to expect the major
impact of these reforms to have materialized over this period. This is not to
suggest a priori, that land reforms have played an important role in this
context. That remains to be analyzed. Moreover, there must have been other
factors, not directly related to land reform, which played a role as well.
To initiate the discussion, let us recall the three aspects of the agrarian
question following Bernstein: those related to accumulation, production,
and politics. Given that land reforms were primarily motivated to resolve
the political aspect of the agrarian question, that is, to reconfigure the
rural class structure in support of the oppressed classes of poor peasants and
laborers, Kerala and West Bengal have both shown substantial progress. The
stronghold of large landlords has been weakened in local factor and output
markets, the weaker sections of the agrarian population have been empowered
both economically and politically, and feudal exploitative practices have been
largely eliminated. However, there are still reasons for concern. First, there is
evidence, as well as statements from left political leaders, that the traditional
landholding class has transformed itself into a class of powerful rural traders
and businessmen (Mishra 2007; Mishra and Rawal 2002) while retaining
their control of land, albeit in smaller amounts. In some cases, middle or
large peasants have joined their ranks showing some mobility in the rural
class structure. It is interesting, however, that this process has not created a
class of rural capitalists who invest substantial surplus in production-related
activities in agriculture or outside it.
Second, while tenancy has been regulated to a large extent, it is clearly not
eliminated. In Kerala, legal tenancy has been prohibited through the KLRAA
legislation of 1969 but recent studies (Nair and Menon 2006) point toward
the existence of underground lease arrangements, even though it is not
captured in the NSSO macro surveys. In West Bengal there are reports of

254
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

decline in share tenancy contracts recorded under Operation Barga and an

increase in short-term leases for boro or summer rice (Sharma 2006). There is
a common argument made now by researchers and policy makers that
legalizing tenancy in Kerala with safeguards against large-scale contract
farming (Nair and Menon 2006) and relaxing the regulations around tenancy
in West Bengal are necessary (Hanstad and Nielsen 2004a). They argue that
this would make for smoother operation of lease and land sale markets and
ensure more efficient allocation of cultivated land among able and willing
farmers. We feel that such relaxation of tenancy regulations (including its
legalization in Kerala) should only happen after analyzing in detail the
characteristics of lessees and tenants in the new lease arrangements and
ensuring that the original motivation behind the tenancy reforms of provid-
ing small farmers with long-term access to land, is not compromised by
such moves.
Third, questions of systematic exclusion of specific sections of the popula-
tion from the land reform process on the basis of class, caste, and gender need
to be brought to the fore. In the case of both West Bengal and Kerala, critics
have pointed out the sacrifice of the interests of landless agricultural laborers
on the altar of “peasant unity” as practiced by the left parties in designing and
executing the land reform programs (Rammohan 2008; Rudra 1981). There is
also serious criticism about the Kerala land reforms being inadequate or
exclusionary from the perspective of lower caste Dalits, as well as women
(Kodoth 2004; Rammohan 2008).
The production problematic, as we have mentioned before, focuses on the
development of capitalism in agriculture with “the dispossession of pre-
capitalist predator landed property and the peasantry” (Bernstein 2006:
451). The exact characterization of the production process in terms of the
extent of penetration of capitalism presents severe conceptual problems. How
does one identify capitalistic production in agriculture? Is the extensive pres-
ence of wage labor or its increasing proportion in the agricultural population
sufficient to make this claim? What about the simultaneous presence of wage
labor and self-cultivation in the same production process? This chapter does
not enter this debate.14 It would suffice to say that a classical process of
dispossession of the peasantry from their land and the ubiquitous use of
wage labor in production has not happened in either Kerala15 or West Bengal.
This is only to be expected in states where the land reform process was geared
toward empowering the smaller peasants and landless laborers with secure
access to land and preventing large-scale proletarianization.
Lastly and most importantly, we now focus on the accumulation problem-
atic of the agrarian question. The accumulation dimension of the agrarian
question is concerned with both the generation of surplus in agriculture
within a specific agrarian structure as well as with the transfer and use of

255
The Land Question in India

this surplus to further industrialization or overall development of the econ-

omy in question. In other words, it presents an understanding of the role
agricultural accumulation plays in industrial accumulation, typically in a
capitalist context. However, the same can also be applied in the context of
so-called socialist accumulation as in the case of the Soviet Union. Land
reform is not a prerequisite to study this interlinkage but clearly major
changes in land tenure are likely to have implications for the resolution of
the accumulation dimension of the agrarian question.
If we review our understanding of the development processes at work in the
economies of Kerala and West Bengal over the post-reform period, we do not
find any evidence of a satisfactory resolution of this problematic. In the case of
Kerala, land reform was not successful in bringing about any significant
change in surplus generation in agriculture. The stagnation of agricultural
production in the period immediately following the implementation of
reforms suggests that. We have discussed at least one reason behind this
stagnation related to the overpricing of labor referred to earlier in the chapter
(Kannan 1998). It is possible that there are other factors as well. But irrespect-
ive of the cause, it can be unambiguously said that land reforms were not able
to transform agriculture into a dynamic surplus-generating sector. Given this
failure, it is not surprising to see that industrialization has not picked up in the
state and the service sector growth in the state is largely driven by external
stimuli such as remittances. Of course, one can argue that alternative sources
of surplus required for industrialization could have been made available.
Corporate-controlled big capital could have brought in investment without
any local level linkage with agriculture. Remittance funds potentially could
also have been a source of capital investment. The fact that these options did
not work out as well for Kerala is a complex matter, which is beyond the scope
of this chapter.
One may ask at this point, for an economy like Kerala’s, which has barely a
third of its labor force engaged in agriculture producing only 12–13 percent of
state income, is there any use focusing on an agrarian question for the state,
whatever may be its characteristic? The answer to this justifiable question lies
in understanding who is still dependent on agriculture and why they continue
to be in the sector in spite of the miserable returns. We would like to assert that
agriculture in its current stagnant, crisis-ridden state is the “parking lot” of the
most vulnerable section of the rural population who do not have any other
alternative source of sustaining their livelihoods, including migration.16 The
agrarian question will remain valid as long as they are trapped in agriculture
(see Chapters 8 and 9 in this volume).
The West Bengal case provides a study in contrast to some extent. The
discontinuous jump in agricultural production from the early 1980s points
to the possibility that the reform measures, especially the security of tenure

256
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

provided to sharecroppers, might have had a positive effect on agricultural

production. Although there is evidence that cultivation of boro or summer rice
using high yielding variety (HYV) seeds, technology, and small-scale irrigation
has led this growth, one can make an argument that the reforms and the
presence of a pro-peasant government facilitated this transformation in agri-
culture by providing incentives to the small cultivators to use labor and non-
labor inputs more intensively (Banerjee, Gertler, and Ghatak 2002). However,
this growth spurt did not last long and by the early 1990s there was a crisis
in agriculture that has continued since then in varying degrees. There are
also external reasons related to macro policies pursued at the national level
that have precipitated this crisis, such as liberalization of input markets and a
sharp reduction in public investment in agriculture. But one question remains:
Was there substantial surplus generated in agriculture during the first eight to
ten years of high growth in the 1980s, and if so, was this surplus invested in
industrial accumulation? There is no clear answer to these questions but based
on data on industrial growth, one can surmise that even if surplus was generated
it was not used for any successful industrialization effort in the state itself.
There is also a related question of whether the possibility of generating
high-volume surplus in West Bengal agriculture exists, given the extreme
fragmentation of land. The limited land redistribution program also has not
been successful in creating a class of independent peasant producers. Because
of the very scarce supply of land above the land ceiling, the average amount of
land redistributed during the LFG regime was barely 0.11 hectares per benefi-
ciary or about a quarter of an acre. The land reform beneficiaries have not been
able to live off their land in the post-reform period. This is demonstrated in the
study by Chakraborti (2003), which finds that more than 90 percent of new
land recipients did not find year-long employment on their own land. The
corresponding figure for bargadars is 83.5 percent. Most of these people join
the ranks of agricultural laborers who work for larger landowners for wages.17
It is not surprising, thus, to find that there has been an unprecedented increase
in the number of agricultural laborers in the rural population of West Bengal.
Indeed, laborers constituted a majority of the agricultural population for the
first time in 2001. The crisis in the agrarian sector is summarized by recent data
that show that while the share of agriculture has dropped from 34.45 percent
to 26.42 percent between 1999–2000 and 2004–5, its share in the workforce
has remained almost stagnant (47.76–46.35 percent within the same time
interval).
The rupture of the accumulation aspect of the agrarian question is also
visible in the rather ambiguous official stance of the CPI (M) regarding its
move toward industrialization in the mid-2000s. On the one hand, there was
an attempt to justify the strategy to attract industrial capital on the basis of the
success of land reform. In this account, the emphasis is on the spectacular

257
The Land Question in India

growth in agriculture since the inception of the reforms and how that growth
has been translated into increased purchasing power of the rural peasantry
and created the basis for broad-based industrial growth (Bhattacharya 2007).
On the other hand, there is recognition of the severe crisis looming in the
agrarian sector, which makes it necessary to look beyond agriculture for
economic growth and employment. The blame for the crisis is put squarely
on the agricultural policy pursued by the national government for how they
have made agriculture unviable for small producers by eliminating subsidies as
well as downsizing public investment in agriculture.
While it is true that the broad agenda of neoliberal development followed
by the Indian state has had definite implications for the crisis in agriculture
in terms of the sharp reduction in public investment (Reddy and Mishra
2009), it is not clear how the state of the small farmer is different in West
Bengal compared to other states despite three decades of agrarian reforms.18
Moreover, there is also the question regarding the best response in the face of
the crisis. The LFG’s move toward corporate-led industrialization ostensibly
to generate employment has justifiably come under considerable attack in
this respect (Bhaduri 2007).

10.6 Conclusion

We will finish this discussion with a final comment about the nature of
the agrarian question itself, especially in the context of the accumulation
dimension. Bernstein (2006) has noted that in the current phase of capitalist
globalization, the agrarian question with respect to capital may have become
less relevant. Particularly, in the contemporary world of internationally inte-
grated networks of agricultural production, distribution, and consumption,
the national-level intersectoral linkages between agriculture and industry
bolstered by a home market have ceased to be a prerequisite for capital
accumulation to continue (Lerche 2013). Bernstein instead emphasizes the
agrarian question of labor, which broadly corresponds to the crisis of social
reproduction faced by people dependent on agriculture and yet not able to
make a living out of it exclusively.
If we look at the two cases of Kerala and West Bengal, the land reforms
notwithstanding, there is hardly any linkage between the agricultural sector
and the process of large-scale capital accumulation, either within the state or
elsewhere in the country. Even the visions of development that are being
sought either explicitly or implicitly through some form of capitalist accumu-
lation, do not subscribe to any agriculture-linked process in a serious way.
However, there are two aspects pertaining to agriculture that continue to be

258
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

important. First, the question of food. Although, imports pertaining to select

commodities are significant (for example, edible oils), India produces most of
its domestic food consumption. Policy makers and analysts clearly recognize
a food constraint for the Indian economy, although this specific term is
seldom used. Of course, individual states are not (and need not be) self-
sufficient in food production and thus Kerala is consistently a food-deficient
state while West Bengal has a food surplus at least with regard to rice, the
main food grain. The second aspect, in line with Bernstein’s position on the
agrarian question of labor, is related to the question of survival and liveli-
hoods for the population that is stuck in agriculture due to a stalled structural
transformation. Both Kerala and West Bengal have a challenge in this regard,
albeit to varying extents: more than half the labor force in West Bengal and
one-third in Kerala.
Irrespective of one’s position in the debate about the contemporary nature
of the agrarian question, the Kerala and West Bengal cases demonstrate a
definite disarticulation of the accumulation dimension of the original agrarian
question. The caveat is that it has been largely the case for India as a whole, but
this should not divert attention from the fact that these two states are excep-
tional in postcolonial India in what they attempted in terms of land reforms.
That none has been able to chart a successful path of equitable development
using land reforms demonstrates the limits of left reformism as practiced in
India at the level of constituent states.
In terms of bolstering a process of capitalist development on the one
hand, land reforms have clearly not worked in India, as the experience of
the two states that seriously attempted such reform, shows. On the other
hand, states such as Punjab and Haryana, hotbeds of capitalist development,
did not have any land reform. This indicates that land reform is not a
prerequisite for high rates of capitalist accumulation. However, if one inter-
prets the original left ideology of providing relief to the poor as one of
ensuring a more humane trajectory of capitalist development, land reform
seems to have provided some relief to the rural poor but at the cost of robust
capitalist expansion or economic growth. Some versions of Marxism will
probably decry the idea of humane capitalism as utopian and the agenda of
land reform as mere populism which slows down the inevitable transition to
capitalism and the eventual struggle for socialism. Conversely, from a liberal
reformist perspective, equitable access to productive assets like land is
undoubtedly an effective way of making the growth process more inclusive.
The fact that some particular attempts with land reform have failed is not
reason enough to abandon the agenda itself. Therefore, the ultimate lesson
from the Kerala and West Bengal experience discussed here is contingent on
who is taking the lesson.

259
The Land Question in India

Notes

1. Jammu and Kashmir and Tripura might be considered exceptions to some extent.
2. With some qualifications, the Mellor framework can be used effectively as an
operationalization of the more theoretical understanding of the agrarian question
by Bernstein and Byres, especially in its accumulation dimension
3. There is little comparative work on Kerala and West Bengal. Nag (1983, 1984, 1989)
compares mortality, fertility, and access to health services in rural Kerala and West
Bengal, Desai (2001) compares the left party formation and its role on social
reforms in the two states and Harriss and Törnquist (2015) is an overview compari-
son of the development experiences of the two states. None of them look at land
reforms and agriculture specifically.
4. For example, the huge media attention given to the Bihar and the Gujarat models
of development under the chief ministership of Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi
respectively.
5. One can also incorporate the cases of implanting noncapitalist forms of produc-
tion systems like those attempted in the USSR, China, or Vietnam within this
framework.
6. Ashok Mitra denied any discussion of the East Asian experience as a role model for
development in either the party or the government at the time of the first Left
Front Government (personal interview, 2013).
7. Although there are numerous academic papers on the so-called Kerala model of
development, they basically talk about the Kerala development experience of
achieving high levels of human development without corresponding high eco-
nomic growth. I have not been able to locate writings by intellectuals or party
activists in Kerala elaborating a blueprint of alternative development following the
land reforms but I suspect that they are there.
8. This so-called “land to the tiller” provision had a major loophole. Even tenants
who merely supervised cultivation were considered tillers and therefore qualified
for ownership (Raj and Tharakan 1983).
9. This ceiling went up to 17.3 acres and 24.2 acres of irrigated and unirrigated land
respectively for larger families.
10. The Indian Communist movement split along ideological lines in 1964 into the
pro-Soviet Communist Party of India (CPI) and the pro-China Communist Party of
India (Marxist). Subsequently, in 1967, a more radical faction of the CPI (M) broke
away to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).
11. According to the West Bengal Land Reform Act (amended) 1972, the legal basis of
the Operation Barga, bargadars were entitled to 75 percent of the produced crop
except in cases where the landlord provided all non-labor inputs. In such cases the
tenant’s share was reduced to 50 percent of the produce.
12. The survey does not mention specific causes for losing possession of land. Micro
level studies report informal transactions in Barga land through which tenants
surrendered their rights to their landlords for a price (Rawal 2001; Hanstad and
Nielsen 2004b).

260
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

13. One can argue that beyond 1983, West Bengal still had redistributed some land but
the scope of this is negligible compared to what had taken place before.
14. The debate on mode of production in Economic and Political Weekly with seminal
contributions by Ashok Rudra and Utsa Patnaik can be consulted in this regard by
interested readers. See Chakrabarti and Cullenberg (2003) for a different take on the
mode of production debate.
15. With the exception of the plantation sector, which was exempted from the land
reform legislation.
16. An apt term quoted by Rajesh Bhattacharya (2010: 201) from Dandekar (1992:
54–5).
17. Some of these cultivators may also earn a livelihood in the rural nonfarm sector.
Recent figures do show a sharp increase in the level of rural nonfarm employment
(NSSO 2013: 81).
18. I am consciously limiting myself to the economic conditions facing the agricultural
population; the question of political empowerment in a Left-ruled state may of
course be raised.

References

Agravala, P. K. 2010. Land Reforms in States and Union Territories in India. New Delhi:
Concept Publishing Company.
Akram-Lodhi, A. H. and Kay, C. 2010. “Surveying the Agrarian Question (Part 2):
Current Debates and Beyond.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(2): 255–84.
Appu, P. S. 1996. Land Reforms in India: A Survey of Policy, Legislation and Implementation.
Delhi: Vikas Publishing House.
Bag, K. 2011. “Red Bengal’s Rise and Fall.” New Left Review, 70(July–August): 69–98.
Banerjee, A. V., Gertler, P. J., and Ghatak, M. 2002. “Empowerment and Efficiency:
Tenancy reform in West Bengal.” Journal of Political Economy, 110(2): 239–80.
Bernstein, H. 2004. “Changing before Our Very Eyes: Agrarian Questions and the
Politics of Land in Capitalism Today.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 4(1–2): 190–225.
Bernstein, H. 2006. “Is There an Agrarian Question in the 21st Century?” Canadian
Journal of Development Studies, 27(4): 449–60.
Bhaduri, A. 1973. “A Study in Agricultural Backwardness under Semi-Feudalism.” The
Economic Journal, 83(329): 120–37.
Bhaduri, A. 2007. “Alternatives in Industrialisation.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42(8):
1597–1601.
Bhattacharya, B. 2007. “On Industrialisation in West Bengal.” The Marxist, 23(1): 1–8.
Bhattacharya, R. 2010. “Capitalism in Post-Colonial India: Primitive Accumulation
Under Dirigiste and Laissez Faire Regimes.” PhD Dissertation, Department of
Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Byres, T. J. 1991. “The Agrarian Question and Differing Forms of Capitalist Transition:
An Essay with Reference to Asia.” In Rural Transformation in Asia, edited by J. Breman
and S. Mundle, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–76.

261
The Land Question in India

Chakrabarti, A. and Cullenberg, S. 2003. Transition and Development in India. London

and New York: Routledge.
Chakraborti, A. 2003. Beneficiaries of Land Reforms: The West Bengal Scenario. Kalyani:
State Institute of Panchayats and Rural Development.
Chandra, N. K. 1978a. “Industrialization and the Left Movement: On Several Questions
of Strategy in West Bengal: Part One.” Social Scientist, 7(1): 3–32.
Chandra, N. K. 1978b. “Industrialisation and the Left Movement: On Several Questions
of Strategy in West Bengal: Part Two.” Social Scientist, 7(3): 57–75.
D’Costa, A. P. 2005. The Long March to Capitalsim: Embourgeoisment, Internationalisation
and Industrial Transformation in India. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dandekar, V. M. 1992. “Forty Years after Independence.” In The Indian Economy:
Problems and Prospects, edited by Bimal Jalan, New Delhi: Penguin Books India,
pp. 33–84.
Dasgupta, A. 2010. “Land Acquisition to Consolidate Land Reforms? The Case of West
Bengal.” In Development, Equity and Poverty: Essays in Honour of Azizur Rahman Khan,
edited by A. Dasgupta, L. Banerjee, and R. Islam. New Delhi: Macmillan, pp. 453–77.
Desai, M. 2001. “Party Formation, Political Power, and the Capacity for Reform: Com-
paring Left Parties in Kerala and West Bengal, India.” Social Forces, 80(1): 37–60.
Dreze, J. and Sen, A. 1995. India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Dreze, J. and Sen, A. 1997. Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives. New Dehli:
Oxford University Press.
Dunham, D. M. 1991. “Agricultural Growth and Rural Industry: Some Reflections on
the Rural Growth Linkages Debate.” ISS Working Paper Series/General Series, 114: 1–22.
Gill, S. S. 1989. “Changing Land Relations in Punjab and Implications for Land
Reforms.” Economic and Political Weekly, 24(25): A79–A85.
Government of India. 2010. “West Bengal Development Report.” Academic Founda-
tion for The Planning Commission, New Delhi.
Government of West Bengal. 2012. “Economic Review.” Bureau of Applied Economics
and Statistics, Calcutta.
Griffin, K., Khan, A. R., and Ickowitz, A. 2002. “Poverty and the Distribution of Land.”
Journal of Agrarian Change, 2(3): 279–330.
Hanstad, T. and Nielsen, R. 2004a. “West Bengal’s Bargadars and Landownership.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 39(8): 853–5.
Hanstad, T. and Nielsen, R. 2004b. “From Sharecroppers to Landowners: Paving the
Way for West Bengal’s Bargadars.” RDI Report on Foreign Aid and Development No.
121, Rural Development Institute, Seattle.
Harriss, J. and Törnquist, O. 2015. “Comparative Notes on Indian Experiences of
Social Democracy: Kerala and West Bengal.” CSES Working Paper No. 29, Centre
for Socio-Economic and Environmental Studies, Kochi.
Kannan, K. P. 1998. “Political Economy of Labour and Development in Kerala.” Economic
and Political Weekly, 33(52): L61–L70.
Kannan, K. P. 2011. “Agricultural Development in an Emerging Non-Agrarian Regional
Economy: Kerala’s Challenges.” Economic and Political Weekly, 46(9): 64–70.

262
 Land Reform in Kerala and West Bengal

Kannan, K. P. and Pushpangadan, K. 1988. “Agricultural Stagnation in Kerala: An

Exploratory Analysis.” Economic and Political Weekly, 23(39): A120–A128.
Karat, P. 2007. “Bamponthi Sarkarer Bhumika abong amader bojhapora” [The Role of
the Left Front Government and Our Understanding], Marxbadi Path (The Marxist
Path), May.
Kay, C. 2002. “Why East Asia Overtook Latin America: Agrarian Reform, Industrialisa-
tion and Development.” Third World Quarterly, 23(6): 1073–1102.
Khasnabis, R. 2008. “The Economy of West Bengal.” Economic and Political Weekly,
43(52): 103–15.
Kodoth, P. 2004. “Gender, Property Rights and Responsibility for Farming in Kerala.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 39(19): 1911–20.
Kohli, A. 1987. The State and Poverty in India: The Politics of Reform. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Lerche, J. 2013. “The Agrarian Question in Neoliberal India: Agrarian Transition
Bypassed?” Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3): 382–404.
Mao, Y. K. and Schive, C. 1995. “Agricultural and Industrial Development in Taiwan.”
In Agriculture on the Road to Industrialization, edited by J. W. Mellor, Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 23–66.
Mellor, J. W. 1995. Agriculture on the Road to Industrialization. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Mishra, S. K. 2007. “On Agrarian Transition in West Bengal.” The Marxist, 23(1): 1–22.
Mishra, S. K. and Rawal, V. 2002. “Agrarian Relations in Contemporary West Bengal
and Tasks for the Left.” In Agrarian studies: essays on agrarian relations in less-developed
countries, edited by V. K. Ramachandran and M. Swaminathan, New Delhi: Tulika
Books, pp. 329–55.
Mitra, A. 1978. “This Opportunity Has to Be Converted into a Challenge. . . . ” Social
Scientist, 6(6–7): 3–8.
Mitra, A. 2007. “The Oblivion of Idealism.” Available at: <http://old.himalmag.com/
component/content/article/954-the-oblivion-of-idealism.html> (accessed June 26,
2016).
Nag, M. 1983. “Impact of Social and Economic Development on Mortality: Comparative
Study of Kerala and West Bengal.” Economic and Political Weekly, 18(19–21): 877–900.
Nag, M. 1984. “Fertility Differential in Kerala and West Bengal: Equity-Fertility Hypothesis
as Explanation.” Economic and Political Weekly, 19(1): 33–41.
Nag, M. 1989. “Political Consciousness as a Factor in the Accessibility of Health
Services: A Case Study of Rural Kerala and West Bengal.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 24(8): 417–26.
Nair, K. N. and Menon, V. 2006. “Lease Farming in Kerala: Findings from Micro Level
Studies.” Economic and Political Weekly, 41(26): 2732–8.
NSSO (National Sample Survey Organization). 2013. “Key Indicators of Employment
and Unemployment in India.” Report No. NSS KI 68/10, New Delhi.
Raj, K. N. and Tharakan, M. 1983. “Agrarian Reform in Kerala and Its Impact on the
Rural Economy: A Preliminary Assessment.” In Agrarian Reform in Contemporary
Developing Countries, edited by A. K. Ghose, London: Routledge, pp. 31–90.

263
The Land Question in India

Ramachandran, V. K. 1997. “On Kerala’s Development Achievements.” In Indian

Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, edited by J. Dreze and A. Sen, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, pp. 205–356.
Ramakumar, R. 2006. “Public Action, Agrarian Change and the Standard of Living of
Agricultural Workers: A Study of a Village in Kerala.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 6(3):
306–45.
Rammohan, K. T. 2008. “Caste and Landlessness in Kerala: Signals from Chengara.”
Economic and Political Weekly, 43(37): 14–16.
Rawal, V. 2001. “Agrarian Reform and Land Markets: A Study of Land Transactions in
Two Villages of West Bengal, 1977–1995*.” Economic Development and Cultural
Change, 49(3): 611–29.
Rawal, V. and Swaminathan, M. 1998. “Changing Trajectories: Agricultural Growth in
West Bengal, 1950 to 1996.” Economic and Political Weekly, 33(40): 2595–602.
Reddy, D. N. and Mishra, S. 2009. Agrarian Crisis in India. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Reserve Bank of India. 2015 “Handbook of Statistics on Indian Economy.” Available at:
<https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/annualPublications.aspx?head=Handbook+of+Statis
tics+on+Indian+Economy> (accessed on June 26, 2016).
Rudra, A. 1981. “One Step Forwards, Two Steps Backward.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 16(25—26): A61+A63+A65+A67-A68.
Sen, A. and Sengupta, R. 1995. “The Recent Growth in Agricultural Output in Eastern
India, with Special Reference to the Case of West Bengal.” Paper presented in the
Workshop on “Agricultural Growth and Agrarian Structure in Contemporary West
Bengal and Bangladesh,” Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
Sengupta, S. and Gazdar, H. 1997. “Agrarian Politics and Rural Development in West
Bengal.” In Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, edited by J. Dreze and
A. Sen. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 129–204.
Sharma, H. R. 2006. “Liberalising the Lease Market.” Economic and Political Weekly,
41(8): 696–8.
Storm, S. 2015. Structural Change. Development and Change, 46(4): 666–99.
Zachariah, K. C. and Irudaya Rajan, S. 2010. “Impact of Global Recession on Migration
and Remittances in Kerala.” CDS Working Paper no. 432, Centre for Development
Studies, Trivandrum.

264
11

How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need?

Historical Patterns of Land Acquisition

and Indian Industrialization

Mircea Raianu

11.1 Introduction

Of the many recent struggles over land acquisition for private industrial use
across India, those involving Tata companies have been among the most
protracted and violent. Tata Steel’s attempts to set up new plants in Odisha
(Gopalpur, Kalinganagar) and Chhattisgarh (Lohandiguda), and especially
Tata Motors’ proposed Singur factory, have become emblematic of a particular
mode of neoliberal accumulation, resisted by innovative forms of popular
politics (Roy 2011). In each case, variations in industry-specific resource
demands and relationships with state governments are important factors in
shaping the contours of the land acquisition process. But despite the geo-
graphically disparate and relatively decentralized nature of the Tata Group’s
constituent companies, they do share a common operational logic, especially
in formulating rehabilitation and resettlement policies (cf. Pati 2012).
Historically, the Tatas’ early involvement in large dam projects and steel
production sets them apart both from Jawaharlal Nehru’s “temples of modern
India,” and from the latest wave of private acquisitions, led by new players
such as POSCO, Vedanta, and Jindal. The activities of these companies,
including Tata Steel, are seen by many activists as a form of extractive
“internal colonialism,” by analogy with the old East India Company. The
losers in this process are mainly adivasi (tribal and/or aboriginal) populations
in eastern India, who refuse to be converted into industrial laborers or to
accept the loss of their land (Padel and Das 2010). However, other theoretical
The Land Question in India

approaches to the “land question” today place far less emphasis on private
capital, given that around 90 percent of acquisitions in India since independ-
ence have been carried out on behalf of state projects. States are not necessarily
acting purely at the behest of capital, but pursuing their own developmental or
public welfare objectives. According to this view, recent highly visible episodes
of resistance, such as Singur or Kalinganagar, attract disproportionate attention
because of the appealing narrative of the “giant private corporation against
the little man,” but cannot represent the problem in its totality (Chakravorty
2013: 59, 122–3). Such diverse appeals to the past suggest the need for critical
reflections on the role of land acquisition in the longer trajectory of Indian
industrialization.
The historian’s task is to answer the difficult question of which pasts we
should look to for a clearer understanding of the present crisis described by the
editors of this volume as an “incomplete transition,” in which large-scale
capitalist development in India depends upon land acquisition at increasingly
higher prices while the commodification of land proceeds without the con-
version of agricultural populations into wage laborers. As the editors note,
we must examine the manifold conflicts over the “circulation of land as a
commodity,” rather than seeking an originary moment of “primitive accumu-
lation” (Chapter 1, this volume). Expropriation of land in India today is
mainly done by domestic rather than foreign capital, with the state playing
an enabling role. This tendency is not new, but its origins cannot simply be
read back in time without an analysis of the legal and political circumstances
in which it arose.
When and how did the involvement of private capital in land markets
restructure agrarian social relations, and under what conditions was the state
called upon to support this process through legislation or administrative fiat?
I argue that the entry of Indian capital in the industrial sector during the late
colonial period was a key moment in the evolution of the land acquisition
process, which is easily overlooked when taking the postindependence era as
a starting point. This moment made possible two seemingly contradictory
but mutually constitutive trends: the legal designation of private capital as
capable of fulfilling a “public purpose,” and the increasingly direct involvement
of the state in resource capture and management for the purpose of industrial
development.
By “capital,” I mean Indian-owned companies with incentives to undertake
expansion into extractive and land-intensive industries in the early twentieth
century, when British managing agencies largely set the terms of India’s
relationship with the global economy. The Tatas, more than any other firm,
were able to leverage both the legitimacy of swadeshi (self-sufficient) enterprise
and the necessary technical expertise to expand in this area. By “state,” I mean
specifically the colonial state at different levels (central and provincial), whose

266
 How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need?

gradual abandonment of agrarian rent seeking and assumption of a “develop-

mental” mantle would lay the foundations for centrally planned industrial-
ization under Nehru. One marked institutional continuity between the
colonial, post-independence, and contemporary iterations of the “land ques-
tion” in India is the importance of competition across multiple nodes of state
power to attract capital and secure control over resources, taking place today
primarily between state-level governments.
The chapter seeks to substantiate this argument by drawing connections
and comparisons between the establishment of two major Tata enterprises
that obtained the status of proto-national industries before 1947: the Tata
hydroelectric power companies in the Western Ghats, and the Tata Iron and
Steel Company (TISCO) at Jamshedpur. The decision to focus on one intercon-
nected set of companies in different sectors is driven by the availability of
uniquely rich archival sources on the Tatas that allow historians to explain
precisely when and how capital becomes “selectively territorialized” (Ferguson
2005: 378–9). The method I have adopted here is multi-sited archival research,
relying on newly accessible materials at the Tata Central Archives in Pune and
the Tata Steel Archives in Jamshedpur, alongside official records from colonial
state archives in Mumbai, Delhi, and London. In particular, I focus on the
negotiations between capitalists (the Tatas), the colonial state, provincial gov-
ernments, and princely states, as well as on the interpretation and application
of land acquisition law. An approach based on specific case studies is best suited
to the reconstruction of long-term patterns of land acquisition in the absence of
aggregate data before 1947. Such an approach also brings to light fruitful
contrasts between the evolution of different regional economies within India.
The analysis of each case study proceeds in two stages. First, I consider how
the use of legal instruments of dispossession varied according to the geograph-
ical distribution of state power in a context of multiple and overlapping
sovereignties, which in turn determined how the provisions of the Land
Acquisition Act (1894) were put into force. Second, I trace the extent of
lands acquired, the purposes for which they were used, and the resulting
spatially bounded regimes of resource extraction and production specific to
each case. This kind of detailed mapping allows for the assessment of the
dynamics of land acquisition, both past and present, in a more contextually
sensitive manner. Dam projects affecting settled cultivators required min-
imum acquisition and maximum displacement, while steel plants in more
sparsely populated areas characterized by comparatively insecure tenures
required maximizing the surface area to be acquired and minimizing the
extent of displacement due to labor needs. Accordingly, the hinterlands cre-
ated by the steel industry were always more closely integrated with the site of
production than those of the hydroelectric companies, which were left in
comparative isolation.

267
The Land Question in India

However, in both cases the promise of proletarianization held out by capital

as an incentive to part with the land—transforming the peasants of Mulshi or
the adivasi residents of Chotanagpur into industrial laborers—did not happen
on any significant scale. By contrast with the later Nehruvian aim of absorbing
local communities into the new steel towns of Bhilai and Rourkela, Jamshed-
pur was “conceived as an entirely original space that should exclude them”
(Sanchez and Strümpell 2014: 1279). The Jamshedpur model has arguably
proven more resilient than the Nehruvian, neither pure “enclave” nor region-
ally integrated township with a stable and rooted working class. This points to
some of the peculiarities of Indian capitalist development addressed in this
volume, including the predominance of domestic over foreign capital and the
persistence of surplus labor, whose origins I uncover in the pages that follow.

11.2 The Tata Hydroelectric Power Companies: Land Acquisition

and Dispossession in the Western Ghats

The first recorded instance of a demand to put the Land Acquisition Act into
force on behalf of a Tata hydroelectric project involved a concession at the
Dudh-Sagar waterfalls in Goa. Despite the location of the falls within the
boundary of Portuguese India, J. N. Tata assured the secretary of state in
1901 that the new undertaking would “utilize a portion of the power in British
territory.”1 From the very beginning, this was in no way conceived as a public
utilities company; instead, the aim was to start ancillary industries, “be the
landlords of the place and have a yearly income from the property for the sale
of water rights,” and eventually get bought out by an American firm.2 The
government of Bombay was reluctant to “permit occupied lands & forests to
be submerged for the benefit of Goa,” since water for irrigation would flow
into Portuguese territory, and suggested a renewable lease instead of perman-
ent alienation. The government was also skeptical of the Tatas’ monopolistic
intentions with regard to water, and thought their works would require far
more than the 85 acres applied for.3 Ultimately, the matter was dropped as the
Tatas’ attention shifted away from Dudh-Sagar, but these negotiations set
important precedents for safeguarding state prerogatives in future agreements.
In parallel, surveys were being undertaken for a more ambitious scheme at
Lonavla in the Western Ghats, which would supply power to the tramways
and mills of Bombay, with the tail water to be used for irrigation as far away as
the Konkan coast.4 A carefully crafted “Memorandum on Public Utility” spoke
of immense benefits to the growth of Bombay industry, as well as the reduc-
tion of the “smoke nuisance,” what one might today view as promoting
“clean energy.”5 An application was submitted in late 1910 for land measuring
5,467.23 acres in total, with three proposed reservoirs at Lonavla, Shiravte,

268
 How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need?

and Walwhan. For the government, the “public purpose” clause of the Land
Acquisition Act in this case was invoked with the assurance that power would
be sold without price discrimination. Tail water would not become the prop-
erty of the company, which would instead be granted a share of the profits at a
later date. Land would continue to be subject to revenue assessment at fixed
rates, despite suggestions that the future profitability of the lands be con-
sidered in raising the rents. Although the company was held liable for the
cost of alternative land for the displaced, in order to speed up acquisition the
requirement to specify the exact plots required was waived (only names of
villages were to be submitted). Finally, two clauses were borrowed from the
recently completed agreement with the Tata Iron and Steel Company, refer-
ring to the necessity of returning the land if the works were not completed in a
timely manner and to the protection of public rights of way, though even at
this stage officials were unsure whether they could be enforced.6 Each of these
points was to prove a source of constant dispute and renegotiation during the
following decade, as two new companies were registered for the construction
of dams in the Andhra and Nila-Mula Valleys after World War I.
By 1919, the Tata power companies were embarking on the third round of
land acquisitions, with the Andhra agreement recently signed and notifica-
tions under Section 40 of the Act about to be sent out to the villagers of Mulshi
Peta in the Nila-Mula Valley. Reports of delayed or inadequate compensation,
lands submerged without being measured, and works begun before the final
settlements were reached, had begun to circulate among the Mulshi villagers,
who duly sent their objections in a series of petitions to the government and
began to organize in opposition to the project (Vora 2009: 31–6, 52–4). The
petitioners rejected private capitalists’ claims to fulfilling a public purpose,
which was left completely undefined by the Land Acquisition Act. The sub-
stance of their legal argument was that the Act was “not intended for the
wholesale acquisition of vast tracts covering hundreds of square miles, and
causing the depopulation and submersion under water of numbers of vil-
lages.” They pointed to a clause in the Andhra Valley agreement whereby
the government received “an additional sum of money equivalent to the
amount of compensation” plus the statutory 15 percent bonus for compulsory
acquisition, as well as the profits on tail water and the rights to increase of
assessment, as evidence of the unfairness of the proposed compensation.7 The
government responded that they made no profits from the additional market
price of the land (collected without the bonus), which “goes to form a fund for
the amelioration of local conditions,” and that tail waters would be utilized
“in the interests of industrial development.”8 The origins of this convoluted
arrangement of “double compensation” lie in officials’ recognition that simi-
lar land could simply not be offered in exchange as per the provisions of the
Act, so “we should double the land values, pay half in compensation and keep

269
The Land Question in India

the balance as a fund to use for the benefit of the expropriated hillmen.” This
was not done for purely altruistic or even paternalistic reasons, but as an
attempt to extract a royalty commensurate to the “situation value” of lands
that were about to appreciate due to their importance for the company, yet to
which the government had renounced all claims. The provision was subse-
quently dropped in the Mulshi agreement, with all costs of resettlement and
compensation to be borne by the company.9 One of the many underlying
conflicts exposed by the extraordinary resistance to the Mulshi project was
over the character of the colonial state itself, as primarily a rent-seeking entity
newly charged with promoting industrialization following the report of the
Indian Industrial Commission in 1918. This required the state to partly aban-
don its role as the designated protector of a settled agrarian order and to
actively engage with speculative pricing in land markets.
To return to the grievances of the Mulshi peasants and their leaders, one of
the key points of contention was the extent of lands to be acquired. At the
outset, the collector of Poona received conflicting information that suggested,
as had been the case at Dudh-Sagar, that the Tatas were deliberately under-
stating their requirements: “Tatas’ say that the lake will only be 15½ square
miles in extent: and almost in the same breath that they propose to acquire
40,000 acres. I am trying to get them to reconcile these figures.”10 To be sure,
the majority of opinion in the valley was against acquisition entirely, symbol-
ized by the cry of “Jan kinwa Jamin” (life or land) raised by Senapati Bapat’s
satyagraha movement (insistence on truth) (Vora 2009: 48, 84–5). But the
particularities of land being submerged by dams were such that the Tatas
sought to limit the amount of land to be acquired, while those willing to
accept compensation or resettlement demanded the company acquire
affected as well as submerged villages at the same rate. A petition from one
K. B. Joglekar claimed the secretary to the governor had given the assurance in
1920 that lands outside the contours of the lake would be purchased, but he
was curtly informed that no such requirement existed.11 In fact, the commis-
sioner had written to the Tatas pointing out that “while all the rice lands of the
Cultivators’ villages are taken up, their ‘Workas’ or ‘Jirayat’ lands which are
useless to them are left untouched.” It would only be fair that these lands be
acquired as well. In response, the Tata Power Company Board directed that
“care must be taken not to acquire any lands other than those which fall
within the rule of ‘injurious affection,’ ” and that compensation would be paid
at market rates and not at the “excessive” acquisition rates (which had been
agreed to only for the sake of expediency).12 Eventually, lands in nine villages
were purchased by private treaty at lower rates: “Rs. 25 to 30 for Jirayat lands
as against Rs. 60/- being paid within the submerged area.”13 By virtue of
its drastic effects on the geography of the surrounding region, the dam pro-
jects produced a distinct set of inequalities, as the provisions of the Land

270
 How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need?

Acquisition Act were not applied to degraded lands. The law, then as now,
provided few mechanisms for redress that went beyond the alienation of land
as a commodity. The character of land as a resource that could be easily
devalued in multiple, often unpredictable, ways went unrecognized.

11.3 State Sovereignty and the Application

of the Land Acquisition Act

This section steps back from the details of the Mulshi case, in order to
examine the broader legal apparatus through which the state dealt with
land claims in this period. The question of compensation was crucial because
it could set a precedent in future acquisitions. Even as the company exploited
the ambiguous and ad hoc nature of the process, the colonial state was
repeatedly forced to clarify the principles which justified the operations of
the Act in the context of clamors for legislative reform, and even confusion
among its own officials. The standing instructions for acquiring officers in
1911, as the first Tata agreement was being negotiated, were to ascertain the
“market value of the land” through laborious on-site investigations of sales.
They were reminded that “ ‘potential values,’ such as may arise from the use
to which the land is to be put, are expressly excluded from consideration.”
Service or inam lands could be acquired, but had to be compensated through
a grant of equal lands in exchange or an annual payment.14 The Mulshi
petitioners were to be tragically disappointed in this respect. They believed
the sanads (deeds granted to princely states in British India) held “from the
time of the Peshwas,” which included both the soil and revenue, were
“absolute and for all times to come.”15 They also rejected compensation
based on market value, proposing instead the “cost necessary to secure
slightly superior lands in another locality.” Since the lands sold on the
market were often of the most inferior quality, they could not be a reliable
guide in fixing the rates. The “real market value” according to the cultivators
themselves was in fact three times greater than the proposed awards, ranging
from Rs. 1,750 to Rs. 2,500 per acre (Vora 2009: 68–72).16 The final amounts
upheld by the District Court, by contrast, came to Rs. 550 per acre for ambemo-
hor rice land, Rs. 350 per acre for sal (actually a forest seed containing oil) rice
land, and Rs. 50 per acre for jirayat (dry crop) lands, plus the 15 percent bonus
for compulsory acquisition.17 They had been determined “unofficially” by the
government, bypassing the Land Acquisition Act and thus “not strictly in
accordance with the law.”18 Although higher and more speedily disbursed
than in the Andhra Valley case, the Mulshi awards satisfied neither the propri-
etors nor the government.

271
The Land Question in India

A few years later, “political agitation” surrounding another dam project at

Bhatgar forced another departure from established principles, erring “on the
side of liberality” by paying similar rates for similar land. When an outraged
surveyor pointed out the arbitrary nature of this decision, he was simply told:
“The reasons for the enhancement of rates are not far to seek. They were
chiefly political and due to the satyagraha movement which was in full
swing then. Unless therefore the rates were attractive it was impossible to
get the rayats (cultivators) to part with their lands without making trouble.”19
It must be emphasized that the Mulshi precedent was never codified, merely
reproduced as a series of exceptions.
What these exceptions did reveal, however, was the peculiar interplay
between the categorical assertion of state sovereignty that lies at the heart of
the Land Acquisition Act, and the fragmentary and highly devolved nature of
its implementation. The only legislative attempt to amend the Act around the
time of the Mulshi struggle was a modest bill by assembly member J. Ramayya
Pantulu, proposing to allow district courts to determine when the “public
purpose” clause could apply to individual acquisitions (Krishnan 2012: 96–7).
Of the many responses to the bill, which did not pass, that of the Development
Directorate of Bombay Presidency stands out. In England, where approval of
the legislature was necessary, compulsory acquisitions

are reduced to a minimum, and may safely be, as titles are jealously guarded and
the seller is normally a person with a title. In India with its present form of quasi-
parliamentary government and a special branch of civil law which deals with
benami transactions and a very haphazard method of dealing in land as though
it were ordinarily a form of property transferable as freely as a roll of cotton cloth
(thought it must be admitted that the law itself does not countenance such a
procedure) it is absolutely necessary that a special collector must be appointed to
extinguish all rights on the property.20

On the one hand, this statement may be interpreted as an unequivocal

defense of the state bringing order to a system characterized by a multiplicity
of tenures, with due allowance to the fact that the state’s own land policies
had sustained it for over a century. However, the lament over the liquidity of
land reads as deeply ironic, considering how easily alienation and conversion
of land (including the ostensibly secure inam titles) took place at Mulshi, and
increasingly so thereafter. The government’s willingness to allow the Tatas to
undertake their own negotiations whenever possible and to secure exceptions
in the calculation of rates, as long as its own fixed rents were secure, suggests
that the massive wave of expropriations in the Western Ghats in the 1910s
and 1920s were made possible at a particular historical juncture when ven-
tures by private capital in the interior of the country may have exceeded the
legal and political frameworks that could have contained it. With many key

272
 How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need?

decisions taken ad hoc and through the exercise of sovereign discretion, a

properly “hegemonic” legal regime governing acquisitions failed to emerge in
this period.

11.4 The Tata Hydroelectric Power Companies: Regional

Consequences and Conflicts

The Tata hydroelectric power projects eventually overcame the resistance at

Mulshi, though not without heavy losses. As Vora shows in great detail,
divisions grew between peasants and moneylenders, with the latter increas-
ingly eager to settle with the company. By 1922, 80 percent of the Mulshi Peta
had accepted compensation, even at the high point of Bapat’s satyagraha
(Vora 2009: 48–51, 152). As construction proceeded, the areas immediately
surrounding the dams in the Western Ghats remained underserved by
company-provided infrastructure. Pursuant to the clause on the protection
of public rights of way inserted by the government into the agreements, the
company initially sanctioned a modest expenditure on constructing and
widening roads around the lake.21 The Second Revision Settlement of the
Mulshi Peta noted that “people living on the western side of the Dam are
seriously handicapped or obstructed from visiting Poona, their chief market-
town and even the places of weekly bazars in the Peta.”22 The collector wrote
to the Tatas in 1930 pointing out that villages on the northern side of the lake
were completely isolated, with ferries the only possible solution: “it is the
greatest pity that all idea of constructing new roads in this area was not given
up from the very start and all effort concentrated on supplying a satisfactory
system of water transport.” The villagers for whom new roads had been
provided “will all be in a much worse position than they were before the
dam was constructed.”23 Dire conditions also prevailed in the Andhra Valley,
where rivers had become impassable at certain places. The company refused to
erect bridges at these obstructed crossings, contending “that their liability was
confined, in accordance with the terms of the agreements, to the provision of
the amenities which had existed prior to the advent of their tail water,” which,
they added, was anyway the property of the government.24 The promise of
using the water for irrigation purposes remained unfulfilled (Vora 2009: 80).
Up to the late 1930s, the government attempted to induce cultivators to take
up irrigation through an exemption from water assessment, but found that
due to a lack of capital and security of tenure, they were unable to do so.25 The
inhabitants of the valleys were caught between conflicting understandings
of the rights and responsibilities of the company, for whom the provision of
infrastructure was a matter best left to the government—yet another conse-
quence of the ambiguous and ill-defined provisions of the initial agreements.

273
The Land Question in India

But what, then, of the prospect of proletarianization? This was one of the
strongest incentives offered to the Mulshi peasants for acquiescing to the dam
projects. Their counterparts in Andhra had agreed to serve as contract labor on
the dam for seven years, and it was hoped this example would be emulated.
A statement submitted by the company in advance of a Legislative Assembly
debate in 1921 made the following claim:

An agriculturist who earned a bare pittance of about Rs. 60/- to 80/- per year by
putting in only 3 months of agricultural labour during the year could earn over
250 Rupees by working for a year on the works at the site of the dam. The obvious
incentive to work would turn him into a daily labourer of regular habits, who
would refuse to go back to the land at the end of the construction period and
would join the ranks of industrial labour for his own and his country's good . . .
[The] total income during the 6 or 7 years of construction which in many cases
would greatly exceed the value of the land they were dispossessed of, apart from
their rescue from the strangling grip of their money lenders.26

The Tatas were, in effect, promoting a sudden and irreversible change in the
class structure of the valley, but without the creation of a long-term stable
workforce on the site (by contrast with the strategy adopted at Jamshedpur).
The worker, alienated from the land and appropriately disciplined, would be
left to roam on his own in search of future employment, presumably in the
factories of Bombay. The Settlement Report in 1926 optimistically declared
that “the Tata works at the Mulshi camp have almost revolutionised the whole
Peta,” despite conditions being “at present unstable and in a state of transition.”
Wages of field and skilled laborers had quadrupled due to the Tata works. But
the most positive result of the land acquisition process was that “a few agricul-
turists who were ever in slavish bondage of their Saokars [moneylenders] having
paid off their debts from the amounts of awards are now free people entering on
a new lease of life though under most trying conditions.”27 In response, the
collector of Poona wondered whether “the demand for labour and food and
the general stimulation of trade caused by the large camp and construction
works is the only cause of the apparent prosperity of the inhabitants.”28 Indeed,
most outward migration had taken place immediately after the acquisition, and
the few remaining villagers resumed farming on inferior quality soils. Even the
displaced who did make their way to the city could not benefit from ongoing
links with the countryside, which otherwise played a crucial role in sustaining
the livelihoods of the working classes of Bombay (Chandavarkar 1994). The
Peta remained without irrigation and electricity until the early 1980s, when
the Mulshi Dam Region Development Committee was formed. Its demands
extended to the provision of roads, schools, and hospitals, as well as permanent
appointments and reservations for affected persons in the company’s works
(Vora 2009, 158–62). This movement pursued a belated recognition that the

274
 How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need?

company was tied to the land and people, despite all its attempts to disavow
them. As with most subsequent large hydroelectric projects in India, labor
demands were easily met by minimal casual recruitment from the areas around
the dams, which remained isolated and impoverished (Hardikar 2013). Displace-
ment for dams results in the destruction of land, which cannot be re-purposed
or returned to the original owners. Provision of infrastructure or alternative land
for cultivation thus becomes the claim of last resort for the displaced.

11.5 The Tata Iron and Steel Company: A Comparative Case

The case of steel plants presents, at first glance, a set of conditions radically
different from the construction of dams. Land is not destroyed but converted
to productive industrial use, and the conversion of agricultural populations
into industrial workers appears more feasible. However, acquired land is
almost never released, even when projects are later given up, and the demands
of creating a secure township and housing a substantial labor force lead to the
necessity of maximizing the surface area to be acquired. This section under-
takes a brief comparative analysis of land acquisition for the steel plant at
Jamshedpur, in order to point to some of the general features of the process
not reducible to the characteristics of a specific project.
Around the same time as he was contemplating the Dudh-Sagar power
project, J. N. Tata began the process of acquiring prospecting licenses for
iron ore, coal, copper, and manganese in the Chanda District of the Central
Provinces, with a view to setting up an iron and steel plant. He sent his son
Dorabji and his nephew Shapurji Saklatvala as far afield as Hyderabad to
pursue all possible leads on raw materials.29 This venture, more than any
other, would require the Tatas to negotiate with the numerous princely states
then controlling vast tracts of land in central and eastern India. With inves-
tigations at Chanda yielding little result, especially with regard to coal of
sufficient coking quality, a fortuitous series of discoveries were made of suit-
able iron ore deposits at Dalli-Rajara near Raipur, and coal beds at Jharia in
Bengal. Saklatvala observed in 1904 that this would mark a significant shift in
location eastward: “We shall not be able to manage easily two Iron-mining
establishments at great distances in Dhullee and Chanda.”30 Having decided
on the sources of raw materials, the next question to be resolved was the
location of the plant. At this juncture, the most important intervention
came from the princely state of Mayurbhanj near Bengal. The geologist
P. N. Bose, then in the employ of the Maharaja, pointed to the extraordinarily
rich iron ore deposits in the Gurumahisani District. The terms of the lease were
favorable, so this became the preferred source.31 This series of decisions reveals
the ways in which a regime of extraction and production emerges across state

275
The Land Question in India

spaces marked by multiple sovereignties (princely and British), and under the
constraints of particular resource geographies.
For this reason, I pay close attention to the negotiations over Sini, a site
located 170 miles inland on the Bengal–Nagpur Railway in the Seraikela state
and ultimately not chosen, which presented difficulties similar to the falls at
Dudh-Sagar. The colonial state grew concerned that the new company would
evade their control, and the potential benefits it could reap from the industry
would be reduced. The deputy commissioner of Singhbhum tried to persuade
the Tatas to build exclusively in British territory:

If the Sini site is adhered to and the Borgaon Tank constructed for its water supply,
both the site and the tank will be in Native States, out of the direct control of
British officers . . . Even after the construction the commencement of the Works,
there are several details of administration where Native States are likely to be
obstructive & troublesome in various ways.

The Tatas’ response was to essentially play one power against the other:

There are two alternatives open to us:- (1) To shift the site as they advise, or (2) to
obtain an option from the Raja of Seraikela fixing definite price for the land to be
occupied by the Works . . . it should be put before him that in case he wouldn’t give
us reasonable terms and a period of option, we would not establish the Works in
his Territory but go over to British land.32

This was a risky strategy, because if the company bound itself to building in
the Raja’s domain, it would be giving up the possibility of using the Land
Acquisition Act: “We might be thus placing ourselves at his mercy. The British
Government could not help us much; there will be no land Acquisition Act to
put into force; and the Raja may insist on his own price being paid.”33 As in
the case of the hydroelectric companies, the primary aim of the Tatas’ acqui-
sition policy was to obtain security of tenure at the lowest possible rates,
whatever the method. But it was not clear whether the flexibility of purchas-
ing by private treaty could overcome the advantages provided by the weight of
colonial law and bureaucracy.
The initial area acquired for the steel plant under Section 41 of the Land
Acquisition Act was 3,564 acres at a rate of Rs. 13 per acre, with a total
compensation amount of Rs. 12,000/- paid to the expropriated raiyats. Tata
Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) informally agreed to provide alternative land
for the displaced, but no explicit provisions were inserted into the agree-
ment.34 There were few protests, mainly because the company had deliber-
ately avoided acquiring the more populated villages. A further 12,000 acres
were added in 1917 for extensions of the plant, employee housing and leases
to subsidiary companies. Borrowing certain terms from the agreement with
the Tata Hydro-Electric Company, TISCO attempted to secure the right to

276
 How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need?

permanently alienate land and to provide for future acquisitions.35 The

Maude Committee, appointed by the government of Bihar and Orissa in
1919 to investigate problems arising from the expansion of the steel town,
stated in its report that more acquisitions were sure to follow, but difficulties
would be encountered due to the rising price of land and insecurity of tenure
in the remaining villages. TISCO held these villages on lease from the Mid-
napore Zamindari Company, which temporarily controlled the estate due
to a succession dispute then pending in the courts. TISCO had “obtained all
the rights of the superior landlord, but they were quite unable to control the
Pradhans (village headmen) who assigned waste lands in the villages of
Sakchi and Beldih for the erection of houses and thus exceeded their cus-
tomary rights.”36 The preferred solution would be the further use of the
Land Acquisition Act, the magic wand that could extinguish all existing
property rights.
However, at this stage colonial officials had begun to doubt that the Act
could legitimately be used to “clear up problems of doubtful ownership.”37
The Maude Committee argued that “the application of the Act has been
unduly extended to cover cases in which land is required for private industrial
concerns such as the Tata Iron and Steel Company,” whose business was
deemed “only indirectly useful to the public.” Therefore, unless the Act was
amended, the Committee’s recommendation was the formation of a statutory
Board of Works, a local government authority that would be far better
equipped than the company to acquire land and assist the dispossessed ten-
ants.38 This was a clear challenge to the arrangement whereby the company
exercised de facto sovereign rights over an expanding area in and around
Jamshedpur, and it was prompted mainly by the legal question of land acqui-
sition. The company itself had precipitated this impasse, by claiming that “we
constitute a large Municipality, and as such we are a public body and entitled
to the operation of the Land Acquisition Act.”39 This attempt to assuage the
colonial state’s doubts about the applicability of the “public purpose” clause
soon backfired. Land became the main vehicle of a long struggle for political
control over the surrounding region, which continues to this day.
Under conditions of frequent industrial unrest at Jamshedpur throughout
the next two decades, no further action on the legal status of the township was
taken. The question of TISCO’s control over land resurfaced only after inde-
pendence, when the Bihar Land Reforms Act of 1950 triggered a thirty-year
court battle leading to a renegotiation of lease terms. The latest agreement was
signed in 2005 with the newly formed Jharkhand government. Jamshedpur,
now an urban agglomeration of more than 1 million people, has not been
declared a municipality and services continue to be provided exclusively by
Tata Steel through its newly formed subsidiary JUSCO (Jamshedpur Utilities
and Services Company).

277
The Land Question in India

The process of land acquisition for the steel company produced a similar set
of conflicts over the provision of infrastructure as in the case of the hydro-
electric companies. The terms of the initial agreements (which, as I have
shown, borrowed from each other) did not anticipate the effects of the drastic
changes in the respective regions’ geographies and the resulting divergence
between the interests of state and capital. The companies were further drawn
into the complexities of rural social relations within an agrarian system
marked by multiplicity and uncertainty of tenures. They severed the bonds
between moneylenders and peasants at Mulshi and sought to break the power
of local village headmen at Sakchi, through a combination of legal proceed-
ings, and the creation of new land and labor markets. The operations of both
industries extended over large areas, yet were concentrated in a set of bounded
spaces (dams, power houses, and transmission lines on the one hand, and
factories, townships, and mines on the other). The key difference was the
extent to which those boundaries were porous, and the steel company as
producer, employer, and landlord found itself directly governing large popu-
lations that could not simply be displaced and freed as a roaming proletariat.
Indeed, TISCO was forced to absorb and discipline labor on a semi-permanent
basis, which tied it to the countryside and regional political economy in ways
that were difficult to manage and predict.

11.6 Conclusion

The “land question” in India is now receiving due scholarly attention from a
variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. One persuasive revision of
David Harvey’s overarching model of “accumulation by dispossession” pro-
poses an emergent neoliberal “regime of dispossession” in India fundamen-
tally unlike its Nehruvian predecessor, with a shift from “land for
production,” as seen in state-controlled industrial estates and townships, to
“land for the market” in special economic zones (SEZs) where agricultural land
is indiscriminately converted into real estate (Levien 2013: 383–4). On the
other hand, it has been argued that “accumulation by dispossession” does not
apply at all in the Indian case, due to the preponderance of state projects
throughout the history of land acquisition since the Nehruvian period, with
the colonial state assumed to have been “not developmental” (Chakravorty
2013: 90–1, 129). Taking a longer view, I have sought to recover an earlier
“regime of dispossession,” marked by the limited assumption of control
over spaces of resource extraction and production by private capitalists
under the aegis of post-swadeshi industrial development. The colonial state
did begrudgingly commit itself to this goal, but it was unable to reconcile its
own fundamental character as an agrarian rent-seeking entity with the tasks it

278
 How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need?

was to perform as a “land broker” for firms like the Tatas. The protracted
negotiations over revenue assessment and the rights to water and land at
Jamshedpur and in the Western Ghats reveal the frustrated desires of the
colonial state to retain some measure of control and assert its own sovereignty,
despite the substantive concessions it had given to the Tatas. It was a problem
specific to this historical moment, with the Nehruvian state later taking upon
itself the responsibility for industrialization, and the postliberalization state
willing to make even greater concessions, such as allowing private capital to
“capture the ground rent” from real estate (Levien 2013: 395).
If much has changed since 1991, we also find continuities between the
present and the more distant colonial past of land acquisition. Negotiations
of capitalists with multiple levels of sovereignty have always been an import-
ant factor in determining outcomes. The Tatas’ playing the Raja of Seraikela
against the British recalls the deal-making over the location of the Nano plant
involving West Bengal and Gujarat, which has been described as the giving
and taking of “geobribes” (Roy 2011: 267). Despite the simplification of
formal tenures after the land reforms of the 1950s and 1960s, the Land
Acquisition Act remains the best instrument available for resolving ambigu-
ities in ownership and usufruct rights (Chakravorty 2013: 112). The broad
definition of the “public purpose” clause of the Act has allowed the courts to
routinely justify acquisitions (Wahi 2013: 51). As I have shown, this definition
was first worked out as the colonial state faced new claims on behalf of private
companies. The Tata case is instructive precisely because it acts at once as a
precedent for, and a catalyst of, the state-driven mode of accumulation that
took shape in the immediate postindependence period and that is now being
radically reconfigured under conditions of rapid globalization and a fractured
political landscape in India.

Notes

1. Tata Central Archives, Pune (hereafter TCA), FP-41. J. N. Tata to Richmond Ritchie,
Secretary to Lord George Hamilton, May 10, 1901.
2. TCA, T53-DES-T20-IMPORTANT-EXTRACTS-DHARAVI-1- 0004, Edward Miller to
Gostling and J. N. Tata, July 25, 1902.
3. Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai (hereafter MSA), Revenue Department
(Forests), 1911, No. 444, Vol. 116. Grant on lease to Messrs. Tata & Sons of certain
forest lands in Dist. Belgaum for construction of reservoir.
4. TCA, T53-DES-T20-IMPORTANT-EXTRACTS-DHARAVI-1-0043-44. Macdonald
Miller & Co. to Gostling and J. N. Tata, December 30, 1904.
5. TCA, T53-DES-T20-IMPORTANT-EXTRACTS-DHARAVI-2-0065-68. Memorandum
on the Public Utility of the Bombay Hydro-Elec. Scheme, prepared by Dr. John
Mannheim, October, 25, 1906.

279
The Land Question in India

6. MSA, Revenue Department (Lands), 1911, No. 625, Pt. I. Acquisition under Act I of
1894 of certain lands in the Poona and Kolaba Districts.
7. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1920, No. B-117, Pt. III. Nila Mula Power
Supply Project, Deputation from inhabitants of thirty-seven villages of Mulshi Peta,
pp. 73–83.
8. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1920, No. B-117, Pt. III. Nila Mula Power
Supply Project, Deputation from inhabitants of thirty-seven villages of Mulshi Peta,
p. 101.
9. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1920, No. B-117, Pt. VI. Nila Mula Power
Supply Project, Correspondence relating to draft agreement under Section 41 of the
L.A. Act, pp. 89–90, 295–303.
10. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1920, No. B-117, Pt. V. Nila Mula Power
Supply Project, publication of press note and compensation terms.
11. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1920, No. B-117, Pt. III. Nila Mula Power
Supply Project, Deputation from inhabitants of thirty-seven villages of Mulshi
Peta, pp. 171–6.
12. TCA, T53-DES-T20-TP-BO-1-PG-025. Tata Power Board Meeting No.18, held on
February 15, 1922.
13. TCA, Box 459, TEC/T20/TP/BO/1, Board Papers, Tata Power Co., 1921–4. Circular
No. 40/22, September 8, 1922.
14. MSA, Revenue Department (Lands), 1911, No. 1636. Instructions for the guidance
of officers acquiring lands under the Land Acquisition Act.
15. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1920, No. B-117, Pt. III. Nila Mula Power
Supply Project, Deputation from inhabitants of thirty-seven villages of Mulshi
Peta.
16. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1920, No. B-117, Pt. III. Nila Mula Power
Supply Project, Deputation from inhabitants of thirty-seven villages of Mulshi
Peta, pp. 91, 128–30.
17. Ambemohor is a particular kind of rice from the hills of Western Maharashtra,
while sal is a forest seed that yields oil.
18. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1920, No. B-117, Pt. X. Nila Mula Power
Supply Project, Rates of compensation to Mulshi Ryots.
19. MSA, Revenue Department (F Branch), 1924, No. 2591-24. Land Acquisition,
Method of correctly estimating the values of land.
20. MSA, Revenue Department (Development),1922, No.79. Land Acquisition Act
Amendment.
21. TCA, Box 459, TEC/T20/TP/BO/2, Board Papers, Tata Power Co., 1925–1933. Circular,
December 23, 1925.
22. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1927, No. 9299-24. Condition of commu-
nications in Mulshi Peta, Report regarding the Second Revision Settlement of the
Mulshi Peta, pp. 3–4.
23. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1927, No. 9299-24. Condition of communica-
tions in Mulshi Peta, Collector of Poona to Tata Power Company, January, 31, 1930.
24. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1924, No.180-24, Non-agricultural assessment,
Kundley Valley Co. quarry purposes, pp. 275–8.

280
 How Much Land Does a Capitalist Need?

25. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1927, No. 8460-24, Tail water of Tata
Hydro-electric works, exemption from water assessment.
26. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1920, No. B-117, Pt. V. Nila Mula Power
Supply Project, publication of press note and compensation terms, Notes on Tata
Power Co., p. 5.
27. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1927, No. 9299-24. Condition of commu-
nications in Mulshi Peta, Report regarding the Second Revision Settlement of the
Mulshi Peta, pp. 10–12.
28. MSA, Revenue Department (B Branch), 1927, No. 9299-24. Condition of commu-
nications in Mulshi Peta, Report regarding the Second Revision Settlement of the
Mulshi Peta, p. 49.
29. TCA, FP-36. D. J. Tata to J. N. Tata, September 25, 1902.
30. TCA, FP-41A. Shapurji Saklatvala to Messrs. Tata & Sons, Mining Department,
Bombay, August 22, 1904.
31. TCA, B. J. Padshah to R. D. Tata, February 24, 1905.
32. TCA, B. J. Padshah to R. D. Tata, December 22–23, 1905.
33. TCA, FP-220. Tata Sons to R. D. Tata, December 21, 1905.
34. Tata Steel Archives, Jamshedpur (hereafter TSA), Land Acquisition File No. 5 (1908,
Pt. I). From the Tata Iron and Steel Co. to the Government of Bengal, Revenue
Department, January 3, 1908.
35. TSA, Land Acquisition File No. 12 (1918, Pt. I). Draft of the Preliminary Acquisition
Agreement, General Manager’s Letter no. 306, January 19, 1918.
36. India Office Records, British Library, London (hereafter IOR), Mss Eur E251/22.
Papers of Sir Maurice Hallett, Report of the Jamshedpur Committee, pp. 20–1.
37. National Archives of India, Department of Commerce and Industries (Industries
Branch), “A” Progs. Nos. 1–9, March 1919, Note by A. E. Gilliat in the Revenue and
Agriculture Department, September 19, 1918.
38. IOR Mss Eur E251/22. Papers of Sir Maurice Hallett, Report of the Jamshedpur
Committee, p. 22.
39. TSA, Land Acquisition File No. 12 (1918, Pt. I). Memorandum, June 11, 1918.

References

Chakravorty, S. 2013. The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Chandavarkar, R. 1994. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies
and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ferguson, J. 2005. “Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security and Global Capital in
Neoliberal Africa.” American Anthropologist, 107(3): 377–82.
Hardikar, J. 2013. A Village Awaits Doomsday. New Delhi: Penguin.
Krishnan, E. 2012. “Private Speculations and the Public Interest: N. C. Kelkar’s Land
Acquisition Bill.” Socio-Legal Review, 8(2): 78–105.

281
The Land Question in India

Levien, M. 2013. “Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic

Zones.” Development and Change, 44(2): 381–407.
Padel, F. and Das, S. 2010. Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel.
New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
Pati, S. 2012. Industrialization and Displacement: An Economic Impact. New Delhi: Concept
Publishing.
Roy, A. 2011. “The Blockade of the World-Class City: Dialectical Images of Indian
Urbanism.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited
by A. Roy and A. Ong, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 259–78.
Sanchez, A. and Strümpell, C. 2014. “Sons of Soil, Sons of Steel: Autochtony, Descent
and the Class Concept in Industrial India.” Modern Asian Studies, 48(5): 1276–1301.
Vora, R. 2009. The World’s First Anti-Dam Movement: Mulshi Satyagraha, 1920–1924,
Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Wahi, N. 2013. “Land Acquisition, Development and the Constitution.” Seminar, 642:
49–54.

282
12

An Ethnographer’s Journey through Land

Grab for Capitalists by the Left Front
Government in West Bengal
Abhijit Guha

12.1 Introduction

Historically, ethnography emerged as a method in the social sciences, particu-

larly in anthropology, as a descriptive writing about a culture or society
through the participation of the ethnographer in the daily life of a community
in a specific site. Gradually ethnographers have moved from mere description
of cultures to explanations and interpretations of human behavior in specific
contexts (Nader 2011: 211–19). In course of time, explanations of societal
phenomena were being sought by ethnographers through the positioning of
their ethnographies in multiple sites and contexts wherein local events and
global issues were often placed within a single ethnographic text. The value of
this kind of multi-sited ethnography is more than one. First, detailed depiction
of ground realities mediated by the author’s personal encounters with
the subjects, which are not found in macro-level theoretical expositions of
the same problems. Second, positioning of the local actors and events in a
macro-level context and theory and, third, generating a dialogue with the
theoreticians who are not confined with the problems of a specific locale.
In line with the aforementioned trends of ethnography, I have attempted to
place a case of land grab (“land acquisition” in the legal and governmental
discourse) at the intersection of the local and the global that took place under a
communist-led government in the West Bengal state of India. For this reason,
I first go through the macro-level scenario of land grabs as depicted in the
literature by academics and international funding agencies, which formed the
global background of a local land grab in a particular ethnographic context.
The Land Question in India

Under the global capitalist market-driven regime, land grab in the literature
(including media reports) is used as a blanket phrase to refer to large-scale
commercial land transactions between countries involving transnational cor-
porations for the production of food, biofuels, and timber (Borras, Jr. and
Franco 2012: 34–59; Murphy 2013: 1–12). International funding agencies on
the other hand prefer to use the term “compulsory acquisition” (FAO 2008:
5–17) and “land transfer” (World Bank 2011: xxv–xlv) in which people are
displaced from their major means of production by the state. Without using
the term “land grab,” the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to
Food, in a 2009 report, however, emphasized putting in place proper institu-
tional arrangements to ensure land rights, food security, pre-investment
impact assessments, and transparency for the local populations prior to all
kinds of large-scale land acquisitions or land leases by developing countries
that are attracting international business investments under the impact of
globalization (Schutter 2009: 12–15). An Oxfam discussion paper entitled
“Sleeping Lions,” on international investment treaties and access to food,
land, and water also used the term “land grab” and pointed out succinctly
that in the developing countries natural resources like land and water have
“cultural and communitarian significance” that “exceeds their mere use and
exchange value” (Perez, Gistelinek, and Karbala 2011: 5).
Academic attempts to look into the phenomenon of land grab from a global
perspective have also started (Schutter 2011: 249–79). In a recent introductory
article entitled “Towards a better understanding of global land grabbing,” the
authors viewed land grabs as a kind of land deal politics which was often
lacking in the current debate. I quote from the authors:

We will focus, ultimately, on the politics of land deals—something often lacking

in the current debate—and therefore we embed the commercial act of exchanging
land titles into a broader framework concerned with “land deal politics”. Through
this initiative, we hope to foster a dialogue with social movements, activists, policy
makers, and concerned academics to produce data and debate potential implica-
tions. (Borras, Jr. et al. 2011: 209–16)

Under this general global background on the study of land grabs the chief
aim of this chapter is to write the ethnography of land expropriation by the
administrative wings of the state of West Bengal and peasant resistance
against a pro-peasant communist party-led government in the West Bengal
state in India.1 The uneven path of the capitalist transition in West Bengal
treaded by the then leftist government was marked by the contradictions
between ideology and praxis, coupled with bureaucratic failures and peasant
resistance against land grabs, which finally led to a stalemate toward capit-
alist transition. The ethnographic method of description, which turned out
to be useful in revealing the troubled path of the stalemate involved the

284
 An Ethnographer’s Journey

juxtaposition of typical anthropological field data with a variety of archival

sources and my personal experiences of interaction with the politicians at
the highest level of policymaking on the issue of reforming a colonial law,
which was in vogue in India until the enactment of the new law, named
the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition,
Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013.2
In Section 12.2 of this multi-sited ethnography, I briefly narrate my experi-
ence of interactions with the policymakers of the country (the members of the
Parliamentary Standing Committee) in the setting of a committee room. My
dialogue with the members revealed their attitude toward capitalist transition,
which cut across political parties. Almost all of them were found to be inter-
ested in how to give land to the capitalists, who, according to the members,
were already purchasing huge amounts of this natural resource from under the
feet of the cultivators.
In Section 12.3, I first describe my field findings in some detail, which
revealed some of the consequences of the dispossession of the peasants from
their major means of production, that is, fertile agricultural land, by the
government for two big private companies. This has placed my field area
within the wider context of land acquisition in West Bengal. In this section
I have also made an attempt to look into the administrative intricacies of land
takeover, which were often hidden from the public view.
In Section 12.4 of my ethnographic narrative I described the story of protest
by the peasants against a land grab by the state, which revealed the contradic-
tions of capitalist transition. The peasant protest has a link with Section 12.2 of
my ethnography wherein I describe my encounters with the members of the
Parliament who, I believed were already alienated from the peasantry at the
grassroots level. In Section 12.5 I briefly recount some anecdotal evidence from
the field that illustrates the wide gulf in understanding of what the poor
peasants of West Bengal aspire to and what the remote decision makers in
New Delhi think about development.

12.2 Facing the Policymakers

I was among the Members of Parliament (MP) from different parts of the
country at the big Parliament Library building, New Delhi, on June 17,
2008. I was feeling nervous, although I was invited as an expert to
give suggestions on the reforms to be undertaken on the century-old Land
Acquisition Act of India (1894) by which the government’s power of eminent
domain was used to acquire land for “public purpose” in lieu of monetary
compensation given only to the land titleholders and calculated on the basis
of the previous market price of land in the area.

285
The Land Question in India

The deputy chairman of the Standing Committee began the discussion by

asking me to highlight the major points that I recommended to insert in the
proposed bill. I talked at length trying to convince the MPs about those
subjects that I thought were downplayed in the bill. I emphasized the recog-
nition of local self-governments while getting consent of the affected people
for land acquisition, protection of food security at the household level, cor-
porate social responsibility, and avoidance of agricultural land from the scope
of land acquisition for private, profit-making industries. The deputy, with a
smiling face, reacted by saying that I had raised certain “basic issues and
philosophy behind the Act and there was no dispute on the idea,” and he
continued quite emphatically, “the reality was, one could not avoid land
expropriation since private companies were already purchasing huge chunks
of land in the rural areas of the country.” The chairman, who belonged to the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, now in power), also raised the same point. It
seemed to me that the Standing Committee might not be interested in
increasing the role of local governments, household-level food security,
endangerment of land reforms, and all other issues on which I made my
observation and published as a field anthropologist in cases of acquisition of
huge chunks of fertile farmland in some of the villages of erstwhile Medinipur
district of West Bengal where the peasants did not agree to sell their land to
the big industrialists. My pro-peasant arguments did not seem to convince
the policymakers who were already inclined in favor of land takeover by the
industrialists through capitalist market mechanisms. The MPs, however,
advised me politely to send the suggestions in script. Suffice it to say that
I did my job on time. But my direct encounter with the policymakers ended at
the Parliamentary Committee room. I will now go back to the story of my
engagement with land grab by the government that I observed and describe
my findings following the style of a multi-site ethnography (Buckley 2011;
Gellner 2012: 1–16).

12.3 Dispossession of the Peasants in West Bengal

by the Left Front Government
12.3.1 Ideology and Praxis
West Bengal is an agriculture-dependent state, which occupies only 2.7 percent
of India’s land area, although it supports over 7.55 percent of the Indian
population and has a much higher population density than the national
average (Census of India 2011). West Bengal had been ruled by the Communist
Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M))-led Left Front Government (LFG) for more
than three decades (thirty-four years), which raised it to the position of
the world’s longest-running democratically elected communist government.

286
 An Ethnographer’s Journey

The LFG in West Bengal claimed its uniqueness among the Indian states not
only by staying in power for thirty-four years through parliamentary democracy
but also for the implementation of a pro-poor land reform program and decen-
tralized local self-government with a fair amount of success (Mukarji and
Bandopadhyay 1993; Lieten 1996).
In the late 1980s, and particularly in the wake of the liberalization in
1991, the focus of the development policy of the LFG radically shifted. The
government, which was fully committed to land reforms, started to invite
capital-intensive and technologically sophisticated private industrial entre-
preneurs, including multinational corporations, to the state. Interestingly,
the success in land reform in the state was first emphasized in the policy
statement of the LFG as early as 1994 and was later cited in a report by the
government as one of the justifications for huge industrial investment
(Government of West Bengal 1994: 1–18; WBIDC 2000: 44).
However, contrary to what has been dubbed a “success” in order to justify
industrialization, an earlier report of the government devoted to the evalu-
ation of the panchayats (decentralized form of governance by elected members
at the village level) in West Bengal observed that land reform was still an
incomplete program (Mukarji and Bandopadhyay 1993: 41). In fact, during
the early 1990s, the ruling LFG leaders argued that since land reform was
a very successful endeavor in the state, raising agricultural production and
the purchasing capacity of the peasantry, the state became the ideal ground
for the establishment of capital-intensive heavy and medium industry.
I call this the industrialization-through-land reform argument. The second line
of argument came from more theoretically oriented Marxists of the ruling
parties, who claimed that industries would be able to absorb the extra labor
engaged in agriculture in disguised form and as well as that resulting from
the introduction of mechanization in agriculture. The proponents of this
argument also stated that agriculture, owing to land fragmentation caused
by inheritance of property rights, and hikes in input costs, have already
become nonviable for many small and marginal farmer families. This argument
may be termed employment-through-industrialization (Mishra 2007: 1–22). The
phrases “industrialization-through-land-reform” and “employment-through-
industrialization” have been coined by me in an earlier publication in the
journal Social Change in 2014 (Guha 2014: 205–28).
The West Bengal Human Development Report (WBHDR) published in 2004
also noted with concern the landlessness among rural households in the state.
It noted a “disturbing feature,” referring to the increase in landlessness despite
land distribution and registration of bargadars (sharecroppers without owner-
ship rights on the land) (Government of West Bengal 2004: 40). In spite of
these findings, the government of West Bengal pushed its agenda of industri-
alization in the era of globalization ignoring its immediate and long-term

287
The Land Question in India

effects on land reforms. This forms the wider context of the ethnography in
which I will now place the local level events around a land grab in the villages
and the land acquisition department of Paschim (West) Medinipur district in
West Bengal.

12.3.2 Dispossession in the Field

I conducted anthropological field investigations with my students during
1995–7 and 2006–8 in some of the villages within the Kharagpur I block
(the lowest administrative category of a district in West Bengal) of the erst-
while Midnapore district, which was subdivided into west and east Medinipur
in 2002. The area was located in western Midnapore and was characterized by
undulating lateritic soils. The rural people mainly subsisted on monocrop
agriculture. The specific area of my fieldwork is situated on the bank of the
river Kansai, the largest river of the district. Cultivation of rice (a staple of the
district) in the villages under study depended primarily upon rainfall and no
systematic irrigation facilities had been developed by the government during
my fieldwork. The villagers residing on the southeastern bank of the river
cultivated a variety of vegetables on the land adjoining their homesteads
owing to a good supply of groundwater from traditional dug wells. But just
on the west of the southeastern railway track the groundwater level was not
very good for cultivation of vegetables. The main agricultural activity on the
western side of the railway track centered on rain-fed paddy cultivation, which
took about four to six months of the year. Land for four private industries had
been acquired by the government on the western side during 1991–6. Among
these four, three had already started production: 1) Tata Metaliks (manufac-
turing pig iron), 2) the coke oven unit of the Wellman Company (supplying
coke coal to the Tata Metaliks), and 3) the Bansal Cement factory. The fourth
was a proposed pig-iron plant named Century Textiles and Industries Ltd
(hereafter CTIL) owned by the Birla group of industrialists for which fertile
agricultural land was acquired in 1996 but no factory was built on this land
until 2004 (Guha 2004: 4620–3). The fourth company finally withdrew its
project because it foresaw stiff competition in the market under the liberalized
economy. Interestingly, the West Bengal government had acquired agricul-
tural land for all these industries despite the fact that a huge area of uncultiv-
able undulating lateritic terrain (“wasteland” in the official jargon) lay just by
the side of these agricultural lands on both sides of the railway track that
extended almost up to the highlands on the bank of the Kansai. It may be that
the companies did not choose these undulating lands since it would have
been more expensive for them to level the ground for building industry. It
should also be noted in this connection, that no members of the land-loser
families were provided with a permanent job in those industries, although the

288
 An Ethnographer’s Journey

local left political leaders tried to create the impression that at least one
member of those families would be given employment (Guha 2014: 205–28).
The results of my fieldwork revealed the maladies of state-led capitalist
development on many fronts. Foremost was the fact that land grabs by the
government created not only food insecurity for the peasants but also endan-
gered the land reform initiatives undertaken by the then pro-peasant LFG
(Guha 2006: 155–73). In the absence of any viable industry-based employ-
ment, the dispossessed peasants were simply left to fend for themselves (Guha
2007a, 2013: 797–814; Majumder 2015). The monetary compensation pro-
vided to the land losers could not rebuild their household economy and this
fact conformed to the findings of researchers in many countries of the world
(Cernea 2008: 15–98).
The following events narrated by a peasant in the field area represented a
typical case of a land-loser family affected by governmental acquisition of
farmland in the study area. The family owned 0.54 acres of inherited land of
which 0.22 acres was acquired by the government for the Tata Metaliks
Company and their other piece of purchased land was also acquired for
another company in the year 1991. The head of the family got compensation
money and he saved some money in a nationalized bank. The remaining land
which he possessed after the acquisitions could not provide the family food
for the whole year and they had to buy food crops for two to three months of
the year and this was the most adverse event in the life of the family
(Majumder and Guha 2008: 121–33; Guha 2011b: 336–57).

12.3.3 How a Land Grab Failed

The land acquisition for CTIL is a typical example of a case of land grab, where
a huge chunk of acquired agricultural land remained unutilized for more than
five years (Guha 2007b: 3706–11). In Table 12.1 I have outlined the chron-
ology of the CTIL land acquisition.
Compensation payments for the company started after June 1996 and
continued up to March 1998 and then the payments came to a halt. The
CTIL did not start any construction work for its proposed sponge and pig
iron plant although buildings were constructed by the side of the land
acquired for the company’s security guards (Guha 2007a: 87–94). The com-
pany’s managing director, B. K. Birla, in an interview to a reporter from The
Statesman said that they would not proceed with the project as “the national
market of pig iron has become very much competitive because of the entry of
China and Australia in the field.” He also said that this decision was conveyed
to the state government. The state land and land reforms minister, Surya
Kanto Mishra, on the other hand, told the reporter for The Statesman: “We
are not finding any taker for the land” (The Statesman, November 18, 1999: 4).

289
The Land Question in India

Table 12.1. Succession of events showing land acquisition for CTIL

DATE EVENT

July 2, 1992 Cabinet of the government of West Bengal approved the project for the
acquisition of 1,137.78 acres of land by Act-II of 1948 in eighteen mouzas
under Kharagpur Police Station.3
December 3, 1992 Assistant secretary writes to district collector to proceed.
October 28, 1995 The first public notification published in the newspaper. Acquisition by
Act-I was made. Land amount reduced to 526.71 acres in 10 mouzas.
December 29,1995 The hearing of objections by the land losers completed.
January 10, 1996 Peasants prevented soil testing.
March 22, 1996 Mass deputation by the peasants at the district collectorate. Peasants
demanded land for land or job and higher compensation.
April 2, 1996 Publication of agreement between the company and the government in
the Calcutta Gazette.
April 10, 1996 Peasants submitted memorandum to boycott parliamentary election.
May 2, 1996 Poll boycott decision of the land losers published in The Statesman.
May 22, 1996 CTIL got possession certificate for 238.86 acres of land.
June 21, 1996 The report on the objection hearing at collector’s office completed and all
objections overruled.
May–July 1996 The peasants were not allowed to cultivate on the acquired land. By this
time the payment of compensation started.
February 28, 1997 Land and Land Reforms Minister announces that state would reclaim
unused land leased to industries.
April 11, 1997 CTIL got possession certificate over another 119.39 acres of land
March 12, 1998 The Statesman reported about the adverse effects of acquisition in
Kalaikunda
June 21, 1998 Kalaikunda Gram Panchayat held meeting with the land losers about the
land which remained unused by the Company
October 12, 1998–March The order sheet of the land acquisition Dept. reveals the non-payment of
15, 1999 compensation to land losers as the company has stopped placing funds
since December 1996
April 19, 1999 Land Acquisition Office, Medinipur writes to the MD of WBIDC seeking
advice over this hanging situation
November 18, 1999 The Company Managing Director tells the reporter of The Statesman that
they are not interested to establish the plant the Minister also expresses his
helplessness over the matter
December 7, 1999 Joint Secretary, Land and Land Reforms Dept. writes to Dist. Collector to
send report on the Acquisition

In another detailed report, published seven months later by the same news-
paper, it was stated that the state government still seemed to be undecided
over the fate of the land acquired for CTIL (The Statesman, July 5, 2000: 4). The
individual landowners, who possessed plots of land in this area, also stopped
cultivation since they received acquisition notices in 1996. It may be of
interest in this context to mention that in one of its publications, entitled
Destination West Bengal, the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation

290
 An Ethnographer’s Journey

(hereafter WBIDC) listed the sponge and pig iron plant of Century Textiles as
an “upcoming” industrial unit in the Kharagpur area (WBIDC 1999: 21). One
important point about the acquisition of land for Tata Metaliks (a pig iron
company which has started production) and Century Textiles Companies
deserves mention. Huge chunks of fertile agricultural land were selected by
the companies and the Cabinet Committee of the West Bengal government
gave approval to this selection. My field observation in this area revealed the
presence of a huge tract of undulating lateritic nonagricultural land on the
western side of the southeastern railway track lying on the north bank of the
Kansai river. During my fieldwork, the land losers of this area repeatedly
pointed out that the government should have acquired the nonagricultural
land for the industries instead of taking their agricultural land. When this
point was raised before the officers and employees of the Land Acquisition
Department of the district collectorate, they simply stated that it was the
decision of the government, which the concerned department at the district
level had to execute. Under the strong policy support toward industrialization
no question of corporate social responsibility was raised in the then adminis-
tration of the government of West Bengal (Guha 2011a: 79–98). The govern-
ment neither requested that the companies ask for unfertile land for industries
nor did the government declare tax relief for companies that would have saved
the livelihood of peasants by avoiding fertile land for industries. In any case,
the aforementioned episode of the failure of land acquisition for CTIL not
only disillusioned the peasants about industrialization, but also created the
ground for protest against the land grab for industries. In the next and the last
section of the chapter, I will narrate the ethnography of the peasant resistance
against the land grab.

12.4 Protests by the Peasants against the Land Grab

The protests launched by the landowning peasants of the Gokulpur-Amba

(two of our study villages) against land acquisition took many forms, even
though these did not last for a long period, as happened in Singur block during
2006–7 in the Hooghly district of West Bengal. Several peasants took up the
statutorily available means and instruments to put up their objections against
land acquisition under Section 5A of the colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894
during December 1995. A government report dated June 21, 1996 vividly
recorded the objections and described in detail how the latter were overruled
by the district collector.
The objections submitted by 342 land losers contained the following points:
first, the acquisition of agricultural land would affect the farmers seriously by
throwing them out of employment; second, the land losers would not get

291
The Land Question in India

compensation at the rate they expected; and third, the proposed acquisition
was against public interest and beyond the purview of the land acquisition act.
It was interesting to observe how the concerned officials of the Land Acquisi-
tion Department overruled all the objections raised by the peasants. Before
rejecting the objections, the officials, however, recognized the severity and
magnitude of the acquisition. To quote from the report: “It is a fact that since
large quantum of land is being acquired and the people chiefly subsist on
agriculture many people will be seriously affected in earning their livelihood
and avocation” (Government of West Bengal 1996).
However, this was the only sentence in the whole report that upheld the
interests of the peasants. The rest of the three-page report was devoted to
justifying the acquisition. The arguments of the officials centered on the low
agricultural yield of the lands, which were monocrop in nature. Furthermore,
the report mentioned the merits of the location of the land that would provide
important infrastructure facilities for industry, such as the nearby railway line
and the national highway No. 6. The report noted that during the hearing of
the objections, the petitioners could not “specify their individual difficulty in
parting with the land,” although in the same report it was stated “most of the
objectors submitted that they have no objection if employment is assured to
them, in the company in favor of whom acquisition is being done.” It is not
clear from the report why the authors of the same could not understand the
nature of “individual difficulty” in parting with the land, which according to
the report was their main source of livelihood.
Three points raised in the report were quite significant and revealed the
insensitive way the government dealt with the acquisition, which was
going to have a severe impact on the subsistence pattern of a group of rural
cultivators in an area where the cultivation was predominantly dependent on
rainwater and a single food crop was grown in an agricultural season. I now
enumerate the points.
First, at one point the report mentioned: “It is worthwhile to point out that
objections have been received only from 342 landowners for the acquisition
of 526.71 acre which will affect at least 3000 landowners, if not more.” It
seemed the official position rested on the logic that since the overwhelming
majority of the peasants would not face any difficulty (at least there was no
record of objection under the Land Acquisition Act), there was no need to
record any objection against this acquisition.
Second, after citing the location related advantages of the land, the officials
overruled objections regarding the question of earning a livelihood by say-
ing that the proposal had been approved both by the screening committee
and by the state after considering all aspects. Incidentally, the screening
committee for the approval of any project included the sabhadhipati
(chairman) of the panchayat samity (the second tier of the statutory local

292
 An Ethnographer’s Journey

self-government) and the Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) of the

locality. It was obvious that these peoples’ representatives, who were mem-
bers of political parties of the LFG, would not object to a proposal that had
already been approved by the cabinet and the concerned ministries of their
own government.
Third, the report dealt with the point of “job for land” simply by saying that
the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 did not provide any relief except compensa-
tion, but the government might take up the matter with the company, par-
ticularly for those peasants who would become landless and would be devoid
of any source of earning a livelihood. After having overruled all the objections,
the procedure for land acquisition marched ahead.
Besides recording objections within the legal framework of the Land Acqui-
sition Act, the peasants of this area also took recourse to extra-legal means to
fight against the acquisition of their agricultural land, which is narrated in the
following paragraphs. The information on this part of the peasant protest
has been collected from interviews with the leaders and participants of this
movement as well as from press reports and the various written memoranda
submitted by the villagers to the district and state administrations.
Two interesting incidents may be mentioned in this regard, which would
throw some light on the reasons behind the popularity of this movement
among the Kharagpur peasants. The first incident took place in the month of
May 1995 when a local peasant leader with the help of other peasants sent a
deputation to the Tata Metaliks Company (this company had started produc-
tion during the early nineties) authorities demanding some compensation for
the damage caused by the movement of trucks carrying goods for the com-
pany over unacquired agricultural fields (there was no crop in the fields at that
time) of those cultivators. The trucks damaged the dykes of the fields (ails) and
the soil. Under pressure from the peasants the company had to pay compen-
sation in kind to seventy-five peasant families in the presence of the pradhan
(elected head of the lowest tier, i.e., gram panchayat of the statutory local self-
government) of Kalaikunda Gram Panchayat (the lowest tier of the constitu-
tional local self-government). Some amount of fertilizer was given to those
peasants whose lands were damaged by the movement of the trucks.
In the second incident, the peasants sent a deputation to the district admin-
istration about the damage caused to the unacquired agricultural fields of
some peasants for putting up pillars to demarcate the lands acquired for
Century Textiles Company in Kantapal, Mollachak, and other adjoining vil-
lages. Those cement pillars were anchored by digging up about 4 square feet of
land to a depth of 3–4 feet. They became permanent structures right on the
agricultural fields of the peasants whose lands were not acquired. About 24–5
such pillars were constructed in early 1996, which demarcated the boundary
of the acquired land for CTIL. The peasants argued that cultivation of fields

293
The Land Question in India

with plough and bullocks outside the area under acquisition was not feasible
owing to physical obstruction created by the pillars (Guha 2007a).
The district administration had to agree with this demand of the peasants
and arranged for a payment of Rs. 420 as compensation to those families
affected by the construction of the pillars. This compensation payment con-
tinued for two years but with the decline of the movement, the administration
discontinued this compensation.
Both these incidents revealed that under pressure from an intelligent and
organized peasant movement, the company as well as the Land Acquisition
Department had arranged compensation for peasant families having no pro-
vision under the existing legal and administrative framework (Guha 2007b:
3706–11, 2009: 41–53).
The movement reached its peak from the later part of 1995 up to April 1996
during which the farmers even resorted to violent means. In the first week of
January 1996 hundreds of farmers in the Kalaikunda area stormed into the
tent of the engineer who was conducting soil testing and a land survey on
behalf of the CTIL A leading national daily reported on January 10, 1996:

Land Survey and soil testing work in Mathurakismat Mouza in the Kalaikunda
gram panchayat area of Kharagpur rural police station undertaken by Century
Textiles—a Birla group of Industries—had to be abandoned following stiff resist-
ance from villagers last week . . . The farmers also blocked Sahachak for nine hours
yesterday . . . They also lodged a complaint with the police against the firm.
(The Statesman, 1996, January 10: 6)

On March 22, 1996, the same national daily reported a mass deputation by a
group of peasants of the Kharagpur region before the district administration
(The Statesman, March 22, 1996: 6). In this deputation, the peasants
demanded land for land or a job for the members of the land-loser families.
They also demanded compensation of three lakh rupees (INR 300,000) per
acre of agricultural land. After this deputation, about 100 farmers came to the
district headquarters at Midnapore town on April 10, 1996 and submitted a
memorandum to the district magistrate declaring that they would boycott the
ensuing parliamentary election to protest against the acquisition of fertile
agricultural land for the industrial projects. The peasants stated in their letter
that this acquisition would disturb the local economy and destabilize the
environmental balance of the region. This event was also reported in The
Statesman (May 2, 1996: 6). It is important to note in this connection that
neither the state nor district level Congress leadership (the Congress was the
major opposition party) nor any MLA of this party showed any interest in
supporting this movement of the peasants in Kharagpur region by raising
their voice in the West Bengal Assembly. The local CPI (M) leadership and
the elected panchayat members of this area not only remained silent about this

294
 An Ethnographer’s Journey

spontaneous movement of the peasants but they also made every attempt to
silence this agitation by labeling it a disturbance created by Congress to stall
the progress of industrialization under the LFG. Without getting support from
any opposition party, facing stiff resistance from the ruling left parties, and
lacking a coherent organization, this localized peasant movement against
land acquisition gradually lost its intensity. The land losers also made an
attempt to organize themselves by refusing to accept compensation money
for a very brief period under the leadership of a few local leaders but this effort
too did not last long and the movement finally lost steam in the Kalaikunda
region probably because of lack of any support from state-level political parties
or human rights groups (Guha 2011b: 336–57).

12.5 An Anecdote from the Field

I started with a description of how the members of Parliament in India viewed

capitalist transition by industrialization through land expropriation and
narrated how, in the opinion of policymakers, land grab was seen as inevitable
under the market forces. I then narrated how a land grab dispossessed
the peasants and the way the administration looked at it and dealt with
the acquisition. I also described why the government was unsuccessful in
returning the land to the peasants when the company failed to build industry
on it, which the government acquired for the capitalist, owing to unforeseen
market forces unleashed by globalization. In effect, under liberalization, a
leftist government could not provide rehabilitation to the peasantry which
led the peasants to protest and bargain around land acquisition in Paschim
Medinipur. I further observed that the peasants did not give away their lands
under market forces as visualized by the parliamentarians in New Delhi. The
peasants in my field area put up resistance, made intelligent bargains going
outside the domain of the Land Acquisition Act, and finally lost their battle to
the overarching state power.
It is also interesting to note that by 2006 the then Marxist government that
was in power changed its age-old Leninist slogan “Land to the tillers” to
“Agriculture is our foundation, industry our future” (Communist Party of
India (Marxist) 2007). In fact, the then CPI(M) leadership argued in favor of
huge capital investment in the state by saying that success in land reforms had
created the ground for industrialization, although two important government
reports during the Left Front regime had recorded very slow progress in the
distribution of land to the landless and even a reversal of land reform benefits
to an alarming level (Government of West Bengal 2004: 39–42; Mukarji and
Bandopadhyay 1993: 41). Without reading these scholarly reports, the dis-
possessed peasants in my field area who depended on agriculture could not

295
The Land Question in India

dream of a bright future in the upcoming industries, which only engulfed

their land but could not provide any job to them. From my field observations
and interviews I learned that almost all the peasants of the studied villages
used to consume the paddy they grow in their land. I have not come across
any peasant family who sold their paddy in the market. Purchasing rice for
consumption was viewed by the members of a peasant family a humiliating
task and was regarded as a dishonorable act for a chasi (peasant). Owning
cultivable land was viewed as socially prestigious for the peasant families of
this area. A “good peasant” in this area was one who could feed his family with
the paddy grown in his field throughout the year. A popular maxim in this
area, which I collected during my fieldwork was Arthe maan/Khote dhan. Freely
translated from Bengali it meant: “Money gives prestige/Fertilizers yield
paddy.” In almost all our conversations, the members of the land-loser fam-
ilies always blamed acquisition of land by the government as the “root cause”
(mul karan in Bengali parlance) of household level food shortages. They also
expressed hopelessness whenever they talked about the number of months
during which they purchased rice from the market for domestic consumption
(Guha 2013: 797–814). Capitalist transition through land takeover by the
state in my field area created a band of despondent peasants who instead of
becoming an industrial proletariat still stuck to their peasant way of living in
worse conditions than before. I will end my story with an anecdote from the
field, which made a nice contrast with what the MPs at New Delhi implicitly
communicated to me.
The event occurred near Kantapal village from where the huge chunk
of land acquired for Century Textiles could be seen. I, with some of my
students, was engaged in a discussion with the locals about the condition of
the small dykes (ail) raised by the farmers to demarcate the plots of land
possessed by different owners within the acquired area. Since no cultivation
could be taken up for three successive seasons in the whole area it had turned
into a grazing field and the dykes had started to break down. Two conse-
quences of this situation followed. First, cultivators who still had unacquired
land in the vicinity of the acquired area were facing difficulties in protecting
their agricultural plots from the grazing cattle. Earlier there were other peas-
ants who also shared the responsibility of driving out the cattle from the fields
during agricultural season. Driving out the intruding cattle in paddy fields is
always a collective affair in rural areas. After acquisition, the number of
cultivators decreased in this area. Moreover, cows and buffaloes of the milk-
men of the urban areas of Kharagpur town also ventured to exploit this huge
chunk of land.
Second, after the breakdown of dykes the poorer people of the area, who
used to collect a good quantity of small fishes of various types from those
agricultural plots as a common property resource, were not getting any fish in

296
 An Ethnographer’s Journey

those plots. In the discussion, three or four persons, including one middle-
aged woman and an old man, were present. All of them were denouncing the
government for the takeover of the fertile agricultural land for CTIL which had
not yet been constructed. When the question arose, if people of this area had
started to dislike the ruling party and the government, then why did they cast
their votes at the panchayat and assembly elections to the same party every
year? The reply came from the old man, which is reproduced here verbatim:

Look babu, we poor people always have to ride on some animal almost blind-
folded. After the ride for some time we start to realize whether it is a tiger or a
bullock. But very often we have to twist its tail in order to keep it in proper
direction. (translated freely from Bengali)

All of us, including the old man, burst into laughter but soon I realized that
the joke symbolized the wide gap between the aspirations of the helpless local
peasants in West Bengal and the distant policymakers in New Delhi.

12.6 Conclusion

Ethnography not only helps us to describe a culture or society, it also explains

local events in a wider context. Accordingly, in this chapter an attempt has
been made to situate the case of a local land grab by the West Bengal govern-
ment within a global and regional context. Description of the local scenario in
two sites (villages and administrative departments) helped me to understand
the mechanisms of the failures of a leftist government which finally led to a
stalemate in the path towards capitalist transition at least a decade before the
Singur episode. The detailed description of how the governmental bureau-
cracy functioned to acquire land for the industrialists with a strong policy
back-up on the one hand and the daily events around the visceral resistance
put up by the land-losing peasants who did not want to become “willing
sellers” on the other, revealed the contradictions toward the capitalist path
of development and here lay the real value of this ethnographic journey. The
outcome of this contradiction was as bad as a natural disaster since it not only
pauperized the peasants without employment either in the industry or
rehabilitation in agriculture but also distanced the policymakers from the
peasants. The failure of the land grab could neither generate a labor force
freed from agriculture, an industrial proletariat, nor created enthusiasm and
hope for the capitalist investors. The Bengal leftist government’s neo-Marxist
theory of riding on the shoulders of land reform to achieve a successful
capital-intensive industrialization finally proved to be a self-defeating exercise
since the praxis sabotaged both past land reform and future industrialization.
Generating capital and employment either through legal means or by the play

297
The Land Question in India

of market forces seemed to be mere political rhetoric of the left political parties
for contesting election battles in West Bengal. This is the macro-theoretical
lesson I learnt from this multi-site ethnographic account on land grab in the
state under liberalization.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted for this work to the villagers, my students, and the staff of the Land
Acquisition Department of the erstwhile Midnapore district, West Bengal. I deeply
acknowledge Achin Chakraborty, Director, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata,
Anthony D’Costa of the Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne, and
Mritiunjoy Mohanty of the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, for inviting me
to present an earlier version of the chapter. I owe my special debts to Anthony for his
critical comments on the successive drafts of the manuscript. However, I am solely
responsible for any errors and omissions.

Notes

1. I have used the term “ethnography” not in the usual anthropological sense of the
term, as the holistic description of a culture, but as a description of my own
interaction as an ethnographer with land acquisition in a particular state of India
in many field sites, including affected villages, government offices, archives, com-
mittee room of the Parliament house, and various public places outside the villages
where I conducted the surveys over a long period of time. This may be called multi-
site ethnography (Auyero 2004: 417–41; Burawoy 2013: 526–36; Gellner 2012: 1–16;
Marcus 1995: 95–117).
2. This Act was passed on August 29, 2013 in the Lok Sabha (lower house of the Indian
Parliament) and on September 4, 2013 in Rajya Sabha (upper house of the Indian
Parliament) under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government. The law,
however, has not come into application since the new National Democratic Alliance
(NDA) Government which has come to power in 2014 has restrained the application
of the new law by amendments on the consent clause and the provision of social
impact assessment through the promulgation of an Ordinance, a move which has
been viewed by experts as the “weakening of the democratic and constitutional
institutions”(Ramesh and Khan 2015: 124–30; Iyer 2015). The Act has provisions to
provide fair compensation to those whose land will be taken away, intended to bring
transparency to the process of acquisition of land to set up factories or buildings and
infrastructural projects and assured rehabilitation of those affected for the first time
in the history of the country (Cernea 2013).
3. Since Independence, besides the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, there existed
another State Act entitled West Bengal Land (Requisition and Acquisition) Act, 1948.
The latter act is no longer applicable in West Bengal since March 31, 1993 by a

298
 An Ethnographer’s Journey

decision of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly. In fact, when this particular piece
of legislation was first enacted in the State Assembly, it was stipulated that the Act
had to be renewed in the Assembly by a majority decision every five years since this
was a very powerful and coercive law. The government opinion was that the State of
West Bengal, which had to receive millions of refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan
just after independence, needed a huge amount of land for various developmental
purposes. By West Bengal Land (Requisition and Acquisition) Act the Government
could first requisition a particular piece of land for which the payment of compensa-
tion may not be made before the land takeover, while in the earlier Land Acquisition
Act of 1894 the government could not take possession of any land without payment
of compensation. In terms of political composition, both Congress and Left-ruled
Governments, who were in power, continuously renewed the Requisition and Acqui-
sition Act of 1948 in the State Assembly and applied it to acquire land for “public
purposes” not only for the rehabilitation of refugees coming to West Bengal but also
for other purposes, like the establishment of industries owned by private companies
(Guha 2011a: 79–98).

References

Auyero, J. 2004. “When Everyday Life, Routine Politics, and Protest Meet.” Theory and
Society, 33: 417–41.
Borras, M. S., Jr. and Franco, J. C. 2012. “Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of
Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 12(1): 34–59.
Borras, M. S., Jr., Hall, R., Scoones, I., White, B., and Wolford, W. 2011. “Towards a
Better Understanding of Global Land Grabbing: An Editorial Introduction.” The
Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(2): 209–16.
Buckley, L. 2011. “Eating Bitter to Taste Sweet: An Ethnographic Sketch of a Chinese
Agriculture Project in Senegal,” Paper Presented at the International Conference on
Global Land Grabbing, Organized by the Land Deals Politics Initiative (LDPI) in
Collaboration with the Journal of Peasant Studies at the Institute of Development
Studies, University of Sussex, April 6–8, 2011.
Burawoy, M. 2013. “Ethnographic Fallacies: Reflections on Labour Studies in the Era of
Market Fundamentalism.” Work, Employment and Society, 27(3) 526–36.
Census of India. 2011. “West Bengal Population Census data 2011.” Available at: <http://
www.census2011.co.in/census/state/west+bengal.html> (accessed March 28, 2016).
Cernea, M. 2008. “Compensation and Investment in Resettlement: Theory, Practice,
Pitfalls, and Needed Policy Reform.” In Can Compensation Prevent Impoverishment?,
edited by Michael M. Cernea and Hari Mohan Mathur, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, pp. 15–98.
Cernea, M. 2013. “Progress in India: New Legislation to Protect Persons Internally Displaced
by Development Projects.” Available at: <http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/
posts/2013/10/21-india-displacement-cernea/> (accessed March 2, 2016).

299
The Land Question in India

Communist Party of India (Marxist). 2007. “Thirty Years of West Bengal Left Front
Govt.” Available at: <http://cpim.org/content/thirty-years-west-bengal-left-front-
govt/> (accessed March 1, 2016).
De Schutter, O. 2009. “Large Scale Land Acquisitions and Leases: A Set of Core
Principles and Measures to Address the Human Rights Challenge.” United Nations
Special Rapporteur’s Report on Right to Food, Geneva.
De Schutter, O. 2011. “How Not to Think of Land-Grabbing: Three Critiques of Large-
Scale Investments in Farmland.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(2): 249–79.
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). 2008. Compulsory Acquisition of Land and
Compensation, FAO Land Tenure Series 10. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations.
Gellner, D. N. 2012. “Uncomfortable Antinomies: Going beyond Methodological
Nationalism in Social and Cultural Anthropology.” AAS Working Papers in Social
Anthropology, 24: 1–16.
Government of West Bengal. 1994. “Policy Statement on Industrial Development,”
published on September 23, 1994, Calcutta.
Government of West Bengal. 1996. “Report on the Hearing of Objections for Land
Acquisition for Century Textiles and Industries Ltd. (Unpublished).” Land Acquisi-
tion Department, Govt. of West Bengal, Midnapore.
Government of West Bengal. 2004. “West Bengal Human Development Report,” Devel-
opment and Planning Department, Govt. of West Bengal, Calcutta.
Guha, A. 2004. “Land Acquisition in a West Bengal District.” Economic and Political
Weekly, 39: 4620–3.
Guha. A. 2006. “Dispossession of Peasants by Industrial Projects.” In The Economics and
Politics of Resettlement in India, edited by Shobhita Jain and Madhu Bala, New Delhi:
Pearson Education, pp. 155–73.
Guha, A. 2007a. Land, Law and the Left: The Saga of Disempowerment of Peasantry in the
Era of Globalisation. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company.
Guha, A. 2007b. “Peasant Resistance in West Bengal: A Decade before Singur and
Nandigram.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42: 3706–11.
Guha, A. 2009. “Peoples’ Strategies of Survival around Land Assets: Decisions under
Contrasting Situations.” Decision, 36(1): 41–53.
Guha, A. 2011a. “Challenges to Corporate Social Responsibility: A Case Study from
Kharagpur, West Bengal.” Sociological Bulletin, 60(1): 79–98.
Guha, A. 2011b. “Special Economic Zones, Land Acquisition and Civil Society in West
Bengal.” In Resettling Displaced People: Policy and Practice in India, edited by Hari
Mohan Mathur, New Delhi: Routledge and Council for Social Development,
pp. 336–57.
Guha, A. 2013. “The Macro Costs of Forced Displacement of the Farmers in India:
A Micro- Level Study.” The European Journal of Development Research, 25(5): 797–814.
Guha, A. 2014. “Generating Public Consciousness around Land Acquisition for Private
Industries.” Social Change, 44(2): 205–28.
Iyer, R. 2015. “When Amendment Amounts to Nullification.” The Hindu, January 15.
Available at: <http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/when-amendment-amounts-
to-nullification/article6789569.ece/> (accessed March 3, 2016).

300
 An Ethnographer’s Journey

Lieten, G. K. 1996. Development, Devolution and Democracy. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Majumder, A. 2015. “Socio-Economic Impact of Land Acquisition for Industries among
the Peasants of Paschim Medinipur, West Bengal: A Test Case.” Unpublished PhD
thesis, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore.
Majumder, A. and Guha, A. 2008. “A Decade after Land Acquisition in Paschim Med-
inipur, West Bengal.” Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society, 43: 121–33.
Marcus, G. E. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-
Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95–117.
Mishra, S. K. 2007. “On Agrarian Transition in West Bengal.” The Marxist, 23(2): 1–22.
Mukarji, N. and Bandopadhyay, D. 1993. “New Horizons for West Bengal’s Panchayats,”
Department of Panchayats, Government of West Bengal.
Murphy, S. 2013. “Land Grabs and Fragile Food Systems: The Role of Globalization,”
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis.
Nader, L. 2011. “Ethnography as Theory.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 1(1):
211–19.
Perez, J., Gistelinek, M., and Karbala, D. 2011. “Sleeping Lions: International Invest-
ment Treaties, State-Investor Disputes and Access to Food, Land and Water,” Discus-
sion Paper, Oxfam. Available at: <https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/
files/dp-sleeping-lions-260511-en.pdf> (accessed March 2, 2016).
Ramesh, J. and Khan, M. A. 2015. Legislating for Justice: The Making of the 2013 Land
Acquisition Law. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
WBIDC. 1999. “Destination West Bengal,” Government of West Bengal, Calcutta.
WBIDC. 2000. “West Bengal: Industry News Update,” Government of West Bengal,
Calcutta.
The World Bank. 2011. Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and
Equitable Benefits? Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.

301
13

Land and Dispossession

The Criticalities in the Hills of Northeast India

Gorky Chakraborty and Asok Kumar Ray

13.1 Introduction

In the transition of an economy from agricultural- to nonagricultural-led

growth, analyzing the role of the state in dealing with the issue of land can
be an interesting area of inquiry. While this “transition problematique” has
been an inseparable part of the development agenda of economies worldwide,
there are differences in the process and its manifestations among nations
and within them as well. While the differences between the technologically
advanced and developing economies have been dealt with in the introduction
to this volume, several contributors to this volume discuss various scenarios
from different parts of India. We analyze the role of the state in its dealing
with the issue of land in the hill areas of Northeast India (NEI). This chapter
reflects on the contested nature of the land question in the hills of NEI due to
the development agenda of the state. In other words, it deals with the complex
ways by which institutional forces result in dispossession of the hill dwellers
from their land, which is essentially collective in nature. In short, it locates
in NEI, the central theme of this volume, that is, the social and political
contradiction between development as an outcome and dispossession,
which otherwise has been the hallmark of capitalism so far.
While appropriation and subsequent dispossession from land by the state as
a consequence of its development agenda is not different between “mainland”
India and NEI, we emphasize that there are dissimilarities regarding the pro-
cess, which stem from a difference in understanding on the part of the state
and that of the communities inhabiting the hills in the region. We argue that
 Land and Dispossession

this gap between the perception of the community (under customary rights)
vis-à-vis the colonial and postcolonial state (under the positive laws) regard-
ing community land, influences the jurisprudential differences that lead to
different understandings on property rights. This subsequently augments
the process of dispossession through appropriation by the state. Nuanced
understanding of the process of appropriation through various institutional
measures highlights how the state has dealt with the land question in the
hill areas of the region. This similar yet unique history of dispossession in the
hills helps us to understand the process of social transformation in NEI. In other
words, we discuss the scenarios where the state, in the name of pursuing its
development agenda, defines property rights in a way that helps it to appropri-
ate land that subsequently leads to dispossession of the hill communities from
their community land.
NEI comprises eight states (see Figure 13.1). More than two-thirds of the
area of the region is covered by hills, the rest encompasses three stretches of
plains namely, Brahmaputra and Barak (in Assam) and Imphal (in Manipur).
NEI covers 8 percent of India’s geographical area and is home to 3.1 percent
(40 million, census 2011) of the country’s population. NEI shares more than
90 percent of its borders with other nations: China (Tibet) to the north,
Myanmar to the east, Bangladesh on the southwest border, and Bhutan to

Sikkim Bhutan Arunachal Pradesh

Assam
Nagaland

Meghalaya

Manipur
Bangladesh

Tripura
Mizoram

INDIA
Myanmar

Figure 13.1. Northeast India

Source: OUP (accessed March 16, 2016).

303
The Land Question in India

the northwest. The Siliguri corridor (a narrow stretch of land), also referred to
as the “chicken neck,” is the only stretch of land that connects the Northeast
with “mainland” India. Socioculturally, this is one of the most diverse regions
in the world. NEI is home to over 220 ethnic groups and as many languages
belonging to multiple language families. Agriculture is the primary source of
livelihood in the region. In the hills, shifting cultivation referred to as jhum is
practiced, while settled cultivation is the norm in the plains. The hills are
home to a large number of tribes spread over different states while the plains
are overwhelmingly non-tribal.
Method of cultivation has been a marker of civilizational norms where
settled cultivation has been the yardstick of transformation from the “state
of nature” to the “state of civilization.” Those areas and people beyond the
purview of settled cultivation were in the “state of nature” and neither their
proprietary rights nor their method of cultivation were considered to be legal
by the colonial state. So until land is privately owned and is under settled
cultivation, it fails to produce value and thereby is not regarded as property
(Harvey 2011). In NEI, those communities who practice shifting cultivation
on community land face similar categorization in the eyes of the state. This
chapter discusses the role of the state in dealing with community land, and
the ramifications in hill areas of the region. As the state failed to take
into account the usufruct practices of the communities (tribal) in the hills,
institutional dispossession of the communities from their land became a
consequence of the development agenda of the state. The chapter elaborates
how such institutional dispossession has been manifested in different states in
NEI. For example, a process of selective interpretation of customary rights
governing community land by the emerging elites among the Khasi tribe (a
matrilineal tribe) in Meghalaya paved the way for increasing land concentra-
tion in their hands; whereas the absence of a cadastral survey and record of
rights over community land leads to the non-acceptance of proprietary rights
of the communities while appropriating these lands for development projects
in Tripura. Likewise, the vacillating understanding by the state of “custodian”
and “owner” of community land created conflicting claims over lands among
several hill communities in Manipur, which continues to fuel instability in the
state. To provide a contrasting view of the hill areas, three states are selected for
our analysis. While Meghalaya and the hill areas of Tripura (under the Tripura
Tribal Autonomous District Council) are governed by the Sixth Schedule of the
Indian Constitution,1 which provides autonomy to the communities to govern
themselves, Manipur is not governed by the schedule. By comparing the scen-
arios among the states, the chapter provides critical insights into the modes
of dispossession of the communities from their community land and high-
lights that, under the development agenda pursued by the state, constitutional
protection falls short in checking usurpation of community resources in NEI.

304
 Land and Dispossession

In Section 13.2, we deal with the epistemology of the gap in the perceptions
between the community and the state in terms of land as a resource, which
will help in theorizing land in the hill areas of the region. In Section 13.3, the
intuitive nature of the communities to continue with the practice of shifting
cultivation and the counterintuitive effort by the state through policy initia-
tives in discouraging such cultivation is discussed. The state’s agenda of
comparing shifting cultivation with petty production and simultaneously
encouraging the adoption of policies to replace it with settled cultivation
and/or plantation agriculture is an age-old phenomenon. The consequences
of such an approach on the communities are also discussed in this section. The
constitutional provision in the form of the Sixth Schedule for the protection
of tribal rights, providing them autonomy to govern themselves, for example,
through the formation of the district councils and the acceptance of custom-
ary laws, has been an important milestone in Indian administration. But the
gaps between the provisions in the Schedule and the practices in administer-
ing the same, particularly related to community resources (land) are discussed
in Section 13.4. Selected judicial cases are referred to here to highlight the
contradictions in the schedule areas. Section 13.5 deals with the modes of
dispossession in the three selected states of the region. While selective inter-
pretation of the customary laws under the Sixth Schedule helps emerging
elites in the Khasi society to usurp community land in Meghalaya, thereby
aggravating the problems of landlessness and indebtedness in Meghalaya,
the absence of a cadastral survey and therefore title deeds on community
land has resulted in communities being dispossessed from these lands in
Tripura. In Manipur, the vacillating nature of the state in recognizing the
role of the chiefs as well as equating their rights as “owners” instead of
“custodians” has led to conflicting claims of various communities over
community lands. While the discussion in the chapter focuses on commu-
nity land and the dispossession of the communities from them due to
various institutional measures, in Section 13.6, we relate this understanding
to the emerging hydropower sector in Arunachal Pradesh, which is becom-
ing the latest casualty in terms of separation of the communities from their
resources and thereby dispossession. This hill state (a non-scheduled state
under Panchayati Raj, which is a decentralized form of governance by a
committee at the village level) in NEI bordering China is presently under-
going a spree of dam building for hydropower generation, showcased as a
development initiative through state–market collusion to foster growth and
prosperity in the region. What has been the experience of the communities
in the state in this process? Is it leading to a new form of dispossession in
the contemporary era? In the concluding section we sum up the experi-
ences of institutional dispossession of the communities in the hills of NEI
and foresee that the collusion of state and capital in the contemporary

305
The Land Question in India

era of globalization may lead to further dispossession of the remaining

community resources in the region.

13.2 Theorizing Land in the Hills

In addition to the geophysical and climatic basis of economic differentiation

between the hills and the plains in NEI, the land systems are also markedly
different. In the hills, shifting cultivation is practiced, resulting in a
subsistence-based social economy, compared to surplus-yielding settled culti-
vation in the plains. Our theoretical understanding of the land system in the
hills of the Northeast gets obfuscated if we see the same through the lens of
market principles. The difference in the understanding of land between the
two economies and its people is thereby essentially historico-epistemological.
First, land in the subsistence economy is held under the stewardship of a chief
(tribal leader) and the community members enjoy only customary usufruct
rights, not ownership right, over such land. The real value of land can thereby
never be expressed only in terms of transaction value. In a market-based
economy, on the other hand, land is primarily a market good having transac-
tion value. The ownership of land is based on individual rights defined by
positive law. This constitutes a fundamental difference between the two
economic systems (Herskovits 1964). Second, in a subsistence economy,
land has a dual connotation. One, devolution of property is from the com-
munity to the individual and the devolution itself is subject to the control of
the community; and two, in ontological terms, individual rights are subsumed
within the community rights since no person or group can have property in
anything except as it is acknowledged by the relevant community and there-
fore property is never private (Taylor 1966). Community property being an
organic part of the social economy, any change in it also brings about change
in production relations (Commons 1957). Introduction of positive law delinks
the social economy of land from the community, which had been established
historically and sanctified by customary laws. In other words, positive laws
become a source of dispossession of the communities from their community
resources.
The individual rights regime in the hills of the Northeast was first estab-
lished by colonial jurisprudence. The application of the jurisprudential prin-
ciples of the colonizers over the customary laws of the communities is
therefore critical for a larger theoretical understanding of the community
land system. The colonial administrators, following Weber’s empirico-
positivistic notion, legitimized force to capture the land and land-based
resources (Roy Burman 1987). They conveniently used the jurisprudential
principles of res nullius (meaning, that which is not assigned by the sovereign

306
 Land and Dispossession

belongs to the sovereign) and terra nullius (meaning no man’s land) (Roy
Burman 1987) and found nothing unusual in prefixing “waste” to any unin-
habited and/or unused land (or any land that did not accrue revenue to the
Crown) and appropriated it for revenue generation (Chakraborty 2012: 8). For
the tribal communities, on the other hand, social behavior rather than force
was the basis of customary rights over land. The right to use land resources was
embedded in the customary law, which was steeped in the ethnohistory of the
tribes. These customary laws, according to Roy Burman (1987), were based on
the jurisprudential principle of lex loci rei sitae (meaning law of the people
where the asset exists). The jurisprudential principles of res nullius and terra
nullius of the colonial state on the one hand and lex loci rei sitae of the people
on the other, marked the fundamental difference between the two concepts of
rights.2 While the colonials individuated the rights on land, the tribal concept
of right was communal. Due to the usufruct nature of land rights, community
members did not treat any unused land as “waste” since this was subject to
re-utilization at a later time (see Table 13.1). Therefore, despite the formal
variations in the customary land ownership patterns among the different
tribes in the region, there were marked commonalities in the essence of land
ownership systems in terms of use of tools and techniques of production, non-
accumulation of effective surplus, absence of rent-revenue, communal labor,
labor reciprocity, and other activities on community land (Ganguli 2008).
This epistemological difference in perception and practice between the colonial
state and the communities in the hill areas of the region laid the founda-
tion for appropriation of community resources, particularly community land,

Table 13.1. Perception gap on land: Customary vs. positive law

Customary Positive

Right is customarily acquired Rights are legally acquired

As such, non-alienable Liable to alienation and appropriation
Largely community ownership Owned by the state
Ownership subsumed in community Individual right is the basis of economic growth
Place value of land Space value of land
Provides identity to the ethnic group Is cosmopolitan, melting pot of identity
Community is the person Community is not legal person
Land is a cultural place Land is a commercial space
Land for subsistence product Land for surplus product
Land is non-revenue yielding Land is revenue yielding
Product yielding Product and revenue yielding
Oral/customary grant of land Legal tenure
Symbol of community solidarity Symbol of power, wealth, and status
Community labor Hired or tenant labor
For subsistence For earning rent, interest, and profit
Natural regeneration Value addition, technology, and capital intensity
Jural fragmentation of land use Uni-jural structural model of land use
Nonwage-based land use Wage-based land use

307
The Land Question in India

which facilitated the process of dispossession through various modes. In the

subsequent sections, we discuss the modes of dispossession. It is interesting to
note that the process of detachment of the community from the community
land went hand in hand with the process of discouraging the traditional
methods of production associated with such lands. So first we highlight how
the process of discouraging shifting cultivation (jhum cultivation) in the name
of petty production added to dispossession and then discuss the process of
institutional dispossession in the hill areas of the region.

13.3 Differing Perspectives on Shifting Cultivation

The petty production mode of shifting cultivation did not receive official patron-
age of the colonial state due to its nonsurplus nature, market imperfection, and
the absence of economy of scale. The petty production of shifting cultivation
was discouraged for the sake of generating revenue from the agricultural sector.
It provided the common alibi to the colonials to discourage shifting cultivation
and introduce cash crop cultivation (Dutta 1983; Scott 2009).3
The postcolonial Indian state followed the colonial policy of discouraging
shifting cultivation in postcolonial economic reconstruction. The Indian
Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the state-supported organization
for agricultural development and extension services, discarded shifting cul-
tivation as environmentally degrading and promoted the three-tier model of
land use in the hills (see Table 13.2) (Ashokvardhan 2004). This ICAR model,
however, was contested for its labeling of shifting cultivation as an environ-
mentally degrading activity. It was critiqued by Ramakrishnan (1993), who
showed that the ICAR model was framed without looking into the village
structures, settlements, and livelihood systems of different hill dwellers.
According to Ramkrishnan, “the activities of industrial man,” and not the
tribal people, was responsible for destroying the forests in the hill areas of
the region. The “big science” approach followed by the policy makers could
not succeed in replacing jhum cultivation, as the hill dwellers did not show

Table 13.2. The three-tier model of land use and conservation of ICAR

Slope Approximate percentage Land use Conservation measures

of total land area

Top 33 Forestry —
Middle 33.5 Horticulture Half-moon terracing for
horticultural plants
Lower 33.5 Agriculture Bench terracing

Note: ICAR = Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

Source: Ashokvardhan (2004)

308
 Land and Dispossession

interest in those measures. He reiterated that jhum was a way of life and not
an evil practice (Ramakrishnan 1993).
In spite of this, from the report of the Commissioner of Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes in 1955 to the Draft Perspective Plan for Development of the
Forestry Sector 2007 (Eleventh Five-Year Plan, 2007–12), shifting cultivation
faced the wrath of the state as environmentally degrading and an inefficient
economic practice. The approach of the state towards land use in the hills
has been influenced by capitalist relations that were tilted toward sedentary
cultivation, cash cropping, horticulture, and industrial use of land. The state
formulated unfriendly policies toward shifting cultivation, de-recognized the
community as a person, and rationalized land tenure through individuation
and land deeds. The Draft National Tribal Policy (2004–6) promoted individ-
ual ownership that defeated the fundamentals of the economy of shifting
cultivation, its usufruct mode, and the incipient collective consciousness
associated with this practice. The National Afforestation Program of the
Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) during the Ninth (1998–2002)
and Tenth (2002–7) Five-Year Plans and the National Mission on Horticulture
(2005–6) also became instrumental in discouraging jhum lands for horticul-
ture and commercial timber.
The policy measures adopted by the states to discourage jhum in the post-
colonial era were critiqued by various studies.4 Karna found that

the new technology and strategy having been geared to goals of production, with
secondary regard to social imperative have brought about a situation in which
elements of disparity, instability and unrest are becoming conspicuous with the
possibility of increase in tension. (Karna 1987: 5)

In an interview with Roy Burman, Datta (1994) found that wet rice cultivation
and dairy farming propagated as an alternative to jhum cultivation had far-
reaching consequences in the hills. Roy Burman remarked:

most of the states in the north-east have adopted programmes of extending wet
rice cultivation and dairy farming in the hills. But in most of the hill areas where
these programmes have been introduced, wet rice cultivation is generally done
by migrant Hindu and Muslim peasants hailing at one time or the other from
Bangladesh, similarly dairy farming in the hills is frequently dependent on Nepali
labour. This is happening not because the hill men are lazy or unenterprising. But
these operations are based on experiences passed down from generation to gener-
ation on crop planning and activities concerning crops in different stages by
relating to soil type and water management, ethno-meteorology; animal behav-
iour in dairy farming, indigenous system of treatment of animal diseases and so
on. Gender related social organisation of labour and time budgeting for various
activities are involved. . . . (Datta 1994: 61)

309
The Land Question in India

Lack of proper understanding and appreciation of the dynamics of shifting

cultivation on the part of the state caused increased dispossession of tribal
land and its transfer to non-tribal people. This at times made the region
politically volatile. Although the nontribals were legally not entitled to own
land in the tribal areas of the region, due to their traditional skills in wet rice
cultivation, they often became the de facto owners of land through informal
leasing-in land of the tribals and cultivating the same land for years together.
Over the years these de facto owners slowly expanded their area of cultivation
and craftily became the de jure owners through state patronage and/or with
the blessings of the tribal power brokers. This has become a common phe-
nomenon in the hills. This shift in policy toward settled cultivation gave a
boost to dispossession of community land and the tribal people suffered from
a perceived identity threat. Undeniably this has been one of the major factors
in the tribal outcry for protection of an ethnic “homeland” and which also
gave fillip to insurgency in the region (Baruah 2005).5

13.4 Institutional Dispossession

Earlier we discussed how epistemological differences in perception and prac-

tice between the community and the state have led to different patterns of
understanding and utilization of community resources, particularly commu-
nity land in the hill areas. In this section we will show how the institutions
that were created to deal with the state–community contradictions performed
during the postcolonial era. Could these institutions provide safeguards to
avoid usurpation of community resources? Did these institutions protect the
interest of tribals at large from dispossession and deprivation? Or, did they
create newer contradictions of authority and agency obfuscating the very
purpose of their creation?
The process of introducing new laws governing land in the hills of NEI
started during the colonial era.6 They were enacted to introduce positive
laws with little safeguard for community land and communitarian practices
compared to the customary laws. The policy shift toward sedentary cultiva-
tion gave a boost to private rights in land that subordinated the customary and
community land ownership system, and invited the market forces in land.
This disturbed the social economy of the tribal areas. The colonial overseers
brought the chiefs and headmen of the tribes under colonial control through
“structured subordination” and initiated the process of transforming the
chiefs from custodians of community land to proto owners. The process,
which started during the colonial era, became more acute in the postcolonial
state and let loose perennial state–community conflict over land rights in the
hills of Northeast India. Here, we discuss the role of the traditional institutions

310
 Land and Dispossession

such as the district councils and their dealings with community land in select
hill areas of the region to highlight the gap in the avowed principle of
autonomy and self-governance of the institutions under the Sixth Schedule
and the actual process of administration in these areas. A brief discussion on
the legal pronouncements helps us to understand these differences related to
governing community land under the councils.
The Bordoloi Subcommittee (the precursor to the Sixth Schedule) registered
anxiety of the hill people over the protection of their land from being alien-
ated. The report stated that:

there was an emphatic unanimity of opinion among the hill people that there
should be control of immigration and allocation of land to outsiders, and that
such control should be vested in the hands of the hill people themselves . . . We
recommend that the Hill Districts should have powers of legislation over occupa-
tion or use of land other than land comprising Reserved Forest under the Assam
Forest Regulation of 1891 or other law applicable. (Hansaria 2005: 230–1)

On the forest issue, the report stated:

we would strongly emphasize that in questions of actual management, including

the appointment of forest staff and the granting of contracts and leases, the
susceptibilities and the legitimate desires and needs of the hill people should be
taken into account, and we recommend that the Provincial Government should
accept this principle as a part of its policy. (Hansaria 2005: 230–1)

On the question of jhum cultivation, the report stated that:

the tribes should have the right of deciding for themselves whether to permit jhum
cultivation or not . . . While therefore we feel strongly that jhuming should be
discouraged and stopped whenever possible, no general legislative bar can be
imposed without taking local circumstances into account. (Hansaria 2005: 230–1)

The land implications of the Sixth Schedule are laid down in Section 3 (1) (a)
of the schedule, which establishes that the district council can make law with
respect to allotment, occupation, or use, to promote the interest of the inhab-
itants. But these provisions under the Sixth Schedule had multiple interpret-
ations and each judicial pronouncement gave conflicting signals regarding the
right of these traditional institutions to enact laws for the protection of
community land under their jurisdiction.7 This puts a question mark on the
extent of legislative competence of the institution of the district council. This
became a contentious issue and a series of claims and counterclaims got
underway between these traditional institutions and the state governments
(Hansaria 2005). This did little to help in preserving the community land for
the usufruct use of the community. A disjointed cocktail of loopholes in the
customary law and the attempt to simultaneously unleash the “animal spirit”
of the positive law by the state resulted in dispossession.

311
The Land Question in India

This process of dispossession has been manifested in different ways in the

hills of NEI. For example, Meghalaya exhibits a case of dispossession due to
selective interpretation of customary laws by the elites, while in Tripura
dispossession is associated with the absence of record of rights on community
land; Manipur shows how competing claims on community land by different
tribes lead to dispossession. These select state scenarios are discussed in the
next section.

13.5 Community Land, Customary Laws, and Dispossession

In Meghalaya there has been a progressive transformation of the Ri-raid land

to Ri-kynti land. The root of this problem was in the customary law itself. In
Khasi customary laws, ownership of land is common while occupancy right is
individual. So if an occupant leaves the land uncultivated for a sufficiently
long period, he loses the right over it but if one makes permanent improve-
ment and continues to occupy it, in the course of time that land is recognized
as the occupant’s property. In postcolonial times, when the opportunities to
earn cash from nonagricultural sources increased, this provision of the cus-
tomary law favored the rich. The resource-poor land users failed to bring about
improvements in land, and were unable to claim private ownership over
community land. Similarly, the rich who introduced cash crops under the
tutelage of the state could employ large numbers of workers and inputs and
made permanent improvements on community land, transforming them into
private lands (Nongbri 1995). The Bakhrawbatris (traditional nobleman) in the
Khasi Hills, being the custodian of community lands, were the first to establish
Ri-kynti right (individual rights on land) followed by others in the Raid Durbar
(traditional assembly of the Khasi tribal community). This in effect created
cleavage of ownership between those who owned and occupied community
land and those who did not, that is, the tribal masses at large (Datta 1992).
The process of land dispossession was speeded up over time due to popula-
tion increase, improvements in transportation, and growing demand for land
for cash crop cultivation and extraction of industrial raw materials such as
coal, limestone, uranium, and timber. The emerging tribal “haves” created big
enclosures in Raid land and facilitated the outsiders (meaning tribals outside
the Raid) to grab community land. It is reported that those who lost on land
were the people from the Raid whereas those who gained were from the towns
(Sen 1987). This phenomenon in the Khasi Hills was not much different in the
Garo villages (another major tribe in Meghalaya, where there emerged a class
of absentee landed gentry, following the same path) (Majumdar 1983).
To arrest the trend of land dispossession, the Land Reforms Commission
instituted in Meghalaya (1974) recommended codification of customary

312
 Land and Dispossession

rights, cadastral mapping, and a record of rights of land to protect the interest
of the weak from unscrupulous land grabbers. The recommendation remained
largely on paper as the influential landholding elites foiled the initiative of the
Commission, on apprehension that the land reform would lead to state
appropriation. Bezbaruah (2007) found that waning community ownership
and absence of institutional reforms for a formal property rights regime has
resulted in growing differentiation in landholding and has led to the emer-
gence of landlessness among the tribal population groups in the region.
Protection of the rights of the tribals from nontribals remained the corner-
stone of politics in the hill areas, mainly under the provisions of the Sixth
Schedule of the Constitution. However, with the passage of time in the name
of development of tribal areas the transfer of land to nontribals became
an increasing phenomenon. The development initiatives through schemes
such as plantations on one hand, and nonrecognition of the community
rights over resources on the other, created conditions that not only enhanced
socioeconomic differentiation within the tribes (and among them as well) but
also created enough space for direct or indirect interventions by the nontribals
in the hill areas in NEI. The emerging tribal elites who benefited from such
development initiatives vacillated between two ends—tribalism and pan-
Indianism—choosing options that suited their narrow interests. Recently,
the Meghalaya Transfer of Land (Regulation) Amendment Act 2012 allowed
the transfer of land through sale, gift, exchange, mortgage, lease, and so on
to the nontribals. The Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council issued No
Objection Certificates (NOC) for mortgage of land to financial institutions
and issued land patta (deeds) to private individuals. Educational institutions
came under this exemption with the Meghalaya Private Universities (Regulated
& Establishment & Maintenance of Standard) Act 2012. This provoked civil
society activism by the umbrella organization called the Social Organizations
of Meghalaya Against Land Alienation (SOMALA), which demanded revocation
of the same (Jyrwa 1988).
Community land as a social safety net is fast disappearing among the
Khasis. With no capital access and declining returns from overcultivated
land, many rural Khasis gave up cultivation and became wage laborers.
Absentee landlordism increased as the wealthier and the “urban” tribals
started up plantations and agribusinesses with institutional credit. They main-
tained a nexus with the office bearers in the traditional institutions, for
example durbars, where the business interests made the custodians of these
institutions act as land brokers. The official attempts to conduct a land survey
therefore faced resistance from the durbars and the emerging elites within the
Khasi society (Sharma 1984). Thus, the Sixth Schedule, which was designed to
protect the community resources in the tribal areas, has fallen short of its
desired objectives. Our analysis reveals that the institutions of durbar and the

313
The Land Question in India

district councils, which should have acted as a bulwark against usurpation of

community land, have failed in their objectives. Moreover, the threat of land
alienation, which was earlier believed to be from nontribals, has become more
ominous with the emergence of elites within the tribal societies. Under such a
scenario, privatization of community resources, particularly land, has become
the order of the day in these areas.
While the dispossession in Meghalaya shows the lack of ability of the
traditional institutions to protect the interest of the community by preserving
their community land, the scenario in Tripura points to another dimension of
dispossession of the community from their land, which occurs due to the
state’s non-recognition of the community’s proprietary rights on community
land. The community land has never been under cadastral survey and there
are no land titles for these lands, which in the eyes of the state remain the only
source of proprietorship over such land. This thereby became a major source
of dispossession of the tribes from their ancestral land. Both the history of
migration of nontribals to the state as well as the enactment of legislation
aggravated the process of dispossession in the hill areas of Tripura state. The
process of discouraging jhum cultivation through introduction of rubber
plantations as well as settler-based plow cultivation reversed the land system
of the tribal people and their communal organization of labor. This privileged
the non-tribal migrant farmers, reducing the tribals to agricultural laborers.
It is interesting to note that Section 187 of the Tripura Land Revenue and
Land Reforms Act 1960 imposed restrictions on transfer of land from tribals to
nontribals without prior permission of the collector. But the caveat was that it
only recognized the individually owned and registered lands. As most of the
tribal lands were community owned and thereby beyond the purview of
registration and records, it became the source for alienation. This made it
easy for the state to take over community land as khas land and to settle the
same with nontribals in the name of refugee rehabilitation. The refugees, who
were otherwise traditionally more used to settled cultivation, were encouraged
to buy land and were provided with incentives for that purpose. In the
process, the tribals lost large swathes of land to the Bengali refugee settlers.
Some among them even set up “land cooperatives,” such as the Swasti Samity
in North Tripura, which violated the Tribal Reserves regulations and took over
large areas of land in connivance with the bureaucrats (Bhaumik 1996).
Dispossessed from their ancestral land, the tribal youth gravitated toward
insurgency and to the “Sengkrak” (clenched fist) movement (Bhaumik
1996). In some parts of south Tripura, as much as 60 percent of the tribal
lands were alienated to nontribals (Debbarma 2008), which further added fuel
to the process of dispossession and dislocation in these societies.
The same fallacy was exhibited when the state acquired tribal land for dams
in the state.8 In the early 1970s, the Dumbur dam submerged over 23,530

314
 Land and Dispossession

acres of land, most of which belonged to the tribal communities. They were
not compensated as their lands were not registered. Although the project
files mentioned only 2,558 individual landowning displaced families
(13,000 persons), studies found that 8,000–9,000 families (40,000–50,000
persons) were displaced without rehabilitation or compensation. Similarly,
the Gumti hydroelectric project submerged large stretches of tribal arable
lands in the Raima Valley in South Tripura. About 26,000 acres of land,
including 24,000 acres of cultivable land, were submerged and 5,000 tribal
families were displaced by the project (Fernandes 1995).
This is thereby another case where the introduction of positive laws on land
in a milieu of communal ownership led to dispossession and deprivation
among the tribals in the state. The more the state tried to bring about change
through development in these areas the greater was the delinking of the
community from the social economy of community land.
When the institution of district council was created under the Sixth
Schedule of the Indian Constitution, the major focus was the protection of
culture and tradition of the tribal people based on their customary practices
and usages. It was similarly thought of in case of protection of tribal land-
holdings. But contradictions emerged once they were operationalized. On
the one hand, the tribal chiefs deemed this to be a threat to their authority
and status within their clan through state intervention; and on the other, a
lack of understanding of the state of the difference between “custodian” and
“owner” of community land/resources created the opportunities for usurp-
ation of community resources from within the tribes (Karlsson 2011). The
scenario in the hills of Manipur shows these operational contradictions,
which is discussed in this section.
With the introduction of the Manipur Hill Peoples’ (Administration) Regu-
lation 1947 and the Manipur (Village Authorities in the Hill Areas) Act 1956,
the conflict between customary law and positive law escalated. These Acts
were opposed by the Kuki chiefs (Kuki tribes are one of the important inhab-
itants in the Manipur Hills, the other being the Nagas) as they viewed this as a
move by the state to erode their traditional rights and privileges, to reduce
their “control” over community land. They feared that over time these lands
would be transferred to nontribals from the Manipur plains. To allay their
apprehension, the Manipur (Village Authorities) in Hill Areas Act was subse-
quently amended in 1983, stipulating that no transfer or allotment of land
could be made to nontribals without the previous permission in writing of
the deputy commissioner of the concerned district. The deputy commissioner
had to secure consent of the village council as per the rules of the district
council. However, in operational terms, neither the safeguards in the acts
nor the district council could arrest land alienation and dispossession of the
ordinary Kuki tribesmen who enjoyed the usufruct rights in these lands. The

315
The Land Question in India

Kangpokpi–Kanglatongbi range in Senapati district of Manipur is one such

living example where the habitat of the Kukis was settled by the more “entre-
preneurial” nontribals by managing to acquire “patta” lands in these hill areas.
Again, there were complications when the state tried to win over the chiefs
through palliatives such as ownership over community land. The “custo-
dians” of the traditional lands sought to be treated as “owners” by bringing
in the issue of compensation for seceding their rights over these lands. The
enactment of the Manipur Hill Areas (Acquisition of Chief ’s Rights) Act, 1967
has been a step in this direction. This act stipulated compensation based on (a)
the amount of land under the chiefs; (b) total number of households within
the chiefdom; and (c) whether compensation was to be given in installments
or as a lump-sum. Despite these allurements, the act was opposed by the Kuki
chiefs, who took a defensive stand in favor of retaining the institution of
chieftainship. In the process, neither the act was implemented nor was the
compensation paid. In the stalemate, the distinction between the “custodian”
and “owner” of community lands that the state wanted to enact was utilized
by the chiefs and they posed themselves as the owners who were now de facto
licensed to usurp these lands for personal favors (Ray and Kamkhenthang
1991). This also led to dispossession of ordinary tribesmen from their com-
munity land.
In a nutshell, what appears in the hills of Manipur is a fragile order. On one
hand, there is a concerted effort by the emerging tribal elites to interpret the
customary laws in their favor and on the other, the state is bent on applying
the yardsticks of the plains to deal with the community land in the hills in
order to entrench its reach in these areas. This has given rise to competing
claims of ownership of hill land, namely among the chiefs (in the Kuki-Chin
Group); the community and village (in case of the Naga group); the state
government (through Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms Act), and
the district council (for which a movement is ongoing in the hills to bring
these areas under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution). Under such
a situation of competing claims the overlapping issues related to community
land remains unreconciled, leading to land-related conflicts and instability in
the hill areas of the state.
These examples from the hill regions of the Northeast suggest that once
there is an attempt by the state to introduce positive laws over community
lands, it leads to a change in production relations in these areas. Community
land being an organic part of the tribal social economy, the introduction of
the positive laws delinks the social economy of land and results in disposses-
sion. In this regard, what also appears from our analysis in this chapter suggests
that constitutional provisions and safeguards (like the Sixth Schedule) to
protect the traditional way of life and landholdings of the tribes under
the hegemony of capital have little success in preventing dispossession of the

316
 Land and Dispossession

tribes from their historically established communal resources sanctified by

customary laws.
In the next section, we deal with the ongoing issue of dispossession of the
tribal masses from their communal resources being enacted by the collusion
of state and market in the name of generating eco-friendly hydropower in
Arunachal Pradesh.

13.6 Emerging Issues with Hydropower

In our section on theoretical understanding we analyzed how the application

of different jurisprudential principles of res nullius and terra nullius by the
colonial and the postcolonial state and lex loci rei sitae by the tribals resulted
in the fundamental difference between the individuated and communal
concepts of rights over land. A similar scenario is unfolding in the hills of
Arunachal Pradesh in the name of generating hydropower through the accu-
mulation of water rights and resources and subsequent dispossession of the
ordinary tribesmen from the milieu in which they are embedded through ages.
It seems that the state is bent on defining property rights in the name of
“development” (read for hydropower generation) in such a way that “the
owners of hydropower plants acquire the basic fuel,” that is, water in this
case, “almost free of cost,” which then minimizes their operational costs vis-à-
vis other sources of power generation (Baruah 2012). Again, although it is true
that the tribes in the hills of Arunachal Pradesh may belong to the land
through which the river Brahmaputra flows (under different names), if the
state chooses, as it also appears to do to use the logic of private property, the
same land being communally owned may not belong to the inhabitants at all.
So these people can then be “readily cast as uninhabitants” who as tribals can
be shown to have “residual presence from a pre-capitalist era” (Nixon as
quoted by Baruah 2012: 49). In such a case, the issue of compensation can
easily be denied or fixed, if at all, at insignificant levels. Thereby both accu-
mulation and dispossession can be dealt with at minimum cost. Sensing the
opportunity, both the state and the markets are in collusion and the spree of
activities related to hydropower generation in Arunachal Pradesh seems to be
an indication in this direction.
The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) assessed the hydroelectric potential
of the northeastern region (NER, including Sikkim) to be 63,257 megawatts
(MW). Out of this estimate, only 1,011 MW, or 1.6 percent of the total, has
been developed so far (see Table 13.3). In terms of basin-wise hydroelectric
potential, the Brahmaputra basin has the highest potential and so 168 projects
were planned along its course (Table 13.3). Once the potential was identified
the search turned to a modus operandi to realize the potential (Menon and

317
The Land Question in India

Table 13.3. Hydropower potential* assessed and developed in NER (in MW)

State Potential Assessed Potential Developed

Arunachal 50,328 281

Assam 674 250
Manipur 1,784 105
Meghalaya 2,394 185
Mizoram 2,196 0
Nagaland 1,574 91
Tripura 21 15
Sikkim 4,286 84
Total NER 63,257 1,011

Note: * Excluding power units below 3 MW.

Source: Menon and Kohli (2005: 22)

Kohli 2005). The Northeast Business Summit in Mumbai during 2002, the
50,000 MW Hydro Initiative of the Ministry of Power in 2003, and the
Pasighat Proclamation on Power in 2007 were some of the initiatives used.
By 2010, the government of Arunachal Pradesh had already allotted 132
projects to companies in the private (120) and public sectors with a total
installed capacity of 40,140.5 MW. Ironically, in almost every agreement,
huge monetary advances were paid upfront “which greatly compromised
the manner in which subsequent clearances took place as such projects were
considered a fait accompli by both the developers and the state government”
(Vagholikar and Das 2010).
Generating hydropower involves huge social, cultural, economic, and
environmental costs. The impact assessment of hydropower projects either
ignored or showed little willingness to consider these costs. If we highlight
this gap with the example of shifting cultivation, a common practice among
the tribes in the state, it becomes illustrative. Project documents related to
impact assessments of hydropower often marked the submergence area within
their catchments as “degraded.” That those areas, which they termed
“degraded,” would either come under cultivation at the end of the jhum cycle
or have been left fallow after a cycle was beyond their comprehension since
they had little understanding of shifting cultivation. Their idea of what is “big”
and what is “small” was similarly vexed. The project assessments often stated
that only a “small” number of people would be displaced in Arunachal Pradesh,
but what is small for mainland India may be very “big” for the affected tribes in
the state. In the words of Dr. Mite Lingi, chairman of the Idu Indigenous Peoples
Forum:
the “small displacement” argument to sell these projects as being benign needs
to be confronted. The entire population of the Idu Mishmi tribe is around 9,500
and at least 17 large hydel projects have been planned in the Dibang Valley in
Arunachal Pradesh. As per this faulty argument (of small number of affected

318
 Land and Dispossession

people), little social impact will be indicated even if our entire population is
supposedly displaced. (Vagholikar and Das 2010)

Ultimately the land, forest, and water resources that are utilized for com-
mercial purpose are nothing but community resources in the hills of the
NEI. This raises several questions, such as, who owns the resources? Who
decides their utilization? And who benefits from their use? In the words of
Akhil Gogoi of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samity:

it is a matter of our rights over our natural resources. These resources are being
handed over to power companies and our rivers transformed dramatically by
political decisions taken in New Delhi and within state governments of the region.
This requires a political response from people of the region and that will be our
focus in the coming days. (Vagholikar and Das 2010)

One who is conversant with the NER will recollect that during the birth of
various insurgencies in the region the questions raised were not much different.
Thus this state–market collusion in the name of hydropower generation is
becoming hegemonic, ignoring the enormous social and environmental costs
both at the site of the projects as well as the downstream areas. In this conflict,
dispossession of tribal people from their communal resource base in their
ancestral land is a foregone conclusion.

13.7 Conclusion

Following the logic of wastelands (as discussed in Section 13.2),9 the colonial
officials considered community property as the sign of a poor institution,
one that hindered investment and growth. Community dispossession in
NEI therefore also became conditional to accumulation. This has been the
“similarity” of the region with the history of global capitalism. But the
historico-epistemological gap between positive law applied by the colonial
and postcolonial state and the customary laws followed by the tribal popula-
tions over community land creates social contradictions and contestation with
no real scope for resolution. Various modes of dispossession through the intro-
duction of alien institutions in the region throw light on the “uniqueness” of
accumulation in the region. This chapter has highlighted that state policies of
land use and cropping pattern, purchase, lease, and mortgage have already
become common. The lease market has sprawled in the hills and both the
“crafty locals” (Datta 1992) and “outsiders” have begun to take maximum
advantage of this situation. Moreover, our analysis also shows that disposses-
sion of community lands has become acute either because of non-recognition
of the customary laws or their selective interpretation aided by the lack of record

319
The Land Question in India

of rights on these lands. So a process of trivializing the economic and social

function of community land has simultaneously enhanced the threat to food
and livelihood security as well as dislocation of the tribes from their sociocul-
tural base. One of the resultant effects of such dislocations in the region has
been the ever-increasing number of political or ethno-nationalist movements,
both constitutional and extra-constitutional, in the name of the right to protect
resources through the demand for separate “homelands” for the different tribal
communities. Today when land and resources are viewed collusively by the
state and business as a spatial fix for corporate investment to further capital
accumulation, increasing dispossession of whatever is left of communal
resources in the Northeast seems inevitable.

Notes

1. A subcommittee under the chairmanship of Sri Gopinath Bordoloi, the then premier
of Assam was constituted in February 1947 to report on the North East Frontier
(Assam) Tribal and Excluded Areas. This subcommittee extensively toured the region
to gain experience from the people in the region on many issues particularly related
to land, natural resources, forests, and so on and their control over them. The threat
of these resources being exploited by non-tribal communities was also ascertained.
The committee submitted its recommendations during July 1949 to the chairman of
the Advisory of Fundamental Right and gave a number of recommendations related
to the continuation of shifting cultivation, forestry, control of immigration, legislative
measures for protection of the tribals, and so on. The report and recommendations
became the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution.
2. Eugen Ehrlich was one of the earliest jurisprudential analysts to interpret the dichot-
omy between the “state law” and “societal law” and in the process contributed
significantly toward the development of legal sociology and legal pluralism theory.
According to Ehrlich, the monopoly of the state in creation of legal norms appeared
only in modern times, as a precept of political theory and natural law doctrines in
the wake of the absolutist state. Reviewing Ehrlich’s Living Law Michel Coutu opines
that societal law is based upon cooperation and voluntary adherence, whereas state
law is grounded in “domination” and “constraint.” For a detailed analysis see Coutu
(2009). Sociological approaches to law highlight the non-uniqueness of law, which
is reflected in the words of Michael Freeman, “a vision of law as but one method of
social control” (2006: 1). He quotes Brian Z. Tamanaha (which reflects Ehrlich’s
notion of societal law) to validate this point as a rebuttal to standard conceptual
jurisprudence, “what law is and what law does cannot be captured in any single
scientific concept. The project to devise a scientific concept of law was based upon a
misguided belief that law comprises a fundamental category. To the contrary law is
thoroughly a cultural construct, lacking any universal essential nature. Law is
whatever we attach the label law to” (2006: 5). For further details see Freeman
(2006: 1–5).

320
 Land and Dispossession

3. James Scott provides an insight regarding the role of the state towards the people
practicing swidden (shifting) cultivation in the South East Asian uplands. According
to Scott, “swiddening has been anathema to all state makers, traditional or modern”
(Scott 2009: 77). He states that “the overriding reason behind such policies, it
appears, has been the states need to use such land for permanent settlement, to
realize for itself the revenue from the extraction of natural resources, and to bring
such non-state people finally to heel” (p. 78). Here it is interesting to note that states
with diverse ideological beliefs have practiced in similar ways to encourage seden-
tary cultivation vis-à-vis swidden cultivation. Thailand, Vietnam, and Burma have
a poor record of torturing and dispossessing population groups who practiced
swidden cultivation. For a detailed discussion see Scott (2009).
Regarding the introduction of cash crops and plantations in the hills of the region,
it is interesting to note that David Scott, the British administrator, introduced potato
cultivation in the Khasi Hills in the early 1850s. In 1853, the total potato cultivation
was 30,000 maunds which increased to 185,000 maunds in 1872 or more than six
times since 1853. For details see Dutta (1983).
4. A number of studies have found cases of land concentration and landlessness among
the tribals of North East India, particularly the Khasi-Jayantias of Meghalaya. Prom-
inent among these studies are Vincent (1979), Mathew and Nair (1983), Dutta and
Datta (1986), and Datta (1984).
5. The Fact Finding Report of Manab Adhikar Sangram Samity (MASS, a human rights
activist group based in Assam) concerning Karbi Anglong district of Assam high-
lights the linkages between the change in land use pattern and the perceived threats
to “homeland,” “identity,” and “security” among the tribal population groups in
the district. As the nontribals possess the occupational skills for wet rice cultivation
and as plantation crops come more under cultivation (with the connivance of the
tribal elites), they become the de jure owners of such land. Now, in the event of any
schism between the tribals and the nontribals the situation boils down to the issue
of “identity-threat” for the tribals at the hand of the nontribals and therefore
securing the land (read “homeland”) from the clutches of the de jure owners becomes
their “sacred” duty. This process led to a situation where the Karbi youths are
influenced by the Karbi insurgent groups with the aim of driving out the nontribals
from their homeland and on the other, the nontribal cultivators (mainly Hindi
speaking people) informally looked to the Indian security personnel stationed in
those areas as their protectors, as they shared common ethnic ties. This resulted in
spiraling of insurgency and violence in the region. For a detailed discussion see
Baruah (2005).
6. The Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation 1873, the Assam Forest Regulation, 1891,
Land Acquisition Act 1894, the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation, 1886, the
Chin Regulation 1896 and a host of other regulations.
7. In Sunil Dev vs. State of Tripura 2002 (1) GLT 538 it was decided that under clause (a)
of paragraph 3 (a), the District Council can make law controlling the occupation or
use of any land within the tribal area, it can make laws fixing minimum ceiling limit
of allotment, prohibiting conversion of agricultural land into nonagricultural and
preventing diversion of land. It can compel the landholders to keep some portion

321
The Land Question in India

for grazing purposes and for promotion of social forestry. It can set up its own
infrastructure to supervise the proper, fruitful, and beneficial occupation and use
of land. It can also make law compelling the landholder to keep some place vacant
within its boundaries and constitute a community farm for the benefit of poorer
sections. In Tarima Kanta Das vs. Karbi Anglong District Council, 1989(1) GLR 147
and Udaldas Panika Prahlad Chandra Das vs. Karbi Anglong District Council,
1990(1) GLR 78 it was stated that land comprised in autonomous districts, however,
does not belong to the District Council and is owned by the state government
(Hansaria 2005).
These conflicting judgments regarding the rights of the District Council to frame
rules concerning land often created an impression in the mind of the elected
Councilors that they can legislate like state legislators. Justice Hansaria, commenting
on the legislative power of a district council and referring to the case the District
Council of United Khasi and Jaintia Hills vs. Sitimon Sawin (1971) 3 SCC 708: AIR
1972 SC 787: (1972) 1 SCR 398, that had come up for consideration before the
Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, stated that the power of the District
Councils to make law were extremely limited unlike the Parliament or the State
Legislatures (Hansaria 2005).
8. There are similar incidents about loss of land, particularly community land of the
tribes, due to dam construction. In fact, the Chakmas who are attributed with
conflicting nationalities and statelessness in NER and South East Asia also have a
similar history of dispossession (other than the political causes) due to the construc-
tion of the Kaptai dam in the river Karnaphuli located in Chittagong Hill Tracts
(CHT) in 1964. For details see Bhaumik (1996), Chaudhury (2011), Prasad (2012).
9. For example, Locke’s famous statements, such as “what is produced from one acre of
enclosed land is ten times more than which are yielded by an acre of land, of equal
richness, lying waste in common.” Similarly, “he that encloses and has a greater
plenty of the conveniences of life from 10 acres than he could have from 100 acres
left to nature. . . . ” For details see Chakraborty (2012: 5).

References

Ashokvardhan, C. (ed.). 2004. Socio-economic Profile of Rural India, Vol. II: NE India, New
Delhi: Concept Publishing House.
Baruah, S. 2005. Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Baruah, S. 2012. “Whose River Is It Anyway? Political Economy of Hydropower in the
Eastern Himalayas.” Economic and Political Weekly, 47(29): 41–52.
Bezbaruah, M. P. 2007. “Land Tenure System in North East India: A Constraint for Bank
Financing?” Dialogue, 8(3). Available at: <http://www.asthabharati.org/Dia_Jan%
2007/Bez.htm> (accessed May 21, 2014).
Bhaumik, S. 1996. Insurgent Crossfire: North East India. New Delhi: Lancer.

322
 Land and Dispossession

Chakraborty, G. 2012. “Roots and Ramifications of a Colonial Construct: The Waste-

lands in Assam.” Occasional Paper 39, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata,
Kolkata.
Chaudhury, A. 2011. “Unheard Voices: The Stateless Chakmas in Arunachal Pradesh.”
Available at: <http://refugeewatchonline.blogspot.in/2011/02/unheard-voices-stateless-
chakmas-in.html> (accessed December 24, 2013).
Commons, J. R. 1957. Legal Foundations of Capitalism. Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Coutu, M. 2009. “Review of Hertogh Marc (ed.) Living Law: Reconsidering Eugen Ehrlich.”
Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 47(3): 587–93.
Datta, P. S. 1984. “Emerging Differentiation in a Traditional Tribal Economy.” Social
Research, 4(3–4): 1–7.
Datta, P. S. 1992. India’s North-East: A Study in Transition. New Delhi: Har-Anand
Publications.
Datta, P. S. 1994. North East As I See It. New Delhi: Omsons Publications.
Debbarma, S. 2008. “Refugee Rehabilitation and Land Alienation in Tripura.” In Land,
People and Politics: Contest over Tribal Land in Northeast India, edited by W. Fernandes
and S. Barbora, Guwahati: North Eastern Social Research Centre and International
Workgroup for Indigenous Affairs, pp. 113–27.
Dutta, P. N. 1983. “The Emergence and Role of the Middle Class in the Khasi-Jaintia
Hills 1824–1950.” In The Emergence and Role of Middle Class in North East India, edited
by B. Datta Ray, Delhi: Uppal Publishing House, pp. 107–49.
Dutta B. B. and Datta, P. S. 1986. “Land Holding Pattern among the Khasi-Jayantias:
The Tradition and Deviation.” In Alienation of Tribal Land and Indebtedness, edited by
B. N. Bordoloi, Gauhati: Tribal Research Institute, pp. 149–56.
Fernandes, W. 1995. “Indian Tribals and Search for an Indigenous Identity.” In Tribals
in India, Development, Displacement and Discontent, edited by A. K. Singh and
M. K. Jabbi, New Delhi: Council for Social Development, pp. 62–79.
Freeman, M. (ed) 2006. Law and Sociology, vol. 8. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ganguli, J. B. 2008. “Impact of North East Indian Tribal Values and Culture on the Hill
Region’s Socio-Economic Development in the Pre-Plan Period.” In Society, Politics
and Development in North East India. Essays in Memory of Dr. Basudeb Datta Ray, edited
by A. Ray and S. B. Chakraborti, New Delhi: Concept Publishing House, pp. 115–21.
Hansaria, V. 2005. Sixth Schedule to the Constitution. New Delhi: Universal Law Publishing
Company.
Harvey, D. 2011. “The Future of the Commons.” Radical History Review, 109: 101–7.
Herskovits, M. 1964. Economic Anthropology: The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples. New
Delhi: Eurasia Publishing House.
Jyrwa, E. 1988. “Critical Assessment of the Working of the Khasi Hills Autonomous
District Council in Meghalaya.” In Power to the People of Meghalaya, edited by
M. N. Karna, L. S. Gassah, and C. J. Thomas, New Delhi: Regency Publication,
pp. 89–96.
Karlsson, B. G. 2011. Unruly Hills: Nature and Nations in India’s Northeast. New Delhi:
Orient Blackswan.

323
The Land Question in India

Karna, M. N. 1987. “Agrarian Studies in North-East India.” In Land Relations in North

East India, edited by B. B. Dutta and M. N. Karna. New Delhi: Peoples Publishing
House, pp. 5–13.
Majumdar, D. N. 1983. “The Emerging Middle Class Among the Garos.” In The Emergence
and Role of Middle Class in North East India, edited by B. Dutta Ray, New Delhi: Uppal
Publishing House, pp. 181–91.
Mathew, T. and Nair, M. K. S. 1983. “Tribal Mode of Production (in Meghalaya) in
Transition.” Department of Economics NEHU, Shillong (mimeo).
Menon, M. and Kohli, K. 2005. Large Dams for Hydropower in Northeast India. New Delhi:
Kalpavriksh-SANDRP.
Nongbri, T. 1995. “Report on Meghalaya.” Paper presented at the workshop on “Land
Reforms—Agenda for the North East,” held at Gauhati, organized by Land Reforms
Unit, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, April 3–5.
Prasad, C. 2012. “Between Nation and Nationality: Chakma Refugees in Arunachal
Pradesh.” Available at: <http://www.asthabharati.org/Dia_Jan012/chun.htm>
(accessed November 8, 2013).
Ramakrishnan, P. S. 1993. Shifting Agriculture and Sustainable Development: An Interdis-
ciplinary Study from North-Eastern India. UNESCO-Man and Biosphere Series, vol. 10.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Ray, A. K. and Kamkhenthang, H. 1991. “Land Reforms and Organizational Problems:
The Chin-Kukis of Manipur,” Paper presented at the seminar “Organising the Rural
Poor for Land Reforms,” March 14–16, Hyderabad, National Institute of Rural
Development.
Roy Burman, B. K. 1987. “Issues in Land Reforms in N-E Tribal Area.” Mainstream,
August 1 and 8.
Scott, J. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sen, S. 1987. “Land as Property: Its Significance in the Traditional Society and Polity in
Khasi and Jaintia Hills.” In Land Relations in North East India, edited by B. B. Dutta and
M. N. Karna, New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, pp. 92–7.
Sharma, B. D. 1984. “Shifting Cultivators and Their Development.” Journal for Social
Science & Humanities, 2(2): 1–36.
Taylor, J. F. A. 1966. The Masks of Society. New York: Meredith.
Vagholikar, N. and Das, P. J. 2010. “Damning the Northeast: Juggernaut of Hydropower
Projects Threaten Social and Environmental Security of Region.” Available at: <http://
www.kalpavriksh.org/images/EnvironmentandDevelopment/NorthEastDams/
Damming%20Northeast%20India_Single%20page%20format.pdf> (accessed
November 5, 2013).
Vincent, K. 1979. Socio-Economic Study of Bhilymbong. Chennai: Christian Literature
Center.

324
Postscript

Land, Livelihoods, and Late Capitalist

Development

Anthony P. D’Costa

The place of land in society has taken on various shades of significance. Land in
noncapitalist or precapitalist societies was a source of livelihood that produced a
subsistent lifestyle all over the world. Agricultural productivity was low while
wars, tributes, and natural calamities ensured subsistence living. That changed
fundamentally as a new form of economic organization emerged, namely profit-
seeking, market-driven production in trading towns and cities and the rise of
agrarian capitalists in the countryside. Capitalism as an economic system
became embedded in a wide variety of social formations but the pursuit of capital
accumulation became the name of the game. Land was no longer simply a source
of livelihood but an asset that would yield returns over time. Increasing agricul-
tural productivity and surplus labor expelled from the countryside became the
basis for modern economic growth and structural transformation through
industrial development. Primitive accumulation has been the modus operandi
for reducing surplus labor, by separating the peasants from their land, and a
source of agrarian dynamism, leading to the rise of a wage-dependent proletariat.
Not every society experienced this kind of primitive accumulation. Western
Europe was fortunate to have the new world in North and South America and
Oceania as almost a systemic repository for surplus labor, sent out as emi-
grants. The colonies such as India, on the other hand, did not have this option
of sending away their surplus labor. Indentured labor in the nineteenth
century could not exhaust the labor supply, while migrant labor to the Gulf
countries in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are only temporary
movements. Peasants remained and held on to their land, eking out a
The Land Question in India

livelihood as taxes and appropriations rearranged land tenure systems and

served the industrial, economic, and state interests of the colonizers. Primitive
accumulation was incomplete and lagging even as the march of capitalist
industrialization ushered in a new postcolonial India. Land was needed for
large-scale industrialization and infrastructure building and the state had the
final say about the use of land for such purposes. But by and large, land
remained valued for providing livelihoods to hundreds of millions of small
farmers and landless workers. The selective rise of industry, rising agricultural
productivity, and the growth of cities and towns in India has contributed to
rural–urban migration, with land increasingly taking on commodity status.
However, the level and pace of Indian urbanization remains lower than that in
Latin America and many East and Southeast Asian countries. India remains an
agrarian society without an agrarian revolution and a transition without the
extensive and intensive industrialization China has accomplished, even as
India positions itself as one of the fastest-growing and largest economies in
the world.
The place of land in India in this new economic organization has also
changed. But the terms of the debate are no longer between pre-/noncapital-
ism and capitalism or capitalism and socialism but rather within the orbit of
global, predominantly neoliberal capitalism. This does not mean that vestiges
of noncapitalist relations of production do not exist or that substantial parts of
Indian petty commodity production are not outside the wage–profit nexus. It
also suggests the possibility of antisystemic movements that could reshape
neoliberal capitalism into something more benign. However, under lagging
primitive accumulation, land is no longer playing out its historic role as the
originator of capital and a source of accumulation although the dispossession
and displacement of peasants continue unabated.
Rather than a headlong rush to capitalize on land as a source of high
productivity-led agricultural income (which is occurring in small pockets
under contemporary contract farming and cash crops), land has become a
burden to many. Farmer indebtedness due to increasing reliance on industrial
inputs, fragmentation of land to uneconomic sizes, drought and other
unfavorable weather conditions, water salinity, and so on have all contributed
to reduce the viability of land as a source of income in many parts of India. Yet
people hold on to land since the alternatives to agriculture are few. While
there has been diversification of the rural economy through nonagricultural
activities and the demand for construction labor in urban areas has acted as a
vent for some of the surplus labor, Indian agriculture remains underdevel-
oped. The unviability of land in a context of commodification of land and
class differentiation has also meant the emergence of noncultivating house-
holds who secure land for rental income. This of course has some interesting
implications for agrarian dynamism in India should such ownership be or

326
 Postscript

become widespread. But that development itself would be consistent with the
increasing commodification of land, which, without the inherent agrarian
dynamism that is so necessary for India, is unlikely to be able to siphon off the
rural surplus labor to the cities, which at the current juncture do not have the
capacity to absorb them gainfully.
The value of land has a new twist in the context of the rise of a consuming
middle class and rapid growth of Indian cities, fueled by domestic capitalist
maturity, local and transnational finance capital, and a state that is more
capital friendly. Far from the moral economy of the tribal communities for
whom land is both sacred and a source of livelihood, minerals and forests are
seen as resources to be profited from. Domestic and foreign mining and
metallurgical industries see natural resources to be exploited for firm expan-
sion, while the Indian state sees growth as necessary for its own legitimacy, by
anticipating job creation and economic development. For small farmers, land
is the source of subsistence while dispossession and displacement are not
desired. But as land exchange becomes routine more for its nonagricultural
use, its economic value also rises. Not all farmers cling to their land or want to
be tied to the countryside. They are willing to sell so long as the price is right
and an alternative livelihood is available. In this vortex of land exchange,
agrarian crisis, and urban-based growth, many farmers willingly sell, while
others are coerced to vacate with small compensation. The recent contestation
between landowners, cultivators, and the state has been over prices just as it
has been over just compensation and rehabilitation. Those who leave, volun-
tarily or otherwise, often end up joining the ranks of the rural and urban petty
commodity producer sector that remains a persistent feature of the Indian
economy despite high rates of growth.
The persistence of the petty commodity sector is not surprising. The absence
of a rural dynamic and large-scale labor-absorbing industrialization limits
employment possibilities outside the petty commodity sector. Employment-
wise, the formal sector in India is relatively small. One principal reason for
this is India’s late entry into capitalist industrialization. With rapid techno-
logical change underway, late entry compels both strategic and compulsive
leapfrogging. This was already evident by state-led industrialization in post-
independence India where import substitution industrialization jump-started
an agrarian economy but failed to either transform agriculture or create formal
industrial jobs on a large scale. Capital intensity in heavy industries was
already high relative to India’s labor-abundant agrarian economy. With the
diffusion of digital technologies and globalization, Indian firms have been
pushed to adopt recent vintages of technologies and adopt automation like
their global counterparts. Not surprisingly, the result has been further increases
in capital intensity among Indian industries in a milieu of surplus labor. Polit-
ically this outcome can be read as capital on the offensive. With technology

327
The Land Question in India

and automation, formal labor is put on the defensive through increasing

contract, part-time, and temporary work. While the virtues of leapfrogging
are observable on economic growth and business profits, employment cre-
ation remains daunting. Even the services sector, which makes up for India’s
manufacturing slack, comprises the vast low-value labor-absorbing petty
commodity sector. The dynamic technology, education, and skill-intensive
services sector for which India is globally visible does not generate large-scale
employment.
The Indian state is not a passive actor in this unfolding of late capitalism—
far from it. It is both a taker and giver of land and livelihoods. For all practical
purposes the Indian state is a democratic state and is answerable to its
citizens—rich or poor. It compensates the dispossessed and displaced while
it gives land or facilitates land taking for development. Like all states its
autonomy is relative even as it enjoys the power of eminent domain when it
comes to the use of land for public purpose. However, the ability to legally
wrest control over land from the public is not without contestation. Through
legal acts the state has made it possible to give the dispossessed and displaced
some compensation but its quest for development in a capitalist system
remains intact, albeit checked by the limits of its own capacity. In fact, the
legal provisions facilitate land taking by setting up the precedent for a more
bureaucratic approach to transferring land. Hence, capitalist development and
dispossession are expected to continue but not in the same historic way as in
early capitalism. The Indian state must now politically manage the fallout of
dispossession and displacement even as it facilitates land taking for national
capital accumulation.
Late capitalism in India as it has unfolded is not the capitalism experienced
earlier by today’s rich economies. It is a curious mix of lagging primitive
accumulation, leapfrogging industries, and a vast persistent petty commodity
sector. Elsewhere I have labeled such uneven and combined development as
the workings of compressed capitalism (D’Costa 2014, 2016) that accounts
for the ongoing but tentative process of dispossession with few livelihood
alternatives. It also implies the necessity of political management of the dispos-
sessed in a democratic India even as the resources devoted to it have declined.
The structural dilemma, however, remains. Late capitalist development in a
deregulated global economic environment today has made transforming sur-
plus labor into relative scarcity a virtual impossibility. Technological change
and rising productivity, while contributing to growth, also contribute to labor
substitution through automation. Late developers are not immune from this
development as businesses are compelled to adopt similar competitive strat-
egies. In the end, the classical transition anticipated from successful primitive
accumulation to capitalist industrial expansion appears to have come to a
dead end. The sobering fact that India adds roughly a million new workers

328
 Postscript

every month poses an employment and livelihood challenge that no state can
meet, nor can a dynamic private sector (domestic or foreign) invest enough to
employ such an expansion in the workforce. How India will absorb and
accommodate them is anyone’s guess, given the persistence of the petty
commodity sector and limited formal employment. State intervention and
high economic growth thus far have not made a dent in what Sanyal (2007: 249)
calls a “dark space.”
Whether the state will politically manage this “dark space,” or not manage
it, are two daunting possibilities that are hard to imagine. Will the state
become repressive, tearing asunder the very democratic fabric that it has
sewn together since the Republic’s founding? Or will the frustration bubbling
beneath the veneer of aspirations result in revolutionary fervor, or something
else? As the more prosperous state of Gujarat shows, the economic and social
divide between the landless and landowners has become not just pronounced
but predatory, a perfect cocktail for fascism (Breman 2010: 335). Should
the many cities in India and elsewhere that indicate the spread of the
lumpenproletariat—often linked to the ranks of the dispossessed (Saunders
2011)—be seen as an anomaly or a permanent feature of the world economy?
As jobs disappear and self-employment and self-exploitation become the only
avenues for desperate livelihoods, politics could take on a whole new mean-
ing, whose boundaries and practices at the moment remain undefined and
untested but unquestionably tense. In the end, under late capitalism, land and
livelihoods are contested, conflicts bloody, and dispossession inevitable, but a
classic agrarian transition and capitalist development of an earlier era is
beyond the realm of our immediate imagination.

References

Breman, J. 2010. “The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in India.” In Routledge

Handbook of South Asian Politics: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, edited
by P. R. Brass, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 321–36.
D’Costa, A. P. 2014. “Compressed Capitalism and Development: Primitive Accumulation,
Petty Commodity Production, and Capitalist Maturity in India and China.” Critical
Asian Studies, 6(2): 317–44.
D’Costa, A. P. 2016. “Jobless Growth Even in Labor-Abundant India: Capitalist Transi-
tion and the Challenges of Employment.” Paper Presented for the Panel on “Global
Capitalism, National Experiences, and Changing Labor Markets in Asia” at the Associ-
ation of Asian Studies Annual Conference, Washington State Convention Center,
Seattle, March 31–April 3, 2016.
Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmen-
tality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge India.
Saunders, D. 2011. Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World. Toronto: Vintage
Canada.
329
Index

Accumulation by dispossession 2, 13–14, Birla, B. K. 289

26, 35, 36, 50, 54–69, 77, 82, 84, 91–4, Brahmaputra 303, 317
162, 278 Business process outsourcing 60
Adani 28 Byres, Terence 22, 113, 116, 243, 245
Adivasis (tribal communities) 18, 26, 28, 32,
38, 69, 82–4, 176–92, 265 Capital accumulation 6, 17–20, 34, 53, 76–95,
Africa 2, 4, 14, 27, 56, 115, 188 108–20, 186, 217, 325–6
Agrarian crisis 34, 101–20, 217, 221–4, 327 Capitalist transition 16, 18, 22, 38, 284,
Agrarian question 24, 40, 53, 101–20, 244–5, 285, 297
255, 258–9 Caribbean 4
Agrarian transition 16, 17, 18, 19, 29, 38, 52, Casual wage workers 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93
53, 199, 243, 245–6, 329 Central Electricity Authority (CEA) 317
Agricultural credit 229–30 Century Textiles and Industries (CTIL) 288–94,
Americas 3–4, 103, 325 296, 297
Andhra Pradesh 39, 67, 106–12, 121–2, 162, Chhattisgarh 61, 84, 182, 192, 265
190, 199–214, 217, 222–36, 269–74 China 5, 42, 56, 58, 72, 260, 289, 303, 305,
Anti-dispossession movements 49, 60, 69, 70, 326, 329
71, 133 Chotanagpur 268
Arunachal Pradesh 42, 303, 305, 317–18 Coal Bearing Areas Acquisition and
Asia 2, 4, 5, 14, 115, 326 Development Act of 1957 142
Assam 162, 303, 318, 320 Coastal Andhra 39, 204–5, 208, 222–8
Association for the Protection of Democratic Coercion 14, 28, 30, 50, 53, 55–6, 58, 66, 134
Rights (APDR) 133, 135 Commodification of land 18, 28, 30, 38, 50,
Association of Chambers of Commerce and 62, 78, 178–83, 187, 266, 271, 326–7
Industry (ASSOCHAM) 144 Commodity economy 5, 180
Australia 3, 4, 103, 289 Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI-ML)
84, 249
Bangalore 33 Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M)
Bangla Congress 249 249, 250, 257, 260, 284–98
Bansal Cement 288 Community land/resources 41–2, 84, 176–92,
Bapat, Senapati 270, 273 303–20
Bardhhaman district, West Bengal 106–12, Community rights 31, 136, 189–90
121–2 Compressed capitalism 95, 147, 328
Bargadars 250, 257, 260, 287 Compromise equilibrium 37, 131, 133, 137–8,
Bentham, Jeremy 159 140, 145
Bernstein, Henry 113, 115–17, 217, 243, 245, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)
254, 258, 259–60 139, 144
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 33, 50, 68, 131, Confederation of Real Estate Developers
143, 144, 145, 166, 234, 286 Associations 139
Bhatta-Parsaul 66, 162 Congress Party 33, 68, 248–9, 294–5
Bhilai 32, 268 Consent 68, 132, 165, 178
Bihar 145, 167, 168, 260, 277 Conservationist argument 182
Bihar Land Reforms Act of 1950 277 Coparcener inheritance practices 26, 42
Birla Group 288, 294 Corruption 2, 62
Index

Cost-benefit analysis 52, 142, 155, 159–70, Goa 268

182, 185, 189 Governmentality 9–11, 64, 94, 221, 237
Customary use rights 19, 38, 82, 181, 303–20 Gram panchayat 293
Gram Sabha 184–6, 189, 190
Dalits 221, 225–9, 233, 255 Gramsci, Antonio 37, 131–2, 145, 220
Dams 30, 32, 49, 54, 59, 64, 265, 267–75, 305, Greater Noida Industrial Development
314, 317–18 Authority 63, 168
Demoralization costs 37, 152, 159–60, 164, Green revolution 29, 104, 199, 221–3, 225
169, 170 Gujarat 28, 62, 67, 143, 145, 162, 168, 172,
Dispossession 6–7, 14, 17–21, 26–8, 30–3, 36, 182, 260, 279, 329
38, 40–2, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 62–6, 77–88,
326–9 Harvey, David 2, 13–14, 26, 35, 50, 54–5, 77,
Dispossession without proletarianization 92, 278
78, 79 Haryana 29, 67, 68, 104, 173, 210, 237, 259
Distress employment 36, 94 Haryana Industrial and Infrastructure
Domestic versus foreign capital 41, 266, 268 Development Corporation 68
Dudh-Sagar dam project 268, 270, 275, 276 Hiring-in/hiring-out of labor 106–8, 122
Dumbur dam 314–15 Hobbes, Thomas 154
Durbars 312–14 Hooghly district, West Bengal 146, 291
Hyderabad 162, 204, 275
East Asia 17, 61, 260, 322, 326 Hydropower 42, 265, 267–75, 305, 317–19
Economic surplus 20, 24, 28
Ekta Parishad 119 Idu Mishmi tribe 318
Eminent domain 28, 32, 57, 69, 130, 137–8, Import substitution industrialization 327
141, 151–6, 162–3, 165–6, 168–70, 285 Inam titles/lands 271, 272
Enclosure movement in England 51–3, 58, 77 Indebtedness 26, 104, 110–12, 305, 326
Engels, Friedrich 113, 245 India, Inc. 71
Ethno-nationalist movements 320 Indian Council of Agricultural Research
Europe 1–5, 7, 14, 26, 53, 101, 103, 113, (ICAR) 308
115, 325 Indian Forest Act of 1878 179, 181
Exchange value 69, 180, 189, 284 Indian Forest Conservation Act of 1980 182–3
Exploitation 76–7, 133, 219 Indian National Congress 6
Export of unemployment to the colonies 103, Industrial revolution 3, 5–6
115–16 Informal sector/labor 6–9, 12, 21, 27, 36, 76,
Extra-economic coercion 19, 52 89, 93, 115, 120, 216–17, 253
Information Technology (IT)/ Information
Fair/just compensation 33, 130–1, 139–40, technology enabled services (ITES) 33, 60,
143–5, 151–70, 285 64–5
Family labor 6, 7, 85–7, 107, 218 Inheritance of property rights 26,
Farmer suicides 34, 39, 223, 231 222, 287
Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce Institute for Motivating Self-
and Industry (FICCI) 139 Employment 133–4
Fictitious commodity 179–80 Integrated Child Development Services 235
Fifth Schedule Areas 177, 182, 183–4 Interstate competition for capital 62, 81,
Food Corporation of India 235 134, 267
Food First Information and Action Network
(FIAN) 134, 135 Jagatsinghpur 66, 69, 70, 134
Foreign direct investment 70, 81, 113, Jamshedpur 40, 267–8, 274–5,
115–16, 141 277, 279
Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA) 177–8, 183–91 Jamshedpur Utilities and Services Company
Forest-dependent communities 176–92 ( JUSCO) 277
Formal sector 7, 21, 36, 76, 93, 327–9 Japan 4, 5, 113
Free wage labor 3, 16, 19, 52 Jharia (Bengal) 275
Jharkhand 61, 106, 162, 182, 192, 277
Gandhi, Rahul 68, 170 Jindal 265
Gandhi, Sonia 139 Jobless growth 78
Gender 18–19, 255 Joint Liability Group loans 230

332
 Index

Kalinganagar 66, 120, 134, 265–6 Manipur 42, 303–5, 312, 315–17
Kamma community 225, 227, 229 Marx, Karl 2–3, 5, 29, 35, 50–3, 69, 77, 178,
Karnataka 167, 237 218, 245
Kautsky, Karl 113, 218, 245 Mass emigration 4, 7, 115, 218, 220
Kelo v City of New London 158 Maude Committee 277
Kerala 22, 29, 40, 81, 210, 247–60 Mayurbhanj (princely state) 275
Kerala Agrarian Relations Act (KARA) 248 Meghalaya 42, 303, 304, 305, 312–14, 318
Kerala Agrarian Relations Bill (KARB) 248 Mellor, John 243, 246, 260
Kerala Land Reforms Act of 1963 248 Michelman, Frank 37–8, 152–3, 157–60, 164,
Kerala Land Reforms Amended Act 169, 170
(KLRAA) 248–9, 254 Midnapore Zamindari Company 277
Kharagpur 162, 288, 290–1, 293–4, 296 Migrant workers 4, 36, 94, 106, 325
Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council 313 Migration 6, 16, 20, 106, 115, 205–6, 212–13,
Khasi society 304, 305, 312–13, 321–2 218, 220, 226, 234, 251, 256, 274, 311,
Kisan Sangathan 144 314, 326
Kuki tribes 315–17 Mining/minerals 5–6, 14, 26, 30, 53–4, 59, 61,
64, 84, 118, 138, 141–2, 162, 176, 180–2,
Labor-exploitation criterion 106 189, 192–3, 275–6, 327
Laclau, Ernesto 2, 10, 11 Mitra, Ashok 237, 247, 260
Land Acquisition Act of 1894 31, 33, 59, 81, Mizoram 303, 318
130, 135–7, 151–3, 161, 163–6, 168, 182, Modi, Narendra 28, 37, 68, 143, 144, 145, 260
267–72, 276–7, 279, 285, 291–3, 295 Moral economy 18, 327
Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill 137–8 Mulshi 268–74, 278
Land Acquisition (Mines) Act of 1885 142
Land alienation (expropriation) 17, 21, 26–7, Nagaland 303, 318
36, 53–4, 76–94, 120, 182, 266, 268, 271–2, Nagas 315, 316
284, 286, 295, 307, 314–15 Nandigram 66, 67, 69, 85, 162, 170, 253
Land grabs 27, 42, 51, 53–4, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, Nano 133, 279
76–93, 188, 283–98 Narmada Bachao Andolan 32, 49, 60, 66
Land reforms 17, 29, 40, 103, 106, 117–18, National Alliance of People’s Movements
199, 214, 242–61, 277, 279, 286–90, 295, (NAPM) 66–7, 84, 134
297, 312–13, 316 National Democratic Alliance 33,
Land Reforms Commission 144, 234
(Meghalaya) 312–13 National Forest Policy of 1952 181–2
Land wars 36, 49, 66, 67, 69, 129, 134 National Insurance and Family Benefit
Landlord class 31, 39, 77, 93, 103, 105, 107–22, Scheme 235
199–201, 208, 210, 214, 225, 226, 229, National Rehabilitation and Resettlement
234, 238, 245, 246, 249–50, 254, 268, Policy (NRRP) 161
278, 313 National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO)
Late industrializers 4, 17, 29, 218 119–204, 254
Latin America 2, 27, 56, 326 Need economy 20, 21
Left Front Government (LFG) 67, 162, 242–59, Nehruvian state 51, 55, 59, 64, 66, 69, 71, 146,
283–98 268, 278–9
Lenin, Vladimir 113, 245 Neoliberal globalization 36, 38, 71,
Lewis, Arthur 20, 246 77–8, 118
Lex loci rei sitae 307, 317 Neoliberal India 36–7, 51, 54, 56, 63, 67, 80–1,
License-permit raj 80 83, 85
Locke, John 154, 179, 180, 322 New National Mineral Policy of 1993 61
Luxemburg, Rosa 5 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 67,
70, 133, 137, 139, 190, 221, 234
Madhya Pradesh 182, 192 Noncultivating households (NCHs) 39,
Maharashtra 162, 182, 192, 237, 280 199–214, 222, 229, 233, 326
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Non-farm/off-farm/non-agricultural
Guarantee Act (MNREGA/NREGA) 33, 85, income 23, 24, 27, 31, 39–40, 89, 91, 96,
94, 189–90, 234–5, 238–9 111–12, 114, 117, 120, 210, 231–4, 236
Mahindra World City SEZ 63, 65, 82, 90, Northeast India (NEI) 41–2, 182, 302–20
91, 173 Northeast Region (NER) 317–19, 322

333
Index

Odisha/Orissa 61, 120, 134, 181–2, 191, 193, Rajasthan 22, 63, 65, 67, 82, 90, 162, 173
265, 277 Real estate development 28, 30, 49, 54, 60–2,
Operation Barga 249–50, 255, 260 64–5, 67, 119–20
Over-accumulated capital 54, 55 Reddy community 225
Over-exploitation 218, 219 Regimes of dispossession 35–7, 40, 49–71, 95,
131, 133, 278
Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act Regular salaried/wage workers 85, 86, 87, 88,
1996 (PESA) 38, 177–8, 184–91 89, 91, 93
Panchayats 184, 287, 292, 297, 305 Rehabilitation and resettlement 10, 13, 33–4,
Parastatals 62, 66 58, 68, 82, 130–1, 134, 136, 138–45, 151–3,
Parliamentary Standing Committee 285–6 160–2, 164, 170, 185, 189, 265, 270, 285,
Peasant resistance/protest 6, 41, 77, 84, 93, 295, 297–9, 314–15, 327
186, 242, 284, 285, 291–5, 297 Remittance income/remittances 24, 251,
Petty commodity production/producers 21, 252, 256
39, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 216–36, 326, 327, Res nullius 306–7, 317
328, 329 Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency
Physiocrats 244–5 in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and
Planning Commission 23, 30, 182, 229, 238 Resettlement Act of 2013 33, 37, 50, 68,
Plantation labor (slave labor) 4 69, 130–1, 139–45, 151–3, 160–5,
Polanyi, Karl 28–9, 179, 187 169, 285, 286
Political society 8–9, 12, 13, 21, 34, 220–1, 235 Rourkela 32, 268
Politics of resistance 83, 134 Rural household income 40, 108–14, 121–2,
Popular resistance 129, 137, 161 231–5
Populism 1–2, 10–11, 14, 220, 259
POSCO 265 Sangh Parivar 68
Positive laws 41, 303, 306, 307, 311, 315, 316 Sanyal, Kalyan 2, 7, 21, 26, 64, 88–90,
Poverty line income 23, 111–12, 122–3, 222, 96, 220, 329
238–9 Satyagraha movement 270, 271, 273
Precapitalist economy 3–4, 7, 19–20, 218 Scheduled Caste 65, 228–9, 237, 309
Primitive “socialist” accumulation 4, Scheduled tribes 38, 65, 176, 184, 192, 228–9,
19–20, 256 237, 309
Primitive accumulation 1–8, 12–13, 17, 19–22, Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest
26, 35–6, 49–55, 76–95, 118, 178, 180, 220, Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act,
266, 325–6, 328 2006 (FRA) 38
Princely states 267, 271, 275–6 Self-employment 8, 21–2, 36, 76, 78, 85,
Privatization 54, 60–1, 92, 314 87–96, 111, 134, 217, 232–4, 253, 329
Productive capital 36, 77, 79, 91, 93, 108 Self-exploitation 7, 39, 107, 218–19, 329
Project affected people 138, 140, 145, Self-help group (SHG) 229, 238–9
151–2, 171 Semifeudalism 22
Proletarianization 59, 78–9, 217, 222, 226, Sen, Nirupam 62, 136
232, 253, 255, 268, 274 Sengkrak 314
Proletariat 16, 20–2, 51–2, 58, 69, 217, 221, Seraikela 276, 279
278, 296–7, 325 Services sector 17, 24, 101, 251, 252, 328
Property rights 32, 38, 41–2, 54, 83, 152, 154, Settlement costs 159, 164, 169, 170
156–8, 169, 177–81, 187–9, 191, 193, 219, Shifting cultivation ( jhum) 41, 304–11, 314,
277, 287, 303, 317 318, 320, 321
Property rights of adivasis 176–92 Sikkim 303, 317, 318
Public Distribution System (PDS) 235 Singur 28, 32, 37, 62, 66–7, 69, 120, 131–7,
Public investment in agriculture 257 142, 146, 157, 160, 162, 169–71, 253,
Public purpose 28, 30–3, 41, 56–7, 67, 81, 265–6, 291, 297
135–43, 152, 155–8, 162, 166–70, 266, 269, Singur Krishi Jomi Raksha Committee 133
272, 277, 279, 285 Sixth Schedule of Indian Constitution 182,
Public-private partnerships 60, 63, 68, 304, 305, 311, 313, 315, 316, 320
140–2, 165 Slums 13, 54, 221
Pune 162, 267 Smith, Adam 3, 51, 71
Punjab 29, 38, 104, 166, 172–3, 210, 237, Social impact assessments 68, 142, 143, 164,
245, 259 165, 284, 318

334
 Index

Social movements 129, 140, 145, 146, 183 Telengana (Telangana) 105–12, 121–3, 204–5,
Social Organizations of Meghalaya Against 223–7, 237
Land Alienation (SOMALA) 313 Tenancy 6, 39, 210, 222, 249–50, 254–5
Social welfare transfers 8, 39–40, 81, 83, 85–6, Terra nullius 307, 317
94, 217–22, 225, 234–6, 238 Transition to capitalism 16, 36, 53, 76–95,
Solatium 142, 146, 163–4, 169 101, 103
South Korea 123, 245–6 Trinamool Congress (TMC) 67, 133
Soviet Union 4–5, 19, 42, 256 Tripura 42, 260, 303–5, 312, 314–15, 318, 321
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) 17, 27, 28, 30,
53–4, 56, 60, 63–7, 69, 81–2, 84–5, 90–1, United Front government 249
93, 95, 129, 147, 278 United Progressive Alliance 33, 137,
State of emergency (1975–7) 8, 9 234–5, 298
State violence 55, 58, 70, 82, 186 Unproductive capital 76, 90, 91, 93
State-led development 35, 49–50, 59, 71, 183, Urban development 14, 30, 61–3, 66, 140–1
289, 327 Use values 180–1, 183, 187, 189, 193, 284
Steel plants/towns 6, 30, 54, 59, 64, 265, 267, Utilitarian property theory 159
275–7 Utilitarian fairness standard 37, 152, 157–9,
Sub-Saharan Africa 19 169–70
Subsistence agriculture 6–7, 20, 24, 26, 218, Uttar Pradesh 38, 67, 104, 162, 168
306, 325, 327
Surplus labor 20, 21, 27, 41, 213, 220, 268, Vedanta 181, 265
325–8 Violence in dispossession 13–14, 19, 30, 51,
Swasti Samity 314 55, 58, 70–1, 78, 82, 84–5, 130, 134, 162,
178–80, 186–8, 191, 253, 265, 294
Taiwan 123, 245, 247
Takings law (in the USA) 37, 152–3, 156–8, Wage labor/employment 3–4, 19–22, 36, 51–2,
160, 162, 169–71 70, 76–96, 107, 111, 216, 225–6, 232–3,
Tamil Nadu 67, 82, 204, 210 236, 255, 266, 313, 325
Tata Group 265 Warangal 204
Tata hydroelectric/power companies 40, Weber, Max 154, 306
267–71, 273, 274 Wellman Company 288
Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) 40, 265, West Bengal 28, 29, 37, 40–1, 62, 81, 85, 104,
267, 269, 275–9 106–12, 121–3, 133, 157, 162, 170–3,
Tata Metaliks 162, 288–9, 291, 293 242–60, 279, 283–99
Tata Motors 62, 131, 133–4, 136, 146, 162, Western Ghats 40, 267–8, 272–3, 278–9
171, 265 Workforce composition 78–95
Tata, Dorabji 275 Working class 2, 77, 113, 120, 268, 274
Tata, J. N. 268, 275 World Bank 30, 32, 188–90

335