Battle for Bhoomi: The Indian Experience of Land Management, Land Acquisition and Land Grab.

Abstract

The rush for land for hard economic infrastructure projects has shot to global attention lately capturing media space and invading the language of informed discourse. Suddenly the votaries of a liberal economic policy are not so sure anymore, and traditionalists skeptical of the inevitability of the new economy feel vindicated. I propose in this paper to study the management of public lands and the related problems of land grabbing and land acquisition for large infrastructure, housing & development projects.The land rush takes various forms: acquisition, encroachment, purchase, conversion and grab. It erodes varied spaces: green belt lung space, grazing land for cattle, cultivable land for agriculture, forests and lakes. It uses various means: notification, denotification, persuasion, use of state pressure and coercion. I argue that while land is undoubtedly an economic resource, the framing of this problem as an economic one is limiting, and it needs to be seen as a larger political economy and sociological issue. I see the conflicts over land as framed within a larger conflict between social groups; with the polity and bureaucracy and thereby the state itself playing multiple roles: adjudicator, mediator, colluder, developer and beneficiary. I use grounded theory methodology and an embedded case study design, grounding my study in India with the state of Karnataka as my local context, drawing global parallels as appropriate.