Rural Real Estate

Abstract

This chapter examines the market-based routes through which agrarian land in India is transformed into real estate—especially on the peripheries of expanding metropolitan cities and regional towns. As agrarian land becomes a key site of speculative accumulation for regional, national, and transnational finance capital, as well as for urban middle class and affluent households, the increasing flow of money into rural land markets produces a pattern of ‘empty urbanization’, in which alienated and converted land often remains unused and unoccupied. This phenomenon reflects the increasing financialization of land in the post-liberalization period.