Michael Levien, Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (Oxford University Press,2018), 300 pp.

Abstract

Forced acquisition of land for developmental projects is always a contentious issue in India, be it in the post-colonial or post-economic reform period. The book ‘Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India’ published in 2018 by Oxford University Press and written by Michael Levien, explores the consequences of land dispossession in neoliberal India in general, through the lens of experiences of Rajpura, a small village 25 km away from Jaipur in Rajasthan, whose land mostly farmland and grazing commons were appropriated for the Mahindra World City, a Special Economic Zone project deemed to be one of the largest private investments in Rajasthan. Levien starts off by differentiating between two regimes of dispossession by discussing the developmental and the neoliberal eras in the Indian context, the former referring to the Nehruvian dispossession regime during the post-independence period when dams and heavy industry kind of projects were undertaken and the latter referring to the post-1991 period since the initiation of economic reforms. While bringing out this distinction, the book describes the state in the neoliberal regime as a ‘land broker’ for private capitalists as it caters to their land demands driven by factors like obstacles on the supply-side created by the fragmentation of rural land, lure of bureaucracy for both licit and illicit rents, and pressure of competition among states. This shift in the role is explored and explained in the second chapter. Here, the neoliberal regime of dispossession is said to be characterised by the commodification of land, switching from land for production in the developmental era to land for market. As a result of this, the rate of accumulation by dispossession which the author refers to as the difference between the price that is paid to farmers and the actual market value became the driving factor and a vindication for dispossessing farmers in the new era. The author points out how India’s Special Economic Zone policy enacted in the 2000s became central in this transition to the new dispossession regime.