"The book is an important contribution to the literature on the thorny questions surrounding land in contemporary India. It would be highly useful for policy makers, researchers and practitioners interested in the discourse on development." (Sujit Kumar Mishra, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Vol. 65, 2022)
1
Introduction: The Political Economy Land and Livelihoods in Contemporary India
Deepak K Mishra & Pradeep Nayak
2
Land Titling or Land Reforms: India’s Policy Dilemma
Pradeep Nayak
3
Ownership v/s Control: The Changing dynamics of land use in Liberalised Agricultural Context of India
Sukhpal Singh
4
Contextualizing Land Question in a Green Revolution Area: Agrarian Transformation and Politics in Western Uttar Pradesh
Jagpal Singh
5
Landowners as Non-farm Workers – A Case of Small Farmer Migrants in Karnataka
Sheetal Patil & Seema Purushothaman
6
Globalising Agrarian Markets and Changing Production Relations: Village-level Evidence from India
Anish Gupta
7
Land, Caste and Class in Rural West Bengal
Dayabati Roy
8
Agricultural Land Markets in India: A Case of Maharashtra
Chirala Shankar Rao
9
Dispossession, Neoliberal Urbanism and Societal Transformation: Insight into Rajarhat New Township in West Bengal
Animesh Roy
10
Land, Labour and Industrialisation in Rural and Urban Areas: A Case Study of Reliance SEZ in Gujarat
Amita Shah, Aditi Patil & Dipak Nandani
11
Neoliberal Governing as Production of Fantasy: Contemporary transformations in Ahmedabad’s landscape
Navdeep Mathur & Harsh Mittal
12
The Expressway to Agra-Two Roads, Same Destination: Land Acquisition under Old and New Land Acquisition Regimes
Prashant K Trivedi
13
LARR 2013: What Does It Deliver?
Dhanmanjiri Sathe
14
Land Issues and Liberalisation in Northeast India
Walter Fernandes
15
The Gendered Transformation of Land Rights and Feminisation of Hill Agriculture in Arunachal Pradesh: Insights from Field Survey
Vandana Upadhyay
Deepak K. Mishra is Professor of Economics at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His research interests are in the areas of the political economy of agrarian change, rural livelihoods and agrarian institutions, and migration. He has co-authored The Unfolding Crisis in Assam's Tea Plantations: Employment and Occupational Mobility (2012), has edited Internal Migration in Contemporary India (2016) and has co-edited Rethinking Economic Development in Northeast India: The Emerging Dynamics (2017).
Pradeep Nayak has completed his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and was until recently Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India. He is a member of the Odisha Administrative Service and works as the Chief General Manager, Odisha State Disaster Management Authority, Bhubaneswar. He has contributed extensively to the study of land administration in India. His publication includes The State and Land Records Modernisation (2015).
The book discusses important developments emerging around the land questions in India in the context of India’s neoliberal economic development and its changing political economy. It covers many issues that have been impinging the political economy in land and livelihoods in India since the 1990s, examining the land question from diverse methodological standpoints. Most of the chapters rely on evidence generated through primary surveys in different parts of the country. The book, via its diversity of approaches and methodologies, brings out new and hitherto unexplored and/or less researched issues on the emerging land question in India. The range of issues addressed in the volume encompasses the contemporary developments in the political economy of land, land dispossession, SEZs, agrarian changes, urbanisation and the drive for the commodification of land across India. The authors also examine role of the state in promoting the capitalist transformation in India and continuities and changes emerging in the context of land liberalisation and market-friendly economic reforms.