Suchergebnisse

This book explores the history of forced land acquisition and transformation of power in the Fifth Schedule areas in India. It examines the contradictory imperatives of extractive capitalism and primitive accumulation, on the one hand, and autonomy and devolution of power to local communities, on the other. The book traces the long history of conflict, displacement, and violence in these areas in central India which are home to the Adivasis or indigenous people and are rich in natural resources. Drawing from an analysis of public policy debates, land acquisition acts, and political and developmental interventions, the book critically looks at the relationship between capitalism, dispossession, and democracy. The author investigates how the state constructed a weak democracy amenable for primitive accumulation, the role of NGOs in this process, the struggle for sovereignty and autonomy by local communities, and the attempts made by human rights activists to find judicial redressal to state violence. Through this engagement, the book offers a new theory of power. This book will interest researchers and students of political science, political anthropology, governance and public policy, development studies, sociology, law and government, minority and indigenous studies, and Odisha and South Asian studies.

This essay engages with the commodification of land in an urban periphery of India. It argues against the tendency to reduce commodification of land to "primitive accumulation" or "accumulation by dispossession." It presents an ethnography of the process of the commodification of land under speculative conditions. The growing demand for land for urbanization and industrialization, along with the availability of speculative finance capital in the real estate market, has made land a scarce commodity. In this land market, local capitals piggyback on finance capital and bid up the prices exponentially in the micromarkets. Speculation makes it impossible for the state to match the market price, and its compensation for the land losers is always quite low, which the latter refuse to accept. The landowning farmers, on the other hand, have developed a capacity to adjust to the speculative conditions and to control the supply of land in the market. Even though they can receive a very good price for their land, they show no urgency to sell it. As a consequence, the state's plan to urbanize a given area, to create a stable arrangement of clear property titles, and to control land prices become uncertain.

Agriculture has been the target of modernization for a long time. The earlier interventions of deploying 'green revolution' technologies were a statist project and aimed at increasing productivity. The focus of public policy has shifted from increasing productivity to finding and servicing consumer markets. It is in this context that contract farming and linkages with formal retail sector have been proposed.  The erstwhile Left Front government in West Bengal, India, had drafted the management consultancy firm McKinsey & Company to strategize a rejuvenation plan for the state's agriculture. McKinsey suggested that the government should encourage farmers to enter into contract farming, which would allow them to access market, especially international and domestic metropolitan markets. The documents produced by McKinsey were confidential, but have recently been leaked. In this article, I analyze these confidential documents and the proposal to transform agriculture into agribusiness. I try to locate such a proposal at the global level to understand the dynamics of (global) agribusiness and why global agri-capital advocates contract farming. Thereafter, I try to critically evaluate the prospect of contract farming in Bengal and India.