Land acquisition and resource development in contemporary India By Shashi Ratnekar Singh. Cambridge University Press. 2020. Pp. 188. £75.00 (hb). ISBN: 9781108486927

Land acquisitions and dispossession have increasingly garnered more attention and provoked debates in India as well as globally, especially in the last two decades (D'Costa & Chakraborty, 2017; Edelman et al., 2013; Levien, 2018). The land database website “Land conflict watch” estimates that there are 781 ongoing land conflicts in India impacting 7.5 million people. While the post-colonial Indian state has consistently used the colonial doctrine of “eminent domain” to acquire private land in India for “public purposes,” the changing nature of the state has been reflected in the intensification of the “land wars” whereby the states now “broker” and acquire land to service the interests of private capital (Levien, 2013; Sud, 2014). Singh's book “Land Acquisition and Resource Development in India” sits at the intersection of state theory, human geography, and political economy of land dispossession in India. It sheds light on the changing nature of the Indian state, uneven development trajectories across social groups and spaces in India as a result of “resource development,” and the impact of public discourse and mobilizations on the processes of dispossession.

The book is divided into three parts, instructively named Theoretical Framework, Case Study, and Analysis, reflecting what to expect from each of those sections. The first two sections make up for most of the book's length, with the concluding section enumerating the journey of and discourse around India's Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, which replaced the colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894, used by the post-colonial Indian state for six decades after Independence in 1947 to dispossess people from their habitats.

The first part of the theoretical framework takes the readers through four main strands of literature: first, on the nature of the Indian state (divided between political–institutional and political–economic perspectives); second, on space, spatiality, and uneven development drawing on the works of scholars like David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Swapna Banerjee-Guha, Neil Smith, and others; third, a brief summary of John Rawls and Amartya Sen's theorizations of justice, under the title “justice as fairness”; and finally, on public sphere and civil society in India, building on scholarship of Jürgen Habermas and Indian scholars like Neera Chandhoke, Sunil Khilnani, and Sudipta Kaviraj. The second part of the literature review focusses on the political economy of land acquisition in India, taking the readers through the legislative framework, framing of compensation and rehabilitation for land acquisition by the state, the changes in laws and policies regarding resource development, mining, and dispossession in the country in the post-colonial era.

The core of the book is an immersive and impressive case study of dispossession in Singrauli, a mineral-rich region in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh that contributes 13% of the total thermal power generation in country. Singh meticulously documents the displacement, compensation, and rehabilitation of the region from 1960 to 2015. The empirical data and document analysis explores “the association between state representatives and the capitalist class in the earlier decades of the planning process” (p. 95), a key contribution of the book that nuances neat divisions between India's “regimes of dispossession” (Levien, 2018). It points out the meagre compensation paid out in the initial phase of displacement in the 1960s where the land compensation came without a patta (land title deed) and low cash compensation, even inadequate to construct a new house; it has also meant any subsequent displacement from the land given under rehabilitation packages renders the occupants ineligible for further compensation (p. 98). The displacement processes continued to work against the interest of the landowners in the second phase in 1980s, where land was acquired up to 30 years before the actual requirement of a project (in this case, a public sector company, National Thermal Power Corporation's [NTPC] thermal power plants in Vindhyachal), thereby depriving the project-affected people of enhanced land prices over the decades (p. 100). The poor record of rehabilitation applied even to the criterion of providing employment to the project-affected people. For instance, thermal power projects provided employment to just 10% of those dispossessed. Those displaced also depend on the projects that acquire their land for employment and often lose a sizeable chunk of their cash compensation on consumption expenditure while they wait for alternative livelihood opportunities instead of being able to invest it in productive schemes (p. 111). The third phase of the acquisition narrates the experiences of displacement after 2008, with a large proportion of mining sites potentially displacing communities belonging to Scheduled Tribes (p. 112), the most socially marginalized social group in India. The long history of displacement in Singrauli where many villages or households have faced multiple displacements within a single generation, Singh argues, has made it into a space of “dependence” that is meant “to serve public or national interest by largely neglecting regional costs and local development” (p. 91). Ironically, despite such displacements in the name of development, 578 out of 1024 villages in the region remain unelectrified. Through data on utilization of government funds, investment in agriculture and public infrastructure, and the involvement of the companies in the development of the district, the book demonstrates how “the local community and the region have not benefitted from the resource development process.” Rather, the state government and local bureaucracy continue to prioritize further facilitation of large private investments in the district. The nexus between the state and private capital is illustrated with strong empirical data as well as anecdotes. For instance, the author narrates how the private corporations set up the district magistrate's office when the district was formed in 2008 by providing furniture, computers, stationery, and even hiring officials under company payrolls who could “aid” the government officials in their tasks of land acquisition (p. 147). It is in such a careful narration of Singrauli's historical experience of the displacement in its entirety that the book remains the strongest.

However, the book's strength in its empirical investigations of displacement and rehabilitation in Singrauli is not matched by its theoretical reflections on the rather vast framework it sets up for itself in the first section. A substantial section of the conclusion is spent on outlining the passage of multiple laws and policies in India in recent decades and shorter discussions on specific aspects of land acquisition, like the social impact assessment expected to be carried out before the acquisition is approved. The conclusion remains more descriptive and contextual and takes away from what could be a more careful analysis of the case study to reflect on theories of state, public sphere, or justice which are discussed rather hastily in a single section (p. 211–213). The readers might struggle to connect the vast literature review attempted in the beginning of the book to the empirical findings. Juxtaposing such disparate groups of literature into a single framework also leads to analytical incongruence in places. I provide two instances of this. One, in the chapter on “Understanding development,” the author infers that “business expansion has served as the basic driver for land acquisition.” This framing de-politicizes (and perhaps, de-historicizes) the nature of the land acquisition process which leads to coercive redrawing of social relations of production in India. It is incompatible with Harvey, Levien, or Bannerjee-Guha's work the author uses in the beginning of the book, whereby capital accumulation, rather than business expansion, is identified as the main driver of displacement in India and elsewhere. Two, in the section on differential impact on livelihood patterns before and after displacement, the author points towards the shift from an agrarian to a non-agrarian economy for the project-affected people where the latter has little employment to offer. He writes that people were predominantly earning their livelihood in an agrarian economy by “utilizing their human labour.” After the displacement, he writes, they are not immediately employable “as the only marketable commodity they possess, in the absence of skills valued by the market, is their labour” (p. 185). In both instances, “labour” is used in generic terms; therefore, the loss to access to means of production, which forms the basis of capital accumulation and is the principal shift before and after displacement for income generation for the displaced is theoretically undermined in discussion of employment. Employment is generated, as the author goes on to point out, but only in insecure, contractual and temporary jobs, which in itself is a reflection of the proliferation of the informal labour economy in India (NCEUS, 2008) and not simply a story of incompatibility of skills and demand for labour.

There is also inadequate consideration of issues of coercion and resistance, both of which have remained critical factors in shaping of the “public sphere” in India. The theoretical framework uses the environmental public hearing in the context of land acquisition in India to explore the development of the public sphere but keeps it limited to the role of “civil society” in the hearings, thereby limiting the scope of the public sphere to civil society for reasons not quite clear. The undermining of the public hearings by the state itself (e.g., using Coal Bearings Areas Act, 1957, to acquire land which requires no such public consultation and arresting or filing legal cases against dissenters) and by the companies (using both monetary incentives and threats of violence) are not discussed, which in turn are telling of the nature of the Indian state, public sphere, and democratic procedures in India. Rather, the author points towards the absence of civil society in such hearings, which he says, “can act as a spokesperson for communities when they are unable to express their opinions, grievances and points” (p. 35). When it participates, the author says, “the modern-day civil society … creates an atmosphere of chaos followed by negotiation” (p. 36). It is not clear if these observations pertain just to the author's own case study or if they are general observations, but by the time he acknowledges the enhanced bargaining power of the post-2008 project affected people due to mobilizations across the country, it is unclear how it relates to his earlier observations in the book about compromised compensation processes and outcomes. Furthermore, the repeated insistence on India as a “vibrant functional democracy” (p. 5, 229), one that encourages stakeholder participation and opinions of dissent, is also difficult to substantiate both due to how consent has been undermined in the legislative framework and processes of land acquisition in India, and the extent of state suppression of dissent which has alarmingly intensified in the present regime.

A final observation: The author's most recent public profile details his affiliation with the NTPC School of Business as well as his past roles where he has been associated with framing responsible compensation and rehabilitation policies for project-affected households and providing trainings for corporations and government actors involved in large-scale land acquisitions. Given the systematic violence processes of acquisition and rehabilitation typically entail, it was important that the author discussed, at least briefly, his positionality as a researcher and how his research has been informed by his own active engagement in these processes.

Despite these limitations, Singh's book is a useful addition to the research on displacement and resource development in India which is both empirically rich and aware of historical continuities and discontinuities in the process of land acquisition in mineral-rich tracts of India. It deserves to be read widely by scholars and students of development policies, politics, and land, as well as by activists, development practitioners, and policy makers to dwell on and debate the implications of such displacement and uneven trajectories of development in India.