My essay begins with a puzzle. The past two decades have been called the decades of intense land conflicts in India. There has been an outpouring of media and academic scholarship on agrarian landowners resisting and protesting the acquisition of their land for urban and infrastructure projects. In this context of land dispossession and opposition to it, my essay looks at the Chennai region. In peri-urban Chennai, the reallocation of land from small farmers to state and corporate actors has taken place without visible opposition. How can we make sense of this lack of opposition? Why are smallholder cultivators not opposing corporate land redevelopment that deprives them of their lives and livelihoods? I build on Vijayabaskar and Menon’s argument that the agrarian crisis, and the state’s disinvestment in agriculture, has produced a distinct form of dispossession: dispossession by neglect. In line with Vijayabaskar and Menon (2018), I assert that dispossession by neglect acts as a form of economic coercion, shaping the decisions of farmers and putting them in a situation where they decide to give up their land for non-agricultural uses.
Here, I would like to delineate the difference between the concepts of dispossession by neglect by Vijayabaskar and Menon and the price of land by Chakravorty (2013). In both of these cases, farmers decide to give up their land based on economic rationality. But I point out that Chakravorty’s argument misses seeing that economic rationality is embedded in a political space. By looking at political embeddedness, I argue that economic rational decisions are an outcome of desperation due to economic coercion and not an outcome of greed to make more profit out of existing opportunity. In this context, I caution that we need to understand coercion not only as the visible form of land acquisition, but also as more insidious forms of economic coercion.
I build this argument by looking at the Sriperumbudur Industrial Region (SIR), located in the peri-urban region of Chennai, India. Although I focus on a specific context, the processes I deal with were shaped by global processes of uneven geographical development, and by regional and national development in India. First, I will introduce the SIR; I will then discuss farmers’ decisions to give up their land for agricultural uses. In this manner, the article seeks to elucidate an example of contemporary forms of peri-urban development in the Global South in a nuanced way.
Sriperumbudur Industrial Region
The development of Sriperumbudur should be seen from three positions: global, national, and regional. First, the development of the Sriperumbudur Industrial Region (SIR) is connected with the global processes of uneven geographical development that replicate the new economic geography model of promoting agglomeration economies (Krugman 1991). The World Bank’s 2009 World Development Report: Reshaping Economic Geography calls for the creation of such agglomeration economies across the world that result in the clustering of industries in urban and peri-urban regions. According to Homm and Bhole (2012), the story narrated by the World Bank in this 2009 report was materialized in Sriperumbudur. Second, India’s industrial development has centered on Special Economic Zones (SEZs) since 2005, following the enactment of the national SEZ Act (2005). Third, in the Indian federal political system, land comes under the control of subnational states, which compete with each other to attract investment by creating an investment-friendly environment for global industrial capital (Sud 2014). Tamil Nadu has emerged as one of the main competitors in attracting global capital investment and has become a leading industrialized state in India. Sriperumbudur is an outcome of this broader picture.
Sriperumbudur Industrial Region (SIR) is located approximately 45 kilometers (28 miles) away from Chennai city, on the Chennai–Bangalore Highway. The development of the SIR started in the 1990s when Hyundai Motors opened a manufacturing unit there. Later, many multinational companies such as Saint-Gobain, Motorola, Foxconn, and Nissan landed at SIR. Meanwhile, real-estate development took off in the region. Many high-rise apartments were built by big real-estate companies, and housing plots were also developed by small- and medium-scale developers. Thus, the SIR region experienced significant industrial and real-estate development. Industrial land was acquired from the farmers in the region by the State Industrial and Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu (SIPCOT). Land for real estate was organized in different ways by various actors. For example, Raman (2016) shows that large developers acquire land though government parastatal agencies, while small-scale developers organize land through their local social and other networks. Rapid real-estate and industrial development suggests that supplying agricultural land for non-agricultural uses is an easy process in this region. This raises the question of why farmers are ready to give up their land for non-agricultural uses. The next section reflects on this question.
What makes agricultural land available for non-agricultural uses?
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, land is very complex and embedded in social relations which actually makes it difficult to acquire or convert it for non-agricultural uses. But in SIR, farmers appear to be willing to give up their land. This raises a question: what leads to such a decision? In order to explain this, I shall present my field insights. During my fieldwork, one of the respondents in the peri-urban village in SIR said that he was a real-estate broker but he used to be a farmer. Another respondent said that he and his fellow villagers protested against land acquisition for an automobile company and later they gave up their land by getting compensated above market price. A naive look at their decision portrays agricultural landowners as economically rational, giving up their land for industrial use because of higher compensation. However, a closer look shows that they took such a decision because of desperation. To make it clear, the first respondent mentioned that he felt guilty for engaging in the conversion of agricultural lands into housing plots as he was from a farming family, but he took such a decision since he was not able to depend on agriculture for his survival. The crisis in agriculture forced him to make such a decision.
The SIR region has faced an agrarian crisis since 2000. Decline of agricultural activity has followed a lack of proper returns, or indeed negative returns, from farming. Farmers only get 5,000 to 7,500 rupees per acre of land for a cultivation period of four months, which means farmers get approximately 1,250–1,875 rupees per month. To understand these insufficient agricultural returns, it is important to look at the poverty line in India. According to Jacob (2022), India follows the Tendulkar Committee, which defines the poverty line as 32 rupees per day in urban areas and 26 rupees a day in rural areas. The national poverty line annually in 2011/12 was 816 rupees per capita and 1,000 rupees per capita for rural and urban areas respectively. If we look at farmers’ income, it is above the official poverty line; however, farmers remain poor. To explain this further, I refer to Iqbal (2022), who argues that even persons with incomes eight times higher than the poverty line remain poor. Thus, it is clear that income from agriculture is not adequate for farmers’ survival. Sometimes, if there is rain during harvesting time, the returns become negative. Moreover, the majority (70.3%) of farmers in this region are marginal or small landowners, which makes them more vulnerable to marginal and negative returns from agriculture.
Second, farmers in this region sell their agricultural produce, mainly paddy, to private players, since there is no proper government procurement system. This puts farmers in an adverse situation, losing money to intermediaries. Third, agricultural laborers suffered from lack of employment throughout the year. The decline in agricultural activities led to a decline in availability of agricultural work for laborers, pushing them towards industrial employment such as loading, unloading, and housekeeping work. This has led to a severe shortage of laborers.
Fourth, the destruction of water systems is another major reason for agricultural decline. A farmer reported that a factory was built on a lake, resulting in loss of water resources for agriculture. Blocking water channels carrying water to lakes was another major reason. Construction of transportation infrastructure, such as the outer ring road, blocked water flow and led to stagnation of water in fields during the rainy season in some villages. Most importantly, water in Chembarambakkam Lake in this region was restricted for Chennai’s residential water needs and for industrial use. As a result, the water system required for agriculture was severely affected and led to a decline of agricultural activities.
Fifth, farmers in a village near Sriperumbudur reported that they left agricultural activities because cows were eating the crops in their field. They reported that earlier there was a support system from local government officials: cows caught grazing agricultural fields were taken under government custody. To get their cows back, owners had to pay a fine. Therefore, cow owners rarely left their cows untied. It seems that this system disappeared in early 2000. At present, farmers state that cows graze their fields if they are not careful, and they also reported that cow owners will fight with farmers if farmers capture the cows grazing their fields.
Thus, a lack of returns from agriculture, a scarcity of agricultural laborers, destruction of the water system required for agriculture, and the loss of local government support to prevent grazing has all led to a crisis and pushed farmers out of agricultural activities. This situation has led farmers to make the decision to give up their land for industrial and real-estate purposes.
Conclusion
Farmers in the SIR region gave up their land without strong resistance; however, the above discussion shows that their decisions were shaped by desperation. Despite farmers’ attachment to their agricultural land, economic coercion and neglect pushes them to give up their land for non-agricultural uses without much resistance. This situation also relieves the state from conflict situations which can affect electoral gains. In this context, I end this article with the question: has the state of Tamil Nadu resolved the land question, that is to say the conversion of agricultural land for industrial use? The answer appears to be yes to a considerable extent in peri-urban areas; however, to strongly establish this argument, further detailed research in different parts of Tamil Nadu is required.
Bibliography
- Chakravorty, S. 2013. The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Homm, S. and Bohle, H. G. 2012. “‘India’s Shenzhen’—a miracle? Critical reflections on new economic geography, with empirical evidence from peri-urban Chennai”, Erdkunde, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 281–294.
- Iqbal, N. 2022. “Earnings 8 Times the Poverty Line but Still Poor: What Official Poverty Statistics Miss”, India Spend, 4 April. Available online at the following URL: www.indiaspend.com/poverty/earning-8-times-the-poverty-line-but-still-poor-what-official-poverty-statistics-miss-811182.
- Jacob, N. 2022. “Fact Check: Has Extreme Poverty in India Really Dropped below 1%, as a new IMF Paper Claims?”, Scroll, 22 April. Available online at the following URL: https://scroll.in/article/1022329/fact-check-has-extreme-poverty-dropped-in-india-below-1-as-a-new-imf-paper-claims.
- Krugman, P. 1991. “Increasing returns and economic geography”, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 99, no. 3, pp. 483–499.
- Raman, B. 2016. “Reading into the politics of land: Real estate markets in the South-west peri-urban area of Chennai”, Economic Political Weekly, vol. 51, no. 17, pp. 76–84.
- Sud, N. 2014. “Governing India’s land”, World Development, no. 60, pp. 43–56.
- Vijayabaskar, M. and Menon, A. 2018. “Dispossession by neglect: Agricultural land sales in Southern India”, Journal of Agrarian Change, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 571–587.
- World Bank. 2009. World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography, Washington, DC: World Bank Publications.
Acknowledgment: This article is based on the author’s PhD thesis submitted to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Prof. Solomon J. Benjamin, for his guidance. I sincerely thank my doctoral committee members, Prof. Suresh Babu, Prof. Ajit Menon, and Dr. K. Kalpana. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
