Abstracts
Your Own Facts: Epistemological Entitlement and Bt Cotton in India
GLENN DAVIS STONE
As the only transgenic crop being planted in a country that is pivotal in the global fate of transgenic crops, Indian Bt cotton has been watched with extraordinary interest. Competing and diametrically opposed narratives have emerged, with one side claiming the seeds to be responsible for enormous gains and the other attributing them with agronomic failure and farmer suicide. Actually, isolating the impact of the new seeds is vastly harder than either side claims, as there are profound difficulties in establishing counterfactuals. We will never “know” what the isolated effect of the Bt gene was, and we will continue to grasp at straws as we interpret the continued evolution of cotton agriculture (including the rise of non-target pests, the advent of Bt resistance, and the deployment of a parade of new genetic constructs). But as we do watch transgenic cotton agriculture continue to evolve, it is vital not to position Bt cotton as simply a change in seed genetics; it represents a suite of changes in the political economy and information environment in cotton farming.From Consequences to Causes, From Indeterminacy to Injustice:
Rethinking Social Appraisal of Transgenics in IndiaESHA SHAH
Unfolding over a decade and more, the controversies on GMOs - Bt cotton and Bt Brinjal (eggplant) - in India exemplify the tension between two approaches of appraisal. The science-based risk assessment processes are focused largely on consequences - economic, health, and environmental - which are often separated from the second approach that advocates a wider discussion on agrarian transformation. The significant part of the public and policy controversies, however, revolves around the assessment of consequences, the science-based knowledge of which remains cognitively indeterminate. For the resolution of these controversies, a decisive agency to experts and scientists is assigned. Deriving from my work on Bt cotton and Bt Brinjal controversies in India, I make a plea here to bridge the gap between normativity and “performativity”. Based on my ethnographic work on social response to Bt cotton cultivation in Gujarat, I show how the risks of transgenics are manufactured in the organization of techno-institutions of agrarian development which create and perpetuate newer forms of injustice and inequality. I ultimately argue that the controversies on transgenics need urgently to redirect their focus from consequences to causes and from indeterminacy to injustice. To this end, I propose to broaden the assessment of risk and uncertainty as merely consequences (in need of science-based evidences) to evaluating them as caused by the historical organisation of particular forms of techno-institutions which are products of specific time, space and social and power relations.
Transgenic Crops and the Right to Food:
What are the Connections and What are the Implications?DOMINIC GLOVER Some campaigners against transgenic crop technologies articulate their concerns within a discourse of sovereignty or rights. What are the implications of this rights-based discourse for the governance and application of crop biotechnologies? In principle, genetically modified organisms are not intrinsically threatening to human rights; yet the intrinsic characteristics of transgenic organisms are thought to justify the award of exclusive property rights over them, and this necessarily limits the freedoms of others in relation to those organisms. Such property rights are said to provide the incentive necessary to encourage private investments in crop and animal improvement that can supply sufficient food for all human beings. However, the duty holder in relation to the right to food is more appropriately the public rather than the private sector, and there are concerns that exclusive property rights undermine the capacity of public sector entities to carry out crop and animal improvement programmes aimed at securing sufficient food for all. In areas where the power of the state or international agencies fails to reach, the duty associated with the right to food devolves onto individuals, families and communities themselves. The implied duty of the public sector is not to obstruct rural people’s capacity to supply their own means of subsistence, which means facilitating their access to germplasm and genomic information. This has implications for the governance of crop biotechnologies (IPRs, farmers’ rights) as well as the R&D strategies and priorities of the public sector.
Knowledge Landscapes in Agriculture:
Institutions governing the Use and Quality of Arable Land in IndiaRAJESHWARI RAINA The paper analyses the norms of the natural and social sciences with respect to rain-fed croplands, to explain how they inform and legitimize land use decisions. The land question in India has shifted from land reform to land acquisition. This paper argues that the future of Indian agriculture and land use cannot be addressed without exploring the institutions or norms that shape current decisions. Even studies that acknowledge the politics of land use and power equations (landed versus landless or rural livelihoods versus urban investment opportunities) ignore knowledge institutions; the norms of the social and natural sciences that legitimize many land use policy goals and instruments. Rural poverty and hunger prevail even decades after the green revolution. The massive numbers of small farmers and rural labour, their dependence on diverse livelihoods, increasing capital intensity and shrinking employment opportunities in agriculture, and limited opportunities for industrial employment are characteristics of the rural economy. The state acknowledges land degradation - consequences of input-intensive, mechanised, irrigated agriculture. The small peasant (handling over 48 percent of operational area and 86 percent of the operational holdings) is the worst affected. Yet the state invests in the same production strategies. Institutional questions about land arise from two levels of knowledge interventions; (i) the overarching norms of development economics, with agriculture expected to mobilize surpluses, and (ii) the norms of knowledge generation and use, with all the constituents and meanings (soil quality, fertility, water, biodiversity) of land reduced to yield.
Landed in Trouble?: Changing Role of Land in Rural Livelihoods in IndiaSUKHPAL SINGH Land remains a major factor of production in agriculture and rural livelihoods in developing economies. But, the increasing globalization and liberalization of these economies has brought new pressures on land from various stakeholders including various types of farming entities. Though India is not a victim of land grabbing, unlike many African and Asian countries, there has been a rush for acquiring and retaining land for farming as well as for industrial, commercial farming, residential, real estate, and investment asset purposes. This new interest in land, in an economy that is marked by scarcity, and in the context of low agricultural growth and farmer distress during the last two decades, raises many new questions like role of land in farming, owned land v/s leased land, leasing of ‘so called’ wastelands to corporates/large farmers, contract farming and corporate farming, role of state and civil society, and alternative uses of land which demand examination. The paper examines the above questions in the context of Indian smallholder and large landlessness by focusing on aspects like varied sources and types of land, ownership v/s operation (control) of land(lease market), land markets, acquisition of farm land, thrust on commercial farming, gender and other barriers to access to land, and livelihoods of disadvantaged rural groups. Most of these issues involve the state in terms of policy and institutions and also as owner and regulator of land because land is a state (provincial) subject. The paper makes inferences about managing land in a sustainable way, including institutional approaches, from the perspective of a smallholder and farm worker.
Reflections on Agrarian Change in India since Independence:
Does ‘Landlordism’ still matter?JOHN HARRISS
The left parties of India continue to emphasize the significance of ‘landlordism’ as being at the core of the agrarian question in India. Yet, since the ‘green revolution’ of the 1970s and 1980s agrarian capitalism in India has continued to develop. What was called ‘semi-feudalism’ has indeed ‘met the market’ (Rogers and Rogers 2001). Although both landlessness and inequality in land ownership have increased, the differentiation and polarization of peasant classes that was anticipated by some has almost frozen. Today’s ‘classes of labor’ reproduce themselves through a range of mostly precarious activities which may include some amount of cultivation for oneself. Land is no longer so much the basis of status and power – as both caste hierarchies and farmers’ movements have weakened. Poor, lower caste people have loosened the ties of dependence, though without securing much political leverage for themselves. The many people who are effectively excluded do not appear to constitute anything approaching a ‘classedangereuse’ in the eyes of the dominant castes/class. New patterns of inequality and of exclusion are emerging, and they sometimes involve the reproduction of power by the old locally dominant castes of the principal landholders/landlords. In this changed context then, is there still a case for redistributive land reform?
“WHATEVER HAPPENED TO “LAND REFORM”? One Big Question and Four Naive Little Answers”ROBIN JEFFREY “Land reform” was perhaps the most prominent issue in Indian politics when the village of Naxalbari and the term “Naxalite” entered the vocabulary in 1967.“Land reform” was then a global topic. The Vietnam war began as a rural insurgency. Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century was published in 1969. Kerala: Yenan of India, a book title of 1971, suggested that the south-western state could be a haven for and a harbinger of radical agrarian-based change. Communist governments in Kerala, frustrated in their attempts to achieve a substantial land transfer in 1957-9, succeeded in bringing off a significant land reform between 1967 and 1970. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, “land reform” has passed out of regular usage. “Land,” to be sure, is discussed constantly, but it is “land” for real estate, “land” for industrial development and “land” for agri-business. “Land to the tiller” is a phrase no longer heard. This paper attempts to understand the structural transformation, political events and ideological changes that make “land reform” seem as dated by 2012 as a “trunk call” or an Ambassador car.” The paper seeks to pinpoint key moments when policy and political rhetoric changed. It touches on the experience of “land reform” in Kerala and West Bengal and the growth of a “real estate market,” as evidenced from the classified advertisements in Indian newspapers.
Land for the Expanding City: Water bodies, Wetlands, and Nature in Kolkata, IndiaPRIYA SANGAMESWARAN The notion of an urban frontier involves the idea of a border between areas, a border that is based on differences along various axes such as the nature and degree of development and what constitutes the urban. Such frontiers could exist within cities or outside them. Further, cities often draw upon such frontier regions for a variety of resources, and sometimes even end up absorbing them. A crucial element in urban frontiers as well as in the relationship between cities and urban frontiers is land. The first part of the paper provides a critical review of the kinds of questions that can be raised about land in urban frontiers. The second part of the paper discusses a subset of these questions using specific instances in the recent history of expansion of the city of Kolkata in eastern India: the politics of classification of particular pieces of land as “land” (as against water), the varied associations that different land uses have with development, and the kinds of understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ that are invoked when land in the urban frontiers becomes part of the city.
Circular Migration through Boomtown Bangalore: Labor, Capital, Social Protection and the StateJONATHAN PATTENDEN This paper is concerned with the determinants of migration flows between Karnataka’s agricultural sector and the building sites of Bangalore - a city seen internationally as one of the epicenters of globalization in South Asia. The two primary determinants identified are the extent of social protection provisioning and the extent of exploitation. It finds that a slight majority of households gain from migration in socio-economic terms and that this contributes to minor class-based socio-political gains in source villages. However better design and implementation of key welfare programs - the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (in source areas) and the provisions of the Buildings and Other Construction Workers Act (in destination areas) - would i) significantly increase migration’s contribution to laboring class socio-economic and socio-political mobility, ii) increase labor’s ability to bargain with employers, and iii) reduce migration levels. Reduced migration flows and better outcomes for individual households and the laboring class as a whole are, though, restrained by the broader social relations of production and the ways in which capital shapes the outcomes of public policy both in rural and urban areas.
Can the Economic Policy Undermine the Constitution?
RAVI REBBAPRAGADA The adivasis’ right to land and resources are protected by the Indian Constitution and also by various legislations and legal decisions. On the hand hand, the New Indian Economic Policy prioritizes globalization, privatization and industrialization of the country. The pursuit of these two contradictory objectives inevitably leads to conflict. Based on examples of emerging conflicts on land ownership in Andhra Pradesh and all over India, this paper examines the current attempts to violate or dilute constitutional land rights to promote special economic zones, industrial corridors, urban extensions, new mines, power plants or large dams to the detriment of local communities and their livelihoods. Through Samata’s experience in the matter, field visits, interviews and analysis of documents, this study explores how an inadequate implementation of laws, the adoption of new contradictory law and a lack of political will are eroding the rights of the people. The question that is raised by these emerging conflicts on lands is whether economic policies can undermine the Constitution. These conflicts are likely to increase in the future and its outcomes depend on whether and how we make a choice between an unlimited exploitation of natural resources for economic growth or an alternative model of development and justice. The future course will also depend on the strength and outcome of social movements, NGO action and the Maoist movement.
Emergence of ‘Consent’ for Land Acquisition: Trajectories of Dispossession in southern IndiaM. VIJAYABASKAR
Land acquisition for private capital has become a key site of resistance to neoliberalism in India even as national and sub-national state actors strive to project cheap land as a factor critical to attract private investments for growth. State driven land acquisition is however a small segment of larger market based processes of diversion of agricultural land for real estate and speculation. Driven partly by declining returns on agriculture, this processhas invested land with new meanings and values among various stakeholders including peasants. There are thus several instances of land acquisition across the countrymarked by an absence of concerted resistance. It appears that these are sites where neoliberalism tends to proceed through consent. The southern state of Tamil Nadu has been one such region characterized by a relative lack of any concerted resistance to land acquisition. This paper, through an examination of land acquisition processes in selected sites in the state and also through a study of contemporary Tamil fiction, explores the micro-politics of production of such ‘consent’. Through this exercise, I underscore the importance of the ‘local’ in shaping the process of neoliberal reforms and policy implementation. A recovery of such local trajectories is critical to not only understand how neoliberal policy moves work through and are shaped by local structures and agencies, but also to forge new mobilizations against such dispossession. The paper pays particular attention to informal processes on the ground like the use of intermediaries, price negotiations, threats and importantly on the role of peasant subjectivities in shaping this process of acquisition.
Natural Resources Privatization in Orissa: Reproducing Patterns of Uneven Development
MATILDE ADDUCI
In parallel with the rise and consolidation of the neoliberal project in India, in the last twenty years the implementation of neoliberal policies in the Indian mineral state of Orissa has implied a steady process of privatization of natural resources. The present analysis aims at discussing the class dynamics underlying the recent drive towards exploitation and commoditization of forest land, mineral and water resources in Orissa within the context of broader capitalistic dynamics. The analysis will be contextualized within the specific socio-economic background of the state of Orissa, historically characterized on the one hand by a lack of intervention aimed at fostering agricultural land productivity and a diversified industrial base and, on the other hand, by the promotion of mining activities in the face of the need for cheap raw materials expressed by industrial capital at an all-Indian level. This specific role of Orissa appears to have strengthened both at national and international level within the neoliberal turn of capitalism, while the claim of an unprecedented process of industrialization of the state, related to the recent boost in extractive activities, appears questionable. It is against this background that a political economy analysis of the ongoing privatization processes of natural resources – with specific attention to the process of forest land diversion for non-forest use – is proposed, taking into account the way in which such process contributes to the creation of new spaces of social reproduction for a local dominant unproductive class as well as the conflict it engenders in the state social fabric.
Eminent Domain: A Scrutiny of the Relationship between State and LandUSHA RAMANATHAN
First there was zamindari abolition, symbolizing the breakdown of feudal systems of land control. Then there was project development, and its search for the power to take over, hold and redistribute land from people to projects. Then there was mass displacement, and the rise of resistance and protest. Rehabilitation was one of the uneasy outcomes. Then, even as coercive acquisition got itself an unenviable reputation, and rehabilitation had failed to convince, `reforms’ brought its own formulae of needs. The state held itself out as responsible for assisting the corporate project. Yet, there was the deep embarrassment of being perceived as an ally of corporate interest which asked of the state that it battle affected people on the ground. So the idea of land acquisition had to be reworked. In the meantime, the urban project was being challenged by the proliferation of slums and squatter settlements. Illegality and `encroachment’ were notions that aided control of the visible poor. (The enclaves of the privileged could also be and are `unauthorised’; but these were of another genus.) The creation of the `urban nomad’ was one consequence. Through these years, and these experiments with state power and its exercise, the relationship of the state with land remains inadequately articulated. Is the state a super- owner of all land in its territory? Is it a trustee? Is it a manager? Is it a landlord? Is its power beyond law? How else may this question be asked?
Land Rights in India:
A Gandhian Social Movement’s response to Land and Livelihood Rights
GILLIAN CARR-HARRIS
A powerful and diverse range of social movements continue to mobilize their members and allies to claim their human rights in the context of land. Ekta Parishad is one such social movement in India. As a Gandhian non-violent social movement, it has brought together indigenous populations with low caste groups, poor women and other marginalized sections of the population into a mass organization to press the government for land reform. Land rights are the recognition of people’s rights to land in the context of survival and subsistence. They protect the existential capacities of safeguarding against hunger or homelessness or extreme poverty and deprivation. In contrast government-sponsored land reform has been one way that the state has addressed land rights. Land reform is referred to as a constitutional right in India because land is an asset or a basis of livelihood. In this context, the (re)distribution of land expands social opportunities, enhances economic security and provides a safeguard against increasing poverty. Ekta Parishad has been pressing for the implementation of existing land reform legislation. One of the contentious issues is that there is no mechanism to implement land reform. Ekta Parishad called for the setting up of the National Land Reform Council, following the 2007 Janadesh March (in which 25,000 people marched to Delhi over a one-month period). Although the government is a federal structure, it used its directive powers. Following this the Government of India carried out extensive policy research on the subject. The Government then constituted the National Land Reform Council under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister and this was seen as a temporary measure until a more permanent mechanism could be put into place. Then no action was taken to date except on the question of land acquisition and rehabilitation. As a result Ekta Parishad decided to carry out a march of 100,000 persons in October 2012 to again pressure the government to take action. This will be called the Jan Satyagraha.
The Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation (LARR) Bill 2011:
Providing Solutions or Raising Questions?
AMITENDU PALIT
Industrialization and land acquisition in India have become intractable; this forces the question can the former occur without displacement and dislocation of livelihoods and communities? More significantly, can benefits from industrialization exceed social, political and economic costs of claiming land by dispossessing original owners? Both queries draw attention to legislations surrounding acquisition of land and its compensation. The Indian state exercises its eminent domain through the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The Act enables federal governments in India to acquire private land for ‘public purpose’. Extensive deployment of the Act for acquiring land since the introduction of the Special Economic Zones Act of 2005 raised the question whether governments can be ‘brokers’ for private industry by acquiring land citing ‘public purpose’. Closely associated with the question was the issue of fair compensation for original owners. In order to minimize the existing imperfections in the process of acquiring land for industrial purpose, the Land Acquisition Resettlement and Rehabilitation (LARR) Bill, 2011 has been introduced in the Parliament. This paper examines the LARR 2011 for studying whether it establishes the fundamentals for efficient market-based land transactions in India. It attempts to do so by looking closely at the role of the state in acquisition and compensation proposed by LARR 2011 for determining whether these provisions provide satisfactory solutions for obtaining land for industry without sacrificing aggregate socio-economic welfare.
Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement: Law and PoliticsAMLANJYOTI GOSWAMI
This paper explores key issues in the new Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Bill (2011) and its attempts at ‘balance’ within the larger political context of land acquisition in India. In particular, it looks at Eminent Domain and ‘public purpose,’ rehabilitation and resettlement, compensation, safeguards for ‘Project Affected Persons’ (PAPs), processes (including the urgency clause), linkages with environment, applicability of the proposed enactment as well as critical areas where the enactment has no applicability. In doing so, the paper asks larger legal and political questions regarding land acquisition in the backdrop of constitutional debates pertaining to the Bill’s implications for federalism and within a detailed analysis of the most recent pronouncements of the Supreme Court. On ‘public purpose’, the paper infers that even if the new Bill renders the concept less vague, it will still not stop the Judiciary from looking into questions of abuse in actual land acquisition or use of the land. What the LARR Bill could however achieve is allow a clearer legal framework within which the Judiciary could look into these questions in general, and on ‘public purpose’ in particular. The paper also looks at potential scenarios, and in particular, possible intended (or unintended) consequences of the enactment for future urbanization patterns in India.