Abstract
Land dispossession under the neoliberal capitalist development has become a focal point of debate across the Indian states, particularly in West Bengal. Based on the household surveys conducted at two points of time (2009 and 2016) in Rajarhat adjoining Kolkata, where the Left-Front Government acquired land for building an urban centre and promoting a knowledge-based economy, this chapter illuminates how a neoliberal planned township adjoining a metropolis through a large-scale dispossession of land gives birth to numerous new forms of livelihoods to the dispossessed households and contravenes the fundamental axiom (proletarianisation) of primitive accumulation. It also analyses how the post-acquisition real estate escalation in Rajarhat develops ‘a subaltern degree of conversion of existing land’, and leads to social differentiation and inequalities.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Enclosure’ refers to the consolidation of farm land. The British Enclosures Acts removed the prior rights of peasants to rural land cultivated for generations. The dispossessed peasants were compensated with an alternative land of smaller scope and inferior quality, and eventually migrated to manufacturing industrial cities. The lands seized by the acts were then consolidated into individual and privately owned farms, with large, politically connected farmers receiving the best land. Often, small landowners could not afford the legal and other associated costs of enclosure and thus were forced out (see Stromberg 1995 for detail).
- 2.
Rekjuani was not chosen for drawing control samples because of two reasons. First, only a handful of farming households, as informed by the sample dispossessed households during the survey, remained unaffected by acquisition. Second, the unaffected households were mostly actuated with the speculative rise in land prices caused by the post-acquisition real estate escalation and sold off their land in part or full. They thus lost the ‘identical characteristics’, and based on the testimonials of the concerned panchayat prodhan (head), Chandapur-Champagachhi was selected for drawing control samples.
- 3.
Third set, to be noted, contains those 18 dispossessed households of the first set that sold off their existing land after acquisition.
- 4.
The food, other consumable items, education and transport expenses which had been selected for the estimation of consumption expenditure at household level were: (i) cereals—rice, wheat, suji/sewai, bread, muri and other rice product; (ii) pulses—arhar, moong, masur, soyabean and besan; (iii) milk and milk products—milk, milk powder, curd and butter; (iv) egg, fish and meat; (v) vegetables—potato, onion, carrot, pumpkin, papaya, cauliflower, cabbage, leafy vegetables, tomato, capsicum, lemon, garlic and ginger; (vi) fruits—banana, coconut, guava, orange fruits, litchi, apple, grapes and other citrus fruits; (vii) education—books, journals, newspapers, stationery, tuition and institution fees; (viii) telephone/mobile, transport and domestic servants (ix) others—sugar, salt, chillies, tea and coffee, cold beverages, smoking, kerosene and dung cake, LPG and coal, clothes and footwear.
- 5.
Chakravorty argued that the access to housing credit by the middle class was of paramount importance. As recently as the mid-1990s, almost all sales in the housing market bore cash transactions. A buyer without the necessary cash could not enter the market. However, since 2000 the credit market in housing grew rapidly and by 2009 it was over 7 per cent of the country’s GDP.
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Roy, A. (2020). Dispossession, Neoliberal Urbanism and Societal Transformation: Insight into Rajarhat New Township in West Bengal. In: Mishra, D., Nayak, P. (eds) Land and Livelihoods in Neoliberal India. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3511-6_9
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