From Incremental Dispossession to a Cumulative Land Grab: Understanding Territorial Transformation in India's North Karanpura Coalfield

Abstract

This article explores a great contradiction in rural land debates in India: on the one hand, explosive political contestation that is often able to halt proposed land acquisition; on the other, an unprecedented urban-industrial expansion that is appropriating rural land. The authors argue that land grabbing for mining proceeds in an incremental manner, yet its cumulative effect leads to territorial transformation. To investigate this incremental appropriation, a temporal study of the North Karanpura coal mining tract in eastern India was conducted, combining remote sensing, interviews and official land-use data. The results reveal a cumulative land grab of thousands of hectares from the late 1980s to the present day as open-cut coal mines swallow up vast swathes of agricultural fields and forests. The political economy mechanism behind this immense land grab, which to date has gone undetected, consists of three phases: the reservation of the land as a coalfield with multiple coal blocks; the division of the blocks into separate mines; and the flexible expansion of individual mines wherever reduced resistance to land acquisition is encountered. This research indicates that an aggregate analysis of land dynamics can more robustly place the dramatic rearrangements of the Indian countryside within the international land grabbing debate.

Published in

Development and Change
2019, volume: 50, number: 6, pages: 1485-1508

SLU Authors

• Oskarsson, Patrik

  • Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Global goals (SDG)

SDG11 Sustainable cities and communities

UKÄ Subject classification

Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
Human Geography

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12513

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/101621