The City in the Twenty-First Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 229 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$69.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8122-5146-3.
Economic liberalization and political decentralization in India have had a profound impact on a wide range of social, economic, and political processes. The land question and the contestations around it have figured prominently as foreign capital has been permitted to enter the real estate market. In the post-independence era, the politically influential dominant-caste elites manipulated state resources such as water, seeds, and fertilizers, to transform their lands into fertile ones. However, the entry of the real-estate sector into the countryside meant that from thereon, the location of land determined its value, rather than its fertility. How did the agrarian dominant-caste elites, who also controlled the political sphere, respond to these transformations? Shareholder Cities by Sai Balakrishnan explores this question through a case study of the economic corridors in western Maharashtra. In doing so, Balakrishnan offers a fascinating and empirically rich account of the political and economic transformations along the new economic corridors, where, she argues, “some of India’s most decisive conflicts over its urban future will unfold” (3). The highly informative book takes a historical view of land relations and shows how politics shaped the uneven geography of the region.
The book provides detailed accounts of Magarpatta city, Lavasa Lake city, and Khed city, which the author terms “shareholder cities,” as they were built with private capital. However, these cities have also relied heavily on state resources. Marathas, the dominant-caste agrarian elites of western Maharashtra, are central to all the case studies. In providing a historical account, the author shows how Marathas (and in some cases Kunbis) appropriated resources such as water, fertilizer, and seeds for transforming their otherwise arid lands into “one of India’s richest agriculture zones” (34). Such policies starved the exceptionally fertile Vidarbha region, in the eastern part of the state, from access to irrigation. This region has been the site of farmer suicides during the past decade. In terms of caste, the irrigation facilities bypassed lands owned by socially marginalized groups such as Dalits and Adivasis. In the post-liberalization era, however, the new value attached to the strategically located waste and arid lands is “unsettling existing caste hierarchies” (63). The Adivasis are using these circumstances to obtain basic civic facilities which were hitherto denied them, and their youths are refusing to work for the Maratha and Kunbi landowners.
By looking at Magarpatta city (chapter 2), established over 600 acres of land, the book examines the myriad ways through which the agrarian Maratha elites of sugar-rich regions were able to reproduce their privileges in the real-estate domain. The sugar-rich and politically powerful Maratha landowners deployed their influential position to gain legal exceptions to convert their fertile lands for the urban township. Moreover, they cornered resources such as water for their urban and industrial development. The elites were also able to enlist the support of marginal Maratha farmers due to the earlier trust gained through the sugar co-operatives. This is a classic example of the agrarian landowners transforming into shareholders of real-estate companies.
The case of Lavasa city, India’s first privately financed city that spans over 25,000 acres of land, saw the involvement of powerful Maratha politicians from western Maharashtra. Land-use laws were modified and key resources such as water were diverted from state-controlled dams for building and sustaining the private city. The new economic corridors have once again displaced the marginal Maratha farmers. A couple of decades ago they were displaced due to the construction of dams, and they had to rely on finding urban industrial employment. The textile mills in Mumbai have been closed and the developments in the countryside have once again placed them in a precarious position.
Khed city is the site of a special economic zone (SEZ), which also presents a typical case of dominant-caste marginal landowner opposition to land acquisition. The Marathas landowners here are not political elites, but they are an important electoral constituency. Therefore, the local-level bureaucrats mediated by offering them the possibility of becoming “share-holders in the new corridor cities” (126). Besides, Marathas were able to redraw the boundaries of the SEZ to protect their fertile lands, creating a safety net in case the development plans did not work. While Marathas gave away their wastelands for urban development, Adivasis who had access to mostly wastelands had no access to safety nets. Nonetheless, Adivasis utilized this moment of transformation by demanding basic services such as water and caste certificates, which they had been denied earlier. The delays on accruing the benefits from the corridor cities have created anxieties among the marginal Maratha farmers. They have mobilized to demand their lands back and dissolve the shareholder model.
While Shareholder Cities is a brilliant contribution to our understanding of the role of agrarian capital in the urbanization process outside the urban metro areas, it has one limitation. The role of crime does not find much space in the book. Local newspapers and media have highlighted the role of criminal elements in the western Maharashtra region for acquiring land from the farmers. There are regular reports of murders of prominent right to information (RTI) activists who were investigating the illegalities involved in the land issues. The acquisition of farmlands through criminal elements is the subject of a popular Marathi film, Mulshi Pattern, that focuses exclusively on the plight of farmers who were compelled to sell their lands and take up informal employment in urban areas. It highlights the intra-Maratha conflict, and the forcible acquisition of Mahar Watan lands, that belonged to the Mahar (Dalit) community. This limitation notwithstanding, Shareholder Cities is an original contribution to scholarship on urbanization in India’s post-liberalization era, and it fills a major gap in the literature on the political economy of Maharashtra and the role therein of Maratha-caste agrarian elites.
Sumeet Mhaskar
O.P. Jindal Global University, Delhi