Search

The Indian state is empowered to acquire land on behalf of private companies by virtue of ‘eminent domain’ outlined in the Land Acquisition Act 1894. Several amendments to the 1894 Land Acquisition Act have broadened the purview of the ‘public purpose’ clause and have facilitated more state intervention in land acquisition on behalf of private capital. Rather than questioning the legitimacy of the prevailing practice of state intervention to resolve the glitches of access to land by private corporations, the New Act of 2013 has expanded the ambit of ‘public purpose’ to include public‐private‐partnership projects. This paper seeks to look into the political economy of why the neoliberal state must continue to acquire land on behalf of the capitalists in the liberalized economy. This paper also attempts to bring out the implications of divergent livelihood outcome under state acquisition and direct corporate land purchase for the land acquisition framework in India through the case study of Rajarhat New Town in West Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many developing economies, a partial or full liberalization of the retail trade has encouraged the establishment of supermarkets. This innovation and the consequent shifts in market share can evoke protest from a spectrum of traditional and small-scale retailers, wholesalers, farmers and market workers whose organized resistance can influence the investment policies and decisions of governments and corporations. Yet, so far, resistance is rarely considered in global production networks analysis. The paper uses the case of the ongoing resistance and protest against the entry of modern supermarket operations in cities in India to show how such resistance and protest groups have influenced retail investors and public opinion, and gained collective power. In the Indian democracy, these mobilizations have developed a strong enough political influence in certain geographic regions to curtail the operations of transnational corporations and induce shifts in corporate expansion strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]