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Large-scale private real estate projects in the past few decades in vast areas of increasingly varied scales have been created that were once sparsely inhabited agricultural land and wetlands in the remote locations of these urban areas. This paper examines the reasons for India's peripheralization of real estate megaprojects. Such projects are typically constructed on agricultural land, notably paddy fields and wetlands. Developers' site selections are mostly influenced by the low cost of land and future development potential. In contrast to the disarray of existing urban spaces, "bypass urbanism" creates restricted and unique city spaces that allow more contented or high-status lifestyles. They avoid large parts of the city area as part of their daily lives, reinforcing socio-economic isolation, peripheralization, and uneven urban development. With the help of two case studies, this paper explores how peripheralization has created a restricted and exclusive space that facilitates middle-class life while bypassing and neglecting existing urban areas. This massive bypass urbanism constitutes a new quality of urban growth with far-reaching and uncountable repercussions, resulting in the creation of islands and the reshuffling of the entire metropolitan region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to initiate a discussion based on a new reading of field data I collected in Nepal and South India that was triggered by the notion of irrigated land tenure. The first part deals with the way of applying this notion to rice fields. In South Asia, rice fields occupy a discriminating position in administrative and vernacular classifications, which has been turned upside-down by the surge in groundwater irrigation. Moreover, some rice fields may be cultivated without irrigation thanks to monsoon rains. However, this is not reflected in the traditionally used visual representations of irrigation systems (aerial photos, satellite images, maps of irrigation networks) that overlook farmers' difficulties to access to water. The notion of irrigated land tenure, hence, has some limitation in the case of rice cultivation, if non-irrigated rice fields are not clearly identified. However, this notion has the advantage of making explicit the interest to analyse the links between water rights and land rights, which is the purpose of the second part of this paper. In a context of legal pluralism, the examples discussed show the diversity of these interactions: in some cases water rights are modified so as to increase the size of the irrigated land; in others the use of water is instrumental in obtaining a legitimate land right. In contrast, in the case of tenancy situations, the status of land tenure continues to jeopardize access to water. The tenure status of an irrigated or potentially irrigable land is important to consider in order to understand the dynamics of water management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]