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This article deals with a case of land that was mortgaged against a loan given by the Gwalior Durbar to a businessman in Bombay in 1925. The said land in Thane subsequently has had a wide range of claimants and uses. The mortgage case is linked to a variety of processes such as the decline in the textile industry in Bombay in the 1920s, federal financial integration in the late 1940s, the trajectory of post-independence industrialisation in cities such as Thane located near larger metropolises, and the character of urban property rights. On the basis of a discussion of the case, the article makes three kinds of arguments. One, it contrasts the implications of acquisition versus leasing of the mortgaged land and shows how acquisition has been used to ensure clear titles. Two, it brings out the varied ways in which urban land can be claimed and accessed and the factors that enable this. Three, the actual trajectory of use of the mortgaged land by two industries is examined to show how even lessees/sub-lessees of land subject to uncertainties can use the land (and select rights over it) for different purposes. Overall, the article contributes to an understanding of the working of property rights as they have evolved to fit new contexts of industrialisation and urbanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study was conducted to explain how the vision of an 'ideal village' is used in the development of feelings of community in a watershed development project in India. It is concluded that the successful working of voluntary labor and watershed-plus measures indirectly reinforces the notion of idealness.

The notion of an urban frontier involves the idea of a border between areas based on differences along various axes such as the nature and degree of development and what constitutes the urban. Cities often draw upon such frontier regions for a variety of resources, of which, land is perhaps the most crucial. This article focuses on a 'frontier' in the city of Kolkata in eastern India--the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW)--and the different meanings that land takes on there. While the creation of 'new' land is facilitated by the material properties and definitional ambiguities of the wetlands, the absorption of the land into standard processes of urbanisation is resisted by invoking ideas of nature. However, the conceptualisation of nature in this case is a functional one that does not do justice to the diversity of livelihood options and development trajectories possible in frontier lands. The article ends with some brief reflections on the specificities of the EKW as an urban frontier, the relationship between development and environmental protection and the possibilities in reimagining the future of frontier lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]