Land Conflicts and Cooperatives Along Pune's Highways: Managing India's Agrarian to Urban Transition

Land Conflicts and Cooperatives along Pune's Highways: Managing India's Agrarian to Urban Transition The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation No citation. Accessed February 19, 2015 12:25:11 PM EST Citable Link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11051195 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University's DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms- of-use#LAA (Article begins on next page) Land Conflicts and Cooperatives along Pune’s Highways: Managing India’s Agrarian to Urban Transition A dissertation presented by Sai Balakrishnan to The Department of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Urban Planning Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May, 2013 © 2013 –Sai S. Balakrishnan All rights reserved. Advisor: Susan Fainstein Author: Sai Balakrishnan Land Conflicts and Cooperatives along Pune’s Highways: Managing India’s Agrarian to Urban Transition ABSTRACT The past ten years has been a decade of land wars in India. Rapid urbanization is spilling beyond city boundaries into the highways connecting large cities, instigating a frenzied consolidation and conversion of agricultural lands into urban/industrial lands. This process is fraught with conflict, as different social groups compete to stake their claims on the land value increments – the increases in land value due to the change in land use from agricultural to non-agricultural - of these newly converted highway lands. Against the backdrop of conflictual land consolidation processes, this dissertation examines the unique case of the Pune highways, located in the state of Maharashtra in India. Along some of Pune’s highways, agrarian landowners – sometimes voluntarily and sometimes with the mediation of bureaucrats – are pooling their fragmented agricultural lands, converting them to urban and industrial lands, and forming collective institutions of land ownership to own and control these newly converted highway lands. In other words, agrarian landowners along these highways are not being displaced from their lands. Instead, they are capturing some or all of the land value increments, and are benefiting from the urban transition. I examine the conditions that made these collective institutions possible in the Pune region, and the possibility and desirability of transferring these conditions to other regions elsewhere that are mired in similar land conflicts. iii My main finding is that the core of India’s land conflicts is a change in the valuation of land from fertility to location. This new, highway-induced restructuring of the land market interacts in complex ways with older caste-based forms of agrarian land control and these changes in land-based social relations is the source of conflict. India’s rapid urbanization along highways is taking place not within cities, but in-between cities, and is leading to new forms of politics that defies the urban-rural dichotomies. I also use Pune’s land conflicts and cooperatives as a window into the broader phenomenon of India’s 21st century transition from an agrarian to urban economy, and articulate the major elements of the new regional institutions that are needed for managing land markets during an uncertain urban transition. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My advisor, Susan Fainstein - who has been a role model in so many ways: as a scholar, as a woman scholar, as a teacher, and as a planner deeply committed to social justice. My committee members – Bish Sanyal, Jenny Mansbridge, Hashim Sarkis and Narendar Pani – who, besides being some of the sharpest minds in the academy, are also some of the kindest people I know. They engaged deeply with my work with timely critiques but also gave me the autonomy to cultivate my own ideas and my own voice. Jerold Kayden and Neil Brenner – for opening my mind to brand new ways of thinking and for their generosity in always making the time to talk about my research. Barbara Elfman – the lifeline of the GSD doctoral program. Many a doctoral deadline would I have missed if not for Barbara and Maria Moran. Patti Foley and Edna Van Saun for squeezing me in, even at last minute notice, into professors’ busy schedules. The Center for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and the National Institute for Advanced Studies, IISc, Bangalore – for providing an institutional base during my fieldwork. Prof. Amitabh Kundu for his mentorship at JNU. Viji aunty (Dr. K. P. Vijayalakshmi) and Ranga uncle for opening their home to me in Delhi. Parimal Patil and the Harvard South Asia Initiative GSAs, Sudhir Chella Rajan, Anant Maringanti and other participants at the NUS ARI conference on decentralization, Michael Leaf, Tulasi Srinivas, Pat Dawe – for their incisive feedback on various drafts of my dissertation. Shirish Kavadi and Amit Narkar at the National Center for Advocacy Studies, Sachin Upadhye and Suvarna at Chaitanya, Prabhakar Deshmukh, Kanersar Gram Panchayat members and other public officials in the Khed taluka – for all their help in Pune. C.M.Lingappa, Putte Gowda, Doraiswamy and others for their help along the Bangalore-Mysore highway, and Vijay for ferrying me around the Bidadi area in his auto. Tijs Van Maasakkers, Nick Smith, Brian Goldstein, Jana Cephas, Delia Wendel – kindred spirits in Cambridge whose friendships humanized the PhD experience. My parents, patti and thatha – with love and gratitude. For everything. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................. viii LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1 1.1 CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVES, SURPRISE FINDINGS ................................................. 4 1.2 TERRITORIAL POLITICS OF LAND CONFLICTS ............................................................... 8 1.3 RESEARCH FOCUS AND FRAMEWORK ............................................................................... 10 1.3.1 POLITICS OF REDISTRIBUTION ............................................................................... 10 1.3.2 FRAMEWORK OF LAND VALUE CAPTURE ......................................................... 13 1.4 RESEARCH DESIGN ..................................................................................................................... 15 1.5 CHAPTER OUTLINE ..................................................................................................................... 20 CHAPTER TWO: HIGHWAY URBANIZATION ............................................................... 23 2.1 URBANIZATION-OUTSIDE-CITIES: “THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME?” ....... 27 2.1.1 THE ENDOGENOUS VIEW ......................................................................................... 29 2.1.2 THE CONVERGENCE VIEW ....................................................................................... 30 2.1.3 THE AGGLOMERATION VIEW .................................................................................. 32 2.1.4 THE UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT VIEW ................................................................... 34 2.2 SITUATING MY RESEARCH WITHIN THE LITERATURE ............................................. 36 2.3 INDIA’S HIGHWAY URBANIZATION ................................................................................... 40 2.3.1 HIGHWAY URBANIZATION AND THE CHALLENGES TO DECENTRALIZATION ..................................................................................................................... 41 2.3.2 HIGHWAY URBANIZATION AND THE CHALLENGES TO STAET- MARKET DICHOTOMIES ................................................................................................................ 43 2.3.3 INTERACTIONS OF A DEMOCRATIC INDIA WITH THE NEW ECONOMY .................................................................................................................................................................... 45 2.3.4 COLLECTIVE INSTITUTIONS: IN THEORY AND IN PRACTICE ................. 48 CHAPTER THREE: THE PUNE HIGHWAYS .................................................................. 50 3.1 INSTITUTIONAL ACTORS IN LAND CONSOLIDATION .............................................. 53 3.2 HIGHWAY URBANIZATION: THE PUNE CASES ............................................................ 56 3.2.1 PUNE-MUMBAI EXPRESSWAY ................................................................................... 56 3.2.2 PUNE-SHOLAPUR HIGHWAY ..................................................................................... 59 3.2.3 PUNE-NASHIK HIGHWAY ........................................................................................... 67 3.3 EXPLAINING THE ABSENCE OF LAND COOPERATIVES ALONG THE PUNE- MUMBAI HIGHWAY ............................................................................................................................... 75 vi CHAPTER FOUR: CITIES OF SUGAR – THE MAGARPATTA MODEL OF LAND CONSOLIDATION ............................................................................................................... 80 4.1 FIRST PHASE OF LAND REFORMS

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