163 79 10MB
English Pages 266 [268] Year 2022
Table of contents :
List of Tables and Figures
Foreword
Introduction
FACILITATING DISPOSSESSION: LAWS, PLANNING, PAPERWORK
1. Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
2. Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
3. Enabling the Great Goan Land Grab
4. Unclean Slates: Greenfields, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles
INFRASTRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS
5. Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance
6. India's New Coal Geography
DYNAMICS OF POPULAR MOBILISATION: SEZs AND THEIR CRITICS
7. Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
8. SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
9. Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
10. Judicial Justice for Special Economic Zone Land Resistance
Bibliography
About the Authors
The Great Goa Land Grab
Kenneth Bo Nielsen Heather Plumridge Bedi and Solano Da Silva
2022
The Great Goa Land Grab
© 2022 Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Heather Plumridge Bedi and Solano Da Silva. Copyright of the collection vests with the authors. First edition published in 2022 by
Goa,1556, 784, Sonarbhat, Saligão 403511 Goa, India. http://goa1556.in [email protected] +91-9822122436.
Cover design by Bina Nayak [email protected] Typeset using LYX, http://www.lyx.org Text set in Utopia Fourier 9,6/13 Printed at Brilliant Printers, #261, Mallarabanawadi Nelamangala, Bengaluru 562123. Tel: +91-9900067878 Email: [email protected] http://www.brilliantprinters.com ISBN 978-81-956329-2-3
See Goa,1556’s catalogue at http://goa1556.in
Contents List of Tables and Figures
5
Foreword
6
Introduction
8
I FACILITATING DISPOSSESSION: LAWS, PLANNING, PAPERWORK 19 1. Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
20
2. Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
51
3. Enabling the Great Goan Land Grab
70
4. Unclean Slates: Greenfields, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles 76
II INFRASTRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS
98
5. Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance
99
6. India’s New Coal Geography
117
III DYNAMICS OF POPULAR MOBILISATION: SEZs AND THEIR CRITICS 145 7. Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
146
3
4
CONTENTS
8. SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
172
9. Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal 192 10. Judicial Justice for Special Economic Zone Land Resistance
214
Bibliography
244
About the Authors
266
List of Tables and Figures Figure 1.1: Cumulative Area transferred for Industrial Estates in Goa (1966-2013) area in m2 . . . ... ... ... ... ... . . . . . . 27 Figure 1.2: Occupied and Vacant houses in Goa (1991-2011) . . . Figure 6.1: Coastal power plants and coal port . . .
...
...
. . . 28 ...
Table 1.1: Change made to LuP of RP-2001 through notifications... Table 6.1: Coastal thermal power plants in India . . .
... ...
Table 7.1: Land Acquired on Behalf of Four SEZ Developers
133 37
. . . 132 ...
149
Table 7.2: Land Allotted to Five SEZ developers in Verna Industrial Estate (Phase IV). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Table 7.3: Rates at Which Land Was Allotted to SEZ Developers . . . 153 Table 7.4: Annual Lease Rent Charged to Six SEZs
...
...
...
154
Table 10.1: Common arguments from three petitions against the Goa state government, GIDC and SEZ corporate developers . . . . . . 232
Foreword
T
book is the outcome of research that we have carried out on land politics in Goa over many years, individually, jointly, or in collaboration with other scholars. HIS
Over the years, a great many people and organisations have contributed in different ways to our thinking on and analysis of what we in this book call ‘the great Goa land grab’. For scholarly inspiration, critical input, and stimulating conversations, we thank Rahul Basu, Jade Comely, Hartman de Souza, Peter Ronald deSouza, Federation of Rainbow Warriors, Jason Keith Fernandes, Ramesh Gauns, Goa against Coal, Goans for Dabolim Only, Goenchi Mati Movement, Shrayragi Israni, Rob Jenkins, Sandip Kambli, Sidharth Karapurkar, Loraine Kennedy, Swati Kerkar, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, Mike Levien, Neha Naik, Alf Nilsen, Patrik Oskarsson, Parag Parobo, Andre Pereira, Edwin and Diana Pinto, Meghana Pote, Abhijit Prabhudesai, Seby Rodrigues, William Rodrigues, Brototi Roy, Alito Siqueira, Diana Tavares, Frederick Noronha and Goa,1556. Most of the chapters in The Great Goa Land Grab have appeared as journal articles or chapters in edited volumes, and we are grateful to the publishers for granting us permission to reproduce them here in the form that they were originally published. Chapter 1 was published as: Da Silva, Solano, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Heather P. Bedi. 2020. Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa, India. Journal of Peasant Studies 47 (6): 1301-1326.1 Chapter 2 is a reworked version of chapter 11 in Solano Da Silva’s doctoral dissertation. Chapter 3 was published as: Nielsen, Kenneth Bo, Heather P. Bedi and Solano Da Silva. 2017. Enabling the Great Goan Land Grab. Economic and Political Weekly 52 (41): 14-16. Chapter 4 was published as: Nielsen, 1
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1822822)
Foreword
7
Kenneth Bo. 2017. Unclean Slates: Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, and EIA Struggles in Goa. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40 (4): 844-861.2 Chapter 5 was published as: Nielsen, Kenneth Bo and Solano Jose Savio Da Silva. 2017. Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa. In Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia, edited by Tereza Kuldova and Mathew Akkanad Varghese, 53-73. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapter 6 was published as: Oskarsson, Patrik, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Brototi Roy. 2021. India’s New Coal Geography: Coastal Transformations, Imported Fuel and State-Business Collaboration in the Transition to more Fossil Fuel Energy. Energy Research & Social Science 73: 1-10.3 It is reprinted here with the kind agreement of the co-authors. Chapter 7 was published as: Da Silva, Solano. 2014. ‘Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal’. In Power, Policy and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones, edited by Rob Jenkins, Loraine Kennedy and Partha Mukhopadyay, 108-136. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chapter 8 was published as: Bedi, Heather P. 2013. Special Economic Zones: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest. Contemporary South Asia 21 (1): 38-51.4 Chapter 9 was published as: Nielsen, Kenneth Bo and Heather P. Bedi. 2017. The Regional Identity Politics of India’s New Land Wars: Land, Food, and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal. Environment and Planning A: Government and Policy 49 (10): 2324-2341.5 And chapter 10 was published as: Bedi, Heather P. 2015. Judicial Justice for Special Economic Zone Land Resistance. Journal of Contemporary Asia 45 (4): 596-617.6 We hope that this book will be of interest and practical use to academics, activists, and concerned citizens.
2 3 4 5 6
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2017.1370185 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101903 https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2012.757582 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17719884 https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2015.1048406
Introduction
T
book describes and analyses what we call ‘the great Goa land grab’. Over several decades, the state government and private companies — often working in tandem – have acquired or appropriated large tracts of land in the Indian coastal state of Goa for a range of development, real estate, port, and industrial purposes. In this introduction, we introduce the great Goa land grab and analyse it in more detail in the chapters that follow. We first briefly discuss what is often referred to as ‘the global land grab’ in the academic and activist literature, before we move on to examine the Indian debate on land grabbing. The majority of the introduction is then devoted to discussing the main components and drivers of the great Goa land grab and its linkages to politics and different economic sectors. We end with an overview of the chapters that follow. HIS
The Global Land Grab While this book focuses on Goa, land grabbing and land dispossession are global phenomena. For centuries, land grabbing has been a defining feature of global capitalism and capitalist development. However, it has assumed a new urgency over the past decades, during which a large and growing academic literature within human geography, sociology and social anthropology has emerged on what is popularly known as ‘the global land grab’. This literature documents how private investors have taken over large areas of land and/or its resources — particularly in Africa and Latin America, but also in Asia. And it shows how the adoption of neoliberal policies and the opening and expansion of markets have been key drivers of such land grabs (e.g. Borras Jr and Franco 2011; Oliveira 2013; White et al. 2012). While much land grabbing involves large-scale land acquisitions for mega-projects, there are also conglomerate or smaller acquisitions involving actors big and small.
Introduction
9
Free, prior, and informed consent for impacted communities are rarely part of such land deals, and there are few examples of meaningful community engagement in decision making processes. In addition, impacted communinties seldom receive compensation, at least not to the degree promised beforehand (Kaag and Zoomers 2014, 4-5). Land Grabbing in India While much of the scholarship that concerns itself with land grabbing and land transfers has focused on Africa and Latin America, we also have a rich and varied literature on land grabbing in India. In a publication released a decade ago, the reknowned activist Vandana Shiva and colleagues used the term, ‘the great Indian land grab’ (Shiva et al. 2011) to frame land deprivation across a range of sectors and geographies. Land acquisitions have occurred on a significant scale in India in this millennium, but what makes India stand out in a global comparative perspective is not the amounts of land that have changed hands, but rather the fact that India is undoubtedly, as Michael Levien (2018) points out, the global epicentre of land grab protests. Across the nation, popular protest have erupted in response to controversial dispossession-driven projects in multiple sectors, from infrastructure to real estate, industry and mining. This has put land squarely back on the political agenda (Bedi and Tillin 2015; Nielsen 2018; Nielsen and Oskarsson 2017). These land transisitions emanate from the political economy of development in India since economic liberalisation accelerated after 1991. In line with global trends, land has become an increasingly scarce and sought-after commodity after the liberalisation of the Indian economy. As the price and use-value of land increased — especially in urban and peri-urban areas with high demands for real estate, and in rural or remote areas that are rich in minerals — contestations over land and its uses have multiplied (Bedi and Tillin 2015). As D’Costa and Chakraborty (2017) show in their work on the land question in India, there is today considerable pressure to transform land into a commodity to be bought and sold in the market for non-agricultural purposes (see also Sud 2020). This is driven by India’s contemporary economic development concerns centred on industrialisation, infrastructure, special economic zones and real estate expansion, exemplified poignantly in Goa. In this context, land no longer acts predominantly as a dynamic source of agrarian accumulation, but is increasingly com-
10
The Great Goa Land Grab
modified and directed towards non-agricultural development. In this sense, we can read ongoing processes of land dispossession and land grabbing in India, including in Goa, as indicative of how the agrarian question of capital has been bypassed (Lerche 2013): accumulation within agriculture is no longer an issue of importance for national or industrial capital, and the quest for the formation of a highly productive agrarian sector is thus no longer on the table, as economic interests and priorities lie elsewhere. This is true for Goa as well, where we have seen as slow but steady decline of agriculture from the 1960s, as economic priorities — and their associated demands for land — have shifted elsewhere. Agricultural Decline in Goa In Goa, the bypassing of the agrarian question of capital and the diversion of land to non-agricultural purposes has registered most visibly in the declining share of agriculture in the state GDP and as a source of employment, as well as in the devastation of the state’s khazan lands. Khazan lands reflect a unique system where agriculture and fishing are practiced together. Khazan lands were reclaimed from the sea over centuries through an intricate system of bunds and sluice gates, regulating the flow of water during tides, primarily to enable agriculture. These were the most fertile lands in coastal Goa, and the quantum of agrarian production depended on the strength of the bunds that prevented the entry of saline water into the fields. Ownership of khazan lands was traditionally communal insofar as it was jointly held by the so-called gaunkari as a unit. The gaunkari is akin to a village council, made up of representatives of the vangad, or clans that could claim descend from the first settlers of a village. Later codified as the communidade, this system assumed a colonial institutional form under the Portuguese colonial state. While communidade has sometimes been translated as ‘the village community’ – including by the famous sociologist D.D. Kosambi (2013) – most of the communidade in fact belonged to the upper castes. And only gaunkars could own land collectively, administer and participate in village meetings, and share in the surplus produced. By the time Goa was integrated into the Indian union in 1961, agriculture was characterised by landlordism, a high degree of exploitation of tenants, low agricultural productivity, and a high degree of eviction and/or dispossession (Parobo 2015, 165). Independent Goa’s first gov-
Introduction
11
ernment set to work addressing this agrarian situation. As chapter two discusses in more detail, the government passed the Agricultural Tenancy Act in 1964 and declared that a person lawfully cultivating any land belonging to another person would be deemed to be a tenant, and tenancy was made hereditary. In the event that the landowner wanted to sell land, the right of first purchase went to the tenant. The act effectively destroyed the monopoly of the gaunkars by declaring that the communidade were to be treated as an individual landowner, thus preventing any attempt to evade land reforms under the pretext of being a cooperative welfare institution. Tenants cultivating gaunkari lands could thus now claim rights to this land. There are good arguments from a social justice perspective for seeing these reforms as progressive (Parobo 2015; Trichur 2013). However, there are equally good arguments for arriving at a more critical assessment of the long-term implications of these land and tenancy reforms for land use in the state. The case can be made that the reforms mistook gaunkars for an association of zamindars, that is, they misread what was essentially an association of people with privileged access to land but proprietorship only in its produce, as an association of landlords with absolute ownership rights. On this reading, the reforms were misguided and ended up fragmenting land, reducing agricultural output, and undermining communal forms of labour and maintenance. For example, the tenancy reforms shifted responsibility for maintaining the bunds from the communidade to tenants’ associations called shetkar committees who were at times unable or unwilling to shoulder the responsibility. In tandem with this, the rising price of seafood in world markets and heavy global demands for prawns brought about a shift towards backwater pisciculture at the expense of khazan land agriculture. Of the approximately 18,000 hectares of khazan land in Goa, estimates suggest that 75 percent is induced with salt water due to lack of maintenance, and is often used for fish cultivation. To this, we may add the corruption of some managing committees of communidades who have been involved in land scams, selling off village lands for private profit. The many drivers of agricultural decline in Goa – both from above and from below – have arguably made it easier to transfer agricultural land to non-agricultural uses for private accumulation. Economic Sectors and the Drivers of the Goa Land Grab As Kohli (2012) argues, pro-growth, pro-business policies emanate
12
The Great Goa Land Grab
from the close but narrow alliance between the state and big business, promoting land grabbing for speculation rather than for productive purposes (Levien 2018). As is well known to observers of contemporary India, such concerted attempts at accelerating land dispossession and commodification have, however, been accompanied by widespread resistance from dispossessed communities, sometimes amounting to outright land wars (Levien 2018). As we reiterate in chapter one, few Indian states have felt the impact of these processes as severely as Goa. As the Goa Foundation’s classic publication Fish Curry and Rice: A Sourcebook on Goa, its Ecology and Lifestyle (Alvares 2002) meticulously documented already in the 1990s, ‘the bills and costs adding up from the present, externally induced development model’ (ibid., 1) were taking their toll on Goa’s land and environment. The book listed tourism development, mining, infrastructure development, the decline of agriculture and the corrupt nature of land use planning as some of the key drivers of environmental destruction and land grabbing. If the situation was critical when Fish Curry and Rice was first published, it is arguably no less critical now. Historically, Goa’s influential mining industry has been singularly important in creating this situation, effectively dispossessing rural communities of their land and bringing about large-scale environmental degradation in Goa’s mineral-rich hinterlands. At the time of Goa’s integration into the Indian Union in 1961, the export of manganese and iron ore accounted for a full 96 percent of Goa’s total export earnings. The mining industry was at that time described as operating in a ‘haphazard, unscientific and wasteful manner’ (Talukdar 1962), and early signs of severe environmental degradation were already evident. As Fish Curry and Rice (Alvares 2002, 225) would conclude four decades later, ‘of all industrial activities within the state of Goa, there is none more destructive of the environment than mining’. Only a few years later, the Beijing Olympics held in 2008 triggered an explosive demand for iron ore. As global prices soared, iron ore exports from Goa spiked in 2011 at 54 MT. Following the exposure of large-scale corruption in the mining industry in 2012 mining has largely been suspended. But, there is still strong pressure from the state’s mining lobby – which has powerful political connections – to resume mining and convert additional land to mining purposes in the interior regions near
Introduction
13
the ecologically sensitive Western Ghats. Irrespective of the future of the mining industry, land grabbing for extractive industries has already done irreparable damage to Goa’s environment and ecology. Alongside this, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, the mining ban created new demands on land elsewhere in the state, as Goa currently witnesses major infrastructural transformations. As we argue in chapter six, an infrastructure that was for decades used to enable the extraction of iron ore from the interior and transporting it to the Mormugao port for export, is now being redesigned to facilitate the import of coal by boat into Mormugao port and onwards, to fire the industrial furnaces in Karnataka. As part of this infrastructural transformation, the harbour is being dredged; new jetties are planned along Goa’s rivers; roads are being widened and train lines double tracked; and power lines that cut across eco-sensitive areas are being set up. Other largescale infrastructure projects that also claim much land include the new international airport at Mopa in north Goa, which we also analyse in this book. The state’s tourist industry exerts a comparable pressure on land. The early trickle of travelers that made Goa a mandatory stop on the ‘hippie trail’ were, in the 1970s, joined by increasing numbers of middleand upper-class tourists, both international, but increasingly also domestic. Tourism in Goa has the status of an industry since 1987, which means that the government has arrogated to itself the power to intervene to acquire land for potential investors in the coastal region. The state currently receives almost 2.5 million visitors annually (predominantly from India), i.e. far more than the resident population of 1.4 million. Although the Covid-19 pandemic for a while dramatically reduced the number of tourist arrivals, the state’s status as India’s dream destination will mean that the tourist industry will seek more land in the future. Closely related to tourism is the booming real estate economy driven largely by the desire for a ‘second home’ in Goa among metropolitan Indian elites and ex-pats. This has had severe repercussions for land use across the state. As is the case in India’s metropolises more generally (Searle 2016), speculative gambles in real estate are transforming the state into a frontier of capitalism and a market for new buildings. There is a large number of holiday homes in Goa that stand empty most of the year, but which nonetheless serve to drive up the real estate mar-
14
The Great Goa Land Grab
ket and increase the demand for land (Sampat 2014). Industrialization has similarly claimed land in Goa’s central regions, first through the setting up of industrial estates and later via the (eventually cancelled) Special Economic Zones policy (Bedi 2013; Da Silva 2014) that we analyse at length in the third section of the book. Several industrial projects have been very controversial, such as Dupont’s Nylon 6.6 project proposed for Querim, and the Meta Strips project at Sancoale. Much like the narrow state-business alliance that underpins India’s pro-growth policies as described by Kohli (2012), the state-business alliance in Goa is an intimate one and the distinction between the political and economic elite is blurred at best. For example, many political and bureaucratic careers in Goa are built on fortunes made in the real estate sector, or in more or less direct involvement in the mining industry (Human Rights Watch 2012; Commission on Illegal Mining 2012) – an industry that is also among the most generous sponsors of increasingly expensive electoral campaigns (see also Kapur and Vaishnav 2018). And, it is well documented that some of Goa’s most important political families function as focal points for large networks that span across the government, the bureaucracy and industry, whose shared interests they both articulate and respond to (Parobo 2018). As several chapters in this book show, the role of the state, elected politicians and bureaucrats in assembling land and making it investible remains crucially important. With a geographical area of just 3,701 km2 , 28 percent of the state is forestland while 61 percent is under cultivation, pastures, tree crops and groves. This, in theory, places severe restrictions on the supply of land to the private sector which can only be increased either by releasing forestland controlled by the state; or by somehow converting land under cultivation to non-agricultural use (Parobo 2018). The fate of mining similarly rests firmly in the hands of the government which regulates the entry into mining through licences, and which may assist private investors across sectors in various other ways: a favourable interpretation here, a suitable amendment there, or a violation of a regulation elsewhere. The intervention of the state is thus crucial, in practice rendering the state not just an enabling entity, but also a rent-seeking entity (Parobo 2018). This of course applies to most of India, where land transactions on a large scale are impossible to carry out without the active intervention of govern-
Introduction
15
ments. Similarly, the state and its administrative and judicial institutions and procedures, backed by the potential for punitive measures, are routinely needed by investors in search of land (Nielsen and Oskarsson 2016; see also Chandra 2015). Elected politicians thus remain crucial ‘master manipulators’ who – with a firm grip on the local state machinery, an intimate knowledge of local social and political conditions, and an extended network of brokers and intermediaries – are well positioned to facilitate, or sometimes block land transfers. The Chapters The chapters in this book are individual texts, each focussing on one or more specific aspects of the Goa land grab. They were originally written in different moments of time and reflect the temporal context of their production. The book, which is divided into three sections, can be read cover to cover, but chapters may also be read in random order, or selectively. I. Facilitating Dispossession: Laws, Planning and Paperwork The first section is titled ‘Facilitating Dispossession: Laws, Planning and Paperwork’, and analyses the different modalities of intervention that are available to politicians and state bureaucracies to facilitate land transfers and dispossession. Chapter one focuses on how land use planning is used to facilitate dispossession. Here, we follow the anthropologist Tanya Li in seeing planning processes and documents as inscription devices, and argue that these are constitutive parts of state-specific regimes of dispossession that work across scales, paving the way for land dispossession to take place. In Goa, we argue, planning evolved to become a terrain of struggle between a state-capital nexus seeking to dispossess and convert land, and an organized citizenry seeking to use planning for alternative purposes. We place this dialectic between manipulative planning ‘from above’ and popular mobilisation ‘from below’ at the centre of analysis as we map the evolution of regional planning in Goa and its consequences for land dispossession and land use. This enables us to show how the long-term trend in regional planning across three decades is arguably one in which planning documents function predominantly as inscription devices that facilitate dispossession and the assembling of Goan land for private investments. Chapter two continues this discussion by grounding the relationship between planning and dispossession in the particular context of a large tourism project in Tiracol in north Goa. We show specifi-
16
The Great Goa Land Grab
cally how a broad range of actors seek to capitalise on the newly emerging economic opportunities in land, brought about by larger changes to the political economy of land in Goa and its rapid increase in value. This, we demonstrate, registers in attempts at converting land uses by altering or bypassing a variety of existing land regulations such as tenancy laws, planning and land-use regulations, zoning regimes, and more. Chapter three then ventures further into the domain of law. Here, we analyse The Goa Requisition and Acquisition of Property Bill, 2017 and the Goa Compensation to the Project Affected Persons and Vesting of Land in the Government Bill, 2017. These bills are, we argue, new additions to the state government’s arsenal of legal tools to facilitate acquisition and conversion of land within the state, while insulating itself from any consequence of ‘environmental justice’. While these bills are state-specific to Goa, they follow a national trend of deploying legal language and institutions to support an aggressive approach towards appropriation of land assets. Chapter four zooms in on the role of environmental impact assessments (EIA) and its technologies and procedures to enable land dispossession. Starting from an examination of the global discourse of ‘greenfield development’, we analyse the development of the controversial Mopa greenfield airport in Goa. The chapter unpacks the conflictual process of carrying out and challenging environmental impact assessments for large-scale infrastructure projects. We argue that the EIA process can arguably be seen as an enabler of land dispossession, insofar as it facilitates the territorialisation of the discourse of greenfield development in particular environments. As the case of Mopa airport shows, this has far-reaching social and environmental consequences. II. Infrastructural Transformations Titled ‘Infrastructural Transformations’, section 2 continues the analysis of infrastructure projects launched in chapter four. The Mopa airport is also the focus of chapter five which, like chapter four, examines the interplay between attempts at land grabbing from above and resistance from below. We draw on popular imaginaries about ‘golden Goa’ and ‘green Goa’ to examine how different parties to the land conflict centred on the planned airport mobilise competing utopias to stake claims to land and nature. Chapter six turns to an emerging coal infrastructure in Goa. While the advance of renewable energy around the world has kindled hopes that coal-based energy is on the way out,
Introduction
17
coal consumption in India is growing. The chapter maps India’s new coal geography comprising new ports and thermal power plants run by private-sector actors along the coastline and fuelled by imported coal. This geography runs parallel to, yet is distinct from, India’s ‘old’ coal geography, which was based on domestic public-sector coal mining and thermal power generation. By analysing the making of the new coal geography at a national level, and scrutinizing its localised manifestation and impact in Goa, we bring to light the significant infrastructural investment and policy work that has slowly enabled this new coal energy avatar. We argue that the enormous effort to establish India’s new coal geography further entrenches the country’s reliance on coal, with detrimental results not just for Goa, but for the contry as a whole. III. Dynamics of Popular Mobilisation: SEZs and their Critics The chapters in the third and final section titled ‘Dynamics of Popular Mobilisation: SEZs and their Critics’ analyse different aspects and impacts of India’s special economic zones policy as pursued in Goa in the first decade of the millennium. Chapter seven narrates the story of SEZs in Goa, from the policy stages through to implementation, resistance, and cancellantion. It focuses particularly on the emergence of a strong civil society-led movement opposing the SEZs which forced the Goa government to reverse course: it not only withdrew permission for existing SEZs, but revoked its entire policy framework relating to SEZs. Chapter eight argues that these protests against land acquisitions for SEZs – both in Goa and elsewhere – provide a terrain for exploring the changing landscape of contestation in India’s liberalising political economy. Observing how different social movements, organizations and communities have resisted the development and sovereignty implications of SEZs, we argue that although there are common concerns across groups and locations, efforts to co-organize protests on a national or regional scale have proved difficult. In place of nationwide narratives critiquing the SEZ model, resistance predominantly reflects localised concerns and interpretations. This more parochial nature of resistance is, we suggest, a product of diverse opinions on preferred outcomes, regional or local viewings of the state, particular political dynamics, and the diversity of actors involved in SEZ struggles. In developing this argument, we explore the localisation of SEZ struggles in Goa, examine the dynamics of resistance at the state level, and address political opportunities that emerge in the context of protest. Chap-
18
The Great Goa Land Grab
ter nine continues the exploration of the relatively localised or statespecific nature of the anti-SEZ movement by bringing Goa into a comparative dialogue with West Bengal. This chapter focuses on the discourses and identities mobilised around controversial land transfers, and we argue that what we call ‘the regional identity politics’ of India’s current land wars help explain the important role of place-based identities in garnering broad, public support for popular anti-dispossession movements. More specifically, we explore how movements in the two states mobilised land and food not as emblematic of structural changes in the political economy, but first and foremost within a symbolic field in which they came to stand metaphorically for regional forms of belonging and identity under threat. While reinforcing regional solidarity, these identities also contributed to the fragmented and often highly localised nature of the two movements, while also potentially disrupting efforts to sustain organising in the long term. Chapter ten traces the SEZs story beyond the so-called ‘scrapping’ of the SEZ policy. While the revocation of the policy framework mollified public unrest and temporarily appeased anti-SEZ movements, scepticism soon arose as the chief minister failed to legally de-register the zones and return SEZ lands to original owners or collectives. Amidst state inaction, movement activists turned to the courts. We use protest and corruption theories alongside political interpretations of liminality to frame how social movements shift strategies and patterns of intervention in response to or in anticipation of state inaction. The shifts we observe in the case of SEZs, we suggest, constitute shifts in the ritual form of protest, as well as the degree of political engagement with the judiciary. Collectively, the chapters allow the reader to explore the processes, peoples and lands central to the Great Goa Land Grab. The collection also details Goa’s rich history of citizen engagement and should inspire policy-makers and plannners to learn from past land and development mistakes.
Part I
FACILITATING DISPOSSESSION: LAWS, PLANNING, PAPERWORK
19
1. Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa, India
I
2015, the inhabitants of the small Goan coastal village of Tiracol were awakened by the arrival of men and machinery hired by Leading Hotels Pvt. Ltd, a five-star hotel company. The machines bulldozed a large part of the village orchard lands as part of Leading Hotels’ plan to build a PGA standard golf course and resort. The villagers strongly opposed this project for several years, triggering Leading Hotels’ attempt to sneak their men and machinery in at the dead of night, protected by 50 security guards. N
Prior to the arrival of machines and security guards, the land in Tiracol had been contested for years. The village is home to a Portuguese fort and includes 16 different ‘survey plots’ of land according to the government land records. The fort itself falls in survey plot number one while the remaining land is mostly tenanted land, owned by a local landlord. While most of the village lands were for long shown in official land use maps as ‘cultivable land or orchards’, things changed dramatically – at least on paper – when the village in 2006 suddenly appeared in official maps as a ‘settlement’ area. The conversion of the land in Tiracol from cultivation to settlement made the value of the land increase dramatically and was in effect the outcome of ‘requests’ impressed upon state authorities by a private consultancy company to that effect. Anticipating the land use conversion and the concomitant increase in value, Magus Hotels and Real Estate – a subsidiary of Leading Hotels – moved swiftly to purchase most of the village lands from the landlord. The landlord, in turn, paved the way for Leading Hotels
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
21
by getting rid of his tenants. In current official land use maps, most of Tiracol is now marked as an ‘eco-tourism’ zone. Local opposition from tenants notwithstanding, plans to build a hotel-cum-golf resort that will cover almost the entire village remain alive and well, with a course designed by golfing great Colin Montgomerie, a marina and 150 villas (Nielsen and Da Silva 2017; Siqueira and Da Silva 2015). * As witnessed in Tiracol, land dispossession and ‘land grabbing’ are contentious public issues in most of the world (Levien 2018). Over the past decade, a large literature on what has been called ‘the global land grab’ interrogates how structural adjustments, neoliberal reforms and the opening of markets have been key drivers of land grabbing allowing corporate entities to gain control of land and/or its resources (Borras Jr and Franco 2012; White et al. 2012; Borras Jr et al. 2012). In this context, India is, as Levien (2018) points out, undoubtedly the global epicentre of land grab protests, as hugely controversial dispossessiondriven projects in infrastructure, real estate, industry, mining and solar energy have triggered popular protest in many parts of India and have put land squarely back on the political agenda (Bedi 2019; Nielsen 2018; Nielsen and Oskarsson 2017). The trouble with land is, as Li (2014) has succinctly put it, that it is not like a mat. It cannot be rolled up and carried away. It has a presence and a location, and a rich and diverse array of values, meanings and uses to which it can be put. In other words, and as our brief opening vignette indicates, work is required to render it investible, to assemble it as a resource available to private investors (see Polanyi 1944). In the Indian context, much such ‘work’ has been carried out through the state’s exercise of eminent domain via the colonial land acquisition act from 1894. In a period marked by accelerated pro-business economic reforms (Kohli 2012), the act was seen to be invoked – and backed by force and violence when needed – by state governments to cater to corporate investors’ desire for land. The act was used as a tool to dispossess small farmers and indigenous groups of land, often with only nominal compensation and little, if any, rehabilitation. Such abject misuse of the land acquisition act, coupled with the equally abject long-running failure on the part of successive central governments to put in place a legal regime that guarantees the right to resettlement and rehabilitation for
22
The Great Goa Land Grab
displaced groups (Levien 2011; Nielsen and Nilsen 2015), turned the question of involuntary land dispossession via the 1894 act into a major source of agitation for civil society and subaltern movements, and led to the repeal of this act in 2013. A key conceptual distinction within the Indian land dispossession literature has been made between dispossession as directly coercive upwards redistribution of landed wealth in which the state plays a key role, as distinct from the ongoing market-induced dispossession that results from the dull compulsions of economic relations (Levien 2018). While it has been suggested that one cannot draw any rigid distinction between the economic and the extra-economic in the Indian context (Vijayabaskar and Menon 2018), this distinction does provide a fruitful entry point for examining the mechanisms that are available to state actors seeking to render land investible for private actors. A growing literature maps this larger, flexible repertoire of measures that states draw on (Adnan 2015; Sud 2014) to show how they implicate a range of specific actors, mechanisms and imaginaries that work to facilitate land dispossession. As the Tiracol vignette demonstrates, these include machinery, security guards and coercive evictions, but also the police, politicians, investors, small-time land brokers (Levien 2015; Sud 2014), petty officials in control of land records or land conversion processes (Chandra 2015) and the systematic manipulation of information (Oskarsson 2013). Land dispossession also relies on what Li (2014) calls inscription devices, that is, those devises that are mobilised to establish forms of exclusion, to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate users and to inscribe boundaries onto space. While Li acknowledges the importance of mundane and everyday inscription devices used on the ground – such as axes, spades and ploughs – she pays particular attention to statistical picturing devices and graphic forms that render land investible. These include maps, title deeds, tax registers, graphs and satellite images that enable land to be manipulated from a distance (see also Baka 2013; Bennike 2017; Nielsen 2017). Unlike most other land conflicts in India, popular protest in Goa centred on land has specifically focused on the regional planning processes. Following Li, we view regional planning in Goa, and particularly the regional planning documents they produce, as inscription devices implicated in processes of land dispossession at the state level. As the Tiracol vignette demonstrates, land use maps and official land classifi-
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
23
cations or ‘zonings’, and the production, circulation and manipulation of these are a constitutive part of the multi-scalar processes that pave the way for land dispossession to take place in specific locations. Following Chakravarty and Negi (2016), we conceptualise plans and planning as microcosms of contested terrains and as condensations of society’s complex contestations over space. In the Goan case, we argue, planning appears as a contested terrain, a terrain of struggle, between a state-capital nexus seeking to dispossess and convert land, and an organised citizenry seeking to use planning for alternative purposes. The maps, titles deeds, and other land-use planning documents are key inscription devices that both shape and respond to this contested terrain. Central to our analysis of this terrain is the dialectic between manipulative planning ‘from above’ and popular mobilisation ‘from below’. We map the evolution of regional planning in Goa and its consequences for land dispossession and land use in the state to highlight this dynamic. We show how the long-term trend in regional planning is one in which planning documents and processes have come to function predominantly as inscription devices which facilitate the assembling of land for private investments, even as the planning process has – especially when combined with popular mobilisation from below – provided important opportunities for citizens to contest and reshape land governance in accordance with popular demands. At times, such popular mobilisation has been spectacularly successful in exposing and putting an end to manipulative planning from above. And yet, by chronologically tracing the creation, evolution, contestation and unraveling of successive regional plans for Goa, we argue that although regional plans were originally introduced to sustainably manage the state’s resources, powerful political and private interests have over time enlisted and undermined these intentions. The outcome has thus been a distinct regional planning process increasingly geared towards the production of inscription devices that facilitate dispossession and the assembling of land for private investments. We seek to make three contributions through this chronological review of the unfolding dialectic between contending social forces on the terrain of land use planning in Goa. First, we empirically demonstrate how the Goan state has sought to bend the planning process, through a series of shifting modalities of intervention from above, in a direction that is consonant with the interest of private investors and leading
24
The Great Goa Land Grab
politicians. These modalities are: (A) the use of ad-hoc bureaucratic processes to change already established land zonings under the first regional plan, Regional Plan 2001; (B) The rezoning of land by stealth during a short window of opportunity during the finalisation of Regional Plan 2011; (C) The illicit creation of entirely new zoning categories to diffuse public opposition under Regional Plan 2021; and (D), a more recent fourth modality, namely the introduction of entirely new legislative measures to circumscribe the efficacy of the planning process altogether. Secondly, we propose to present Goa as a potentially diagnostic case. Goa is, in the broader Indian context, a statistical outlier. It is India’s smallest state and has felt the intensifying pressure on land and nature more acutely than many larger states; it was an early mover and devised a land-use management policy involving integrated regional planning covering the entire area of the state already in the 1980s; and, it has a more resourceful and educated civil society than most other states, with a long history of mobilising around environmental issues. At the current conjuncture where the government of India (2013) is increasingly calling for the ‘optimal utilisation of land resource’ (sic) through ‘systematic and integrated land use planning at national, state and regional level’, the more than three decades of integrated planning in Goa diagnoses the multiple ways in which integrated land use planning can be aligned with elite interests, as well as what is required if popular movements and counterforces are to shape land governance in accordance with popular demands. Lastly, we use our case to develop the emerging scholarship on regimes of dispossession (Kenney-Lazar 2018; Levien 2013, 2018), a concept Levien (2018) coined to refer to the political apparatus coercively redistributing landed wealth upwards. While Levien (2018, 17) uses the concept to ‘highlight variation in the robbers and what they do with their loot’ across states, in this chapter we rather foreground ‘the means of looting’ to argue for the central role of inscription devices such as land use planning within state-specific regimes of dispossession. We thus offer our account of the Goan experience as complementary to the larger literature on state-led land dispossession in India as we work towards a more detailed understanding of the intricate ways in which planning is used to facilitate dispossession. We proceed to contextualise regional planning in Goa with reference
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
25
to broader debates on the political economy of land and dispossession in contemporary India, and in Goa in particular. We then discuss the relationship between planning and dispossession before we move on to analyse the unfolding contestation over Goa’s regional plans. Here we focus on the preparatory and implementation phases of each of the three regional plans (RP) that have so far been implemented in Goa, and on the response of citizens and popular movements. Establishing the key importance of Goa’s regional plans to the fate of the state’s land, we pay attention to the ways in which successive and shifting modalities of intervention from above have been deployed to enlist regional planning in a larger elite project of restructuring land use in the state, in spite of sometimes-strong mobilisation from civil society. To anticipate what is to come, we show, first, how legislative amendments made to the Town and Country Planning (TCP) Act, 1974, enabled thousands of piecemeal zonal changes to be made after the government finalised the state’s first regional plan, RP-2001. We then analyse how government officials accommodated private sector interests during the preparatory stage of the second plan, the RP-2011. Lastly, we demonstrate that whereas attempts were also made in the most recent RP2021 to accommodate private interests during both the preparatory and implementation phases, new mechanisms were simultaneously being introduced from above to render planning largely irrelevant. In line with the comparative ambition of this special volume, we draw parallels to the Chinese experience when relevant. We base our analysis on a diversity of inscription devices and related material artefacts such as draft and finalised planning documents, several thousand gazette notifications, news reports and other secondary sources. All three authors have done fieldwork in Goa over many years on related topics, but we draw only sparingly on original ethnographic material. Land Dispossession in Neoliberalising India and Goa The liberalisation of the Indian economy over the past three decades has rendered land an increasingly scarce and sought-after commodity. As in China, where accelerating land commodification has been the foundation of the rise of capitalism since the 1990s (Zhang and Wu 2015), the price and use value of land has increased steadily in India, especially in urban and peri-urban areas, or areas that are rich in minerals. Consequently, contestations over land and its uses have
26
The Great Goa Land Grab
multiplied (Bedi and Tillin 2015). As D’Costa and Chakraborty (2017) point out, there is today considerable pressure to transform land into a commodity to be bought and sold in the market for non-agricultural purposes. The motivation behind this is driven by India’s contemporary economic development concerns centred on industrialisation, infrastructure, special economic zones and real estate expansion. Thus, while capitalist expansionary dynamics and accumulation are not entirely absent from agrarian Indian settings (Lerche 2013), land is increasingly commodified and directed towards nonagricultural development. The potential for profit and accumulation in non-agrarian sectors in turn drives the demand for land and pushes up prices (Chakravorty 2013). As Kohli (2012) argues, a close but narrow alliance between the state and big business has been central in pushing this pro-growth, pro-business policy. Such concerted attempts at accelerating land dispossession and commodification have, however, been accompanied by widespread resistance from dispossessed communities, sometimes amounting to outright land wars (Levien 2018). Thus, in contemporary India the centrality of land and the uses to which is should be put can hardly be exaggerated (D’Costa and Chakraborty 2017, 27). Over the past decades, Goa has been home to several intense land contestations that reflect, and even anticipate these broader Indian land wars. Indeed, the pressure on land in Goa, including the pressure to alter the uses to which it can be put, has been particularly intense compared to much of India. Already more than three decades ago Newman (2001, 29) drew our attention to how capital in Goa came from the destruction of land, not from the careful use of it. Newman was writing in a context in which the rapidly expanding mining industry had led to a ‘ravaging of Goa’s splendid mountains and forests [and] the pollution of Goa’s rivers’ (Alvares cited in ibid., 24; see also de Souza 2015; Human Rights Watch 2012), and where the surge in mass tourism had led to the alienation of land from traditional owners, the disruption of village life, and the destruction of the environmentally sensitive coastal areas. Goa’s influential mining industry has been singularly important in terms of effectively dispossessing rural communities of their land and bringing about large-scale environmental degradation. At the time of Goa’s integration into the Indian Union, the export of manganese and iron ore accounted for a full 96 percent of the total export earnings of Goa. The ‘haphazard, unscientific and wasteful manner’ (Talukdar
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
27
1962) in which the industry operated had already been noticed, as had the negative environmental consequences. The export of iron ore from Goa grew from 14 megatonne in 1985 to 54 megatonne in 2011, and there is strong pressure from the state’s mining lobby – which has powerful political connections – to convert land to mining purposes in the interior regions. The state’s tourist industry exerts a comparable pressure. In the 1980s, tourism emerged as the economic activity with the most potential for growth. Tellingly, the most important ‘obstacle’ to the capital-intensive development of tourism at the time was identified to be ‘the nonavailability of land’. By bestowing the status of an industry on the tourism trade in 1987, the government arrogated to itself the power to intervene to acquire land for potential investors in the coastal region. The state currently receives almost 2.5 million visitors annually, i.e. far more than the resident population of 1.4 million. With the building of a brand new international airport in north Goa (Nielsen 2015; 2017) and current plans to relocate the state’s floating riverine casinos onto the mainland, the tourism-generated pressure on the land will increase further. Industrialisation – first through the setting up of industrial estates and later via the (eventually cancelled) Special Economic Zone policy (Bedi 2013; Da Silva 2014) – has similarly sought to lay claim to land in Goa’s central regions.
Figure 1.1: Cumulative Area transferred for Industrial Estates in Goa (19662013) area in m2. Sources: (Hugar 2015, pp. 100-105) and Goa Industrial Development Corporation (Goa IDC) website: http://www.goaidc.com/ind estsiteplan.php
28
The Great Goa Land Grab
Figure 1.1 above shows the progression of areas acquired for setting up industrial estates with a sharp increase in land acquisition for estates in the early phase of economic liberalisation. The booming real estate economy driven by the desire for a ‘second home’ in Goa among metropolitan Indian elites and Goan ex-pats has also had repercussions for land use. As is the case in India’s metropolises more generally (Searle 2016), speculative gambles in real estate are transforming the state into a frontier of capitalism and a market for new buildings. A large number of holiday homes in Goa stand empty most of the year, but nonetheless drive up the real estate market and increase the demand for land (Sampat 2014). The proportion of vacant houses has grown steadily in Goa following economic liberalisation. Today more than 22 percent lie vacant (see Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2: Occupied and Vacant houses in Goa (1991-2011). Source: Census of India (Goa Abstract) 1991, 2001 & 2011. Like the narrow state-business alliance that underpins India’s progrowth policies (Kohli 2012), the state-business alliance in Goa is an intimate one and the distinction between the political and economic elite is blurred. Many political and bureaucratic careers in Goa are built on fortunes made in the real estate sector, or in more or less direct involvement in the mining industry (HRW 2012; Shah Commission 2012) – an industry that is also among the most generous sponsors of increasingly expensive electoral campaigns (Kapur and Vaishnav 2018). And, it is well documented that some of Goa’s most important political families
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
29
function as focal points for large networks that span across the government, the bureaucracy and industry, whose shared interests they both articulate and respond to (Parobo 2018). In the Chinese context it has been argued that the ‘visible hand of the state’ (Zhang and Wu 2015, 101) is indispensable in commodifying land and determining the uses to which it can be put (Chen 2013; 2019). As the Goan experience indicates, the role of the state, elected politicians and bureaucrats in assembling land and making it investible similarly remains crucially important. With a geographical area of just 3,701 km2, 28 percent of the state is forestland while 61 percent is under cultivation, pastures, tree crops and groves. This, in theory, places severe restrictions on the supply of land to the private sector that can only be increased by releasing forestland controlled by the state; or by somehow converting land under cultivation to non-agricultural use. The fate of mining similarly rests firmly in the hands of the government which regulates the entry into mining through licences, and which may assist private investors across sectors in various other ways: a favourable interpretation here, a suitable amendment there, or a violation of a regulation elsewhere. The intervention of the state is thus crucial, in practice rendering the state not just an enabling but also a rent-seeking entity (Parobo 2018).7 Regimes of Dispossession and Planning As in the global land grab debate more generally, the concepts of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession have been mobilised in the Indian context. While we cannot revisit the full debate here, we follow Levien (2013; 2017; 2018) and Hall (2013) in seeing primitive accumulation as too ambiguous a concept at the current conjuncture. While Hall (2013, 1195) points to the conceptual challenges that arise when different authors define primitive accumulation in very different ways – variously foregrounding its characteristics, consequences, or intentions – Levien (2013; 2017) asserts that land grabbing at a stage of advanced capitalist development requires a distinct and altogether different set of concepts than what is offered by classical Marxism. Levien considers Harvey’s (2004) work on accumulation by means 7
This holds true for the broader Indian pattern where land transactions on the scale required for industrial use are impossible to carry out without the active intervention of governments; or where the state and its administrative and judicial institutions and procedures, backed by the potential for punitive measures, are needed by investors (Nielsen and Oskarsson 2016; see also Chandra 2015).
30
The Great Goa Land Grab
other than expanded reproduction – as captured in the concept of accumulation by dispossession – a step forward, but critiques him for advancing an understanding of dispossession that is vague about mechanisms and overly capital-centric. To Levien, extra-economic coercion and a ‘fundamental and transparent reliance on state force’ (2017, 55) is the defining characteristic of the current land grab. In this sense, Levien foregrounds the centrality of state force in overcoming obstacles to accumulation. To account for why a state is willing to dispossess certain populations for certain purposes at certain historical conjunctures and with reference to certain normative or ideological justifications (as well as the extent to which it succeeds or fails in doing so), Levien gives us the concept of regimes of dispossession, defined as a socially and historically specific constellation of state structures, economic logics tied to particular class interests, and ideological justification that generate consistent patterns of dispossession (Levien 2013, 383). India has, Levien argues, witnessed a transition from a developmentalist regime of dispossession under the aegis of Nehruvian state capitalism, to a neoliberal regime of dispossession that emerged through state-led economic reforms from the 1990s and under which land is primarily dispossessed to be commodified (Levien 2018, 32). While Levien broadly speaks of a new pan-Indian neoliberal regime of dispossession, his empirical work locates specific regimes of dispossession at the level of India’s subnational states, where regimes are constituted by historically distinct state-specific processes within the broader federal state system.8 When scaled in this way, regimes of dis- possession can be deployed comparatively to ‘highlight variation in the robbers and what they do with their loot’ (Levien 2018, 17) across both temporal and spatial axes. Or, to put it differently, to variously understand historical transitions between regimes, as well as similarities and differences across contemporaneously existing regimes. Although the concept has been criticised for being ‘limited in its capacity to analyze differing dynamics of dispossession within such regimes’ (Kenney-Lazar 2018, 683), we rather argue that the flexibility of the concept enables comparative and empirically grounded analyses of the differing mechanisms and dynamics within 8
This focus on the sub-national scale aligns with other recent interventions in the Indian land grab debate that show how global trends play out unevenly, and how national policy directions are often largely normative (Sud 2014; Bedi and Tillin 2015; Nielsen and Bedi 2017).
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
31
and across actually existing regimes of dispossession. It is against this backdrop that we argue for the central role of inscription devices such as land use planning as ‘a means of looting’ within a state-specific regime of dispossession. Thus, while all spatial planning policies inevitably present land-use planning as a systematic and scientific technique that seeks the integrated management of the economic, social and physical resources of a spatially bounded area, we find good analytical and empirical reasons for seeing planning processes as implicated in regimes of dispossession that transfer landed wealth upwards. As a specific form of inscription device, planning documents and land use maps, and the classifications, graphs, charts and tables that constitute them, are not mere representations of space, nor are they simply descriptive. They are prescriptive to the extent that they hold a certain power to create and convey authority over territory (Wood and Fels 2008): they carry the weight of law and state machinery and have real effects. At the same time, as we show empirically below, they are contested terrains. Once made, plans can be challenged, recalibrated and rewritten multiple times in response to the working of contingent social forces (Fogelman and Bassett 2017) from both ‘above’ and ‘below’. Our argument that land use planning is integral to state-specific regimes of dispossession rests on an empirically observable general shift in the role and function of planning in India. From the time of independence and in accordance with the tenets of Nehruvian state capitalism, a Planning Commission was crucial in determining the goals of national development, ostensibly in isolation from the churnings and squabbles of politics (Chatterjee 1997).9 While the importance of the national Planning Commission began to decline already from the 1960s (Frankel 2005), urban development continued to be dominated by the state up until the 1990s. Public Housing Boards and various urban development authorities exercised strong control over residential construction, and regulations were in place to check land speculation and assure housing for the poor. In contrast to China which retains and even expands a highly centralised form of landuse planning embedded in national land administration laws, long-term as well as annual land-use master plans, and intricate nationally scaled quota systems determining land-use changes 9
The Planning Commission was dissolved in 2014 and replaced by a new institution called NITI Ayog.
32
The Great Goa Land Grab
(Chen 2013; 2019), India’s model of state-led urban planning and development has crumbled after the liberalisation of the economy gathered momentum in 1991. Instead, the sub-national states (and municipalities) have become increasingly important in opening up land-based urban development to private corporations (Searle 2016, 29).10 These empowered sub-national states benefit from land and land use planning being largely state subjects, and there are significant interstate variations in terms of the composition of the agencies associated with spatial planning, their respective functions, and the extent of their planning endeavours (Kulshrestha 2012, 28). For example, while a majority of Indian states are strongly orientated towards urban planning, some states such as Maharashtra, Punjab and Karnataka have given some focus to rural and regional planning alongside town planning (Routra 1993, 64–67).11 But only Goa has a planning policy that covers the entire state. Practically all states have State Planning Boards who are expected to formulate five-year and annual plans at the state level. For the purpose of managing land resources all states were expected to form State Land Use Boards in 1974. Thereafter they were requested by the Union government to prepare a Policy for Land Use in 1986, but in practice, only Uttar Pradesh and Kerala formulated a draft land-use policy (Bhat 2010, 292). The variation is considerable. Studies have shown how the centralised and hierarchical distribution of quotas for planned farmland conversion, preservation, and replacement within the Chinese system of land-use planning has been important in assembling land and rendering it an abstract and spatially mobile commodity (Chen 2013; 2019; Zhang and Wu 2015). Within the centralised Chinese planning set-up, the quota system thus functions as an instrument of dispossession insofar as it ‘successfully divorces [land] from village livelihoods in a process of dispossession and enclosure’ (Chen 2013, 105) with highly disruptive local impacts. Comparably, the 10
11
In spite of the more centralised and nationally scaled modality of land-use planning in China, the contrast to India should not be overdrawn. In China, local states are the most active force pushing forward rural land commodification, which is generally orchestrated and led by local states (Zhang and Wu 2015). In spite of centralisation, a good deal of land churning is enabled by collusion between township, subdistrict, and village officials with local bureaus of the Ministry of Land and Resources (Chen 2019, 340), which often adapt implementation rules to the specific needs and conditions of local governments (Chen 2013, 111). While there is a strong urban bias in planning the same is still limited: out of the 7,935 towns and cities enumerated by the 2011 Census only about 1,800 had master plans (Bedi and Mahavir 2013).
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
33
growing literature on land dispossession and conflict in India shows how planning, planning institutions, and planning documents transform into and operate as instruments of dispossession within statespecific regimes. Levien’s study of land dispossession for a SEZ in Rajasthan shows how the Jaipur Development Authority was rapidly transformed into a machine geared towards dispossessing land for urban expansion. This ‘machine’ relied not just on outright coercion at the point of dispossession, but also on the manipulation of advance information and bribes, and on a multitude of bureaucratic procedures and their attendant inscription devices such as illicit conversions, zoning exemptions, and various approvals that could be granted or withheld on a discretionary basis (Levien 2018). The trajectory of the Delhi Development Authority offers an even more illustrative example of these transformations in Indian urban planning. The dominant planning instrument in Delhi is the Delhi Master Plan, a legally enforceable document outlining the arrangement of land uses and attendant policies. Until the late 1990s, Delhi’s land was managed by a policy of socialised land but, as with the Jaipur Development Authority, the Delhi Development Authority have repositioned themselves as facilitators and regulators of private participation in urban development according to new aesthetic norms that foreground a world-class aesthetics over the interests of the poor and marginalised, who are routinely evicted (Bhan 2016; Chakravarty and Negi 2016; Ghertner 2015).12 Comparable land dispossession patterns embedded in the planning process can be found across small and large Indian metros. In Bangalore, non-elected administrative bodies and para-statal agencies govern urban land planning, an approach other Indian cities seek to mimic despite its undemocratic nature (Goldman 2011). Here, land speculation and dispossession of those working and living in the rural periphery is now the main business of government, and the management of dispossessive practices the main source of revenue and wealth accumulation (Goldman 2011). In Goa, a nexus of private interests and government officials dominate land use decisions in the state. Some families hold both private stakes in land deals and elected office simultaneously, and Goan politicians actively use land as a resource to attract private capital investments. The ability to manipulate planning, we argue, is a key tool in this en12
Like the Jaipur Development Authority, the Delhi Development Authority has used the power of eminent domain to assemble thousand of acres from the hundreds of villages around the capital, making it the largest land-holding agency in the state.
34
The Great Goa Land Grab
deavour. As in other Indian states studied by Sud (2017), more or less informal networks connecting families, real estate ventures and government officials thus work to enlist the planning process in projects that aim to free up land for private capital investment.13 Zooming in on the centrality of land use planning in enabling dispossession in Goa, we start by tracing the creation, evolution and unravelling of successive regional plans for Goa over time to show how regional planning processes that were originally introduced to sustainably manage the state’s landed resources have, over time, been increasingly geared towards the production of inscription devices that facilitate dispossession and the assembling of land for private investments. We start by offering a brief background to the regional planning process. Regional Planning in Goa Within the broader Indian landscape, Goa is unique insofar as it is the only state to have a spatial plan that covers the entire state. It is also the only state in which the planning process and its outcomes have been so intensely contested through popular, broadbased mobilisation from below. Indeed, Goa has India’s perhaps most vibrant civil society that has politicised land and the environment to a high degree. In 1964, the Goan state established the Town and Country Planning (TCP) Department (Coelho 2009) to develop the state in a planned manner. Later, in 1974, the government passed the Goa, Daman and Diu Town and Country Planning Act, which empowered the government to create a regional plan for the state where development would be undertaken without compromising the state’s natural resources. Under this act, the Chief Town Planner was required to prepare a socio-economic plan known as a Regional Plan for Goa, and to integrate this with a land-use plan (LuP) covering the entire surface of the state. The LuP was to functionally provide the spatial expression of the goals and objectives of the RP and took the form of a zoning plan demarcating areas for different human uses, including agriculture, forestry, industry, urban and rural settlements, etc. Once this demarcation exercise was complete and the LuP notified, the ‘zoning’ of land for these different uses was fixed, and development work carried out in contravention of the regional plan in force forbidden (Alvares 2002, 271). To ensure plan 13
According to Sud (2017, 88) such networks are invaluable ‘conduits for the transfer of information, access to the state, capital, business experience, and more’.
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
35
stability, no changes were allowed to the LuP for five years after its notification. Given the small size of Goa, and its very limited landed resources, the need to judiciously manage land was felt more urgently and at an early stage compared to other parts of India. Thus, to address growing concerns related to land use and environmental degradation, the Government of Goa in 1981 started the process of creating the first actual regional plan, the ‘Regional Plan for Goa 2001’ (RP-2001). The LuP corresponding to RP-2001 framed the state’s land-use vision for a period of approximately fifteen years. The RP-2001 and the LuP that specified zoning for the entire state was the first of its kind in India (Chandra 2016, 119). Through such planning exercises Goa has had three regional plans: RP-2001 notified in 1986; RP-2011 notified in 2006 and RP-2021 notified in phases over 2010 (State Level Committee for RPG2021, 2010) and 2011 (State Level Committee for RPG-2021, 2011a & 2011b). Once the government finalised the RP and its corresponding LuP was notified, it became legally enforceable. While all three regional plans had different sub-objectives, their overarching officially stated goal was consistent: to balance economic growth with environmental protection and the preservation of agricultural lands. In line with our view of planning documents – comprising of RP documents and LuP – as inscription devices, we draw from the experience of the three distinct regional planning exercises in Goa to trace the unfolding contestation over planning and to map out the successive modalities of intervention used to facilitate land dispossession. Indicatively, both the planning process when plans are prepared and the final plans themselves, as well as their implementation, have been mired in controversy and have evoked strong reactions from Goan civil society. RP-2011, for example, was eventually cancelled in 2007 following sustained social protests, while the RP-2021 was partially ‘frozen’, i.e. suspended (following popular protests) from 2012 to 2018.14 Regional Planning and the RP-2001 The government explicitly formulated the first regional plan, RP-2001 (Government of Goa 1986), to resolve conflicts between conservation and development (Alvares 2002, 277). Our analysis of its implemen14
Although we do not engage it explicitly here, there is a large literature on social movements in India, e.g. Shah (2004); Ray and Katzenstein (2005); Nilsen and Nielsen (2016).
36
The Great Goa Land Grab
tation illustrates how the political elite soon introduced legislative amendments to empower the government to make piecemeal zone changes to the finalised LuP.15 While the formal planning architecture in Goa had been developed during the era of Nehruvian state capitalism, the notification of the first operative regional plan, the RP2001, occurred when India was accelerating the liberalisation of its economy and transitioning to a neoliberal regime of dispossession. Thus, while it was envisaged at the time of the notification in 1986 that the RP-2001 and its accompanying LuP would be frozen for a period of five years, the rapidly changing economic environment and the growing demands for land from investors in a neoliberalising order led to a provision being made within just two years of its notification to accommodate private requests for additional land-use changes in the regional plan. Specifically, the statelegislature made an amendment to the TCP Act in 1988 that empowered the TCP Board (and thereby the state government) to change the LuP ‘at any time after a regional plan has been published in the Official Gazette’16 (Section 17), thus eliminating the ‘no changes for five years’ clause. Following this amendment, the modus operandi of enabling land use changes would be that private parties, individuals and institutions made applications for zone changes, which were then considered by the TCP Board who could accept or reject the application after studying the case. If the TCP Board approved the application, the ‘proposed’ zone changes were made public through the government gazette; if the TCP Board received no objections, a second government gazette notification notified the zone change as ‘final’. This is a modality of land use change by stealth that is well known from particularly urban contexts elsewhere in India, in which land use changes are quietly enabled through similar practices of ‘informality from above’ (Roy 2009, 84), that is, in ad hoc, discretionary ways that do not generate public attention. Thus, even if gazette notifications are technically in the public domain, few people in practice regularly read these gazettes, and even if they did, it would take considerable investigate work to piece together the many isolated notifications into a broader picture. 15
16
The analysis in this and the following sections is based on co-author Da Silva’s doctoral research (Da Silva 2019). The only other full-length study that substantially engages planning in Goa is to our knowledge Puttaraju (2014), who writes from a more technical perspective. A Gazette prints official notices from the government.
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
37
There is ample evidence to suggest that the amendment to the TCP Act was brought to satisfy the industrial lobby and, especially, the tourist and hotelier lobby. Among the first 28 zone changes made already in 1988 immediately after the amendment, eight were for industries and six for tourism related projects. This provision was also used to allow Thapar-Dupont to set up a hugely controversial Nylon 66 factory project in Goa (Alvares 2002, 271; see also Sampat 2015). During the period from November 1988 to February 2005 when zoning changes were made under the amended section, the TCP Board approved a full 2,241 requests for changing zones through which approximately 12.19 square km were re-zoned (see Table 1). A vast majority of the changes involved the conversion of agricultural land (71 percent) while another 21 percent has involved the conversion of natural cover. Most of the area was re-zoned for settlement and commercial uses (54 percent), while another 38 percent was re-zoned for industrial use. Table 1.1: Change made to LuP of RP-2001 through gazette notifications.
Land-use/Zone changed to Year 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Totals
No. of changes Settlement Industrial Others 28 47 86 64 81 121 138 113 137 120 146 105 237 250 260 134 165 9 2241
7 40 67 42 43 100 69 77 92 100 116 69 178 170 173 77 108 9 1537
8 6 8 4 4 12 6 12 8 8 26 9 7 12 12 6 5 0 153
13 1 11 18 34 9 63 24 37 12 4 27 52 68 75 51 52 0 551
Given the power of the TCP Department to convert land, it is widely regarded as a lucrative portfolio. The amendment that permitted the RP2001 to be repeatedly changed gave enormous discretionary powers to
38
The Great Goa Land Grab
the TCP Minister, the TCP Board, and the officials of the department. Land use changes to the regional plans were often used in a transactional manner by political parties and individual politicians, who used them to secure political allies, renew loyalties, extract rents, and command favours in return for zoning ‘exemptions’. While we return to this point later, what is important to note here is that while applications for land use changes were supposed to be permitted only after satisfying certain technical and environmental conditions, in practice these were carried out arbitrarily without justifications for the changes. As a result, private investors bought the land they wanted with confidence that they could – via their informal links to the TCP Department – have the zoning changed to regularise the new use to which they intended to put the land (Alvares 2002, 272), thus dispossessing erstwhile owners of the increase in land valuation. Additionally, a ‘sons of the soil’ argument was effectively used by Goan hoteliers to impress upon the TCP Department that the RP, and hence its corresponding zoning plan, should be used in ways that benefited Goan capital and native Goan entrepreneurs, rather than ‘outsiders’ from other Indian states. While the state-business nexus evidently operated at the level of planning and land use documents, it was supplemented on the ground by strongarm tactics as local government officials collaborated with prospective investors to coerce, harass or bully unwilling sellers to part with their plots (Trichur 2013, 114–115). Thus, while the zoning of RP2001 forbade constructions in low-lying coastal areas and on areas covered by ecologically sensitive sand dunes – a zoning that severely restricted the ability of hoteliers to expand their business – Goa’s coastal areas in practice saw a rapid increase in the number of hotels and related services. The practice of stealthily freeing up land for private investors by ad hoc discretionary changes to the regional plan through gazette notifications – coupled with the use of strong-arm tactics when required – continued for a full 17 years. Opposition was limited to small groups of informed social activists, but failed to spread into widespread public dissent. The practice of changing the zoning only came to a halt in February 2005 when Goa came under President’s rule during a period of considerable political instability, with the governor ordering the practice to be stopped. Tellingly, the government that assumed office after President’s rule sought to circumvent the Governor’s decision by promulgating an ordinance to (re)enable the government to carry out the practice of effecting changes in the regional plan based on indi-
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
39
vidual applications, but this was widely condemned by a recently mobilised citizenry in the state and the ordinance ultimately lapsed. In contrast, Goa’s two subsequent regional plans would generate much wider popular dissent that would make it substantially more difficult for politicians and bureaucrats to use the above-described modality of making illicit land use changes. With RP-2011 that we turn to below, we thus arrive at another phase in which the confrontation between contending social forces in the domain of land use planning becomes more pronounced. Accommodating Private Interests in RP-2011 The government initiated the preparation of the second Regional Plan, RP-2011 in 19971998. Government officials outsourced the task to a Delhi-based private firm, Consultancy Private Services, who submitted a draft of the RP-2011 in 2005. This draft version of the RP2011s LuP was open for public comment from November 2005 to August 2006. Subsequently notified as the final RP-2011, the plan represents a new modality of intervention from above, one that is comparable to yet different from that described above. Rather than attempting to stealthily change the plan once it had been finalised, politicians and bureaucrats sought to use the much shorter window of opportunity between the presentation of the draft plan and the notification of the final plan to rezone land in response to ‘requests’ made by investors. Zoning changes were thus woven into the drafting process, but kept out of public view. In the Tiracol vignette detailed earlier, the consultancy Handsell Goa Pvt. Ltd. was directly involved in ‘requesting’ that several survey numbers be converted from orchard to settlement, as well as in several similar zoning changes under RP-2011. This practice would, as shown later, ultimately be exposed and obstructed by popular mobilisation from below. As indicated, under RP-2011 the TCP Board approved en-masse land conversions during the nine months window of opportunity when the draft LuP was open for public scrutiny. The draft RP-2011 had itself proposed to increase the area zoned for settlement purposes by 11.53 percent when compared to its predecessor, RP-2001. However, when the plan came to be notified (i.e. the final RP-2011) it was found that there was an additional 21 percent increase in the total area zoned as settlement. These included conversions of prime real-estate locations such as picturesque areas, hill slopes, and agricultural land and seaside
40
The Great Goa Land Grab
areas. In addition, the final regional plan also envisaged a fourfold increase in mining areas. This was stated in the policy document but not depicted in the land-use map of the RP-2011. However, in light of the growing public awareness of how RP-2001 had been manipulated, within weeks after the RP-2011 was notified and made operational a number of civil society groups and individuals began studying the corresponding LuP and raised apprehensions that large-scale zone changes appeared to have been made in the final version of RP-2011. Indeed, a main difference between the manipulation of RP-2001 and RP-2011 that appears to have enabled a more broad-based mobilisation from below around the latter, is that whereas changes were stealthily made to RP-2001 in a piecemeal way over nearly two decades, changes to RP-2011 were made en-masse and within a span of less than a year. These changes were thus potentially easier to detect and analyse. Several different civil society groups alleged that these zone changes were done in a clandestine manner. News regarding illicit conversions soon spread and concerned citizens in many different localities started to undertake more local studies to detect and expose such rezoning by stealth. They identified real estate developers and the tourism lobby as the main culprits and argued that these had exercised discretionary influence with the TCP Department (Sampat 2015, 774–775). The fact that the plan also envisaged a dramatic increase in mining pointed to the influence of the mining industry on the zoning process. Importantly, while the mobilisation around opposition to RP-2011 was started by a small group of professionals and activists, it soon evolved into a broader social movement as different groups and individual activists coalesced into a federation called the Goa Bachao Abhiyan (GBA), convened by Dr Oscar Rebello. The GBA spearheaded a movement against the RP-2011 known as the ‘Save Goa Movement’, which has been described as an ‘alliance across caste, class, gender and community difference’ (Sampat 2015, 767). Unlike what had been the case with RP-2001, the GBA could thus successfully mobilise large sections of the public to demand the cancellation of RP-2011, and call for a Central Bureau of Investigation enquiry to be initiated with regard to the massive zoning changes ‘made without public knowledge’. GBA demanded that a new plan be prepared by first amending the Goa TCP Act, 1974, to incorporate the provisions of the 73rd and 74th Consti-
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
41
tutional Amendments pertaining to empowering decentralized institutions of local government in both rural and urban areas, and vowed to empower the gram sabhas to plan their own villages by conducting training workshops. Several gram sabhas passed resolutions demanding that RP-2011 be scrapped. The Save Goa Movement intensified in December 2006, and in January 2007, the state government decided to withdraw the RP-2011 and revoke all construction permissions issued on the basis of the plan. In addition to illustrating the capacity of popular mobilisation from below to undermine the efficacy of planning as a tool of dispossession, the controversy surrounding RP-2011 exposed the ways in which political parties and individual politicians in Goa used the TCP Department to extract rents, secure allies, and form governing coalitions. We see this most clearly in the political career of Atanasio Monseratte who was elected to the state legislative assembly in 2002 from the United Goans Democratic Front. After the election, his party provided vital support to the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, allowing it to remain in office. Monseratte was, in turn, rewarded with the TCP Ministry. However, in 2004 he was stripped of his portfolio following allegations of corruption and rent seeking. Soon after, Monseratte engineered a series of defections of BJP legislators to the main opposition party, the Congress (Sastry 2005). By 2005, the BJP government had been reduced to a minority, was forced to resign, and was replaced by a Congress government who promptly reinstated Monseratte as TCP Minister. While overseeing the finalisation of RP-2011 in 2006, Monseratte – according to later Income Tax Department investigations – received kickbacks worth a quarter of a billion Indian Rupees from land sharks to convert large chunks of land in prime locations into settlement or commercial zones (Times of India 2012).17 With RP-2011 thus repealed in 2007, the former RP-2001 once again became the law of the land. In the Tiracol case, this had the effect that the zoning of the land acquired by Leading Hotels now reverted back 17
A comparable example of the use of the TCP Ministry in stitching together governing coalitions occurred after the 2017 state assembly election. Having failed to win a majority on its own, the BJP formed a coalition government with the Goa Forward Party by offering its party leader the TCP Ministry. In 2019, when the government was on the verge of losing its majority in the assembly, ten opposition MLAs defected and joined the BJP, thus ensuring government stability. As part of the deal, the incumbent TCP Minister from the Goa Forward Party was stripped of his portfolio which was instead handed over to the leader of the defectees.
42
The Great Goa Land Grab
to the zoning specified in RP-2001, that is, it reverted from ‘settlement’ back to cultivable land/orchard, zoning categories that from the point of view of hotel and real estate developers rendered the land useless. RP-2021 and the Circumvention of Planning As the GBA’s convenor, Dr Oscar Rebello, would note, the Save Goa Movement managed to ‘create awareness towards environmental sensitivity in the minds of the masses’ (Coelho 2009, 114). By the time the development of RP-2021 was set in motion in 2007, this awareness had been further bolstered by a strong, statewide popular movement against the setting up of SEZs in Goa. Higher awareness and enhanced public scrutiny thus shaped the development of the RP-2021. In an attempt to avoid controversy akin to that which erupted around RP-2011, the government constituted a Task Force comprised of town planners, architects, and representatives from the local chamber of commerce and civil society. On the one hand, the voice of social movements thus in theory found their way into the very heart of the planning process. On the other hand, as we elaborate below, the issue of whether GBA activists should agree to be included in the Task Force led to fractures within the movement. The Task Force had the responsibility to prepare a draft regional plan that would provide a set of guidelines for the RP-2021 formulation. The case of RP-2021 that we turn to below illustrates a new phase in the contestation over planning, a phase in which government officials would eventually seek to enable land dispossession through the creation of new zoning categories alongside creating the impression of increased public participation in the planning process during the preparatory phase of the plan. Subsequently, a new modality of intervention from above was adopted during the plan’s implementation phase when popular mobilisation once more threatened to derail the entire process. This modality involved the passing of legislative instruments that enabled select projects and parties to override adherence to the notified LuP, thus rendering planning irrelevant and circumventing Task Force or broader public scrutiny. The Task Force prepared a draft regional plan in October 2007 (Task Force for RPG2021, 2008). It included a future socio-economic and environmental vision for the state, and draft versions of high quality zoning plans for each panchayat and the municipalities. The draft was prepared by collating information from various government departments
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
43
and other imaging sources such as land surveys, topographical charts and satellite imagery. As part of the guidelines, popular participation was ensured by sharing the zoning plans with every panchayat and municipality who would constitute committees that would verify the plans through ground level inspections and provide inputs about requirements and future land-uses for the respective villages. The plan made significant steps to protect vulnerable lands. It suggested that, in order to address the pressure to convert land, ecologically sensitive areas should be protected by listing certain land uses where no development was allowed. This included forests, mangroves, water bodies and paddy fields that were marked as Ecologically Sensitive Zones-1 (ESZ-1) where development was prohibited. The plan used the category ESZ-2 for lands where limited development was permitted, including orchards, cultivable land, saltpans, fish farms and mud flats. ESZ-1 and ESZ-2 protected close to two lakh hectares and one lakh hectares respectively. In addition, the plan delineated a one kilometre ‘no development zone’ as a buffer around wildlife sanctuaries and national parks. Soon, however, bureaucrats attempted to undermine these categories by introducing new zoning categories and shifting land from one category to another. Notably, a new zoning category called ‘natural cover’ was created within the ESZ-2 by reallocating land from orchard land and private forests, general tree cover and social forests. Government officials moved more than 10,000 hectares from ESZ-1 to the less protected ESZ-2 category. Officials also modified the land use policy to permit several additional land uses in ESZ-2 areas. These included eco-tourism projects in cultivable, orchard or natural cover zones and agro-based eco-tourism in cultivable lands akin to farmhouses (State Level Committee for RPG-2021 2010, 26–27). These changes represents a significant deviation from the objective of the RP regarding participation and transparency as no explanation was given for how officials created a new zoning category or how the government prioritised the ecotourism projects and the six specific sites marked out for these on the zoning maps. In fact, it appears that using natural cover zoning and assigning eco-tourism sites was a way of reintroducing projects that had been stalled when the RP-2011 was repealed. For example, in Tiracol, the land acquired by Leading Hotels now appeared as an eco-tourism zone; this enabled the group to push ahead with its plans to convert
44
The Great Goa Land Grab
Tiracol into a hotel and golf resort. Additionally, officials introduced two other new land use zones: ‘Institutional’ and ‘Micro Industrial Zones’. Educational and religious organisations are permitted to introduce zone changes in Institutional Zones. As for Micro Industrial Zones, RP-2021 proposed to reserve areas of up to five hectares in each village panchayat with a projected population of 10,000 by 2021 (State Level Committee for RPG-2021 2010, 29–30). In contrast, the plan admits general negligence in several other fields of intervention: no initiative was taken on several key issues such as surveying and mapping agricultural fields; no critical area plans for high density coastal tourist areas were commissioned; proposed growth centres were not set up nor was hinterland connectivity enhanced by new road networks (State Level Committee for RPG-2021 2010, 2); and surveys to pave the way for affordable housing were not carried out. While selective changes to the ESZ1 and ESZ2 categories were thus made to open up new spaces for private actors to acquire land, selective inaction in other spheres made sure that no comparable efforts were made to preserve agriculture, limit the impact of unsustainable tourism or ensure affordable housing. The finalisation of the plan involved receiving and processing participatory inputs from the village panchayats. However when the RP-2021 was finalised the TCP Department admitted also receiving more than 8,500 requests from individuals in addition to comments from local bodies (State Level Committee for RPG-2021 2010, 6). While the TCP Department had an established procedure for changing or not changing the zoning, the case-by-case details explaining the basis on which applications for zone change were accepted or rejected was never made public. Repeated attempts by activists to obtain this information using Right to Information applications also failed to elicit a response from the TCP Department. Thus, while the RP-2021 allowed citizens to provide inputs for the regional plan, discretionary power was retained by the government (Fernandes 2003) and TCP Department with regard to whether to incorporate or discard inputs from below. Like its predecessor the RP-2011, the RP-2021 also faced opposition from civil society and party political activists, albeit on a somewhat lesser level of coordination. Civil society groups compared the notified zoning plans under RP-2021 for their respective villages with the ones prepared by them as part of the participatory planning process and al-
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
45
leged that many of their inputs and suggestions had not been incorporated. Further, they claimed that there were many zoning changes made in their villages that had never been recommended by the Village Level Committees or gram sabhas. These, they alleged, were generally done to favour real estate companies. There was also popular opposition to the creation of new zoning categories like ‘natural cover’ and ‘Micro Industrial Zone’, as well as – in the case of Tiracol, for instance – new ecotourism and agro-tourism zones which had never been deliberated upon by local bodies but rather appeared out of the blue. However, popular opposition to RP-2021 was more fragmented than earlier. For example, when the GBA early on in the process decided to withdraw its members from the Task Force, the convener resigned and many members left the organisation in protest. Civil society was also divided on the question of whether the flaws in RP-2021 could be corrected and the plan salvaged, or whether the plan was fundamentally flawed in design so that it should be outright rejected. While the latter view was articulated most forcefully by a group called Goencho Awaz (Voice of Goa), it never led to a mass-movement on the scale of the Save Goa Movement. Moreover, the plan was finalised in four phases spanning two years, something that prevented civil society actors from getting a comprehensive view of the zoning changes in their entirety. Lastly, the fact that a newly elected BJP-led government that assumed office in 2012 soon ‘suspended’ RP-2021 ostensibly in order to ‘correct’ it meant that sections of civil society adopted a ‘wait and watch’ attitude. Several factors thus combined at this conjuncture to partially dampen, partially fragment popular mobilisation from below. In light of the controversy – generated by activists and popular movements – surrounding all three regional plans, the ability of political elites and private sector interests to free up land through the manipulation of regional planning had clearly, at this conjuncture, become not only more contentious, but also more difficult. At the same time, the demand for land from the sectors we identified at the beginning of this chapter showed no signs of abating. This registered, we argue, in new strategies from above that proceeded along two tracks. On the one hand, ministers and bureaucrats continued to seek new ways of retaining land use planning as a key tool within the current regime of dispossession. On the other hand, the same actors simultaneously sought, via new legislative means, to render the increasingly contested planning process less relevant for determining the uses to which land in
46
The Great Goa Land Grab
Goa could be put. In this unfolding phase, we thus encounter an evolving fourth modality of intervention from above, one that works both with and against planning by simultaneously co-opting and selectively bypassing it, and by enhancing the scope for dispossession by force and fiat. Dispossession Beyond Planning Within the domain of the planning process proper, and even as the government finalised the RP-2021, an amendment was made in 2008 inserting section 16A to the TCP Act, 1974– the act that underpins the planning process – which permitted government projects to be exempted entirely from the provisions of the regional plan. Projects, schemes, or development works that are undertaken by the government ‘either by himself or’ through his servant or agent or any other person, as the amendment vaguely states, were henceforth exempt from the provisions of the regional plans which were thus effectively bypassed. As a result, more than 70 government projects have been approved causing the conversion of orchard, agriculture, forested and even specifically designated ‘no development zones’ (i.e. ESZ-1) into settlements or institutional land uses.18 Thus, the amendments have allowed the government to effectively override the policy and zoning provisions of the regional plans. Towards a similar end, the TCP Minister in 2018 introduced a new section 16B to the TCP Act that empowers the Chief Town Planner to consider requests ‘from any person for change of zone of his land in the Regional Plan.’ This, in effect, constitutes a return of earlier modalities of dispossession by stealth associated with the very first regional plan, RP-2001, under which authorities could effect land use changes at their own discretion and on a case by case basis. Both amendments are, we argue, attempts from above at working with the planning framework so as to retain it as a useful tool within the current regime of dispossession. However, the declining efficacy of planning as a tool of dispossession in a context characterised by a growing demand for land led to new initiatives from above that worked against the planning framework. In 2014, the Government of Goa passed the Investment Promotion Act, 2014, with the objective of ‘kick-starting investments’ in the state. An Investment Promotion Board was set up in order to make the process 18
Response given in Goa Legislative Assembly to Unstarred Question No. 18 ‘Change of Zone’, 24 July 2017.
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
47
of investment simple and quick, and was empowered to declare areas for ‘investment promotion’ to exempt them from the provisions of the regional plans and its related zoning regulations. In fact, the act enables the Investment Promotion Board to override all state, town and village-level laws related to clearing industrial growth. Investment promotion projects include undertakings by private as well as government agencies. In only three years, more than 100 projects have been cleared using this mechanism.19 A comparable purpose has been served by the recent passing of new laws governing land use to dilute or supersede existing laws and regulations. While the emergence of these laws must be understood in light of the state-specific trajectory of regional planning, it is important to note that at this conjuncture, the introduction of the national Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (LARR), 2013, in place of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act, had considerably undermined the states’ capacity for exercising the right of eminent domain.20 As a result, many state governments soon tabled new bills seeking to circumvent and/or dilute LARR (Kohli and Gupta 2017). In Goa, these include the Goa Requisition and Acquisition of Property Bill, 2017,21 and the Goa Compensation to the Project Affected Persons and Vesting of Land in the Government Act, 2017. Formally, the former seeks to provide for the speedy acquisition of immovable property for certain public purposes (Government of Goa 2017a, 12), while the latter purports to provide the right of compensation to persons affected by a land acquisition, and to ensure that they are adequately compensated (Government of Goa 2017b, 6). Yet it is clear that the main reason for introducing the two bills in tandem is first and foremost to make land acquisitions and transfers swifter and cheaper, and to reduce the many administrative and legal complications that often accompany them (Nielsen, Bedi, and Da Silva 2017), including those embedded in the regional planning process. Towards this end, both bills operate with very expansive definitions of ‘public purpose’ that 19 20
21
Response given in Goa Legislative Assembly to Unstarred Question No. 10 ‘Projects Approved by Investment Promotion Board’, 7 August 2017. At the same time, land pooling schemes under town planning laws that had been proposed in other states as a less ‘coercive’, more voluntaristic alternative to outright land acquisition were unable to entirely eliminate controversy and contestation over land. See e.g. Sampat (2016) and Kolstø (2019) for critical case studies, and ASCI (2016) for a general assessment. This bill has not yet been passed as an act.
48
The Great Goa Land Grab
can, in principle, cover a range of purposes, including transport, communication, irrigation, drainage, tourism promotion, slum clearances, industrial estates, medical and educational institutions, mining, bus stands, airports and truck terminals (Government of Goa 2017a, 2–3). In line with pan-Indian developments (Kohli and Gupta 2017), the two new Goan bills further expand the notion of public purpose; in effect vest acquired land in the government encumbrance free irrespective of whether that land actually has encumbrances or not (Almeida 2017); and omit any discussion of consent and participation by people who stand to lose their land. Crucially, while the High Court and Supreme Court are allowed to entertain disputes relating to land acquisition, no court is empowered to grant injunction. This represents a return to the spirit (if not the letter) of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act. And, in combination, these new legislative instruments effectively bypass many of the provisions of the regional planning process and reduce the scope for popular mobilisation from below to influence land use decisions. Conclusion We began this chapter with Li’s (2014) observation that land is not like a mat that can simply be rolled up and carried elsewhere. Land has not only a particular location, but also a rich set of values, meanings and uses to which it can be put. Our aim in this chapter has been to analyse the work performed by planning in transforming land into an increasingly valuable commodity by assembling it as a resource available to private investors. Drawing on Li’s notion of inscription devices, we have mapped out the mechanisms used by politicians and bureaucrats to enlist the planning process to facilitate the dispossession of land in Goa. Nascent laws, Gazette notifications, various forms of zoning and rezoning, maps, and draft and finalised plans became devices wielded by government officials to shape land use and land dispossession in accordance with the interests of private investors. Planning in the Goan context thus stands out as a key instrument used to convert rural land into private real estate and attract investors, a process that has played out across India in recent decades, albeit in uneven ways (Levien 2018; Sud 2017). In this sense, planning has been an integral part of the evolution since the late 1980s of a distinct, neoliberalising Goan regime of dispossession. Although Goa’s planners crafted the state’s planning architecture during the era of a more ‘developmentalist’ regime of dispossession under Nehruvian state capitalism, the workings of the actual
Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa
49
inscription devices that eventually flowed from this architecture could be effectively aligned with the interests of state and private capital in a neoliberalising context through successive modalities of intervention from above. As such, the Goan regional planning process has been increasingly geared towards the production, circulation, and grounding of inscription devices that facilitate land dispossession and commodification under a neoliberal regime of dispossession. Whereas land use planning has not been consistently politicised nationally, Goans have explicitly enlisted the planning process to contest land-use changes. The statewide attention paid to the small land war in the remote Tiracol village exemplifies the contested nature of regional planning and its attendant forms of dispossession. As such, our empirical evidence highlights the capacity of civil society to politicise procedures and decisions in the domain of land use: The planning process offers possibilities for citizens and movements to engage and potentially contest and reshape land governance from below. Doing so, however, requires access to significant resources, knowledge and literacy – elements that are far from always readily accessible to popular antidispossession movements elsewhere in India. The unfolding dialectic between contending social forces on the contested terrain of land use planning within a particular regime of dispossession gives rise to shifting modalities of intervention from above in the planning process. These shifting modalities were shaped by the nature and contents of earlier plans; by the capacity of bureaucrats and politicians to enlist the plans and the planning process in a larger elite project of altering land use in the state; by the degree of mobilisation of counterforces in civil society, and by the larger political economy of land in India. Although planning inscription devices begin by manipulating land from afar, there are always tangible local implications. Within the span of just a few years, the Tiracol backwater went from comprising largely tenanted cultivated land and orchards, to becoming a prime real estate and golf location targeted by global investors. Then, overnight, it reverted to cultivable land of little value to investors, before it re-emerged, phoenix-like, as a prime eco-tourism site that was made physically transformable by a large team of security guards and heavy machinery. While we thus acknowledge the crucial role of popular mobilisation from below in shaping the planning process, it is striking to note the
50
The Great Goa Land Grab
ability of economic, political and bureaucratic elites to introduce successive modalities of intervention and new inscription devices that, in spite of temporary setbacks and concessions, ensured that the uneven trajectory of regional planning generally aligned with the interests of elites. Given that land (and related environmental questions) are politicised to a very high degree in Goa, and that the state has a highly organised and vibrant civil society, the ability of elite interests to effectively manage dispossessive practices raises broader questions about the capacity of India’s democratic institutions to manage and mediate contested land use practices. In China, the state responded to the contradictions and failures of the rural enclosures during the ‘development zone fever’ of the 1990s with much more strident forms of centralised regulation of rural land resources. Yet as Chen (2013, 108) notes, new forms of regulation have paradoxically created a system under which there are now more rather than fewer economic and policy incentives for enclosure and displacement. In India, policy makers at both state and national levels now claim that the solution to the contradictions and contestations that arise from multiple and often conflicting claims to scarce land can similarly be found in more comprehensive and systematic spatial planning. While such a new planning set-up is yet to emerge, the cumulative results of the Goan experience with spatial planning spanning three decades may indicate that the outcome of such an endeavour is unlikely to be a resolution of India’s land question. It may rather produce new forms of dispossession and contestation in the years to come.
2. Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of a Large Tourism Project in Tiracol, North Goa
N
pressures on land arise as wider economic changes unfold. In Goa, for example, the transformation from a predominantly agrarian economy to one where tourism, real estate, industry and mining have become dominant resulted in the demand for new kinds of predominantly non-agrarian land uses.22 EW
State-driven land regulation usually seeks to balance multiple societal objectives. This often includes growing an economy along with promoting social justice, protecting the environment and ensuring food security (promoting agriculture). In this vein, following Goa’s liberation from Portuguese colonialism in 1961 various governments have passed legislations that have secured agricultural tenants from eviction, protected agricultural and forest land, and devised regional and zoning plans to ensure safeguards from unbridled economic development in the state. Goa’s economy has undergone rapid transformation since liberation in 1961. The transformation has been even more pronounced following economic liberalisation in the late 1980s and early 22
This research was supported through a grant from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi (CSDS). The Principal Investigators included Dr Solano Da Silva, late Prof. Alito Siqueira, former Associate Professor, Dept. of Sociology at Goa University, and Prof. Peter Ronald deSouza, former Professor CSDS, Delhi and former Director IIAS, Shimla. Arch. (Ms.) Neha Naik served as a research assistant on the project.
52
The Great Goa Land Grab
1990s. Considering that the economy has been such a dynamic factor, land regulation in Goa, arguably, needs to keep up and requires periodic re-calibration. However, there has been a perceptible lag between Goa’s economic changes and the response from the state’s land regulation and policies. Over the last few decades as tourism, real estate, industry and mining have become drivers of Goa’s economy, various land regulations have come to be perceived by developers as an impediment to their ‘development’ projects. As land regulators have either struggled to grasp and keep up with the unfolding of new land pressures or deliberately chosen not to update their regulatory regimes, powerful economic interests have devised a range of manoeuvres (Sud 2014a) to sidestep and override the ‘impediments’ imposed by existing land regulations. This has often been in connivance with political and bureaucratic actors. However, not all of these manoeuvres have been successful. At times civil society groups have exposed and even stalled the execution of ‘development’ projects. The emergence of opposition to land grabbing and land dispossession – often invoking claims of social justice and environmental protection – has become increasingly prevalent in the country, often referred to as ‘India’s land wars’ (Shiva and Fontana 2011). This chapter reveals the processes that repeatedly play out in many land development projects in Goa. The methodology of a case study is used here to reveal the often-hidden manoeuvring of various land actors as they subvert existing land regulations or devise new policies to enable projects of ‘select’ developers. The case in focus is that of a large tourism project proposed in the village of Tiracol in Pernem taluka, in North Goa. As elsewhere in India, this tourism project too has been the target of concerted opposition from Tiracol villagers, who have organised to have the project stopped, and who have several times been successful in stalling or delaying its progress.23 However, in this chapter our focus largely remains on the manoeuvres – both within and beyond the domain of policy – of those actors actively seeking to free up land for 23
Opposition has been spearheaded by the St. Anthony’s Tenants and Mundkar Association (SATMA), formed in 2010, to protect the interests of tenants opposed to the project. It was headed by Mr. Francis Rodrigues. Among other strategies pursued, SATMA sought out the support of then Chief Minister Mr. Manohar Parrikar (with little effect); petitioned the Civil Registrar; approached the High Court assisted by Dr Claude Alvares and the Goa Foundation; and filed cases before the Administrative Tribunal.
Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
53
the project and take it forward. The chapter begins by providing a background sketch of the village of Tiracol focusing particularly on the land relations that existed in the village during the colonial era. The focus then shifts to the post-colonial period where various land-related legislations, regulations and policies were passed. These pertain mainly to tenancy, agricultural land-use, forest, and zoning laws. The chapter then describes the tourism project that was proposed in Tiracol going on to explain how the abovementioned land regulations posed as impediments to the execution of the project. The various ‘manoeuvres’ undertaken by various actors to circumvent these ‘impediments’ are then described. Background The village of Tiracol is located on the North-Western tip of the state of Goa bordering Maharashtra. It is an enclave of Goa surrounded by the Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra, which surrounded the Northern and Eastern borders of the village. It is separated from the main landmass of Goa by the Tiracol River. The Arabian Sea makes up the Western side of the village and the Southern side marks the mouth of the Tiracol River. The total landmass of the village is 13,84,000 m2 (138.4 ha). Geographically the village is constituted of large plateaus containing a mix of agricultural land and forests. Most of the settlements are located in a valley between two plateaus. In terms of population, according to the 2011 Census of India, Tiracol has 48 households comprising a population of 205 individuals, 115 are males and 90 females. The workforce comprises of 103 individuals. In terms of literacy, there are 165 literates: 98 males 67 females in the village. The village comprises almost exclusively of Christian Catholics. For administrative purposes, it forms part of a local body of governance, the Village Panchayat of Querim-Tiracol (VP Querim-Tiracol) which comes under the taluka24 of Pernem and which in turn falls within the jurisdiction of the district of North Goa. The landmass is subdivided into 16 land-survey numbers i.e. survey Nos. 1-16.25 Survey no. 1 is the location of the Tiracol fort which belonged to the Portuguese colonial government and following liberation came to be possessed by the Government of Goa. 24 25
Also called tehsil. Survey Plan and DSLR website: www.dslr.goa.nic.in
54
The Great Goa Land Grab
Land Relations in Tiracol during the Colonial Era During the colonial era, in 1889 the village was granted on perpetual lease by the Portuguese colonial government to an individual from Pernem known as Nagesh Shet Khalap. Over the generations, the Khalap family came to be the landlords or the bhatkars of the village. There were two types of tenants in the village: the first was agricultural tenants who were in turn distinguished between those associated with paddy cultivation and those associated with the cultivation of fruit-bearing trees such as cashew, coconut, areca nut and mangoes. The second type of tenants were mundkars 26 who were persons who whilst working on the property of the landlord also had a dwelling (residence) on the landlord’s property. A majority of the agricultural tenants were sharecroppers associated with the cultivation of fruit-bearing trees with only a few cultivating paddy. They used to pay rent in cash to the Khalap family.27 A majority of the agricultural tenants were simultaneously also mundkars. According to late Mr. Francis Rodrigues, a resident of Tiracol, ‘the residents of Tiracol are 100% agricultural tenants and 80% mundkars’. In terms of the land ownership pattern, there was one parcel of land held by the fort, while six other parcels were granted by the colonial administration to private individuals.28 Apart from these parcels, the remaining – approximately 12,50,000 m2 (~90% of the village area) – land was owned by the Khalaps. But most of it (12,37,500 m2 )29 was tenanted by agricultural tenants and mundkars. 26
27 28 29
‘The term Mundkar refers to a person who works in the property of another, plants trees, raises plantations and protects it. In return, he gets a dwelling house to live and remuneration in kind or cash or both for the work done in the property. The owner of the property in colloquial terms is called a Bhatkar and the word ‘Bhat’ means the property of the owner. The term Bhatkar and Mundkar therefore establish a relationship between land holder bhatkar and the person staying in his property to raise and protect his plantation and the term mundkarship refers to the relationship between the two. Source: Goa Law Commission, ‘Mundkars Legislation No. 1’ [online] from: http://goalawcommission.gov.in/reports/report1. pdf (Accessed on 4th Jan 2016). Interview with Francis Rodrigues, President of St Anthony Tenants and Mundkar Association (SATMA), Tiracol on 15th June 2015. Referred to as afframents. Three plots in the possession of the Khalaps did not have any tenants. These plots include survey Nos. 11/7(p), 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15, amounting to an area of 11,800 m2 , and two other smaller plots: one in survey No. 13 amounting to 200 m2 and another in survey No. 14 amounting to 500 m2 .
Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
55
Important Land Legislations Passed in the Post-Liberation Era Following Goa’s liberation from Portuguese rule in 1961, Goa joined the Indian union and entered a phase of democratic politics. With the democratic turn, governments came to be elected and a series of new land legislations and policies were passed. The first and most important of these protected agricultural tenants and mundkars from eviction and subsequently even made them ‘deemed owners’ of the parcels of land that they had tenanted. In due course, other important legislations and policies were passed which included land zoning (in the 1970s and 1980s); laws preventing the conversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural uses (in the 1990s); and the Union Government’s legislation protecting forest land (in the 1980s). This section describes each of these legislations and policies, and the implication they had for land relations, ownership, and land uses in Tiracol. Legislations Protecting Tenants With Goa’s integration with the Indian Union and its entry into electoral politics, the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) dominated Goa’s state legislative assembly from 1963 to 1978. The party had a strong voter base amongst bahujans and agricultural tenants (Parobo 2015) and it passed a series of legislations that were beneficial to tenants. The first of these was The Goa, Daman and Diu Agriculture Tenancy Act, 196430 (Tenancy Act, 1964) which declared that agricultural tenants were ‘protected tenants’ who could not be evicted. The original intent of the Act was to protect only those tenants associated with paddy cultivation. But after having secured the rights of these tenants the MGP government then began considering the protection of other agricultural tenants who used to tend to gardens or orchards consisting of plantations of coconut trees, areca nut trees, cashew trees or mango trees.31 To ensure their protection, in 1971 the government passed ‘The Goa, Daman and Diu Protection of Rights of Tenants (cashew nuts and areca nuts) Act 1971 (Almeida 2013, 223). This was a stopgap arrangement as subsequently the protection of these tenants was brought about through an important amendment to Tenancy Act, 1964 in 1976. The amendment – known as the Fifth Amendment – was partic30 31
Also known as The Goa Agricultural Tenancy Act, 1964. These plantations were also known as kula-ghars and were tenanted under the tolluk system where the tenants maintained watch and guard, and would get a share of the fruit that was plucked.
56
The Great Goa Land Grab
ularly significant for two reasons. First, it expanded the scope of agricultural tenants to include tenants of kula-ghars. Second, it vested quasiownership rights to the tenants by making them ‘deemed owners’ of the lands they were tenants on. In other words, on 18th October 1976 – the day the amendment was promulgated – all agricultural tenants were made ‘deemed owners’, and the date came to be known as ‘tiller’s day’. Another important provision in the Tenancy Act, 1964 placed an embargo on the transfer, sale and purchase of agricultural tenanted land. In other words, the agricultural tenants, even while being deemed owners, could neither sell these parcels of land nor could a third party buy them. The only exception being that the tenant could transfer the land by way of a mortgage to the government or a cooperative society that too for the explicit purpose of availing a loan for the purpose of farming. Around the same time, in 1975, the MGP government also sought to protect the mundkars who resided in houses within the properties of the landlords. To secure mundkars from eviction the MGP passed The Goa, Daman and Diu Mundkars (Protection from Eviction) Act, 1975 (Mundkar Act, 1975). According to the act the mundkars could, along with the house, also possess up to 300 m2 of land surrounding the habitation. Going a step further, the Government of Goa, thereafter, incorporated the Tenancy Act, 1964 including its 1976 amendment (i.e. the Fifth Amendment) and the Mundkar Act 1975 in the Ninth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, ensuring its protection from legislative review by arguing that the said acts were considered progressive legislation conceived in the interest of the public (Goltekar 2012; Upadhyaya 2015, 68-69). In this way, the Tenancy Act of 1964 and the Mundkar Act of 1975 were granted constitutional protection. Since the inhabitants of Tiracol were almost all agricultural tenants and mundkars the legislations had the following implications. When first passed, the Tenancy Act of 1964 only protected tenants associated with paddy cultivation and this only benefitted a few tenants as there were just a few paddy cultivators in the village.32 However, after passing the Goa, Daman and Diu Protection of Rights of Tenants (cashew nuts and areca nuts) Act in 1971 and incorporating the ‘Fifth Amendment’ to the Tenancy Act of 1964, this resulted in significant benefits for the agricul32
From fieldwork it was gathered that at the time there were only about three tenants who were cultivating paddy: Custodio Rodrigues, Santan J. Mendes and John Pereira.
Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
57
tural tenants since a vast majority of them used to tend to the coconut, cashew and mango orchards belonging to the properties of the Khalaps. In order to enumerate the various tenants, the Government of Goa had, prior to passing the legislations, carried out a land survey in 1969. Pernem taluka, in which the village of Tiracol falls, was the first taluka in the state where the survey was conducted. Tenancy claims could also be filed with the respective Mamlatdars and by 1992 almost all the tenants in Tiracol had submitted claims before the office of the Mamlatdar in Pernem, and in many cases orders had also been passed in the 1990s recognising them as tenants. Further, as a result of the Mundkar Act, 1975 most of the residents of Tiracol also obtained protection from being evicted from their tenanted residences. Thus, as a result of the land reforms, large tracks of land which were in the possession of the Khalaps came to be quasi-owned by the agricultural tenants; in addition, many of the tenants who were also mundkars – residing in houses – were protected from eviction. These legislations essentially extinguished landlordism in Tiracol and ended feudal relations in the village. Zoning Laws In the 1970s the Government of Goa passed the Goa Town & Country Planning Act 1974 (TCP Act, 1974) which instructed the Goa Town & Country Planning Department (TCP) to formulate a regional plan along with a zoning plan for the entire state. Importantly the TCP Act, 1974 required all development activities to conform to the zoning plan.33 The zoning plan prepared by the TCP Department became a basis upon which the Office of the Collectorate would issue a conversion certificate (locally known as a conversion sanad) for any proposed development or construction activity anywhere in the state. With regards to Tiracol, as per the zoning plan accompanying the state’s first regional plan in 198634 most of the village was zoned as cultivable and orchard zones with only a small – already fairly inhabited – portion zoned as settlement. Prohibition against the Conversion of Agricultural Tenanted Land In 1991 the Goa Land Use (Regulation) Act (Land Use Act, 1991) was passed which prohibited agricultural tenanted land from being used for non-agricultural purposes. The preamble to the Act indicated that it 33 34
TCP Act, 1974 Section 16. Goa Regional Plan – 2001 (RP-2001).
58
The Great Goa Land Grab
was enacted to regulate the use of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes. Though the Act was enacted in 1991, it was given retrospective effect from 2nd November 1990. Section 2 of the Act stated that parcels of land containing agricultural tenants, and falling under the purview of the Tenancy Act of 1964 could not be used for purposes other than agriculture: Notwithstanding anything contained in the Goa, Daman and Diu Town and Country Planning Act, 1974 or in any plan or scheme made thereunder or in the Goa Land Revenue Code, 1968, no land which is vested in a tenant under the provisions of the Goa, Daman and Diu Agricultural Tenancy Act, 1964 (Act 7 of 1964) shall be used or allowed to be used for any purpose other than agriculture. Reading the provisions of the Tenancy Act, 1964, the TCP Act, 1974 and the Land Use Act of 1991 implied that large swathes of land in Tiracol could not be converted for non-agricultural land uses. Prohibition against the Conversion of Forested Land According to the Indian Constitution, forests are on the concurrent list. The Union Government passed the Forest Conservation Act in 1980 (Forest Act, 1980) whereby state governments were not permitted to de-reserve or transfer forest land for non-forest purposes without the prior permission of the central government. Since many state governments did not accurately identify parcels of forest land in their respective states there were many instances where the provisions of the Forest Act were bypassed (Alvares 2002, 325-329). In 1996 following a landmark case in the Supreme Court35 and pursuant to the apex court’s directives, all state governments were expected to create an inventory of forests in their respective states. To do this, the Government of Goa initiated two surveys: one headed by S. Sawant in 1997 and another headed by H. Y. Karapurkar in 2000 respectively, to identify forests in privately held parcels of land. The two identified approximately 67 km2 of private forests in the state but also stated that the same would need to be verified. As recently as November 2012 the Government of Goa had constituted a private forest review committee to revisit and review 35
Writ Petition No. 202 of 1995, T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad vs.Union of India, Supreme Court of India.
Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
59
the areas previously identified as private forests. There were two teams constituted, one for each district. Following the constitution of the 2012 committee, the North Goa District Forest Committee submitted three field inspection reports related to their survey work in Tiracol. The three reports dated 15th May and 17th October 2013 identified survey numbers 4, 5, 6, 14 and 15 as private forests in the village of Tiracol. Following this, a re-inspection was carried out by the State Level Expert Committee (SLEC) who submitted their report on 10th June 2014 and stated that ‘Sy. Nos 4, 5, 6 identified are harbouring tree species which are forest in nature to the extent of 95%’.36 This in effect confirmed some of the findings of the earlier reports submitted in 2013. This section has described the implication of two broad sets of legislations on Tiracol. The first comprised of ‘beneficial’ tenancy laws which secured the agricultural tenants and mundkars of Tiracol from eviction and made them ‘deemed owners’ of the properties they previously tenanted. Challenges to these reforms were also effectively undermined over time as a result of the Union Government placing the Tenancy Act of 1974 within the ambit of the Ninth Schedule of the Indian Constitution which was deemed to protect fundamental rights. The second set of legalisations comprise of various acts – the TCP Act of 1974, Land Use Act of 1991 and the Forest Act of 1980 – that effectively prohibited the diversion of agricultural and forested land for non-agricultural or non-forestry purposes. The Proposed Tourism Project The villagers of Tiracol first learnt that a project was proposed to come up in their village in 2006 when the then Minister of Tourism in the Government of Goa, the late Dr Wilfred de Souza, visited Tiracol on 24th May. Four years later, in 2010, the Government of Goa issued an expression of interest (EoI) to have a golf course in Goa; the then Tourism Minister, Mr Nilkant Halarnkar, later announced that three parties responded to EoI. He further mentioned that the government had decided to set up the golf course in Pernem,37 the taluka that Tiracol falls in. 36 37
See Herald (2015), ‘With a Senior Forest Officer as a Friend, No forest in Tiracol could come in the way of Leading Hotels’, pages 1 and 6. The three parties included: DLF, Oxford Properties and Leading Hotels.
60
The Great Goa Land Grab
In April 2011, the Goa Tourism Department selected the proposal made by a company called Leading Hotels to set up a PGA golf course in Tiracol, and issued them a letter of approval. Four Seasons – the international luxury hotel and resort company – was to be associated with the project in terms of operations and management.38 The announcement of the government’s decision to set up a golf course in Tiracol was welcomed in the press by the Travel and Tourism Association of Goa (TTAG): An excellent golf course is a must for Travellers from South East Asia and Japan in particular are avid golfers. An ecofriendly, well-designed golf course will surely add to the infrastructure for tourism and is most welcome (Ralph de Souza, spokesperson for TTAG).39 The case of the tourism project at Tiracol needs to be located within the macro political economy context of the emergence and growth of tourism and real estate in Goa. Tourism and real estate emerged as major economic activities in the 1980s and have since steadily grown. The state receives more than 900 international charter flights and welcomes more than 2.5 million visitors every year. This has meant a boom in the construction of tourism-related infrastructure namely hotels and housing projects. There are more than 3,300 hotels and guest houses in the state. For a couple of years, the Department of Tourism and the local association of hoteliers known as the Travel and Tourism Association of Goa (TTAG) have been mulling the need to attract ‘high spending tourists’40 to Goa, and for which tourism infrastructure such as marinas for yachts and golf courses are claimed to be required. 38
39
40
See Times of India, ‘Leading Hotels wins bid to set up golf course at Tiracol’, Goa edition 1st May 2011. Accessed online on 2nd Sep 2015 on: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Leading-Hotels-wins-bid-to- set-upgolf-course-at-Tiracol/articleshow/8129992.cms See Times of India, ‘Goa may soon be home to marina, eco-friendly hotels’, Goa Edition 20th May 2011. Accessed online on 2nd Sep 2015 on: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Goa-may-soon-be-home-tomarina-eco-friendly-hotels/articleshow/8451976.cms Department of Tourism, Government of Goa & KPMG (2016) ‘Preparation of Goa’s Tourism Master Plan and Policy Interim Presentation-Tourism Master Plan for Goa excerpt’ Available online: http://www.goatourism.gov.in/images/goa_tmp_modul e3.pdf (Accessed on 5th May 2017).
Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
61
Impediments to the Project The various land legislations described earlier in this chapter posed as potentially serious impediments for the developers to set up the proposed tourism cum golf course project. The main impediment for the developers arose from the existence of large swathes of land in Tiracol that contained agricultural tenants who were protected and conferred deemed ownership thanks to the Tenancy Act of 1964. Furthermore, the 1964 Act forbade the tenants from selling these parcels of land and also forbade any private party from purchasing them. Hence, purchasing land for the project was not possible under the existing legislation. In terms of land use, the large swathes of agricultural tenanted land could not be converted to non-agricultural uses since they came under the purview of the Land Use Act of 1991. To add to this, only a small portion of the village was available for any construction activity at all because of another set of limitations posed by land zoning at the time. According to the TCP Act of 1974 all development had to strictly adhere to a zoning plan and all construction had to be confined within settlement zones. Since the TCP had demarcated most of Tiracol with agricultural zones, only a small portion was zoned as settlement. Furthermore, this existing settlement zone was already fairly inhabited since this was where the residents had historically built their houses. Notably, these residents were also mundkars and thus protected from eviction thanks to the Mundkar Act of 1975. All this meant that the construction of a hotel would have to be confined to a small and already inhabited area. It also meant that it would also be almost impossible to set up a golf course anywhere. Yet another impediment to the tourism project arose because there were significant parcels of land in Tiracol identified as forests. These came under the purview of the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 (FCA). Surveys conducted by the Forest Department had identified large tracts of land in survey numbers 4, 5, 6, 14 and 15 in Tiracol as private forests which, according to the FCA, could not be diverted for development purposes. This meant that 5 out of the village’s 15 survey numbers (i.e. one third) could neither be clear-felled, nor have any construction on them. Finally, when the villagers learnt of the tourism project, they soon expressed their opposition by passing resolutions against it. The gram sabha of the village panchayat passed two such resolutions, the first in
62
The Great Goa Land Grab
2009 requesting the government to remove the proposed golf course (and jetty) from the regional plan in Tiracol.41 The second resolution, passed in 2011, reiterated these demands and was forwarded to the Town Planner, TCP department and the Department of Finance.42 Removing the impediments and Enabling the Project In order to deal with the above-mentioned ‘impediments’ that were in the way of the project, the developers initiated a variety of ‘manoeuvres’ to circumvent them. At various points in the project’s development, influential political actors encouraged and aided the developers, and various government departments enabled the circumvention of existing land regulations. Political Assurances Given Early on Newspaper sources and persons encountered during fieldwork suggest that well-placed political actors provided assurances to the developers even before the project was initiated. An editorial published in a local daily mention that ‘the village of Tiracol was first introduced to Leading Hotels in 2005-06 by the then Chief Minister of Goa Mr. Pratapsingh Rane who met Mr. Shiv Jatia, Managing Director of Leading Hotels whilst attending a wedding. Jatia who was at the time credited with bringing the Hyatt hospitality brand to India had proposed the idea of developing a resort in Goa’. The editorial further states that ‘Jatia was then taken on an escorted tour around the countryside to pick a spot of his fancy for his Goa resort. Everything would be “taken care”, the hotelier was told. All he had to do was pick a spot’.43 Members of the Rane family subsequently played an important role in altering the land zoning of Tiracol as shall be explained in this section. Removal of Tenancy Claims In order to clear Tiracol of agricultural tenants, the developers first entered into sale deeds with the erstwhile landlord of the agricultural tenants, stating that the parcels of land were unencumbered by any tenants. The developers then tried to persuade the agricultural tenants to provide them with undertakings renouncing their tenancy. While 41 42 43
Vide Gram Sabha resolution #1 dated 12th April 2009. Vide Gram Sabha resolution #6 dated 1st May 2011. See ‘Meet the “leading lights” who showed the way to Leading Hotels’, Herald, 31st May 2015. [Online] https://www.heraldgoa.in/Edit/Fly-on-the-wall-/Meet-the-\T 1\textquoteleftleading-lights\T1\textquoteright-who-showed-the-way-to-Lead ing-Hotels/89166 [Accessed on 5th January 2016]
Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
63
some tenants agreed, others refused. To deal with those tenants who refused to renounce their tenancy, the erstwhile landlord filed cases against them, challenging their tenancy. In June 2006 Leading Hotels entered into an indenture with the erstwhile Khalap landlords to purchase land in Tiracol. From June 2006 to September 2010 five sale deeds were made, amounting to a transfer of approximately 12,50,000 m2 from the Khalaps to Leading Hotels.44 Interestingly, none of the sale deeds mentioned that the land was tenanted, i.e. that it had agricultural tenants. This was the first in a series of steps to remove claims of agricultural tenancy from the land to enable its conversion to non-agricultural purposes. The second step involved directly approaching each of the agricultural tenants and inducing them to give up their tenancy claims. This was done by middlemen – representatives from Leading Hotels – who met individual tenants and persuaded them to sign three documents: (a) a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the tenant and developer through which the respective tenant first stated that his/her name has been ‘erroneously recorded’ in the tenancy records of the property. The tenant then stated that s/he had no objection to the deletion of these ‘erroneous entries’, and that s/he would fully cooperate with the representatives of the developers to remove these entries. (b) in the second document, the tenant was made to swear an affidavit renouncing his/her tenancy claims and stated that s/he had no objection to deleting the ‘erroneously recorded’ names from the survey records of the respective properties. In another statement, the tenant confirmed that the ‘Khalap families’ were in possession of the property; that the tenant was aware that they had sold the same to the developer Leading Hotels; and that the tenant had no objection to the development or selling of the property. (c) the third document was a signed certificate granting Power of Attorney (PoA) to a representative of the developer45 bestowing upon them the right to delete the name of the tenant in various land records; attend to any court proceedings that may be filed against the tenant with respect to the said property; to apply for the conversion of the use of the land from agricultural to non-agricultural purposes; to 44 45
The sale deeds were made in parts as the company progressively cleared various parcels of land from tenancy claims. From fieldwork it was recorded that these included either of three persons: Mr. Sandip Ganguly, Mr. Ryan Semelhago or Mr. Shailesh Shetty.
64
The Great Goa Land Grab
prepare and submit plans for construction in the said property; and to sell or dispose of that property. These three sets of documents were popularly called ‘negative declarations’ since they sought to extinguish claims of tenancy. From fieldwork, it was learnt that these ‘negative declarations’ were obtained through the illicit exchange of money between the developers and the respective tenant, with rates ranging from Rs. 60 per m2 to as much as Rs. 600 per m2 . In the third step, after obtaining ‘negative declarations’ from tenants, the erstwhile Khalap landlord filed civil suits against each of them. This process was initiated in 2007, and from 2008 onwards the Civil Courts passed several orders/judgements that the respective properties were free from tenants. In the fourth and final step, Leading Hotels then used the judgements/orders passed by the civil courts to move the Dy. Collector/Sub Divisional Magistrate (SDM) of Pernem to procure tenancyfree certificates (TFC). In the proceeding between Leading Hotels and the tenants before the Dy. Collector/SDM, the tenants were themselves represented by officials of Leading Hotels, whom they had previously given PoAs. Between 24th November and 29th December 2011, in a span of just over a month, the Dy. Collector/SDO of Pernem disposed of 114 cases and granted TFCs. In order to deal with the ‘unagreeable’ tenants – those who refused to renounce their tenancy claims – a different strategy was employed. In 2011 the erstwhile Khalap landlords filed cases before the Dy. Collector challenging their tenancy claims. The Dy. Collector then passed an order in May 2013 setting aside all these tenancy claims on the grounds that due procedure had not been followed 17 years earlier, when the tenancy claims had been established. The Dy. Collector reasoned that the tenancy orders issued 17 years ago had been issued ex parte – since the landlord did not appear for the hearings – and thus set aside the tenancy order, annulling any current claims to tenancy. Land Use Changes As mentioned, only a small and already inhabited portion of the village was earmarked as a settlement zone. This significantly restricted the scope of the proposed construction of the project. To work around this, influential political actors first made applications seeking a change of zone that would benefit the developer. When this was unsuccessful an altogether new zoning category was devised by the TCP department –
Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
65
called ‘Eco Tourism’ – to enable both the hotel construction and the golf course. The period when Leading Hotels first showed interest in setting up a hotel project in Tiracol46 coincides with the period when a controversial Regional Plan, the Goa Regional Plan 2011 (RP- 2011) was being prepared. The preparation of the RP-2011 involved producing an accompanying zoning plan. A draft version of a zoning plan was completed around 2005 and the final version was prepared in August 2006. The draft version of the zoning plan was almost identical to the zoning plan prepared by the earlier RP-2001. Both zoning plans (RP-2001 and draft RP-2011) designate most of the village as paddy and orchard zones with only a small portion marked as settlement zone. The draft RP-2011 had been kept open to the public prior to its finalisation from November 2005 to June 2006 where members of the public could make suggestions and objections to the plan. A record of all the suggestions and objections was maintained by the Town & Country Planning Department (TCP) and a perusal of the same reveals that during the interim period between the draft and final RP-2011 zoning plans, a request was made by a company named Handsell Goa Pvt. Ltd. on 15th Dec 2005 to convert Survey Nos. 2 to 6 in Tiracol from Orchard to Settlement.47 Various sources ranging from an investigative television programme by New Delhi Television (NDTV 24x7)48 and newspaper articles49 have linked Handsell Goa Pvt. Ltd. to the son of the then Chief Minister of Goa, Mr. Vishwajeet Rane, the current BJP MLA from Valpoi and Minister for Town & Country Planning. The sources show that this company was registered under the name of Ms. Divya Rane who is Mr. Vishwajeet Rane’s spouse. Tellingly, when the RP-2011 was finalised in August 2006 the zoning in Tiracol had been completely altered so that, in the final RP-2011, the entire village – apart from the fort – was zoned as settlement. 46 47
48
49
Leading Hotels entered into an indenture with the Khalaps on 15th June 2006. These are the exact same survey numbers mentioned in the indenture between the Khalaps and Leading Hotels dated 15th June 2006. Franky Fernandes, Sreenivasan Jain, Sujay Gupta (2007) Text of NDTV 24x7 Programme ‘Witness’ on 9th January 2007. Accessed online on 2nd Sep 2015 from: http://www.funonthenet.in/forums/index.php?topic=29731.0 See Goan Observer, ‘Massive fraud on the Goan people – II’, 20th Jan 2007. Posted online on: https://www.mail-archive.com/goanet%40lists.goanet.org/msg08432. html; also see Goa Chronicle, ‘Does Vishwajeet Rane Have A Devious Role in SEZ Land Scam?’ Accessed online: https://goachronicle.com/does-vishwajeet-ranehave-a-devious-role-in-sez-land-scam/ [Accessed online on 2nd Sep 2015].
66
The Great Goa Land Grab
The company Handsell Goa had featured in a number of land use changes in RP-2011 and appears to have played the role of a consultant, facilitating zone changes for various real-estate developers. It is also pertinent to note that even though Handsell Goa did not own any property in Tiracol, and furthermore that none of the company’s representatives attended the hearing for zone change before the TCP department, their request was nonetheless granted, and the entire village was marked as a settlement zone. However, around the period from September to December 2006, there was a public outcry against the RP-2011, as a result of which the entire zoning plan was repealed in January 2007. With that, the conversion of the entire village into a settlement zone was repealed, and the zoning reverted back to the previous RP-2001 zoning, in which Tiracol was zoned as mostly cultivable/orchard zones, and with only a small portion earmarked as a settlement zone. In October 2007, the TCP then appointed a Task Force to formulate a new regional plan for Goa. The Task Force first prepared a draft Regional Plan 2021 in October 2008 and set up a process by which the village panchayats would have a role in formulating regional plans. In the draft version of the zoning plan accompanying RP-2021, it was observed that a golf course and a marina/jetty were proposed to be set up in the village of Tiracol. In November 2010 when the final RP-2021 was notified, the accompanying notified zoning plan50 showed that an altogether new development category called ‘eco-tourism’ had been introduced. Under ecotourism, construction was permitted in 10% of the area so long as the parcel of land was at least 2,00,000 m2 , even if the underlying zoning was natural cover or agricultural land. This was in complete contravention of the gram sabha resolution earlier passed by the gram sabha of VP Querim-Tiracol. It also broke with international guidelines for ecotourism resorts51 since it permitted the setting up of a golf course which is considered problematic on environmental grounds. Moreover, this development category was never even recommended by the Task Force that prepared the draft RP-2021. Yet in the following year, in September 2011, the TCP approved and recommended the golf course proposal by 50 51
State Level Committee for Regional Plan for Goa - 2021(2010) Final Report Regional Plan for Goa – 2021: Release One, Panaji, Goa: Govt. Printing Press. C.f. the guidelines specified by the International Ecotourism Society. For details, see: https://www.ecotourism.org/what-is-ecotourism
Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
67
Leading Hotels,52 after which the Government of Goa also approved the same on 17th November 2011. In this way, the TCP essentially retained the agricultural/orchard zoning of the village but simultaneously provided the developers with a route to develop their tourism project. Removing FCA Regulations When developers applied for conversion sanads, the Dy. Collector (Revenue) sought clearances from the Deputy Conservator of Forests–North (DCF (North)) with respect to the application for conversion sanad pertaining to survey numbers: 4/1, 4/2, 5/3, 5/5-6-7-8, 6/2-5- 8-10, 7/1-3, 8/2-23, 9/2-5, 11/4 and 13/2 of Tiracol. The DCF–North reply dated 16th April 2013 mentioned that of the above survey numbers, 5/3, 5/6 and 6/2 had a canopy of 20% while the rest had a canopy of 10% implying that all three were private forests. Since this could create difficulties for granting the conversion sanads to the developers, the Dy. Collector wrote to the DCF-North on 19th April 2013 ‘seeking clarification’. Already the very same day, the DCF-North wrote back, stating that the survey numbers for which Leading Hotels has sought conversion had canopy cover that was below 10%. In other words, the DCF-North reversed his own earlier findings submitted only three days earlier. On the nights of 14th and 15th May 2015, Leading Hotels then began to cut trees and bring in heavy machinery to enable the construction of a road, without tree felling permission. They employed the support of some 40odd security personnel (bouncers) for the task. When villagers opposed this move, a First Information Report (FIR) was filed against Leading Hotels for illegal tree felling; on 18th May 2015 the Range Forest Officer (Pernem) wrote to inform the Judicial Magistrate that the FIR against Leading Hotels had ‘substance’; but only two days later, on 20th May 2015, the DCF-North issued tree felling permission to Leading Hotels. On 11th June 2015, further permissions were granted to Leading Hotels to cut an additional 94 trees. In this way, the ‘impediment’ posed by forested land on the proposed project site was also circumvented. Conversion Sanads The above passages describe the various ways in which ‘impediments’ were removed and permissions obtained from various government departments, such as the Tenancy Free Certificates from the Dy. Collector/Sub Divisional Magistrate (SDM) of Pernem, zoning clearances from the Town and Country Planning, NoC for the golf course from the 52
139th TCP Board meeting held on 21st September 2011.
68
The Great Goa Land Grab
Government of Goa, and forest clearance from the Forest Department. These permissions were all used to obtain the conversion sanads from the office of the Collector that were granted in December 2011 and May 2013. In January 2013 the Water Resource Department (WRD) also issued NoCs for the construction of two water bodies (artificial lakes) on the Tiracol Plateau. Thereafter the Union Government’s Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) granted the project CRZ and Environmental Clearance in April 2013 and December 2014 respectively. Government Subsidies Proposed for the Project Apart from enabling the developers to remove various ‘impediments’ to the project, the government also tried to take it forward by subsidising it, while also undertaking the task of building a bridge that was part of the developer’s original design for the project. In 2011, statements made by the then Tourism Director, Mr. Swapnil Naik, indicated that the golf course project was to be set up with the help of a 50 crore subsidy from the Central Government’s Union Ministry of Tourism via a scheme called the Large Revenue Generation Scheme (LRGS).53 This was then repeated when the Tourism Minister, Mr. Nilkant Halarnkar, later met the Union Tourism Minister, Subodh Kant Sahay, and impressed upon him ‘to allow Goa at least two projects a year under its Large Revenue Generation Scheme (LRGS), where a subsidy component of 20 percent or Rs 50 crore could be granted for a project whichever is less.54 The original project plans had proposed a signature bridge connecting Tiracol with the Querim landmass. Apparently, a Singapore-London engineering firm that designed the golf resort had proposed the bridge over the Tiracol river.55 However, after the project had received various approvals in June 2014, the Government of Goa commenced work on the construction on the bridge at the government’s own cost. The bridge was expected to cost the government a whopping Rs. 77 crore. Conclusion 53
54
55
See Financial Express, ‘Goa mulls setting up an international PGA-standard golf course’, 31st May 2011. Accessed online on 2nd Sep 2015 on: http://archivefhw.fin ancialexpress.com/20110531/market23.shtml See Web India 123, ‘Goa Tourism Minister urges for additional budget allocations’, Panaji 25th May 2011. Accessed online on 2nd Sep 2015 on:http://news.webindia123.com/news/articles/India/20110526/1757608.html See Herald, ‘Keri-Tiracol bridge tendered’, 30 August 2013.https://www.heraldgoa. in/Goa/The-Sunday-Roundtable/keritiracol-bridge-tendered/69004 [Accessed online on 2nd Sep 2015].
Undoing Land Regulations: The Case of Tiracol
69
The mismatch between Goa’s rapid economic transformation and the delay in updating its land policies and regulations has resulted in a perception among land developers that existing regulations are impediments to their ‘development’ projects. However, as a way around these ‘impediments’, land developers along with political and bureaucratic actors have coalesced to devise a host of ‘land policy manoeuvres’ that serve as workarounds for the supposed impediments to development projects. Using the specific case of a large tourism project in Tiracol, this study has highlighted the micro-politics that enable land development in spite of ‘impediments’. It has shown how numerous and seemingly insurmountable impediments to the project – such as legislations protecting the rights of agricultural tenants, zoning laws preventing the conversion of agricultural and forest land, and resolutions passed by local bodies of government – were circumvented by devising a variety of ingenious procedures. In doing so, our study sheds light on those political and bureaucratic actors who constitute the ‘men in the middle of India’s land grabs’ (Sud 2014b). These include local politicians who have been involved in not only introducing the project developers to the location, but have also provided consultancy services to get land zoning changed. It has involved the role of various government departments such as the office of the Collectorate, the forest department and the TCP department, all of which operated in suspect ways and with the intent of subverting many of the regulations they were otherwise entrusted to enforce. From the perspective of the broader goals of land regulation, one sees how considerations for social justice, the promotion of agriculture, and environmental protection are compromised in favour of the promotion of the private economic interests of select economic actors.
3. Enabling the Great Goan Land Grab
A
2017 saw two ominous developments in the domain of land-related legislations in Goa. On the one hand, the Goa state assembly, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), passed two new bills intended to ease the acquisition of land for ‘public purposes’. On the other hand, the BJP-led central government issued a notification requiring that all environmental litigation originating from Goa, which have so far been placed before the National Green Tribunal’s (NGT) West Zone Bench in Pune, be shifted to the NGT’s Principal Bench in Delhi. This is the latest turn in a series of moves through which the government has enabled access to land, whilst simultaneously disabling civil society-led opposition. UGUST
Enabling Access to Land The two recently passed bills are the Goa Requisition and Acquisition of Property Bill, 2017, and the Goa Compensation to the Project Affected Persons and Vesting of Land in the Government Bill, 2017. The former seeks to provide for the speedy acquisition of immovable property for certain public purposes (GoG 2017a, 1168), while the latter purports to provide the right of compensation to persons affected by land acquisition, and to ensure that they are adequately compensated (GoG 2017b, 1150). Manohar Parrikar’s BJP-led coalition government, which assumed office earlier this year, tabled the bills and, given its parliamentary majority, the government encountered no difficulty in having them passed. As always, the statement of objects and reasons for introducing the bills appear beyond reproach. Yet, on closer inspection, it seems clear that
Enabling the Great Goan Land Grab
71
the main reason for introducing the two bills in tandem is to make compulsory land acquisitions swifter and cheaper, and to reduce the many administrative and legal complications that often accompany them. Both bills operate with very expansive definitions of ‘public purpose’ that can, in principle, cover a range of purposes, including transport, communication, irrigation, drainage, tourism promotion, slum clearances, industrial estates, medical and educational institutions, mining, bus stands, airports, and truck terminals (GoG 2017a, 1168). Critically, the bills include language noting the public purpose of the state’s troubled mining industry. It may be recalled that the definition of public purpose was a key point of contention when the national Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013—the LARR bill— was drafted. As the then environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, had stated, “seldom has a term existed that has caused so much persistent confusion as a result of its obscurity” (Ramesh and Khan 2015, 23). The national LARR bill sought to pin down what was meant by public purpose by listing at length all undertakings that it considered as furthering a public purpose (Ramesh and Khan 2015, 27). Critics maintained that the lengthy final list included a large number of non-public spirited activities. Thus, rather than truly safeguarding the rights and interests of vulnerable sections of society, the bill made the process of acquiring land ‘easier’ by diluting the notion of public purpose (Desai 2011). This followed a broader national trend where public purpose is increasingly shaped by the needs of private developers, thus increasing the infrastructure and wealth gaps among the nation’s haves and have-nots (Roy 2009). The two new Goan land bills accelerate this national trend, further expanding the notion of public purpose. Moreover, the said land shall vest in the Government encumbrance free irrespective of whether that land actually has encumbrances or not (Almeida 2017), and would omit entirely any discussion of consent. While the national LARR bill has elaborate social impact assessment and consent clauses for certain projects that involve private companies, the Goan bills do not mention consent, nor do they include any provisions for participation by people who stand to lose their land. In this regard, they represent a return to the draconian and now repealed Land Acquisition Act of 1894 that was designed for colonial subjecthood rather than citizenship.
72
The Great Goa Land Grab
While the Goa Requisition and Acquisition of Property Bill contains provisions for the government and the landowner to work out an agreement regarding the compensation that shall be granted, persons aggrieved by the government’s decision to acquire land are only allowed to appeal before the office of the collector, who, after giving the parties an opportunity to be heard, may pass an order that shall be final. Crucially, while the bill does allow the high court and the Supreme Court to entertain disputes relating to land acquisition, it specifies that no court is empowered to grant an injunction. Following a National Trend The passing of the two bills in Goa link up with other legal manoeuvres at the national and state levels that facilitate the access to and acquisition of land, and its conversion for profitable uses. It will be recalled that the Narendra Modi government in late 2014 and early 2015 fought a long battle to amend (and dilute) the LARR bill, a move that followed intense lobbying and pressure by industry groups in the wake of Modi’s electoral win. This was done first via the ordinance route, and later by introducing the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment) Bill, 2015. Both the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India ‘whole-heartedly’ welcomed the move (Rajalakshmi 2015), but the amendments were never passed, as the BJP lacked the requisite numbers in the Rajya Sabha. Unable to push through the dilution of key provisions in the LARR bill, the Modi government instead encouraged the states to pass their own, more investor-friendly land laws, assuring them that the centre would duly approve these (Hindustan Times 2015). Since then, National Democratic Alliance (NDA)-ruled states, such as Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, have all introduced legislations to water down key provisions of the LARR bill, while NDA-ruled Jharkhand has, in a similar spirit, sought to undermine the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act and the Santhal Pargana Tenancy Act (Chacko 2016). Goa has now followed suit and has, in the process, given further momentum to the overall process of undermining whatever progress had been made in safeguarding the rights of the dispossessed under the LARR bill. Simultaneously, recent moves to shift Goan environmental litigation from Pune to New Delhi further threaten opportunities for participation and engagement by civil society. With the passing of the National
Enabling the Great Goan Land Grab
73
Green Tribunal (NGT) Act in 2010, the NGT was established to ‘provide speedy environmental justice and help reduce the burden of litigation in the higher courts’. Goa was placed in the NGT’s western zone and put under the jurisdiction of the Pune bench. Recourse to the NGT has been an important avenue for environmentalists in Goa. Indeed, according to one estimate, 40% of the cases filed before the Pune bench originate from Goa (Times of India 2017), and NGT orders have resulted in a number of important victories from the point of view of environmental justice. But, on 10 August 2017, the central government’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change issued a notification shifting Goa to the principle bench in New Delhi. This effectively means that all environment-related litigation originating from Goa would now have to be heard in New Delhi. Geographically, this transition will make it financially burdensome for individuals or groups in Goa to lodge cases in the nation’s capital. Environmentalists have justifiably labelled this shifting of jurisdiction a “war on environmental justice,” and have demanded that the decision be reversed. Local Impact Locally, the two bills are likely to have an adverse impact on the environment and on the rights of the dispossessed. It is commonly accepted that Goa’s development over the past decades has been driven by “the destruction of land, not from the careful use of it” (Newman 1984, 444) through, for example, rampant illegal mining (de Souza 2015), unregulated real estate development (Sampat 2014), as well as industrialisation and mass tourism (Goswami 2008). Land-based conflicts have thus shaped Goa’s political economy, and have in recent years given rise to popular movements against various forms of land conversion, whether related to mining expansions, special economic zones (Abreu 2014; Da Silva 2014; Bedi 2013, 2015; Sampat 2013), deeply flawed regional planning processes (Da Silva et al 2013), tourist infrastructure, or airport development (Nielsen 2015; Nielsen and Da Silva 2017). The explicit mention of mining as a public purpose indicates that the government wants to boost the industry, which is currently slowly resuming operations after the statewide ban, imposed in the wake of the Shah Commission’s report on illegal mining (Commission on Illegal Mining 2012), was lifted in 2015. The mining industry’s track record of environmental degradation and outright illegalities is, of course, well known, not just in Goa (Alvares and Saha 2008; Human Rights Watch
74
The Great Goa Land Grab
2012; CEE 2013), but across the world. Additionally, the inclusion of airports in the “public purpose” list is not surprising, given the ongoing contentious construction of a new international airport in Mopa in north Goa. Large tracts of land have already been acquired for the airport, but additional land is likely to be ‘needed’ for roads, hotels and other infrastructure. The two bills join a longer list of already existing legal tools that can be deployed to promote investor- friendly land acquisition in the name of public purpose. For example, in 2008, an amendment was made to the Goa, Daman and Diu Town and Country Planning Act, 1974, which exempted government projects from adhering to the zoning and land-use provisions mandated by a spatial plan created for the state, called the Goa Regional Plan. Using these amendments, 72 government projects have been approved, causing the conversion of orchard, agriculture, and forested zones, as well as specifically designated “no development zones” into settlements or institutional land uses (Town and Country Planning Department 2017). Thus, these amendments allow the government to effectively override the policy and zoning provisions of the regional plans. Comparably, in 2014, the Government of Goa passed the Investment Promotion Act, 2014 with the objective of ‘kickstarting investments’ in the state. An Investment Promotion Board (IPB) was set up in order to make the process of investment simple and quick. The IPB was empowered to declare areas for investment promotion so as to exempt them from the provisions of the regional plans and its related zoning regulations. Investment promotion projects include undertakings by private as well as government or government agencies. In only three years, 107 projects have been cleared using this mechanism (Directorate of Industries, Trade and Commerce 2017). The two bills passed in August 2017, when read in tandem with the IPB Act, 2014 and the provisions of the amendments to the Town and Country Planning Act, imply that the government can not only fast-track the acquisition of land, but also quickly facilitate the land-use changes. Conclusions The two new Goan bills follow a national trend of using legal reforms to facilitate land transfers through the expansion of the notion of public purpose to include a broad range of activities. As such, they provide the government with a firmer basis for enlisting legal language and institu-
Enabling the Great Goan Land Grab
75
tions of law to deflect popular opposition. The inclusion of mining in the bill language justifiably furthers civil society concerns that the state will seek to expand this contentious industry that has been hit by a corruption scandal in 2012. In sum, the great Goan land grab that has now played out for many years has, unfortunately, received another boost.
4. Unclean Slates: Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, and EIA Struggles in Goa
T
idea of greenfield development has gained currency in India in recent years. The high-profile ‘Make in India’ programme that was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 promoted India as the world’s topmost greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) destination for 2015, and in many Indian states, one comes across largescale infrastructure projects that are being promoted as ‘greenfield’ projects. Here, we approach the idea of greenfield development as a particular discourse on land and nature that, following Kennedy and Sood (2016), conjures up distinct images of emptiness and opportunity and fosters enticing visions of commencing ‘development’ from a tabula rasa—a clean slate on which there is nothing. Yet, in practice, few (if any) infrastructure projects are able to be built entirely on virgin lands, or in political or historical vacuums. Rather, project developers have to deal with ‘unclean slates’, that is, social and natural environments that are already inscribed with human and non-human history, habitation and activity. The construction of particular places as ‘greenfields’ available for ‘development’ is therefore a discursive and political act that seeks to gain recognition for a particular view of a given environment— to the exclusion of other, diverging or contending views—in order to facilitate a specific intervention in that environment. HE
In this chapter, we link our analysis of the discourse of greenfield devel-
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 77 opment in India to an analysis of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and the reports that accompany them as technologies that promote this discourse. We ground our arguments in a case study from Goa, where work on a new ‘greenfield’ international airport at Mopa, in the state’s northernmost taluka of Pernem, commenced in 2017, thus seemingly signalling an end to a decade-long land conflict centred on the state government’s acquisition of 800 hectares of land on and around a large laterite plateau on which the airport will be constructed. While the project has received the strong backing of political and business elites, both the airport and the acquisition of land for it have been opposed by environmentalist groups and sections of the dispossessed in Mopa. This land conflict has over the past years predominantly played out in the domain of environmental approvals in which the EIA process as well as the EIA report itself are crucial. Inspired by Baya-Lafitte’s (2016) concept of ‘EIA struggle’, we analyse the EIA process as a key site where ‘greenfield’ claims are simultaneously produced and contested. While the EIA process is thus shown to have mediated and eventually imposed closure on the prolonged land conflict in Mopa, we argue that, in reality, the EIA process operated first and foremost as a technology that worked to ‘greenfield’ the proposed airport site—to clean the slate, in other words. In this way, the EIA process promoted and consolidated a discourse of greenfield development that enabled a massive transformation of the local environment, both figuratively and literally. The chapter proceeds to historicise and contextualise the discourse of greenfield development and its relationship to airport development in India. By drawing on recent critical work on EIAs, we then analyse the nature and implications of the EIA process and EIA struggle and bring these into conversation with the case of the new airport in Mopa. Greenfield Development On one level, greenfield development can be seen as an enduring idiom in Indian politics (Kennedy and Sood 2016, 41). As Gidwani (1992) has shown in his analysis of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal, the colonial category of ‘wasteland’ had by the eighteenth century emerged as a key discursive device through which ‘idle’ or ‘unproductive’ land was recast as ‘untapped land’, that is, as land that was not being tapped for its commercial potential. As Bennike (2017) has pointed out, while the category of wasteland was technically part of a descriptive, classi-
78
The Great Goa Land Grab
ficatory system based on productivity, it functioned first and foremost as a future and revenue-oriented category that conjured up images of a no-man’s land open to adventure and investment. Baka (2013) has shown how this category was later taken over by the post-colonial state and retained as a land classification technique. Based on this, the postcolonial state would introduce new, comprehensive wasteland development programmes. This ‘wasteland governmentality’ similarly construed wasteland landscapes as empty, unproductive spaces available for the state’s land-use projects or other forms of state-led ‘improvement’ that would ostensibly provide economic and environmental benefits. Baka’s emphasis on how ‘wasteland discourses’ have remained a remarkably persistent feature of the language of the state across time and space shows how the logic underpinning the contemporary discourse of greenfield development is part of a longer genealogy. It is also a logic that is integral to what is commonly referred to as ‘the global land grab’ in which the ‘solution’ to a multitude of current ‘crises’ related to food, energy and climate is to be found in capturing the potential of so-called ‘marginal, empty, and available lands across the globe’ (White et al. 2012, 631). Such categorisations of land use are the key operational mechanisms through which land-use changes are facilitated (Borras Jr. and Franco 2012). In post-liberalisation India, urbanisation and infrastructure have increasingly been instrumentalised to generate economic growth. Big cities and world-class infrastructure are routinely promoted as the key drivers of the Indian economy in the future, and terms such as ‘growth engines’ or ‘growth infrastructures’ (Sampat 2014) are often mobilised to designate the kinds of infrastructure that will attract capital. Insofar as many such projects—and greenfield projects in particular—require far-reaching changes to existing patterns of land use, questions of who has the power to define how and for what purposes land should be used have become increasingly salient. Importantly, India’s states retain a large discretionary role in processes of land acquisition, conversion and diversion (Chandra 2015). By leveraging their control over land, the state governments can effectively shape the conditions for capital accumulation and circulation in their states (Kennedy 2014), and many state governments are currently ‘racing to identify and acquire “available” land’ (Kennedy and Sood 2016, 43) so as to channel it into privatesector-led infrastructure development or other projects. This prominence of the state(s) in facilitating the transfer of land to the
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 79 private sector has led some to label India a ‘land broker state’ (Levien 2013). What drives this development is the expanded potential for accumulation that arises from the conversion of ‘available’ land to urban infrastructure, and real estate in particular. As Sampat argues, this reconfigures the political economy of land, apparently rendering agriculture less profitable and devaluing agrarian infrastructure and relationships (Sampat 2016). Within this broader picture, the concept of ‘greenfield’ development occupies a distinct place. In common parlance, the term ‘greenfield’, when used in conjunction with ‘development’, can variously denote land that has never been used; land which has not previously been built on; or land that has not previously been developed. This sets greenfield development apart from so-called ‘brownfield’ development where previously used (and sometimes polluted) land is either upgraded or redeveloped, as well as from the predominantly US–American variety of ‘greyfield’ development centred on redeveloping ‘dead’ shopping malls and their adjacent seas of empty asphalt. As the ‘Make in India’ programme suggests, greenfield development is closely connected to investment, usually private sector investment of the cross-border kind. Indeed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective ‘greenfield’ was originally used predominantly in the context of commercial investment and business. ‘Greenfield investments’ are often seen as more desirable than their grey or brown counterparts: brownfield investments may improve existing conditions, but greenfield investments promise to create new physical assets, enhance capacity, create fresh employment and introduce superior technology. In India, greenfield development projects are now found across many sectors. Among the most spectacular are the greenfield city-making projects that are being pursued in, for example, Dholera in Gujarat and in Amaravati, the new capital city of Andhra Pradesh (Datta 2015; Ramachandraiah 2016). Such urban mega-projects are promoted by entrepreneurial state governments seeking to position themselves nationally or globally, and they may include a slew of related ‘greenfield’ developments of, for instance, riverfronts, industrial parks, integrated townships, and much more (Kennedy and Sood 2016, 44). But one can also come across ‘greenfield development’ in the context of steel production, road and seaport construction, beverage production, in the national ‘Smart City Mission’ and, as mentioned, the ‘Make in In-
80
The Great Goa Land Grab
dia’ programme.56 The latter includes aviation and greenfield airport development among the sectors it covers. India has in fact had a national Greenfield Airport Policy since 2008. It put in place a more liberalised approach to airport construction and opened up the possibility of private participation and public–private partnerships (PPPs) in greenfield airport development (Government of India 2008). The ‘Make in India’ programme takes the Greenfield Airport Policy further. It allows 100 percent FDI for greenfield airport projects and highlights the planned greenfield airports at Navi Mumbai and Mopa—both described as ‘growth drivers’—that in combination provide investment opportunities of up to US$3 billion. And, in September 2015, another fourteen greenfield airports received in-principle approval from the Indian government, with an estimated total project cost of Rs240 billion.57 ‘Make in India’ also encourages Indian airports to emulate the special economic zone (SEZ) ‘Aerotropolis model’, an airport-centric development model whereby an airport is surrounded by other forms of urbanisation that can include luxury hotels, shopping and entertainment facilities, convention, trade and exhibition complexes, golf courses, sport stadiums, industrial parks and more. Greenfield development has, in other words, already taken on not just discursive but also material dimensions in the concrete shape of large projects in many sectors, with everything that implies. Like other development discourses, the discourse of greenfield development has both imaginative, moral and material implications. In the present context, we find it useful to follow Mühlhäusler and Peace (2006) in conceptualising a discourse as referring ‘to specific ways of 56
57
See ‘Tata Steel invests Rs 22,000 Crore in Odisha Project; to Start Ops Soon’, Livemint.com (4 Oct. 2015) http://www.livemint.com/Companies/B5PPwgs rqeeEBHcuscDvqI/Tata-Steel-invests-Rs22000-crore-in-Odisha-project-to-star .html accessed 27 Feb. 2017; Rajat Arora, ‘Japan may Back 10 Northeast Highway Projects’, The Economic Times (5 April 2016) http://economictimes.indiatimes.com /news/economy/infrastructure/japan-may-back-10-northeast-highway-project s/articleshow/51691573.cms?intenttarget=no, accessed 27 Feb. 2017; Gujarat Maritime Board, ‘Greenfield Ports’ (2017) http://www.gmbports.org/greenfield-ports, accessed 27 Feb. 2017; ‘Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Invests Rs 1,000 Crore to Set Up Greenfield Plants at Ahmedabad, Nellore’, News Nation (15 Jan. 2017) https://bit.ly/HindustanCocoCola, accessed 27 Feb. 2017; and Ministry of Urban Development (2015). See Sunny Sen, ‘Govt Projects Rs24,000-Crore Cost to Develop 14 Greenfield Airports’, The Financial Express (11 Sept. 2015) http://www.financialexpress.com/ec onomy/govt-projects-rs-24000-cr-cost-to-develop-14-greenfield-airports/1339 15/ , accessed 27 Feb. 2017].
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 81 talking about particular environments and their futures’. These ‘ways of talking’ invoke specific ensembles of ideas, concepts and categorisations that are produced, reproduced and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities (Hajer 1995). Mühlhäusler and Peace’s emphasis on how the future is implicated in discourses of the contemporary, however, also points to the relational constitution of discourse and environments insofar as discourses not merely bestow meaning upon what already exists, but are simultaneously implicated in the remaking of particular social and biophysical environments. This may be particularly pronounced in the case of ‘development’ discourses that explicitly invoke ensembles of ideas about and categories for how environments are to be reconfigured. As explained above, in the imaginative domain, the assemblage of ideas and concepts that are implicated in the discourse of greenfield development works to construe particular environments as ‘clean slates’ of untapped potential. To understand the configuration of the moral domain, it is helpful to return once again to the discussion of wasteland. As Gidwani (2013) writes, the notion of ‘waste’ is weighed down by a double pejorative that is both moral and economic. It acts as a rubric for what modern societies consider ‘bad’ and, as such, takes on a moral quality that aspires to guide conduct (Gidwani 1992). The moral injunction embodied in the idea of waste is directed both at undesirable and economically unproductive forms of land use (i.e. idle land/wasteland) and undesirable and economically unproductive social behaviour (i.e. wastefulness/idleness). This underlying moral rationale for wasteland development across the post-colonial divide has remained constant, namely to improve the productivity of lands by converting ‘waste’ into ‘value’ and, in the process, converting the ‘savage’ into the ‘civilised’ (Baka 2013, 410-411). While the ‘savage versus civilised’ distinction may be less pronounced today, it has been observed how the contemporary Indian real estate sector invokes a similar moral vocabulary as it draws upon ideologies and aesthetics of waste and value, and backwardness and modernity, to develop land for private accumulation (Sampat 2014). The discourse of greenfield development taps into the same moral domain by promising to realise untapped potential (transforming waste to value) and to usher in infrastructural modernity on barren lands. In addition, because it construes specific environments as clean slates, it also promises prospective investors a greatly reduced
82
The Great Goa Land Grab
risk of getting stuck in what Levien (2011) has evocatively called ‘land acquisition purgatory’. Across India, land disputes that have arisen because of state-led compulsory land acquisitions have deadlocked a number of industrial and infrastructure projects and have ostensibly stalled investments worth nearly Rs2,000 billion (Oskarsson and Nielsen 2014). The discourse of greenfield development thus combines the imaginative and moral appeals of the tabula rasa fantasy with the more material prospects of high profits coupled with little popular resistance. Lastly, both wasteland development and greenfield development — and, indeed, ‘land grabbing’ more generally (White et al. 2012) — are carried out through the mechanism of enclosure. Enclosure is not just a discursive but also an eminently material practice that involves environmental transformation such as dispossession of land, water, forests and other common property resources, and their concentration, privatisation and transaction as corporate property. As such, it has considerable consequences for both social and biophysical environments. For example, much of the 33,000 acres on which the new ‘greenfield’ city of Amaravati is being built was previously farmland;58 to build the Navi Mumbai ‘greenfield’ airport, thousands of families had to be displaced; and the Mopa plateau on which the ‘greenfield’ airport will be located has for decades been inhabited by a number of families who farm and graze their cattle there (see below). It is by erasing or eliding the historical traces of human and non-human activity and their sociopolitical meanings that the discourse of greenfield development is able to construe environments as ‘clean slates’. In the next sections, we link the discussion of greenfield development to the EIA process. As Rozema and Bond have pointed out, impact assessment tools do not exist outside of discourse, but rather ‘induce the articulation of particular discourses’ (Rozema and Bond 2015). In this case, we analyse how the EIA process and its associated documents articulated a discourse of greenfield development to promote a ‘greenfield’ or ‘clean slate’ view of the Mopa plateau that eventually enabled the construction of a new airport covering several hundred hectares. To bring this out, we also analyse at length the (eventually failed) attempts 58
See Uma Sudhir, ‘Amaravati Chosen as New Andhra Pradesh Capital’, NDTV (2 April 2015) http://www.ndtv.com/andhra-pradesh-news/amaravati-to-be-andhr a-pradeshs-new-capital-751518 , accessed 27 Feb. 2017].
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 83 by opposition movements to stop the airport through what, following Baya-Lafitte (2016), we refer to as ‘EIA struggle’. The EIA process and ‘EIA struggle’ Projected by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) as ‘an important management tool for ensuring optimal use of natural resources for sustainable development’, EIAs are now mandatory for 29 categories of activities that involve investments exceeding Rs500 million.59 Projects that require EIAs are thus typically large and require access to financing and regulatory processing that are usually only available to elite actors with good political and bureaucratic connections. With estimated investments to the tune of Rs30 billion, Mopa airport is an emblematic case. It falls to a project’s proponent to produce the EIA, but the task is often contracted out to consultants (Bedi 2013, 102). The EIA process necessitates an in-theory very thorough exercise in estimating the environmental, biological, social and economic impacts of a given project to determine its sustainability; to suggest adequate plans for mitigation and environmental management; and to present the details at a public hearing held in the vicinity of the project area (Chowdhury n.d.). The EIA process is thus one that involves a system of knowledge production about a particular environment (Cashmore and Richardson 2012), and one of its main functions is to map out the terrain and create an inventory that makes the socio-natural landscape quantifiable and intelligible in scientific terms (Li 2009, 222-223). This often includes the production of maps, graphs, tables and charts that should, again in theory, offer an authoritative account of just how ‘clean’ the slate is. The EIA process also constitutes an arena for the playing out of discursive conflicts over the relative weighting given to different values in decision-making (Cashmore and Richardson 2012) as affected populations and the general public are to be included. In this way, an EIA ‘affords its use for legitimizing and challenging decisions where a balance between competing environmental and developmental interests is to be struck’ (Baya-Lafitte 2016). This may lead to mutual ‘discursive accommodation’ (Rozema and Bond 2015) between initially opposed 59
See Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India, ‘Environmental Impact Assessment’ [http://envfor.nic.in/division/introduction-8, accessed 27 Feb. 2017].
84
The Great Goa Land Grab
actors in countries that are characterised by a large degree of consensus (Runhaar et al. 2013), but opposing views on land and land use in India often draw on discourses that differ so fundamentally that they easily become nigh-on irreconcilable (Oskarsson 2017). On the one hand, the mandatory and key strategic role of the EIA process makes EIA struggles possible and perhaps even attractive from an environmentalist point of view. EIA struggles, as we define them, share certain features with the proliferating ‘law struggles’ recently analysed for India by Sundar (2011). Here, collective action is increasingly geared towards using—or achieving the introduction of—laws that safeguard the rights, entitlements and needs of subaltern groups to further specific mobilisations in specific locales. Such recourse in political struggles to the law’s language and institutions parallels the recourse to the language and institutions of the EIA process in environmental struggles that we here refer to as EIA struggles. In theory, an environmental clearance granted to a project can be challenged—and even annulled—on grounds of ‘illegality, irrationality and procedural impropriety’ during the EIA process (Chowdhury n.d.). This means that (again, in theory) a simple documented breach of proper procedure in conducting an EIA is enough to build a challenge that could lead to the cancellation of the entire project. Given how environmentalists often justifiably complain about the poor quality of EIA reports in India (Dongre 2013), and the reports’ often barely disguised ‘attempts to mask economic goals in the language of social development’ (Bedi 2013), the scope for waging successful EIA struggles through the EIA process would seem considerable. Yet, as the Mopa case shows, the EIA process does not unfold on an even playing field. For one thing, for most projects that require EIAs, the investments are significant, the project’s proponent is embedded in networks that also include politicians and bureaucrats, and influential stakeholders are likely to promote the project as a ‘prestige project’. However, as recent critical work on EIAs has pointed out, EIAs are in themselves ‘inescapably, and fundamentally, concerned with power’ (Cashmore and Richardson 2012; Aguilar-Støen and Hirsch 2017). The EIA process requires that decision-makers, developers, consultants, affected populations and other actors agree to play by the rules of the game; the game, however, follows an ‘authoritative script’ (Baya-Lafitte 2016) that favours certain discourses, interests and forms of knowledge.
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 85 The language of the EIA process, and thus also of EIA struggle, is overwhelmingly the language of ‘large-scale, capital intensive science’ (Li 2009). On the one hand, this privileges investors and project developers who have significant resources at their disposal while simultaneously directing the actions of environmental groups towards the difficult, costly and time-consuming production of scientific or technical counter-arguments, often in contexts where both resources and local expertise are limited. On the other hand, the ‘corporate science’ produced by project proponents may, as convincingly shown by Kirsch (2014), be systematically biased towards obscuring or minimising environmental impacts. While there are evident power asymmetries at play here, there is also the latent risk of a more subtle depoliticisation of environmental conflict (Baya-Lafitte 2016) inasmuch as popular opposition that may be motivated by shared political or moral concerns can only be registered in the EIA process if it can be convincingly couched in the technical language of science. To Aguilar-Støen and Hirsch (2017), the EIA script thus predetermines the horizons of what activists can hope to achieve through an EIA struggle. This challenge is compounded by how, as argued by Li (2009), the very form of the EIA tends to facilitate project approvals. This capacity of form to render substance irrelevant has been more eloquently rephrased by the veteran Indian ecologist, Madhav Gadgil, who, during a recent visit to Goa, pointed out how EIAs can ‘make reality an illusion and an illusion reality’.60 Lastly, the power asymmetries involved in the EIA process and EIA struggles are further cemented by the frequent changes that have been made to the environmental clearance process in India. According to the Hindustan Times,61 more than 100 changes were made to this process over a span of just seven years, from 2006 to 2013. To borrow Jenkins’ (2014) phrase, such a state of ‘permanent reform’, with its back and forth changes, usually leads to shifting and contrary interpretations, ad hoc-ism and confusion, and benefits well-positioned individuals who can use their discretionary power and superior knowledge to influence 60
61
Cited in Digging Deeper: Mining Tales’, Navhind Times (16 Sept. 2015) [http://www.navhindtimes.in/digging-deeper-mining-tales/, accessed 27 Feb. 2017]. See Chetan Chauhan, ‘Environment Impact Assessment Changed 100 Times in Less than 7 Years’, Hindustan Times (11 November 2013) https://www.hindustant imes.com/india/environment-impact-assessment-changed-100-times-in-less -than-7-years/story-EzIZvzfSLmyQDEupHRrgXP.html, accessed 27 Feb. 2017.
86
The Great Goa Land Grab
outcomes. Seeing the EIA process and EIA struggles through this prism reminds us of their embeddedness in often highly asymmetrical power relations. Below we show that while the Mopa EIA process did indeed provide an arena for contestation as local environmentalists mobilised to stop the airport, the EIA process in effect induced the articulation of discourses that worked to ‘clean the slate’, while also imbuing its claims with the scientific authority and legitimacy that enabled land dispossession. Clean slates, barren lands: The draft EIA report on Mopa The draft EIA report for the proposed Mopa airport was prepared by the Environment Division of Engineers India Limited (EIL).62 EIL is a public-sector company and one of India’s leading consultancy and engineering, procurement and construction services companies in hydrocarbons and petrochemicals, and it also has a track record of executing large infrastructure projects including highways, bridges and airports. While the ten ‘greenfield refineries’ EIL has in its portfolio illustrate its commitment to the discourse of greenfield development, it also has a consultancy service that carries out EIA studies and prepares environmental management plans for external clients. It collected environmental data in Mopa from October to December 2011 and published the draft EIA report in October 2014 (EIL 2014). By the time the draft EIA report was released, plans for a new airport at Mopa had been in existence for fifteen years; the site had already been selected in 1999. Land acquisition notifications were first issued in 2003, but these were eventually allowed to lapse. Fresh notifications were then issued in 2008, and land acquisition proceedings picked up speed under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government that assumed office in Goa in 2012. In late 2013, land acquisition was complete, and soon after, Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India on the promise of replicating his ‘Gujarat model’ in the rest of India. That model was, among other things, rooted in a practice of swiftly obtaining all the required clearances—including environmental clearances—for prospective investors under a ‘single-window’ system, a practice which Modi’s first minister of the environment, Prakash Javadekar, went on to adhere to in New Delhi as well. It was against this 62
This and the following section draw on Nielsen and Da Silva (2017).
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 87 backdrop that the draft EIA report was circulated, and the mandatory public hearing was scheduled to follow some months later. The draft EIA report described the area earmarked for the airport as having ‘only few trees but mainly bushes’ (EIL 2014, vi, 88). The land was predominantly a ‘tabletop plateau area surrounded by steep slopes that act as natural drains’ during the monsoon. For this reason, there was ‘no surface water available on the plateau’ (ibid., 8). Four catchments drained rainwater to the north, south, and east and west, through natural slopes to lower elevated lands where it accumulated in various rivers. The land on the plateau, the report said, was largely noncultivated due to an out-cropping of lateritic soil with shallow layers of reddish-brown sandy soil in several depressed locations, and vegetation and trees were sparse (ibid., 11, 37, 73). The report identified one reserved forest within 15 kilometres, but no other ‘environmentally sensitive areas’, i.e. no archeologically important places, no national parks or wildlife sanctuaries, no protected forests, and no ‘areas occupied by sensitive man-made land uses’ such as hospitals or schools (ibid., 8). Beyond the plateau, the surrounding land was described as ‘predominantly forest land’, with reserve forest areas to the north and east, and ‘barren and village cultivated land’ to the west (ibid., 65). Moving on to describe the socio-economic environment of the project site, the report presented a table to illustrate that agricultural activities were—as one might expect on a barren, rocky plateau—very limited in and around the project area: a mere 3 percent of the population comprised agricultural labourers, while 4.35 percent of the people were cultivators. Yet the figures used were from the 2011 population census of India and covered all of North Goa district, that is, half of Goa. These figures thus said virtually nothing about the extent of agriculture on and adjacent to the acquired land. The same section contained a table that showed the total number of households in the project-affected villages to be 1,641 and the total number of affected people to be 7,298. Whether one considers these to be large numbers is a matter of perspective, but the EIA report certainly diminished them by again contextualising them with reference to all of North Goa district to claim that only around 1 percent of the district’s population stood to be affected (ibid., 39-49). The effect of these kinds of contextualisations is to reinforce the impression that these are sparsely-populated lands with only very limited agricultural activity.
88
The Great Goa Land Grab
In the section on the biological environment, the report listed 385 species of plants identified within a 10-kilometre radius of the project site, recording no critically threatened species. It also reported on birds, but listed only the Indian Peafowl as a schedule-I species (ibid., 4254). There were also 33 butterfly species (three schedule-I species), five species of amphibians, twelve species of reptiles, and ten rather unexceptional mammals (e.g. hare, mouse, rat and dog) listed, but ‘no visual sighting of any threatened species’ (ibid., 60). There was a brief mention of the closeness of the Mopa plateau to the Western Ghats, a World Heritage Site and an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) known for its biological richness and diversity, but, as the report correctly stated, Pernem taluka is not part of the ESA. In its assessment of impact, the draft report found that the ‘significance value’ of the effect of the airport on the local biology, water, land use, topography and socio-economic aspects would be uniformly ‘low’, albeit with two exceptions: first, the presence of construction crew, passengers and staff would increase the demand for water and could lead to water scarcity; and second, increased vehicular movements and open pipeline trenches and un-barricaded waste water pits during construction could cause injury to animals. These two ‘medium’ impacts in terms of significance value were addressed, along with other concerns, in the report’s environmental management plan. The rehabilitation and resettlement of affected people during the construction phase was also mentioned as an impact under the category, ‘socio-economic environment’. Here, however, it was stressed that the overall project impact would in fact be positive because it would lead to ‘more benefits to the local people’ through better infrastructure, more commercial activity, more employment opportunities, development of communications, a drinking water supply, the building of hospitals, schools, clubs and a stadium, regular health camps, a CSR policy, and the creation of ‘social harmony and goodwill’ through cultural events (ibid., xiii). The draft EIA report can reasonably be seen as articulating a discourse that actively coproduced Mopa as a greenfield on which the construction of a new airport could proceed with little negative impact on local social, economic, biological and environmental life: these are sparsely populated drylands with little agriculture, no places of historical or religious significance, and only common animals that one finds
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 89 more or less anywhere. The EIA for Mopa is far from unique in this regard; based on a reading of more than 75 different EIA reports on mining in Goa (Dongre 2013), Madhav Gadgil concluded that every single report described Goa as a treeless, waterless, barren land with no hills or plateaus.63 But according to the EIA report, Mopa airport would—through the ‘trickledown’ mechanism that Bedi has identified as a key legitimising device in several other Indian EIAs—deliver what this greenfield site lacked, namely development through jobs, infrastructure, commerce and connectivity. This was, however, a discourse that was hotly contested by the environmentalists who challenged the EIA report. The life-giving Barazan: Critiquing the draft EIA The opposition to Mopa airport has come from several quarters, including the Mopa Vimantal Pidit Xetkari Samiti (MVPXS), a local association of affected landowners and tenants. However, efforts centred on contesting the airport by engaging in the EIA process have been spearheaded by other activist groups elsewhere in state – groups that, in terms of membership, overlap to some extent. It is commonly accepted that for many decades, Goa’s development has been based on the destruction of land rather than the careful use of it (Newman 1984). And activists had—as we detail below—many arguments as to why a new airport at Mopa would wreak additional havoc on the state’s already fragile environment and hurl dispossessed locals into poverty. Activists were also apprehensive that a new airport would exacerbate many of Goa’s already existing problems associated with unsustainable tourism—both environmental ones pertaining to coastal erosion and loss of local control over land and sea, as well as social and moral ones pertaining to increased crime, prostitution and drug abuse (Routledge 2000)—and that it would exclusively benefit real estate developers, wealthy entrepreneurs, land brokers and corrupt politicians. While these critiques are rooted in forms of moral and socio-political reasoning, the problem that activists faced when challenging the airport through the authoritative EIA script was strikingly similar to the situation described by Baya-Laffite (2016) in the context of struggles over nature in Uruguay, namely, how to move from moral and political reasoning to demonstrating ‘the truth’ about impacts. This, we sug63
Cited in Digging Deeper: Mining Tales’, Navhind Times (16 Sept. 2015) [http: //www.navhindtimes.in/digging-deeper-mining-tales/, accessed 27 Feb. 2017].
90
The Great Goa Land Grab
gest, is a problem that requires a different solution than Bernstein and Sharma’s (2016) ‘technomoral politics’ that they recently identified as a prevalent strategy among non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society groups in Delhi. Among these groups, moral projects are translated into technical terms by mixing the languages of law, policy and morality. The resultant ‘technomoral politics’ can then be effectively deployed to claim authority over public stewardship. In the context of an EIA struggle, however, moral posturing and judicialised strategies of claim-making are in themselves incapable of lifting the burden of proof; what is required is substantial engagement in producing, exchanging and criticising scientific and technical information of an often complicated sort. Activists used the mandatory public hearing on the draft EIA held on the Mopa plateau on 1 February 2015 as an opportunity to contest the discursive production of the local environment as a greenfield. Public hearings are the only medium in the environmental clearance process through which people are assured of an opportunity to interact directly with the relevant public officials and project proponents regarding project-related concerns (Mohan and Pabreja 2016). And, in theory, the entire EIA process can be undermined if the ‘conduct of public hearings [is done] in an improper manner’ (Chowdhury n.d.). The Mopa public hearing drew a large response: 1,586 people attended, alongside the 1,000 police who were deployed, and seventy oral and 1,150 written presentations were made, of which a single activist submitted nearly 600. The hearing proceeded in an unruly manner. There were ‘altercations between supporters and opponents which threatened to escalate into physical confrontations’,64 and ‘the two groups exchanged verbal feud, while some of them clashed, forcing the police to intervene’.65 One activist was attacked as he tried to speak against the airport, and activist groups subsequently called the public hearing ‘a stage-managed show of strength [by the airport’s proponents] rather than a public hearing’.66 64
65
66
‘Unruly Scenes at Mopa Airport’s EIA Hearing’, The Times of India (2 Feb. 2015) [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ goa/Unruly-scenes-at-Mopa-airportsEIA-hearing/articleshow/46089868.cms, accessed 27 Feb. 2017]. ‘Public Hearing on Mopa Airport Impact Report Held Amid Chaos’, Business Standard (1 Feb. 2015) [http://www.busi ness-standard.com/article/pti-stories/publichearing-on-mopa-airport-impact-report-held-amid-chaos- 115020100446_1.html, accessed 27 Feb. 2017]. ‘GFDO Terms Mopa Public Hearing as Stage-Managed’, Navhind Times (3 Feb.
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 91 Activist submissions consisted of, among others, hundreds of signed statements by locals opposed to the airport, detailing their historical connection to the place, the many different vegetables they grew for personal consumption and commercial purposes, the presence of a large number of timber trees, the many perennial springs that supplied drinking water, and the importance of the plateau for irrigation, agriculture, fodder, medicine, fruits, berries, honey and firewood. A sacred grove on the plateau itself, the Barazan, was also regularly mentioned as the most important religious site in the area, along with a number of other devasthans (divine dwellings). For this reason, activists routinely referred to the plateau as the Barazan rather than Mopa, underscoring its crucial role in an ancient socio-religious order linking man and nature. Many of the written statements opened with a declaration that the signatories were grateful and happy with their current life and survived ‘completely on farming and agriculture’. Signatories spoke of how they had seen their grandfathers and fathers struggle to make ends meet, and voiced their fears that they would now lose the traditions, culture, beliefs and community spirit that had been passed down to them from their ancestors. Most submissions ended by calling on the authorities to stop the destruction of the plateau and to allow the local residents to continue to live in eco-friendly connectivity with the environment, the plateau, the life-giving springs and the rich wildlife. Activists had also carried out preliminary studies on and around the plateau over a one-month period from December 2014 to January 2015. Based on this, they prepared a report that listed 44 springs and their locations, thus undermining the claim that rainwater simply ran off the plateau and into the rivers, leaving the plateau and its surroundings dry and barren. In the report—and in environmentalist discourse more generally—the image of the area to be developed was therefore radically different from that found in the draft EIA report. In the report, the plateau appears—in a manner strikingly similar to how bauxite hills are described by anti-mining scholars and activists in other parts of India (Padel 2015)—as a giant sponge that absorbs and stores water, releasing it gently into the many freshwater springs to nurture and sustain life throughout the year. 2015) [http://www.navhindtimes.in/ gfdo-terms-mopa-public-hearing-as-stagemanaged/, accessed 27 Feb. 2017].
92
The Great Goa Land Grab
Its unique hydrology, topology and geology, it is thus argued, ‘allow all the larger faunal and floral species to flourish, without a need to leave the plateau’. This included a number of ‘flagship species’—many of them endangered—including elephants, tigers and leopards. Hundreds of birds were also listed, alongside mammals, reptiles and four sacred groves. The report concluded that the Mopa biosphere was ‘a self-sustaining island that surpasses the Western Ghat ranges and protected areas to its east and south east in biodiversity and uniqueness’. In a comparable Indian context, Mujumdar and Menezes have argued that the politics of mapping and representation implicated in the production of official EIA reports involve a ‘deliberate unmapping of territory and population’ in order to get projects pushed through (Mujumdar and Menezes 2014). By this, they imply that these reports utilise wilfully-distorted mappings of the places and peoples they claim to represent. In light of this, the reports and submissions can be conceived as attempts at redrawing the map by embedding the plateau in a wider environmental, hydrological and social context, and by foregrounding a competing claim that had been marginalised by the EIA report, namely the experiential reality of some of the local inhabitants. Activist representations and statements were recorded in the Minutes of the public hearing proceedings which were later forwarded, along with the 2015 final EIA report, to the MoEFCC’s expert group on infrastructure projects. Additional objections from the project’s opponents, also listed in the Minutes, included the inadequacy of the data collection period (only three months), the lack of analysis of soil fertility, the likelihood that the airport would lead to the destruction of nearby rivers and cause more floods, the flawed recording of the local flora, fauna and wildlife, the report’s failure to cover the requisite full 10-kilometre radius, the lack of reference to groundwater percolation and recharge and the many existing perennial springs, the neglect of local villagers’ medical knowledge, the exclusion of sacred groves including the Barazan, the lack of consideration of the four million cashew trees growing on the plateau’s slopes that generate an annual income of Rs500 million which would be lost if the airport was built, and a general lack of authenticated data. It was this lack of authenticated data that, it was claimed, rendered both the report and the public hearing illegal. The Minutes from the public hearing also contain an overview of the
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 93 ‘comments of the applicant’ (i.e. ‘response’) to the ‘statement of issues’ (i.e. ‘questions’) raised during the public hearing. The 25 ‘comments’ listed provide an interesting illustration of how the technology of the EIA allows for the absorption of environmentalist counter-discourse: first, given the very large number of ‘issues’ raised through the more than 1,000 submissions, the ‘applicant’ could reasonably choose to respond selectively; second, those ‘issues’ that did receive ‘comments’ were addressed almost exclusively in the techno-administrative language that is embedded in the EIA script. The public hearing had been properly notified and copies of the draft report circulated to all the relevant panchayats; rainwater harvesting would take care of water stress; water flows had already been studied; sewage treatment plants and garbage management plans would address pollution concerns; the new terminal building would be energy efficient; the EIA report had been prepared as per the manual of the MoEFCC and as per the terms of reference; all ecological aspects had been taken into account; etc.67 This process, in which certain EIA critiques are ignored and others addressed in techno-administrative language, has been described as ‘rendering technical’ (Aguilar-Støen and Hirsch 2017). Here, fundamental political debates about development trajectories and their risks are largely eclipsed by technical and scientific arguments. Beyond the Hearing After the public hearing, the EIA report was redrafted and submitted to the MoEFCC for environmental clearance (EIL 2015). Comparing the final report to the earlier draft report offers an opportunity to analyse to what extent the activists’ counter-discourse had been accommodated. In accordance with the objections, the final EIA report had expanded its area of coverage to the mandatory full 10-kilometre radius that an EIA must study. Since Mopa is close to the state border with Maharashtra, parts of that state fall within the 10-kilometre radial area, and so the final report also incorporated some new information on Maharashtra (ibid., 44-45). There was, again in line with the objections, a new and expanded list of environmentally-sensitive areas that now included wetlands (two), water bodies (four rivers), state boundaries (one), tourist areas (none), industrial estates (four), major industries (two) and archaeologically important places or monuments (three) (ibid., 8). Yet 67
See Goa State Pollution Control Board (GSPCB), ‘Proceedings of the Environmental Public Hearing held on 01/02/2015’ (Panaji: GSPCB, n.d.)
94
The Great Goa Land Grab
this recognition of environmentally-sensitive areas was partly countered by a new table that quantified land-use patterns to claim that a full 85 percent of the land already acquired was scrub, scrub forest or wasteland. There was also discussion of a fresh environmental baseline data collection undertaken between November 2014 and January 2015. The section on biological environment had a new table on medicinal plants (36 species) and a new section on fish diversity which— somewhat curiously, given that Mopa is roughly 25 kilometres from the sea—listed ‘some of the major fish species catched (sic) in the sea as well as rivers of Goa’ (ibid., 67). The section on land environment now also mentioned that the airport area consists of bauxite ore, for which a ‘no objection certificate’ had been obtained from the mining department (ibid., 81). The only other change was the addition of some new annexures. Annexure 21 was a mandatory version of the proceedings of the public hearing; 85 comments were listed and addressed more extensively than in the Minutes drawn up by the Goa State Pollution Control Board. In addition, a new Annexure 20 purported to offer a description of the socio-economic environment, but was based almost exclusively on state or taluka-level census data from 2011, and a mere half page of stray observations from the ‘study area’. The impact of the many representations made by activist groups became negligible in the final report, limited to some data on Maharashtra finding its way into the report alongside information on a few water bodies and some common fish and medicinal plants. None of this fundamentally altered the report’s discursive production of the project area as a greenfield. Activists, however, did not abandon their EIA struggle. They produced a comprehensive plan for conducting further independent studies of the local environment, economy, society and culture on the assumption that a proper EIA study would vindicate their position that the environmental clearance should not be granted. Activist groups enlisted experts in the fields of flora and fauna, sociology and anthropology, as well as an expert on otters and one on reptiles. But although activists thus challenged the EIA on the grounds that its report was poor and incorrect, they reaffirmed its legitimacy as a key instrument for arriving at decisions on the environment and, in the process, similarly reaffirmed the need for anchoring counter-arguments in the techno-scientific language of EIA scripts. The work of activist groups eventually led them to challenge the final
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 95 EIA report by submitting a list of thirteen queries to the MoEFCC in the latter part of 2015. The ministry directed the Goa state government to respond to the queries in writing, which it soon did. After that, the environmental clearance was granted in late October 2015. This occurred in the wake of a visit by the Union minister of state for environment, forests and climate change, Prakash Javadekar, to the Global Business Forum in Goa. At it, Javadekar stated: ‘Mopa is essential for development of Goa and my ministry will always have a positive viewpoint on any developmental project of a state’. He added that his ministry would ‘not be against the airport and give consent to it readily’,68 which he duly did four days later. With the environmental clearance officially granted, activists turned to the National Green Tribunal (NGT), a special tribunal empowered to provide speedy environmental justice and reduce the burden of litigation. While the pleadings on the petition have not yet been completed, the NGT has not ordered a stay on construction, which is now well underway. Concluding Discussion The case of Mopa airport illustrates how current discourses about greenfield development work to render particular environments as clean slates suitable for particular kinds of interventions that have significant ramifications for land use. The tabula rasa fantasy is, as we have argued, an integral part of this discourse and goes a long way towards accounting for its popularity. As such, discourses of greenfield development do not merely describe given environments in more or less accurate terms, but rather create the preconditions for their own territorialisation by enabling wide-reaching forms of environmental transformation, in this case the setting up of an international airport on and around a laterite plateau. We have devoted special attention to the EIA process as an important ‘greenfielding’ technology. Although EIAs and other assessment tools are often projected as useful paths towards discursive accommodation between opposing groups, the Mopa case shows how the EIA process worked in practice to induce the articulation of a discourse of greenfield development that was endorsed by elite business groups and politicians alike. In other words, the (strongly disputed) environ68
Cited in ‘Mopa Airport Vital for Goa’s Development: Javadekar’, Navhind Times (17 Oct. 2015) [http://www.navhindtimes.in/ mopa-airport-vital-for-goasdevelopment-javadekar/, accessed 27 Feb. 2017].
96
The Great Goa Land Grab
mental information codified in the Mopa EIA reports analysed here was crucial in securing not just the required environmental clearances, but also in deflecting opposition and bestowing procedural legitimacy on the airport project. The mere completion of all the mandatory steps involved in the EIA process— data collection, drafting the report, circulating it, holding a public hearing, taking Minutes, responding to criticism, redrafting the report, responding to further queries, etc.—appeared to provide sufficient grounds for granting of the environmental clearances. This is not to say that content was irrelevant, only that the aesthetics of form and process could significantly compensate for the lack of substance in several of the areas of study. In a paradoxical way, EIA struggles may contribute to this outcome. As shown elsewhere, environmentalist counter-knowledge and counterdiscourse, produced with the intent of undermining an EIA and stopping controversial projects, may end up being selectively incorporated into the official EIA report, thus resulting in an even more robust and irrefutable EIA (Baya-Lafitte 2016). Goa chief minister Parrikar acknowledged as much when he commented, with reference to the Mopa project, that ‘when someone opposes something the advantage is that it gives perfection to the project’.69 Existing power asymmetries between project proponents and opponents are compounded by a general trend of weakening Indian environmental legislation, coupled with increasing hostility towards NGOs and activist groups that are routinely labelled antinational or antidevelopment, or accused of retarding India’s economic growth (Manor 2015). The futility of activist efforts to deconstruct the EIA’s greenfield discourse was undoubtedly partly attributable to such contributory factors within the larger political economy. Yet the authoritative script and language of the EIA process has also been shown to consistently reinforce such pre-existing power asymmetries in a manner that can seem almost intrinsic to the nature of the arrangement. Waging EIA struggles is both time-consuming and difficult for environmentalist groups lacking resources and access to expertise, and deconstructing greenfield views of an environment as articulated in an official EIA report is concomitantly burdensome. It is also a process that, as the Mopa case illustrates, can play out over a long period of time in a situation 69
Cited in ‘BJP Top Brass Hits Out at NGOs for Opposing Projects’, Herald (31 May 2016) [http://www.heraldgoa.in/Goa/BJP-top- brass-hits-out-at-NGOs-foropposing-projects/102518.html, accessed 28 Feb. 2017].
Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession, EIA Struggles in Goa 97 in which many crucial decisions—the choice of location and size and scope of the airport, etc.—had already been made, and where the process of identifying a successful bidder, signing contracts and commencing construction went on unhindered. The EIA struggle thus evolved in the shadow of growing irreversibility, in which even a hypothetical victory for the activists began to seem increasingly pyrrhic. Given that the waiting game has come to be synonymous with such processes in India, it seems inevitable that greenfield projects such as that described here will, once begun, eventually get the go-ahead courtesy of political technologies such as the EIA.
Part II
INFRASTRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS
98
5. Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa
I
2014 the newly elected Indian National Democratic Alliance government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its charismatic, pro-business Prime Minster Narendra Modi, launched its ‘Make in India’ programme. Promoted as a major national programme designed to transform India into a global manufacturing hub, the ‘Make in India’ programme promised to provide global recognition to the Indian economy, facilitate investments, foster innovation, and build best-in-class infrastructure (Government of India, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion 2015, 3). Indeed, in terms of investment opportunities, the development of the so-called growth infrastructures is one of the cornerstones of the programme, with ‘top visionary projects’ worth a whopping USD 34 billion to be developed over the next five years (ibid., 11). While India’s new ‘smart cities’ are perhaps the most iconic manifestation of such new growth infrastructures (Datta 2015; see also Kuldova, this volume), the broader bundle of growth infrastructures also includes seaports, roads, highways, power generation, industrial corridors, railways, and aviation, all designed to take economic growth and innovation to new global heights. The planned, rapid development of new growth infrastructures is thus the key not only to the ‘Make in India’ programme but also to ‘making’ India into a globally recognised, innovative, world-class nation. New growth infrastructures, in other words, will provide the material basis on which what Kuldova (2014, 17) calls the ‘utopian visions of India’s rise to power’ can rest and be realised. N
100
The Great Goa Land Grab
This chapter examines infrastructure development and the utopian visions infrastructures materialise and embody; their generative links to other utopias and counter-utopias; and the expulsions that new growth infrastructures necessitate. Informing the analysis is a view that holds that while infrastructures are certainly technical in nature, they are much more than that. Infrastructures hold the capacity for doing such diverse things as making new forms of sociality, remaking landscapes, defining new forms of politics and resistance, and reconfiguring subjects and objects (Jensen and Morita 2015, 82–83). They are, in other words, infused with social meanings and reflective of larger priorities and attentions (Howe et al. 2015, 2). While this may be said to be the case for all infrastructures, from roads (Harvey and Knox 2015) to water pipes (Björkman 2015), the materiality of India’s new growth infrastructures is additionally defined by its designed capacity for facilitating circuits of capital—by allowing for the exchange and circulation of goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance—as well as by its power to conjure up new aesthetic and affective desires and possibilities, and to fundamentally reconfigure relationships with land and resources by moving people away from agrarian mores and alternative possibilities for development (Sampat 2014, 103). It is in this sense that we locate growth infrastructures at the nexus of utopia and expulsion. We use the aviation sector as our infrastructural point of entry. In terms of investment potential, aviation is a small sector, but in terms of enabling rapid connectivity and the speedy movement of goods and people, it is an important one. It is also a controversial sector insofar as greenfield airport development in particular will tend to entail a significant measure of expulsion through dispossession and displacement of the kind that has in recent years triggered a spate of ‘land wars’ (Shiva et al. 2011) that have by now become ‘the most significant obstacle to capitalist growth in India’ (Levien 2015, 156). The concrete materialisation of growth infrastructures in the guise of new airports thus brings into play contested utopias concerning what tomorrow’s India ought to be and for whom. Empirically, we focus on Goa, where a planned greenfield airport in Mopa in Pernem taluka in the northernmost corner of the state has been pushed through with massive political and financial backing, while also spawning considerable resistance and deep political divides. By also looking at plans for a new golf resort in Tiracol as well as related developments elsewhere in Pernem, we analyse the utopias and counter-utopias generated by new growth infrastructures.
Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa
101
While we here limit ourselves to the Goan context, we believe the analysis resonates with the broader Indian experience as covered elsewhere in this volume. We proceed to briefly locate the emergence of new growth infrastructure as drivers of economic development in the broader context of economic liberalisation and, more importantly, in relation to the symbolic and discursive construction of what Kaur (2012) calls a hyperreal ‘New India’. In light of this, we analyse how and why airport development has emerged as an important component in India’s overall strategy of using infrastructure development as a key means to usher in robust economic growth in the years ahead. We then turn to Goa where the proposed Mopa airport and related plans have become important sites for the articulation of contested utopias about what tomorrow’s Goa will look like. One utopia, which we call ‘Golden Goa’, envisions Goa as a booming tourist and real estate economy and an ideal leisure destination for the domestic and global middle class; its counterpart, which we call ‘Green Goa’, sees the proposed airport and its associated developments as the final nail in the coffin of an environmentally sustainable and humane ‘Green Goa’ that should be preserved.70 Preserving ‘Green Goa’ has, however, increasingly become a utopian mission insofar as Goa’s development over the past many decades has come from ‘the destruction of land, not from the careful use of it’ (Newman 1984, 444) through rampant, often illegal mining (de Souza 2015), unregulated real estate development, industrialisation, and mass tourism (Goswami 2008). In the conclusion we present some preliminary reflections on the relationship between growth infrastructure development and the formation of contested utopias in the context of contemporary Goa. Growth Infrastructures and ‘New India’ The story of India’s economic liberalisation and its increasing embrace of pro-business policies over the past three decades has been told and analysed at length (see for instance Corbridge and Harriss 2000; Sanyal 2007 Chatterjee 2008; Ruparelia et al. 2011; Kohli 2012; Kennedy 2014). 70
We stress that those who have opposed the Mopa airport, and the golf resort at Tiracol, have done so for a complex and nuanced set of reasons, and have worked hard in civil society and legal arenas to stop these projects. We do not mean to trivialise these dedicated efforts by pointing out that ideas about a lost ‘Green Goa’ utopia have also informed their opposition.
102
The Great Goa Land Grab
We will not retell this story here, but will instead focus more narrowly on one particular aspect of India’s neoliberal turn, namely the emergence of the powerful, symbolic, and hyperreal construct of a ‘New India’, and examine its relationship to the materiality of new growth infrastructures.71 As we show later, this construct has also provided an important, new framework for the rearticulation of, and alignment with, discourses and images of Goa as ‘Golden Goa’ that have a much longer genealogy. ‘New India’ at one level refers to the socio-political and economic realities that characterise India today after more than two decades of liberalising economic reforms and the increasing consolidation of capitalist markets of commodity production and consumption (D’Costa 2010, 2). There now exists a considerable scholarly literature that has carefully deconstructed the ‘newness’ of this ‘New India’ to bring to light not only the continuities with the ‘Old India’ of the past but also the persistent socioeconomic inequalities that ‘the Wall Street version’ (D’Costa 2010, 7) of ‘New India’ glosses over (see e.g. D’Costa 2010, Kohli 2012, Corbridge and Shah 2013). While one could thus legitimately dismiss ‘New India’ as little more than elite myth-making, we here draw inspiration from Kaur (2012) and Kaur and Hansen (2015) by locating the significance and aspirational force of ‘New India’ precisely at the representational level, that is, as an ideational and symbolic construct that mobilises particular identities, desires, and aspirations. To Kaur and Hansen (2015, 266), ‘New India’ denotes ‘a new world of enterprise, techno-mobility, consumption and fresh market opportunities’ as embodied in the country’s globally renown IT and ITES industry; its impressive rates of economic growth during the first decade of this millennium; its global soft power spearheaded by Bollywood and its film stars; its long strides towards attracting corporate praise and investment; and not least its rapidly emerging consumer-oriented new middle class. As D’Costa writes (2010, xi): There is a striking optimism about the emerging India. The country that only had a past is beginning to be seen as a country with a future. The land of scarcities is being thought of as a land of opportunities. The land of snake charmers is now considered a land of fashion designers. 71
Our discussion of ‘New India’ draws on Nielsen and Wilhite (2015).
Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa
103
The land of traditional crafts is increasingly perceived as a land of information technology. The land of bullock carts or steam trains is beginning to be seen as a land of automobiles or jet planes... the mood is contagious and the images are larger than life. A distinct feature of this version of ‘New India’ is its claim to represent a collective dream and aspiration, even when a major part of the population remains outside of it (Kaur and Hansen 2015), superfluous to it (Kaur 2015, 319), or expelled from it (Kuldova 2014), as several chapters in this volume amply demonstrate. Yet ‘New India’ is more than just a myth propagated by ‘sections of the elite masquerading as the “common man”’ (Kaur and Hansen 2015, 270). It is a ‘hyperreal’ construct insofar as it aspires to ‘make the real’, seeking to make the real coincide with itself, even as it precedes the real (Kaur 2012, 619). Much of this ‘making coincide’ takes place at the discursive, visual, and aesthetic levels and seeks to produce ‘an exaggerated reality that seeks to subsume and replace all other realities’ (Kaur 2015, 318, emphases added) that resonate less well with the hyperreal ‘New India’. We argue that the development of new growth infrastructures can be seen to constitute an important material equivalent to this discursive and aesthetic work of ‘making the real coincide with New India’. In other words, the bundle of new and ostensibly worldclass growth infrastructures is what will provide the hyperreal ‘New India’ with the material foundations it needs in order to subsume and replace what went before it. In the context of Goa, but also elsewhere, airports form, as we discuss next, an important node in this bundle of new growth infrastructures. Promoting Airport Development India’s early phase of recent airport expansion focussed on the development of new international ‘world-class’ airport infrastructure in, for example, New Delhi and Bangalore. Thus, when the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh inaugurated the new terminal 3 at the airport in New Delhi in July 2010 he tellingly described it as signalling ‘the arrival of a new India, committed to join the ranks of modern, industrialized nations of the world’ (cited in Lalchandani 2010). While these airports are still upheld as successful examples of what public–private partnerships (PPPs) can achieve in the field of aviation, contemporary airport development is increasingly attuned to upgrading existing domestic
104
The Great Goa Land Grab
airports to international airports, while also developing the so-called no-frills airports—envisioned as little more than upgraded railway stations in terms of services—in India’s tier II and tier III towns located some distance from the urban metropolises. Airport development in India thus mixes the creation of new, utopian elite leisure, lounge, and travel spaces with the more mundane ambition of enhanced regional connectivity between the centres and the peripheries for the benefit of the upwardly mobile mofussil classes. The strong emphasis on aviation and airport development in Indian policy-making circles is, as mentioned, evident in the ‘Make in India programme’, but also in strategic plans from the Ministry of Civil Aviation (2010) and in a recently circulated new draft national civil aviation policy from the same ministry. Indian aviation has been a chronically loss-making sector, best exemplified by the spectacular collapse of Kingfisher Airlines in 2012 at a time when it was India’s second largest domestic operator. But several Indian airlines are currently posting profits, and the present policy aim is ‘to take flying to the masses’ (Ministry of Civil Aviation 2015, 1) and to reach 300 million domestic ticketing in 2022 and half a billion in 2027 (ibid., 2), up from a modest 70 million in 2014–2015. In line with our analysis of the link between growth infrastructures and ‘New India’, the guiding idea behind the current policy is to use airports to attract investments and act as drivers of regional economic growth. This is to be achieved either by improving some of the existing approximately 400 Indian airstrips/airports that do not have scheduled operations (ibid., 4) or by building new greenfield airports such as that planned for Mopa. Airport development is thus intended to develop a region’s hinterland economy, rather than waiting for the regional economy to grow on its own to the level where the construction of a new airport would immediately be economically sound. This approach is justified in the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s (2010) strategic plan for 2010–2015, where the linkage between the civil aviation sector and economic activity and its catalytic impact on general development is said to be ‘well recognised’: USD 100 spent on air transport produce benefits worth USD 325 for the economy, and 100 additional jobs in air transport result in 610 new economy-wide jobs, it claims. In sum, the expectations associated with airport development are massive. As one report states: It has been observed that the airports and especially Inter-
Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa
105
national airports have become the catalysts for local economic development. Experts in the field are of the opinion that airports will shape business location and urban development in this century as much as seaports did in the 18th century, railroads in the 19th century and highways in 20th century. (Government of Goa 2015, 106) The development of greenfield airports is currently possible with 100 per cent foreign direct investment under a PPP set-up, thus making greenfield airport development—including the so-called nonaeronautical revenue from, for example, retail, advertising, vehicle parking, security equipment, hospitality, and other services—a potentially lucrative sector for private investors (Ernst & Young 2014, 26–27). The potential for huge profits is projected as, indeed, almost utopian: While India is currently the world’s tenth largest aviation market, it is the fastest growing, and it will be among the largest in the world if the projected ticketing targets indicated above are met. According to the President of India, the government plans to invest a full USD 120 billion in the development of airport infrastructure and aviation navigation services over the next decade (cited in Phadnis and Majumder 2016), and the recent draft civil aviation policy’s so-called regional connectivity scheme includes a slew of subsidies and concessions—such as viability gap funding, VAT at one per cent or less, free land, and the provision of multimodal hinterland connectivity—to attract developers and operators (Ministry of Civil Aviation 2015).72 In addition, Indian airports are encouraged to adopt or emulate the ‘SEZ Aerotropolis model’ under which ‘airport cities’ can include hotels, golf courses, amusement parks, aviation training schools, or IT parks to enhance revenues. Airports thus not only facilitate the transportation of goods and people; they also pry open new spaces of accumulation and enable new forms of conspicuous consumption of branded goods, and new forms of leisure and entertainment that are increasingly associated with ‘having made it’ in ‘New India’ (Kaur and Hansen 2015). Mopa: Redefining ‘Golden Goa’ ‘Mopa airport will generate tourism and hence the income for the state; Mopa is a golden opportunity for the state of 72
The policy also covers areas such as aviation training, and maintenance, repair and overhaul facilities, and more.
106
The Great Goa Land Grab Goa’. (Sandip Fulari, convenor of ‘People for Mopa’, cited in Times of India 2013b)
The trajectory of the new greenfield airport in Mopa is illustrative of how airports have recently emerged with force as a priority area for Indian governments: Plans for establishing a new international airport at Mopa have been around for more than 15 years, but actual—and very rapid—progress has only been made over the last few years. In 1999, a Congress-led state government had approved the Mopa project, and land acquisition proceedings for a whopping 80 lakh square metres (800 hectares) of land were initiated in 2003. The land acquisition was never completed, mostly because the proposed airport encountered stiff resistance from south Goa where a key worry was that the building of Mopa would eventually lead to the closure of the existing international airport in centrally located Dabolim. The potential closure of Dabolim would mean that all tourists arriving by plane would land in Mopa and would therefore be more likely to head for the nearby beaches in the north, thus hurting the tourist industry in the south. This early controversy over Mopa coincided with a phase of intense popular mobilisation against illicit land conversions under Goa’s Regional Plan 2011 in late 2006 and, in the following year, the implementation of the highly unpopular policy of establishing special economic zones (SEZ) for industrial production in the state (Abreu 2014; Bedi 2013; Da Silva 2014; Sampat 2013). These campaigns brought popular concerns over environmental destruction, water depletion, land scams, and pollution to the top of the political agenda, forcing the incumbent government to withdraw the regional plan, scrap the SEZ policy, and put Mopa on the backburner. It was not until mid-2008, when things had calmed down, that fresh land acquisition notifications were issued for Mopa. But the actual acquisition progressed slowly and was not declared to be complete until late 2013. By then, the state had a new government, led by the BJP and the current Union Minister of Defence Manohar Parrikar, who had risen to become Chief Minister in 2012. Parrikar hails from north Goa (Bardez). So does his party compatriot and current Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar, who succeeded Parrikar in late 2014 and who hails from Pernem itself. In addition, the former speaker of the legislative assembly and
Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa
107
current state forest and environment minister—a crucial ministry in terms of obtaining project-related clearances and permits—BJP’s Rajendra Arlekar, is elected from Pernem constituency. Both Chief Ministers have been strong backers of the Mopa project, and it is under their dispensations—and in the broader Indian context of prioritising growth infrastructures as outlined above—that the project has been carried forward at full speed. Depending on audience, Mopa airport has been discursively promoted by its backers in two complementary ways. On the one hand, they have claimed that the state was badly in need of a new airport insofar as the existing one at Dabolim was reaching saturation and could not, for technical reasons, be expanded.73 And without a new airport, there was a real danger that the crucial tourism industry would suffer irreparable damage in the years ahead.74 Yet more importantly, Mopa has been construed in utopian terms as not just a simple necessity, but also as, as the quote above illustrates, a ‘golden opportunity’ that will revive Goa’s economic fortunes, fortify its position as India’s dream holiday capital, and set in motion the transformation of the state’s backward northern areas into new leisure spaces. In 2012, Chief Minister Parrikar had said that the state would raise its annual tourist arrivals from 2.6 million to 6 million in just five years (Indian Express 2012); by the time the first phase of Mopa airport would be completed, in 2020, it alone would cater to 2.8 million arrivals per year; by 2045, when the fourth and final phase had been completed, that number would have risen to a full 13.1 million (Government of Goa 2015). Not only would this generate considerable revenue—it would also lead to the development of ancillary inductees such as hotels and tourism infrastructure. And the addition of air cargo operations would shift the current ground-based movements in Goa and attract air operations currently conducted outside the area (Government of Goa 2015, 2). This would have a ‘positive impact on socio-economic environment due to development of infrastructure in the area, growth of secondary and tertiary sector businesses and subsequent enhancement in the standards of living of the local populace’ (Government of Goa 2015, 73 74
See Nielsen (2015) for a short overview of the technical–legal challenges associated with expanding Dabolim. The Goan economy has suffered over the past few years due to a total ban on mining, one of the state’s most important industries. To offset this loss, the performance of the tourist industry has become much more important.
108
The Great Goa Land Grab
97). Yet the full vision for Mopa was much larger. The proposed airport would be equipped with five-star hotels; eco, adventure, and wellness resorts; a shopping plaza; office and exhibition spaces; an amphitheatre; arts and craft workshops and displays; a large auditorium; a VIP lounge; and even a cultural museum (Government of Goa 2015, 108– 109); and, in anticipation of a boom in the Indian convention industry, it would have a 1000 delegates convention centre spread over 5 hectares (ibid., 108–110). In all, 381 out of the 2271 acres acquired for Mopa were reserved for ‘commercial activities’ according to the ‘Request for Qualification’ document. Mopa airport would thus not, as airports are otherwise often described, be a quintessential non-place (Auge 1995) through which people pass without dwelling; it would be a site for leisure, recreation, spending, and experiences. The role of Mopa as an infrastructural nodal point for realising a larger utopian vision becomes even more apparent if we lift the gaze and survey related developments elsewhere in the state. Not only has Goa for some time been home to a, albeit limited, number of offshore casinos that offer the wealthy an opportunity to fritter away their money in luxurious surroundings; there are also recurring plans for setting up new marinas to cater to the clientele of Indian ‘bankers, industrialists, corporate houses, and several high-net worth individuals in the country’ who have yachts but nowhere to park them (Sequeira 2015). Yacht owners and casino goers of course constitute an important social segment in ‘New India’, and bringing them to the state would help transform it into something much more aspirational than just a compulsory stop on the hippie trail, or a favoured destination for Russian charter tourists. More importantly, in Pernem taluka itself, vast tracks of land surrounding the planned airport have already been bought up by real estate developers, politicians, and businessmen in anticipation of an impending real estate boom. Although the use of middlemen or strawmen makes it notoriously difficult to trace the actual buyers of the land, it is well documented that, for example, organised crime groups, politically linked ‘syndicates’, and the politicians’ black money routinely play important roles in the land and real estate market in cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata (see e.g. Weinstein 2008; Björkman 2015; Kaul 2015). Indeed, to Sampat (2014, 148), the real estate economy in Goa is endemically corrupt and discloses a free-for-all grab of land and
Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa
109
resources by the political and economic elite. What is important for the present discussion, however, is how the real estate economy more than any other sector powerfully draws upon ideologies of ‘waste’ and ‘value’, and ‘backwardness’ and ‘modernity’ (Sampat 2014, 147) to develop what is routinely projected as wasteland or idle land for accumulation. Some real estate projects are already under construction, such as the B&F Countryside Estates’ farmhouse project, where people can sit on the porch of their luxury bungalows and ‘marvel at the beauty of the flora and fauna under endless blue skies . . . or just awaken to the call of peacocks in the morning’ (B&F Realty n.d.). The most spectacular of such new luxury projects is undoubtedly the hotel-cum-golf resort proposed for Tiracol located right on the northern border with Maharashtra. In 2011, the Goa Tourism Department granted approval to the Shiv Jatia-owned Leading Hotels Ltd. to develop a PGA standard golf course and resort in Tiracol, located only 20 km from the site of the proposed Mopa airport. The village is in fact an enclave of Goa and is separated from the main landmass by the Tiracol river. It covers an area of only 1.38 square kilometres and is home to just 48 households. Claiming to have secured ownership of more than 90 per cent of the village through market transactions, Leading Hotels said in a press release that it envisaged setting up an ‘iconic resort, wrapped by a golf course perched on a rocky elevation’ (Herald 2015). Golfing great Colin Montgomerie was roped in to design the course which would sprawl over more than 560,000 square metres and have two artificial lakes. The resort would, in turn, be built by Leading Hotels but would thereafter be managed and operated by high-end hotelier Four Seasons. According to the site plan, the entire resort would cover an area measuring close to one square kilometre (nearly all of Tiracol) and would have 153 villas ranging from two to six bedrooms.75 The project also includes a marina and a signature bridge which would connect the resort to the Goa landmass. The project also proposed that the area where the inhabitants of the village reside would be developed into a ‘model village’ through the provision of 24-hour water supply, continuous electricity, sewerage systems, health care, a primary school, and internet and banking facilities, all of which would be paid for by the company as part of its corporate social responsibility.76 In addition, the project claimed it would gener75 76
Site plan submitted to the Town & Country Planning Department dated 25 February 2013. In the mid-1990s, a comparable project, the ‘Japanese Village Project’, had been
110
The Great Goa Land Grab
ate local employment and create opportunities for medium and small enterprises (Herald 2015). What is conjured up in the project visions for Mopa, B&F Countryside Estates, and Tiracol are, we suggest, a version of ‘Golden Goa’ rearticulated within the discursive framework of ‘New India’. The idea of Goa as golden, as Goa dourada, originated as an idealised image of Goa conceived by the Portuguese colonisers, conjuring up the idea of a sossegado lifestyle characterised by affluence and leisure (Trichur 2013). This ‘Golden Goa’ image has been a remarkably persistent, if malleable, feature of the face Goa shows to the outside world (Newman 2001, 107), and its seamless appropriation into discourses of tourism has long been noted (e.g. Siqueira 1991). Its present rearticulation within the framework of ‘New India’ similarly continues to conjure up images of prosperity and leisure, now made possible by neoliberal economic reforms rather than mercantile trade under Portuguese rule. However, it is now more unequivocally attuned to the presumed aspirations and desires of the high-spending new Indian elite. In other words, just as the prosperous and leisurely lifestyle extolled in the classical Goa dourada genre of poetry and literature was always the landlord lifestyle (Newman 2001, 106), the rearticulation of Golden Goa with ‘New India’ extols an elite lifestyle that is reserved for the few. And, just as the colonial version of Goa dourada elided the fact that it was built on the exploitation of tenants and labourers (Tichur 2013) and a rigid class and landowning system backed by Portuguese colonialism (Newman 2001, 106), the ‘New India’ version of Golden Goa seeks to elide the dispossession or displacement of tenants and other land owners that underpins its realisation in Mopa and Tiracol. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, the materialisation of Mopa and Tiracol has been hotly contested as resistance has emerged both from dispossessed people who fear that they will find no place in such visions and from social activists and environmentalists across the state. The opposition has, in turn, invoked their own counter-utopias as part of their strategic politics of representation that we analyse below. ‘Green Goa’ We have our fields, kulaghars (plantations) and devasthans proposed for Paliem, a short distance south of Tiracol. The project would have required around 300 hectares of land but was eventually cancelled.
Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa
111
(temples) here. We won’t leave our devasthans... even if they plan to rehabilitate us, can they rehabilitate God?... There are so many different species of plants and animals including the tiger living here. Cutting down such a large part of forested land can lead to a repeat of the natural calamity (a devastating flood and landslide) that recently occurred in Uttarakhand. (Sandip Kambli, Convenor, Mopa Vimantall Piditt Xetkari Samiti, cited in Times of India 2013a) Struggles over land in contemporary India are often framed in terms of displacement and dispossession. But neither Mopa nor Tiracol involved much direct displacement: Tiracol was sparsely populated while few people resided on the Mopa plateau itself, something which is not unusual for plateaus rich in aluminiferous bauxite where cultivable land on the hilltop is scarcer than what the case is on the plains below, or on the forested slopes (Oskarsson 2017). Perhaps for this reason, the resistance to the land transfers occurring in these two sites has invoked a different register of protest that focussed more on environmental and sustainable livelihoods issues, both recurring tropes in popular mobilisations in Goa. The Mopa airport opposition has come from local tenants facing dispossession, or otherwise affected by the land acquisition, who organised under the Mopa Vimantall Piditt Xetkari Samiti (association of farmers aggrieved by the Mopa airport), but also from citizens’ groups and NGOs from other parts of the state, most notably Goans for Dabolim Only, the Federation of Rainbow Warriors, and the umbrella organisation Goans for Sustainable Development, all predominantly based in south Goa. This broader coalition has made use of a diverse repertoire of contention and styles of framing, and has actively and creatively struggled against the airport in both civil society and legal arenas. While the resistance strategies of the Mopa opposition are thus clearly not reducible to the strategic projection of a ‘Green Goa’ threatened with annihilation, this trope, we suggest, has been an important one as they have sought to unravel projected images of ‘Golden Goa’ as outlined above. The differences between ‘Golden Goa’ and ‘Green Goa’ in the context of Mopa are perhaps nowhere as evident as in the radically different ways in which they conceptualise the plateau on which the airport is to be built. To the proponents of the airport, the plateau epitomised ‘waste’ waiting to be turned into ‘value’. The Environmental Impact
112
The Great Goa Land Grab
Assessment (EIA) Report prepared at the behest of the Government of Goa described it as little more than a rocky, barren patch of land without habitation, residents, or permanent structures of any significance: ‘The land is largely non-cultivated due to an out cropping of lateritic soil and no residential and water bodies are found within the project location except few houses’, it claimed (2015, 11), adding that ‘vegetation and trees are sparse’. Eighty five per cent of the acquired land was, it said, either ‘land with scrub’ (55 per cent), barren rocky/stony waste (22 per cent), or scrub forest (8 per cent) (ibid., 11). The EIA report did acknowledge that the airport would have a ‘medium impact’ on the local biological environment insofar as it heightened the risk of animals being killed in increased car traffic or falling into open construction pits or trenches. But apart from that, placing a new international airport on top of the plateau would have very little impact on the local land, water, and socio-economic environment. The project’s opponents begged to differ. At a controversial public hearing on the EIA report which took place on top of the plateau itself on 2 February 2015, they spent considerable time deconstructing this view of the plateau as barren wasteland. Prior to the hearing, activists had organised an environmental study of their own to counter the official EIA report. To the project’s opponents, the plateau’s location close to the Western Ghats made it an intrinsically eco-sensitive zone almost on par with the Western Ghats itself, second only to the Amazon in terms of biodiversity. The plateau, they claimed at the hearing and elsewhere (Gokhale 2016), was home to a plethora of flora, fauna, and wildlife, including 174 species of birds, 41 reptiles, and 37 mammals, including endangered species such as leopards, gaur (Indian bison), and pangolins. As one environmentalist argued, this exceptional concentration of life on the small plateau was the result of the destruction of ecosystems elsewhere (cited in Gokhale 2016), in effect making Mopa the last refuge of animals on the run. The laterite plateau itself, along with the more than 40 surrounding perennial springs, performed an indispensable function in terms of ground water percolation and recharge, acting as a giant sponge that stored and released water throughout the year, thus providing water for thousands of people and countless ecosystems. A groundwater expert enlisted by the activists estimated that the plateau recharged more than six million litres per day, or more than two billion litres every year.
Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa
113
Hence, if the plateau was destroyed to make way for the airport, its crucial role in the wider local hydrology would be disrupted, leading to repercussions far beyond the plateau itself. A wrecked hydrology would destroy not only cultivation on the slopes of the plateau, and on the nearby plains below, but also the fisheries in the nearby Chapora and Tiracol rivers. It was also found that cattle and goats grazed on the plateau, and that agriculture was practised across the area, including extensive cashew plantations on the slopes that generated an annual turnover of as much as INR 50 crore, and which enabled the production of the locally popular cashew-feni, a strong liquor produced from the cashew apple. Several sacred groves (and a Buddhist-era cave) would be lost if the airport came up, including the Barazan on the very top of the plateau, a grove comprised by 12 trees at which important rituals were carried out yearly. For the same reason, one activist group consistently referred to the plateau as the ‘Barazan’, and not the Mopa plateau, so as to underscore its importance in an ancient cultural and socio-economic order that was now fast disappearing. The resistance to the Tiracol golf project again presents an interesting parallel example of how the project proponents and opponents have invoked radically different ways of conceptualising the character of the land. On 31 May 2015, the Goan paper The Herald carried a full-page, front page advertisement by Leading Hotels, promoting its project in Tiracol. Tellingly, the advertisement was titled ‘The Treasure of Tiracol Displayed to the World: From Barren... to Beautiful’, underscoring how—as in Mopa—the targeted land was little more than barren wasteland waiting to be transformed. Again, the local opposition begged to differ. The opposition to the golf course and resort is mainly led by members of the St. Anthony’s Tenants and Mundkar Association which was formed in 2010 and mainly consists of agricultural tenants who have not surrendered their tenancy rights to Leading Hotels, the project developer. While claims that Leading Hotels have illicitly circumvented Goa’s strict tenancy laws when buying up land for the project has been a key argument for villagers opposed to the project, they have also argued that such a project—which, it will be recalled, covers the entire village—will lead to extensive environmental damage to lands that are far from barren. In an interview with journalists, community locals Ag-
114
The Great Goa Land Grab
nelo Godinho and Sarto D’Souza stated that apart from denuding the village of its natural cover, the felling of cashew trees will impair the livelihoods of many of the villagers who are dependent on the cashew orchards (Video Volunteers 2015); others point out that setting up a golf course would involve the diversion of large quantities of water, with village resident Cyril D’Souza alleging that the government will divert the Tillari project—an inter-state hydro project intended to supply water for irrigation, municipal, and industrial purposes—to the golf course (Video Volunteers 2015). It is also feared that the use of fertilisers and other chemicals in the golf course will leach into the freshwater table and into the estuary, which would negatively affect drinking water and fish breeding, respectively. Two separate petitions have also been filed before the National Green Tribunal, one arguing that Leading Hotels has felled large numbers of trees on the plateau without obtaining the requisite permissions under the Goa, Daman and Diu Preservation of Trees Act. Francis Rodrigues, a member of the tenants association and a leading figure in the local resistance, says that till date, even though the government has not provided any jobs to the villagers, the people of Tiracol have still managed because, thanks to earlier land reforms, all the tenants have had houses and agricultural land in their possession (Video Volunteers 2015). While acknowledging that in recent times many youngsters from the village head to other parts of Goa, Mumbai, and even abroad for work, Rodrigues opines that if the villagers were to set up a cooperative and develop a small-scale ecologically sensitive tourism project, like a 20-rooms ecotourism project, they could both arrest the outmigration of youngsters while also preserving the ecology and pristine beauty of the village.77 By thus focussing on the claimed, actual, or potential importance of land, agriculture, and the environment in both Mopa and Tiracol, the project opponents have drawn on a particular ‘moral economy of agriculture’ (Münster 2015) that articulates ideas about what is just, fair, and sustainable, and which draws attention to a particular ethics of care for land and soil embedded in local communities, and fundamentally incompatible with large infrastructural projects. Conclusion In this chapter we have located popular discourses on India’s new 77
Francis Rodrigues, personal communication, 2 October 2015.
Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa
115
growth infrastructures at the intersection of utopia and expulsion, focussing predominantly on greenfield airport development in Goa. It is often said that infrastructures go unnoticed and only become visible when they break down. But in the context of India’s growth infrastructures in the making, maximising visibility and public attention is of crucial importance. The purpose of growth infrastructures is, after all, primarily to attract investments and stimulate enhanced economic activity. As Björkman (2015, 13) writes with reference to contemporary Mumbai, large-scale infrastructure projects are often conceived first and foremost as a way to signal and perform world-class character to investors. Such ‘prestige infrastructures’ (Howe et al. 2015, 5) therefore construct a particular vision of the future—a spectacular one, filled with possibility (Gupta 2015) along the lines of ‘New India’ or ‘Golden Goa’ as outlined above. As Harvey and Knox (2015, 6) argue, this may be particularly the case in ‘development settings’ where infrastructures are aspirational and carry great promise. As nodal points for flows of capital, goods, and people, airports are embedded in larger utopian visions for transforming geographies and economies through, in our case, luxury estates, golf resorts, and marinas, thus creating new, aspirational spaces for both accumulation and leisure. They are, in other words, important in conjuring up new aesthetic and affective desires and possibilities that draw on hyperreal ideas about a ‘New India’ in the making. In Goa, this has allowed for a powerful rearticulation of the long-standing idea of ‘Golden Goa’ that speaks to increasingly hegemonic elite desires in the context of neoliberalisation. Yet growth infrastructures also carry threats of unwelcome change, of destabilisation and increased vulnerability, thus combining ‘integrative promises and disintegrative threats’ (ibid., 74). As Datta has argued for India’s new smart cities—the stellar example of India’s new phase of ‘utopian urbanisation’ (Datta 2015, 6)—social fault lines are built into such infrastructural utopian imaginings, which prioritise urbanisation (and related infrastructural developments such as airports) first and foremost as a business model rather than a model of social justice. Infrastructures evidently produce contradictions and unevenly felt consequences in the lives and places they contact (Howe et al. 2015, 3), and the powerful discourse of a ‘Green Goa’ threatened with annihilation that we have shown informs environmental activism in Goa can, we suggest, be seen as expressive of popular anxieties over the looming ‘disintegrative threats’ and uneven consequences that accompany
116
The Great Goa Land Grab
large-scale infrastructure development. While growth infrastructures—in the guise of new airports—thus bring into play contested utopias and counter-utopias concerning what tomorrow’s India ought to be and for whom, the issue of temporality deserves particular attention. Strikingly, plans for a new airport at Mopa have, as mentioned, been around for nearly two decades without actual construction work ever commencing. As Gupta (2015) argues, this ‘suspension’ between the early start of an infrastructural project and its conclusion needs to be understood not so much as a mere temporary phase but as a particular condition of being. While the construction site may be said to be the ideal typical embodiment of such ‘a temporal space between the hopes pinned upon future infrastructures and the actualization of that promise’ (Howe et al. 2015, 7), the cumbersome, contingent, and often contradictory political, social, and legal processes that have underpinned the various stages of planning, design, and implementation of the Mopa project have, in effect, created a different kind of space—a temporal discursive space that enables contestation to play out, visions and countervisions articulated, and discrepant utopian or dystopian meanings assigned to such infrastructures in the making.
6. India’s New Coal Geography: Coastal Transformations, Imported Fuel and State-Business Collaboration in the Transition to More Fossil Fuel Energy
W
Europe and North America are transitioning away from coal, its reign over power generation is not over yet. Among the main countries that consume coal, India remains a key player: not only is domestic coal extraction and use still expanding – the country is also emerging as a key agent in the global coal trade as the second biggest importer (Dubash et al. 2018; IEA 2019). India’s increasing use of coal, coupled with China’s unrelenting coal consumption, means that coal contributes 40 percent of the world’s total power and heat generation: a share in global energy production which has remained the same for the past 40 years in spite of growing attempts at decarbonization (IEA 2019). The catastrophic implications of burning coal for power generation at this rate are well documented and can on its own destabilise the HILE
118
The Great Goa Land Grab
climate change target of staying below the two-degree centigrade rise in temperature (Edwards 2019; Warner and Jones 2019). India is expected to become the main international coal importer in the future as Chinese reliance on imported coal reduces (IEA 2019; Edwards 2019), with Indonesia and Australia being the main coal exporting countries (Cardoso and Turhan 2018). India has long imported higher purity coking coal for steel-making, primarily from Australia. The import of thermal coal for power production is, however, entirely new. Before 2002, thermal coal did not even exist as a category in official trade statistics.78 In the fiscal year 2007–2008, India imported 10 million tons of thermal coal. This rose to 45 million tons in 2011–2012 (Pargal and Banerjee 2014).79 The latest available figure from 2018 to 2019 shows imports of 150 million tons (GoI 2019),80 and for the fiscal year 2019–2020, the projection is 200 million tons.81 Using 2007–2008 as a baseline, this amounts to an increase in recorded imports of 1,400 percent in just over a decade. In response to India’s dramatically increasing coal imports, we analyse the production of what we term India’s new coal geography: an entirely new landscape of thermal power infrastructure based on international supplies of coal, which has so far not been mapped and analysed systematically. The new coal geography is predominantly coastal and controlled by private actors who operate ports and power plants that rely on imported coal. And it runs parallel to the domestic public-sector mining and power generation of the ‘old’ coal geography. To map and analyse this new coal geography, we ask: What are the political- economic and technical-infrastructural realignments that have enabled coal-based power generation in this new coal geography? How is this geography configured at the national level and how do sub-national regions change infrastructurally, politically and environmentally when they are integrated into the new coal geography? By addressing these 78 79 80
81
See the Export-Import database of GoI’s Ministry of Commerce, https://commerce -app.gov.in/eidb/ Available statistics use financial rather than calendar year. Domestic coal mining meanwhile recorded an output of 730 million tons for 2018– 2019. See Ministry of Coal, Production and supplies, 2020 Accessed 24 February 2020 at: https://coal.nic.in/content/production-and-supplies. See The Economic Times, Thermal coal import likely to cross 200MT in 2019–20, 2019 Accessed 25 Feb 2020: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/indlgoods/svs/metals-mining/thermal-coal-import-likely-to-cross-200-mt-in-201920/articleshow/71480990.cms
India’s New Coal Geography
119
questions that incorporate both the making of the new coal geography at a national level and its localised manifestations and impact in specific contexts, we argue that India’s rise as a global player in coal trade, coupled with the emergence of a new coal geography at home, represents an energy transition to (more) coal-based energy. This energy transition will add to India’s already substantial reliance on coal energy for years to come, with significant negative consequences for global climate change. This finding is in line with recent research on energy transitions that show the remarkable endurance of fossil fuels like coal, in spite of available, lower cost renewable options both globally (Gellert and Ciccantell 2020; York and Bell 2019; Edenhofer et al. 2018) and in India (Sareen 2018; Mohan and Topp 2018). The chapter is structured as follows. We start our analysis of the making of India’s new coal geography by providing theoretical entry points into energy transitions and the making of resource geographies. This is followed by a discussion of our methods. We then proceed to map and analyse the new national coal geography, followed by its localised manifestations and impact through a case study of the Indian state of Goa, which is rapidly emerging as a new coal hub. In the next analytical section, we bring our findings from the national and the state level together. Finally, in the conclusion, we reflect on how the enormous scale of financial and political investments that has enabled India’s new coal geography is likely to block the country’s transition away from coal. An Energy Transition to (more) Coal-Based Energy The sizeable literature on energy transitions has, to date, mainly focused on how to design, implement, govern and operate new low carbon power production facilities, based on the assumption that older forms of energy will disappear once renewable options become available (Gellert and Ciccantell 2020; Grubler at al. 2018). One cause for great optimism has been the increasing availability of cost-competitive forms of renewable energy around the world giving impetus to the massive decarbonisation efforts that are urgently needed. One factor that underpins the optimism in much of the energy transitions literature is the understanding of energy transitions as the process of a new fuel acquiring a large or dominant share of overall use (Sovacol 2016). Following this definition, historical examples of energy transitions include transitions from wood to coal and from coal to oil. However, if we focus not on the share, but rather on the total amount of energy used,
120
The Great Goa Land Grab
a quite different picture emerges wherein no actual energy transition has ever taken place in modern times (Gellert and Ciccantell 2020) as the amount of coal, wood and oil that are currently used globally are all at historic highs. New energy forms, including more recent renewable ones, are, from this perspective, what Bell and York (2019) term additions rather than transitions. This is the case because older forms of energy may reduce their overall share of energy use but remain important, or even continue to increase, in terms of amount. From an energy addition perspective, the global energy system remains locked into high coal-energy use for the foreseeable future undermining reports of ’a terminal decline’ (Edenhofer et al. 2018; Steckel, Edenhofer and Jakob 2015). An energy addition perspective in this manner focuses our attention on how ‘the teleological model [of energy transition research] asserting the “death of coal” needs to be fundamentally re-examined’ (Gellert and Ciccantell 2020, 208). As some parts of the world reduce their use of coal, primarily Europe and North America, it becomes pertinent to understand how and why India is not only expanding domestic coal production and use but also adding an entirely new energy geography based on imported coal (IEA 2019; Chandra 2018). Understanding the specific national and international networks that continue to support high carbon energy is vitally important in order to seek actual energy transitions away from the use of fossil fuels rather than merely adding renewable energy on top of existing fuels, as has been the case at a global level to date. To understand the emergence of new coal energy, we draw inspiration from recent work on resource geographies within Human Geography, and specifically assemblage thinking, which enables us to see the interlinking of different networks of humans and materials (McFarlane 2011; Swyngedouw 2006; Bakker and Bridge 2006). Putting in place a complex resource geography like coal energy is, from this perspective, always ‘a process of making, of continuous transformation, and of becoming, rather than as something final or static’ (Kadfak and Oskarsson 2020, 240). Resource geographies rely on a set of interlinked logics of economy, territory and subject formation (Bridge 2011; Huber 2015) that bring together a rich ‘energyscape’ (Cardoso and Turhan 2018) of new relations, as different sites become connected in the production, transportation, generation and transmission of energy. Such relations not only shape energy and socio-environmental outcomes; they also crucially produce economies and forms of politics whose impact may span
India’s New Coal Geography
121
generations (Mitchell 2013). If we understand resources and energy ‘as interconnected networks tying together sites and scales’ (Haarstad and Wanvik 2017, 434], we see how the shaping of a new (coal) resource geography depends on much more than merely infrastructural solutions. By looking across ‘material infrastructures, socio-cultural artefacts and political structures’ (Haarstad and Wanvik 2017, 437), energy appears as ‘fragmented, contested and converted at particular sites’ (Haarstad and Wanvik 2017, 446). New resource geographies – in our case, India’s new coal geography – thus emerge as one spatial aspect of ‘a global assemblage of finance, infrastructure, and expertise that together constitutes the political economy of coal’ (Brown and Spiegel 2019, 153–154). Rather than seeing energy production as a singular and fully functional system with a controlled and centralised design, this conceptualisation draws our attention to distributed experimentation by many different actors in pursuit of partial and compartmentalised energy solutions. In this chapter, we analyse one crucial aspect of the present energyscape of coal, namely, how the assemblage of the network of relations across Indian national and state government together with domestic and international private sector entities in power generation, logistics, and transmission produce India’s new coal geography. Coal is perhaps the resource that more than any other material commodity has shaped India as a nation, including its political economy and ecology (LahiriDutt 2014). Coal transforms landscapes and rearranges social relations around the coalfields, along transport routes and in India’s megacities where much of the electrical energy is consumed. Coal is also fundamental to India’s national and global relations by influencing industrial growth, the balance of trade and national energy-security concerns. Crucially, the availability of coal in large quantities close to the surface across central-eastern India, the long history of extraction with significant technical and infrastructural provisions and the many-faceted and multi-tentacled bureaucratic superstructure that surrounds it combine to give unprecedented preferential status to this fossil fuel – in spite of the many factors that support a transition to low-carbon energy. The creation over the past two decades of a new coal geography in India marks a significant departure from the well-established trajectory of domestic energy security rooted in coal-based resource nationalism, what Chatterjee (2020) calls India’s model of fossil developmentalism. A prerequisite for understanding how this new coal geography has
122
The Great Goa Land Grab
been assembled is to disentangle the existing system of domestic coal economies in India. Lahiri-Dutt (2016) uses the concept of ‘coal worlds’ to show that that the Indian coal industry is neither singular nor homogenous. She identifies four separate coal economies, which she terms national, neoliberal, statecraft and subsistence coal. With multiple and complex labour arrangements, these coal economies are defined by different coal worlds that have distinct production logics and labour and supply arrangements. The first two coal economies (national and neoliberal) constitute the official economies that contribute to large-scale power production in the public sector, for electrical energy, and in the private sector, to generate power for industries like cement and steel. The two other worlds constitute the informal sector, with varying degrees of legality involved; and they present different community uses of coal in small-scale operations that might even defy straightforward distinctions between legal and illegal (hence termed non-legal by Lahiri-Dutt). Against this backdrop, the new coastal coal geography has emerged as a fifth coal world in India since about the year 2005. This new coal world operates within the formal large-scale system of coal energy, yet with distinct production logics and supply arrangements vis-à-vis the other two formal coal worlds, in addition to the specific spatial dynamic of coastal infrastructure.82 The backbone of Indian energy security was always Lahiri-Dutt’s (2016) national coal: domestically produced coal that relied on a set of interlinked public sector enterprises. In this ‘old’ (and still-expanding) coal geography, the state-owned enterprise Coal India Limited extracts coal in the central and eastern parts of the country. This coal is then transported by the Indian Railways via heavy-duty links to the main cities of the north, west and south, with the National Thermal Power Corporation – or one of the many state electricity boards around the country – as final customers. All this is done for electricity generation primarily for the ‘urban-industrial nexus’ (Lahiri-Dutt 2014).83 India’s coal energy sector has, in stages since India’s Independence, managed to put in place a relatively robust model for coal extraction and transport and for electricity generation and transmission. The sector has been able to produce and transport ever larger amounts of coal, particularly from 82 83
Since our analysis focuses on the spatial and political-economic aspects, we prefer the use of coal geography to Lahiri-Dutt’s coal world. We here outline only the main characteristics of the old geography for comparative purposes (see Lahiri-Dutt (2014) for further details).
India’s New Coal Geography
123
the 1980s onward, to new and expanding metropolitan power plants, even as it has faced stiff resistance and pressure from a vast number of groups and actors around the country (Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Dubash, Kale and Bharvikar 2018). Yet in spite of its vast scale and substantial policy support, neither coal production nor thermal power generation have ever kept pace with electricity demand (Dubash, Kale and Bharvikar 2018; Chatterjee 2020). India’s old coal geography has continued to struggle to serve all consumers, to remain financially viable and to adhere to environmental and social legislation (Dubash, Kale and Bharvikar 2018). Reforms to increase coal-based power generation have included opening up to private sector coal mining and power generation for use in cases such as, for example, steel and cement production in 1993 (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). Significant weaknesses have, however, remained, and these culminated in the early 2000s, when the already distressed old coal geography entered into a prolonged state of crisis as the large gap between demand and supply escalated dramatically. As other forms of electricity production failed to contribute, India’s inability to supply electricity in line with developmental targets, and with the aspirations of key pressure groups (Dubash, Kale and Bharvikar 2018; Chatterjee 2020), became evident. A discourse of ‘a national energy crisis’ subsequently took hold and set in motion policies and programs seeking to expand energy production outside of the traditional centraleastern coal heartland. Another aspect of the ‘energy crisis’ is the profile of Indian coal and thermal power companies as among the lowest cost producers in the world (Ahn and Graczyk 2012). A large part of this low-cost profile – the ability to produce cheap coal-based electricity – is the sector’s inability or unwillingness to deal appropriately with a range of social and environmental consequences, including compensation and resettlement of project affected populations, environmental mitigation, and proper mining closure and post-mining rehabilitation when operations stop (Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Oskarsson, Lahiri-Dutt and Wennström 2019; Ghosh 2016). The reorientation of coal-based energy production to new territories, that is, the coastal regions, promises improved stability against some of the challenges that plagued the old geography, such as ‘disruptive’ public protests and litigation related to mines and thermal power plants (Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Kale 2014). In addition, the coastal states along India’s western and south-eastern coastline generally display a more predictable pro-business orientation, are better governed, and
124
The Great Goa Land Grab
are less prone to political instability and unpredictable populist policies that have often characterised the central and eastern coal belt. The move away from the forests and agricultural fields into new territories has generated new political conflicts due to new forms of land expropriation and dispossession (Levien 2018; Nielsen 2018). Operating along the coastline comes with new challenges, including administrative approvals to use often ecologically sensitive stretches of land (Menon et al. 2015) as well as environmental and other clearances and permissions (Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Chatterjee 2020). While coastal land might be seen as ‘available’ – since ownership, as is the case in the coal-bearing inland, is vested with the state as common property – or is seen as ‘unproductively used land’ (Sud 2009), much coastal land is in fact occupied by informal land users, generating new conflicts and resistance movements.84 Coastal coal infrastructure, like elsewhere in the country, thus requires high-level political support to secure land and administrative approvals for developers. India’s new coal geography signifies dramatic rearrangements of coastal land use, the rise of new private players in the sector, significant infrastructural transformations, realigned domestic energysecurity concerns and modified international relations – even as it extends and solidifies the use of coal energy at a time when renewable alternatives are not only needed but are also increasingly affordable. Understanding the making and manifestation of this new coal geography thus offers important insights into the future of coal, not just in India, but globally. Before we turn to a more detailed mapping and analysis of the making and manifestation of India’s new coal geography, we introduce our research methods. Research Design and Methods In this exploratory case study, we outline and explain the emergence of a new, national coal-based energy geography that is separate from the dominant geography of thermal power production in India. Following Bridge and Gailing we understand energy transitions as ‘the production of novel combinations of energy systems and social relations across space’ (Bridge and Gailing 2020, 1038). Further, we define India’s new coal geography as coal energy infrastructure established in 84
Such processes are well known in the global and Indian land-grabbing literature where so-called vacant lands have been identified for new investments (ArizaMontobbio et al. 2010; Baka 2013; Nielsen 2017).
India’s New Coal Geography
125
coastal India with mainly private sector involvement, predominantly using imported coal,85 and supported by the Government of India (GoI) in the fields of energy policy, infrastructure and land governance. Such coastal energy infrastructure was absent across India before the year 2005, barring in a few megacities such as Mumbai or Chennai. Our political economy understanding of energy transitions enables us to look beyond socio-technical solutions in infrastructure to embrace political challenges, which shape outcomes (Bridge and Gailing 2020; Goodman and Marshall 2018). Significant controversy has followed the development of India’s new coal geography with differences of opinion within the national government and widespread resistance to specific projects among various civil society actors and groups. The picture that emerges from our analysis by necessity plays out unevenly across the nation (Goodman and Marshall 2018). To analytically integrate the ‘big picture’ of the new coal geography in its entirety, with the ‘smaller picture’ of its manifestation in, and impact on, particular localities and environments in Goa state, we apply a multi-level perspective. This allows us to outline national energy development while providing deeper insights into one specific local context. This is particularly relevant in India’s federally organised governance system wherein the state governments exercise authority over several domains that impact directly on energy transitions, including land governance. We use the Goa case study as an ‘exploratory’ rather than a typical case (Yin 2018) to analyse emerging sub-national rearrangements of existing and new energy infrastructures that enable the new coal geography to materialise. By moving the analysis to a lower level, we draw attention to (1) the extensive and oftentimes environmentally destructive transformations in infrastructure, land use and biophysical environments that occur as particular regions are integrated into India’s new coal geography; and (2) the uneven and regionally varied nature of the national geography. In using Goa as our case study, we acknowledge that it is not a representative case – indeed, it is India’s smallest state, and one of its wealthiest. At the same time, the integration of Goa into the new coal geography, as it currently unfolds, is characterised by two transitions that render Goa useful as an exploratory case: the transition of the region from marginal to central in the coal trade as existing iron 85
Available environmental approval documents show that many coastal power projects propose to use a mix of domestic and imported coal in spite of their different chemical compositions.
126
The Great Goa Land Grab
ore export infrastructure was repurposed for coal imports; and the slow but steady transition in coal imports from coking to thermal coal. For the big picture, we combine publicly available government documents and news reports with satellite images. We analyse the thermal power projects that were approved up to 18 November 2019 in all the coastal districts of India, according to information available on the website of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. We found 84 cases in total that we classified as coastal, and we examined their environmental clearance approvals along with other administrative documents to identify their stages of operation (under construction, delayed, operating or cancelled), the composition and percentage of coal in supplies (domestic/imported) and the project promoters (private/ public). We also used the largest inventory of global environmental justice movements, the Atlas of Environmental Justice (http: //www.ejatlas.org/) (Temper, del Bene and Martinez-Alier 2015), in combination with local news reports to analyse active protests against these coastal power plants. To examine actual implementation on the ground and create the map in Fig. 6.1 below, we visually inspected satellite images. This does not require advanced GIS analysis. As Oskarsson, Lahiri-Dutt and Wennström (2019, 9) point out, ‘anyone with an internet connection can browse Google Earth images to see the “black holes” at the heart of India’s energy security’ since mining, transport and electricitygeneration activities based on coal colour the infrastructure and its immediate surroundings pitch black. Unfortunately, a lack of data prevents us from fully untangling the international coal supply network to see the ‘global picture’ that feeds into India’s new coal geography. We know, however, that supplies come from Indian-owned mines in, for example, Australia, Indonesia and Mozambique (Oskarsson and LahiriDutt 2019; Lahiri-Dutt 2013), while other supplies are purchased on the global market from independent producers, or even occasionally on the domestic market if coal is available at a lower rate. Our analysis of the Goa case is based on a combination of qualitative field research in the ethnographic tradition, coupled with a desk study of relevant documents. The second author has worked on environmental challenges in Goa over several years, while the fourth author conducted month-long fieldwork in 2017 focusing explicitly on coal protests. The fourth author conducted 11 semi-structured interviews
India’s New Coal Geography
127
with social and environmental activists, journalists, fishing communities and concerned citizens affected by coal projects. The fourth author also observed community meetings that passed resolutions against coal. We have also analysed key policy documents pertaining to coalrelated infrastructure projects in Goa, and have closely monitored the news coverage of coal-related developments in the state over the past four years. We have also analysed reports and other public statements produced by civil society and activist groups. The Emergence of India’s New Coal Geography The preconditions for India’s new coal geography lie in the liberalisation of the economy from the 1980s onward, which slowly opened the coal energy sector to private sector actors (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). An early key reform in the sector happened in the year 2000, when the private sector was allowed to mine coal for its own industrial production purposes in, for example, cement and steel-making units. And since 2018 the entire sector has been opened up for private companies, including international ones (Yadav, Singh and Gautam 2019). Other significant policy reforms that have paved the way for the new coal geography include the possibility of importing the coal and power generation technologies required to expand energy production. In combination, these reforms and rearrangements represent dramatic change for an industry long stuck in old ways of producing energy (Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Dubash, Kale and Bharvikar 2018). As shown above, it was in response to an intensifying energy crisis that extensive policy experimentation in the domain of energy began around 1995. This process would unfold over several decades and involved frequent adjustments between various branches of the GoI, led by its Ministry of Power. The focus was initially on domestic coal-based power expansion (as well as hydro) but widened over the years to include private sector thermal power from 2006 (Menon et al. 2015). Key to the development of India’s new coal geography was the Ultra Mega Power Production (UMPP) policy, introduced in 2005, to support large power plants of at least 4000 MW using high efficiency Super Critical Technology. By establishing a set of very large power plants, the GoI hoped to generate a further 100,000 MW by the year 2012. Nine projects were originally proposed, with four located next to coal mines and five in coastal locations. One key reason for selecting coastal locations – other than the use of imported coal – was the possibility of using seawa-
128
The Great Goa Land Grab
ter for cooling, thus solving the problem of scarcity of freshwater that hampered plants on the fringes of Indian cities.86 While most coal projects proposed since the early 2000s were based on the use of domestic coal, UMPP projects encouraged the use of imported coal of a higher quality than what is available in India, particularly in terms of sulphur content.87 Over the years, more proposals were made. Fifteen received approval, with approximately half of these intending to use imported coal.88 However, to date only two UMPPs have become operational: the coastal Mundra power plant in Gujarat and the Sasan power plant next to a coal mine in the central Indian state Madhya Pradesh.89 Reasons for the failure of UMPP projects to start operations are similar to those that have affected other large power plants across the country: public protests over land acquisition, delayed or denied environmental approvals and a lack of affordable coal supplies.90 In spite of its limited appeal, the UMPP policy did manage to open up a new approach to producing power in coastal locations, something that had not been attempted before. One key Ministry of Coal planning document noted already in the early years of coastal power developments that ‘importing power grade coal for consumption in power plants at certain coastal locations . . . is considered necessary for enhancing fuel diversification and energy security’.91 . While overcoming the energy crisis has been a top, long-term national goal, significant resistance to foreign energy dependency remains within key government ministries. The import of oil and natural gas weighs heavily on India’s balance of trade, and branches of the GoI have therefore not looked favourably at adding coal to the list of imported fuels. Successive high-level ministers have continued to reit86
87
88
89 90 91
See Ministry of Power, Ultra mega power projects, Government of India, New Delhi, n. d. Accessed 25 February 2020 at: https://powermin.gov.in/sites/default/files/we bform/notices/UMPP_Projects.pdf See Ministry of Power, Annual report 2003–2004, Government of India, New Delhi, 2004, and Ministry of Power, Annual report 2006–2007, Government of India, New Delhi, 2007. See Ministry of Power, Ultra mega power projects, Government of India, New Delhi, n. d. Accessed 25 February 2020 at: https://powermin.gov.in/sites/default/files/we bform/notices/UMPP_Projects.pdf. See Ministry of Power, Annual report 2006–2007, Government of India, New Delhi, 2007. See Ministry of Power, Annual report 2003–2004, Government of India, New Delhi, 2004. See p. 4 in Ministry of Coal, The expert committee on road map for coal sector reforms: part 2, Government of India, New Delhi, 2007.
India’s New Coal Geography
129
erate their intention to end all import of coal, and recently the Minister of Coal stated that all coal imports would end in the fiscal year 2023– 2024.92 . Yet in spite of such statements, the amount of imported coal continues to rise. This is in no small part due to other branches of the GoI offering support for coal imports, including reduced taxes.93 But exactly where all this coal is used is unclear as data remains incomplete. The Central Electricity Authority of the Ministry of Power states that for the fiscal year 2018–2019, 61 million of a total of 150 million tons of imported coal was used in power production.94 Of this, 40 million tons wasused for coastal coal producers designed to use imported coal, while a further 21 million tons was imported for power plants intended to use domestic coal. The imported coal in the latter category is termed ‘blended coal’ and is used to augment uncertain and more polluting supplies from domestic sources.95 All in all, many coastal as well as interior power plants continue to struggle with the quantity, quality and price of coal. In GoI environmental approval documents, thermal power-plant proponents are typically only required to broadly indicate the source of the coal they plan to use, even though the composition of the coal has a direct bearing on pollution-control measures as well as financial viability. For example, the approval for Adani Power Ltd.’s Mundra thermal power plant merely states that international coal will be used.96 At times requirements are included to specify the country of origin, such 92
93
94 95
96
See ‘India to stop importing coal from fiscal 2023–2024’, S&P Global Platts, (2020) Accessed 20 February 2020 at: https://www.spglobal.com /platts/en/marketinsights/latest-news/coal/021920-india-to-stop-importing-coal-from-fiscal2023-2024. While analysing why different Indian ministries entertain widely different attitudes towards coal is beyond the scope of this chapter, we note that such ‘internal contradictions within the state’, to use Poulantzas’ (1978) wording, are not uncommon in India. See Sampat (2014) for a comparable and highly illustrative example of such internal contradictions in the domain of land use and governance. See Central Electricity Authority, CEA annual report 2018–2019, Government of India, New Delhi, 2019. Among the 54 public and private thermal power plants listed in 2020 as using blended coal, many are located far from the coast in northern states like Punjab or Chandigarh. These power plants have, in many cases, been forced to import low ash coal to comply with air quality regulations. See Ministry of Environment, Forest and climate change, environmental clearance for 1980 MW thermal power plant at Mundra, Gujarat by M/s Adani Power Ltd., (2008).
130
The Great Goa Land Grab
as Indonesian coal for the Ennore Creek thermal power plant.97 Coastal power plants may also indicate a range from 100 percent imported coal to as little as 30 percent. Adding to the regulatory uncertainty is the flexibility that producers have to use more domestic coal when this becomes available, as the GoI has allowed already operating power plants to shift part of the coal to lower cost Indian coal. Available statistics indicate, however, that the opposite also occurs as power plants designed to run on domestic coal use imported coal.98 Given this flexibility to switch between sources of supply, we may expect further coal supply changes as operators align with domestic and international coal market fluctuations, changing regulatory norms and the overall trajectory of the Indian power sector. Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of thermal power coal and has been the main source for India’s coastal power plants. One source places the country’s share at 61 percent in 2018.99 Domestic and international coal market purchases make up the remainder of imported coal to India, although details about the quantities and qualities remain scarce. Direct ownership of coal assets abroad by Indian firms include Indonesian mines, where Tata Power has been the co-owner of the PT Kaltim Prima Coal mine since 2007 (Lahiri-Dutt 2013), while GMR has been a coowner of PT Golden Energy Mines since 2011.100 A number of Indian companies have attempted to establish Australian coal mines. The largest and most controversial among these is the Adani Group’s proposed Carmichael mine and GVK’s Alpha Project (Talukdar 2016; Colvin 2020). The cost of transporting coal is always a major concern for low-cost operations like those in India,101 but transportation costs become even more important for imported coal since 97
98 99
100 101
See Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Environmental clearance 2x800 MW Ennore SEZ supercritical imported coal based thermal power plant by M/s TANGEDCO, (2014). See Central Electricity Authority, CEA annual report 2018–2019, Government of India, New Delhi, 2019. See The Economic Times, India’s 2018 thermal coal imports grew at fastest pace in 4 yrs, (2019) Accessed 25 February 2020 at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com /industry/indl-goods/svs/metals-mining/indias-2018-thermal-coal-imports-gre w-at-fastest-pace-in-4-yrs/articleshow/67718101.cms?from=mdr. See GMR Group, International coal assets, (2020) Accessed 3 April 2020 at: https:// www.gmrgroup.in/coal-international/. See Ministry of Power, Report of the Working Group on Power for Twelfth Plan (2012–2017), Government of India, New Delhi, 2012 Accessed 28 May 2012 at: http://planningcommission.nic.in/aboutus/committee/wrkgrp12/wg_power1904. pdf.
India’s New Coal Geography
131
transport across oceans is often two to three times as high as the cost of transporting domestic coal. Data from the Indian Ports Association show that 58 million tons of coal was handled across public sector ports during the six months from April to November 2019.102 However, these statistics do not disaggregate handling, and some of the coal that is moved along the Indian coastline is domestic coal. The Adani Group, which owns a number of thermal power plants, also handles about a third of all Indian coal imports via its ports.103 The company operates five ports around India with the flexibility to switch to domestic coal if this becomes preferable to international coal. In a newspaper interview, one Adani executive stated: ‘[. . . ] that’s the advantage we have. Having ports on both sides of the peninsula, you can catch coal for instance at Dhamra and ship it to Goa, Vizag [Visakhapatnam], Mundhra or Dahej’.104 The power plants of India’s new coal geography will depend on shipments of coal for decades to come, and an operator such as the Adani Group is well positioned to ensure a flexible supply of it via its ports, from a variety of international and domestic sources. Flexibility in coal supply and port infrastructure are, in this manner, two additional key enablers of the new coal geography. GoI data shows that 77 coastal power plants with widely variable powergeneration sizes were approved from 2005 to 2014, mainly by private sector proponents, but also by public sector ones. The projects were environmentally approved, which means that specific sites had been identified and that detailed Environmental Impact Assessment reports had been finalised and extensively vetted in both public hearings and by environmental experts.105 In contrast, after 2014 only seven projects have been approved, possibly because imported coal has become more expensive. Had all 84 environmentally approved coastal power plants been operational, they would have added significantly to India’s cur102 103
104
105
See Indian Ports Association, Traffic handled at major ports Apr to Nov 2019, (2019). See The Economic Times, Thermal coal import likely to cross 200 MT in 2019–20, 2019 Accessed 25 Feb 2020: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/indlgoods/svs/metals-mining/thermal-coal-import-likely-to-cross-200-mt-in-201920/articleshow/71480990.cms. Cited in Vinson Kurian, Adanis to focus more on coastal movement of coal, The Hindu Business Line, 2018 Accessed 22 February 2020 at: https://www.thehindubus inessline.com/economy/logistics/adanis-to-focus-more-on-coastal-movement of-coal/article7949533.ece. See Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Environmental clearance database, 2019 Accessed 18 November 2019 at: http://environmentclearance.nic. in/.
132
The Great Goa Land Grab
rent 281 operational thermal power plants.106 However, as of early 2020, ‘only’ 27 of these 84 power plants (with an installed capacity of 36,600 MW) are operational while a further three are under construction. This indicates the difficult and contested path from formal approval to actual operations (see Table 6.1). In addition, the operational power plants often have less installed capacity than in the approval document, but the range is very wide, from a mere 60 MW to 4620 MW. Table 6.1: Coastal thermal power plants in India. Total proposed
84
Cancelled or delayed 54 Operating 27 Under construction 03 Source: Global Energy Monitor, Coal plants in India (power stations), July 2020, Accessed 18 September 2020 at: https://docs.google.com/spread
sheets/d/1n1q3RVVqjE8I01MpmZECviUY9QTSOnwmf7Sj1y8TlYI/ed it#gid=48949133 plus own analysis. Some of the new energy producers are among India’s largest business groups, including Adani, Reliance and Tata. The Adani Group has, in addition to building ports, been active in thermal power by building its own coastal power plants and buying already existing ones.107 At the same time, the company has invested in a new power plant away from the coast, running on domestic coal.108 Other power producers include companies with generic names like Coastal Energen Pvt Ltd and Thermal Powertech Ltd.109 Little is known about these companies and their operational and financial strengths. Data also shows five public sector power plants using imported coal, though only as a supplement to the main supply of domestic coal. 106 107
108 109
See Global Energy Monitor, Coal plants in India (power stations) – July 2020, Accessed 18 September 2020 at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets See The Economic Times, Adani Power buys Lanco Infratech’s Udupi thermal power plant, 2014 Accessed 28 February 2020 at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com /industry/energy/power/adani-power-buys-lanco-infratechs-udupi-thermal-p ower-plant/articleshow/40200946.cms. See Adani Power, Tiroda Thermal Power Plant, 2019, accessed 28 February 2020 at: https://www.adanipower.com/operational-power-plants/Tiroda-maharashtra. M/S. Coastal Energen Pvt Ltd. runs a 1050 MW power plant in Thoothukudi District, Tamil Nadu, M/S. Thermal Powertech Corporation India Limited has a 1980 MW unit in Nellore District, Andhra Pradesh. M/S. Ind-Barath Power (Madras) Ltd. operates a 660 MW power plant in Thoothukudi District, Tamil Nadu. M/S. Torrent Energy Ltd operates a 950 MW unit in Bharuch District in Gujarat.
India’s New Coal Geography
133
As seen in Figure 6.1 below, we find thermal power clusters across a few states: in Gujarat (seven power plants), Andhra Pradesh (six) and Tamil Nadu (seven). These are industrialised or higher income states and have higher energy demand. Within the states with coastal power, most of the power plants form coal clusters in the immediate vicinity of a coal port. A few larger companies have also been able to build dedicated ports to import coal to meet their own needs. Moving the coal a short distance overland from ports to power plants appears the preferred choice for operators, rather than locating the power plant on cheaper land further away from the port. But the picture is somewhat muddled as we also witness the opposite phenomenon where power plants that are located in or close to the main coal mining regions import coal, while power plants located further away from Indian coalfields still use domestic coal. The possibility to secure domestic coal supply contracts in many cases appears to trump the logistical considerations of coal transport.
Fig. 6.1: Coastal power plants and coal ports. In sum, India’s new coal geography consists of coastal power plants spread across the country and driven by many different investors, from well-known Indian business groups to state power producers and relatively unknown private entities. The fact that these plants have great
134
The Great Goa Land Grab
operational flexibility indicates the considerable political support they enjoy: where public authorities could have strictly enforced approval conditions pertaining to plant size, fuel use or environmental regulations, they have, in practice, preferred that power plants are established and become and remain operational.110 It is, however, also apparent that many power producers persistently struggle to operate profitably with widespread low plant load factors, frequent attempts to renegotiate power purchasing rates and attempts to secure lower cost coal supplies.111 While we thus note that overall the private sector appears to be preferred, when establishing new port and power plant infrastructure, the new coal geography, along with India’s wider coal sector, struggles in actual operations, characterised by dramatic declines in private shareholder value and recurring government bailouts of public power plants (Ahn and Graczyk 2012; Mohammad 2018). While this section has mapped and analysed the big picture of India’s new coal geography, we now turn to the analysis of how this geography is established in specific sub-national locations. Goa: Reassembling Infrastructure for India’s New Coal Geography Although Goa is now emerging as a new coal hub, it was iron ore mining that had long played an important role in the state’s economy, and much of the state’s infrastructure was configured to cater to mining. Mines in their own right claim much land, but the mining infrastructure additionally incorporated road transport networks (de Souza 2015) and riverine spaces, since much of the ore was transported by barge from the mining areas to the Mormugao port for export. The public sector Mormugao Port Trust (MPT), which operates the port, derived most of its revenue from iron ore exports. If capital is indeed value 110
111
Since economic liberalisation, the structural power of Indian business in general has expanded dramatically, if unevenly (Murali 2019); but beyond such general assertions, little is known about how energy investors connect to policy makers, the strategies they deploy, etc. Gautam Adani, the chairman of the Adani Group, India’s largest private coal mining company, largest coal port operator and largest coal importer, is known to have been close to Prime Minister Modi for many years, and allegations of crony capitalism (also in the coal sector) are often raised (Bhattacharya and Thakurta 2019). But details remain scarce. See e.g. Mohammad (2018); The Economic Times, India’s 2018 thermal coal imports grew at fastest pace in 4 yrs, (2019) Accessed 25 February 2020 at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com /industry/indlgoods/svs/metals-mining/indias-2018-thermal-coal-imports-gre w-at-fastestpace-in-4-yrs/articleshow/67718101.cms?from=mdr; and Central Electricity Authority, CEA annual report 2017–2018, Government of India, New Delhi, 2018.
India’s New Coal Geography
135
in motion, as Marx would argue (Harvey 2017), the mining ban that was imposed in Goa in 2012 severely undermined the ability of Goa’s mining infrastructure to serve the needs of capital. When mining activities stopped, the associated infrastructure no longer underpinned the movement of raw materials, goods and services, and thus no longer played a role in the generation of capitalist value. Mining sites turned unproductive, barges and trucks sat idle, roads and rivers saw less traffic and activities and revenue for MPT fell dramatically. The ban on mining was thus a central component in a conjuncture in which multiple factors coalesced to create enabling conditions for the emergence of a new coal geography: the loss of jobs and income caused by the collapse of mining; a dormant infrastructure; a revenue crisis at MPT; a new national Indian government with grand visions for new infrastructure projects; and private industrial actors requiring coal. From this conjuncture emerged attempts to rework the state’s existing infrastructure to a new coal geography. At Mormugao port, central actors (both public and private) moved relatively quickly to reposition it as a multi-commodity port with an important coal component. In 2015, the port had two dedicated coal terminals, both run by private operators: one by a subsidiary of the private sector group Jindal South West (JSW), JSW Port Ltd.; the other by the private sector conglomerate Adani Group’s Adani Mormugao Port Terminal Private Ltd. While coal had started arriving in minor quantities already in the 1990s,112 total coal imports stood at only 2.7 million tons in 2001. In 2011–2012, this amount had risen to nearly 7 million tons and in 2015–2016 to nearly 12 million tons per year – an increase of more than 70 percent in four years. In contrast to the new national coal geography, for which thermal coal is crucial, coking coal still dominates at Mormugao port. Coking coal comprised 82 percent of total coal imports in 2011–2012 and 67 percent in 2015–2016. But a transition is clearly under way as the growth of thermal coal imports has outpaced coking coal during this period: thermal coal imports more than tripled while coking coal imports grew by 37 percent. The integration of Goa into India’s new coal geography aligns with the big national infrastructure programs of the GoI, namely Bharatmala 112
See Nihar Gokhale, The sea breeze will bring more coal dust into Goa – if the government has its way, Scroll.in, 2017 Accessed 24 January 2020 at: https://scr oll.in/article/832741/the-sea-breeze-will-bring-more-coal-dust-intogoa-if-thegovernment-has-its-way.
136
The Great Goa Land Grab
and Sagarmala. The former is a road and highways project, while the latter seeks to ‘unlock’ the potential of India’s waterways and coastline to promote ‘port-led prosperity’. Under Sagarmala, a new master plan for Mormugao port was finalised in 2016 in which coal imports played a key role. To turn the port into a coal hub, the plan envisioned several new infrastructure projects at the port. One was the capacity expansion of the existing coal berths run by private actors to double imports.113 The second was the expansion of the approach channel to enable much larger vessels carrying more cargo to dock. The third was the development of three additional berths to be used for coal import by Vedanta Limited, one of the largest extractive industry companies in the world (Jamwal 2017). The ambitious master plan operates with an ‘optimistic scenario’ in which up to 50 million tons of coal would arrive per year by 2035. To reach this target the master plan identifies 17 coalbacked power plants and more than 20 steel plants ‘in the pipeline in the hinterland’114 as potential clients and envisions a much greater role for imported thermal coal in the future. The coal geography that MPT’s ‘hub’ connects to is truly global. As described by The Indian Express,115 a coal shipment for a steel factory in Karnataka began its journey in South Africa’s Richards Bay – one of the largest coal export facilities in the world – where it was loaded onto a vessel sailing under a Bahamas flag, by the Singapore based importer Adani Global Private. After it arrived in Goa’s Mormugao port, it was transported by road to its final destination in Koppal, Karnataka state. Currently, the destination for most of the imported coal is the expanding, coking coal dependent steel factories in Karnataka, across the state border. The Karnataka steel industry includes key actors at the MPT such as JSW Steel, another subsidiary of JSW. Its Bellary unit is the largest steel plant in the region, requiring more than 15 million tons of coking coal per year. While this demand is largely met by ports located on India’s East coast, JSW’s terminal at MPT supplies one third of 113
114
115
See Nihar Gokhale, Goa allows dirty coal handling facility to restart so it can study how bad the pollution actually is, Scroll.in., 2018 Accessed 24 January 2020 at: https ://scroll.in/article/885294/in-goa-company-allowed-to-resumecoal-imports-sopollution-study-can-be-conduct See page 291 in AECOM India Private Limited, Master plan for Mormugao port, Ministry of Shipping, New Delhi, 2016 Accessed 24 Jan 2020 at: http://sagarmala.gov. in/sites/default/files/7.Final%20Master%20Plan_Mormugao.pdf. See https://indianexpress.com/article/india/goa-coal-industry-jsw-mormugaoport-pollution-adani-group-coal-burying-goa-4908209/
India’s New Coal Geography
137
the coking coal.116 The closer proximity to Mormugao port cuts down costs for JSW and is the main driver of the company’s desire to expand its import via Goa. The Adani Group, another key actor involved in the reconfiguration of Mormugao port, mainly imports coal for its clients in the steel industry in Karnataka. But Adani is also India’s largest private thermal power producer with an installed capacity of 12,450 MW, most of which is coal based. This includes a 1200 MW capacity thermal power plant in Udupi, in coastal Karnataka, which uses 100 percent imported coal as fuel and is proposed for a significant expansion to 2800 MW. While the first part of Goa’s infrastructural rearrangement thus centred on the expansion of an existing public port to enable private operators to import more coal, the second part centred on enabling the movement of imported coal from Mormugao port to destinations in Karnataka state. This involved widening and/or linking existing roads, doubling existing railway capacity and setting up power transmission lines to provide power generated outside the state to flow into Goa. Existing road, rail and riverine infrastructure is thus being reassembled to suit the needs of coal, with new infrastructure being added as well. These ambitious plans for a new road-river-rail corridor between Goa and Karnataka all entailed construction in the ecologically sensitive Western Ghats mountain range, one of the world’s ‘hottest biodiversity hotspots’ and home to two wildlife sanctuaries. In addition to widening existing roads to enable more trucks to pass, an entirely new highway on viaducts running through pristine parts of one wildlife sanctuary is planned (Jamwal 2017). The new power transmissions lines similarly run through the wildlife sanctuary for several kilometres, while the laying of a second railway track through the Western Ghats takes place on the steepest gradient anywhere on the Indian Railway System (D’Mello 2017). According to official figures, more than 34,000 tonnes of coal is transported by this rail route every day, most of it by JSW (Nair 2017a/b). Existing riverine infrastructure is also being integrated into the new coal geography. Six rivers have been nationalised under 116
See Nihar Gokhale, The sea breeze will bring more coal dust into Goa – if the government has its way, Scroll.in., 2017 Accessed 24 January 2020 at: https://scr oll.in/article/832741/the-sea-breeze-will-bring-more-coal-dust-into-goa-ifthegovernment-has-its-way; and Nihar Gokhale, Goa allows dirty coal handling facility to restart so it can study how bad the pollution actually is, Scroll.in., 2018 Accessed 24 January 2020 at: https ://scroll.in/article/885294/in-goa-companyallowed-to-resume-coal-imports-sopollution-study-can-be-conducted.
138
The Great Goa Land Grab
the National Waterways Act, 2016, in order to facilitate their rapid ‘development’ with, among other things, new jetties (D’Mello 2018) that are ostensibly designed to stagger coal silos from MPT towards the east (Nair 2017a). In combination, the road and rail projects will mean that 80,000 trees need to be cut and more than 200 ha of protected and reserve forests in the Western Ghats diverted (D’Mello 2017). The integration of Goa into the new coal geography will in these ways affect a large number of Goan villages.117 Many of these deeply interrelated coal projects only make economic and infrastructural sense when seen as a singular intervention. Officially, they have, however, been split into small, isolated projects. This obscures the bigger infrastructural transformation underfoot, artificially minimises the ‘official’ environmental impact of the new coal geography and makes it difficult for those affected by localised coalrelated developments to organise politically across sites and scales (for similar experiences see Oskarsson, Lahiri-Dutt and Wennström 2019; Kohli and Menon 2016). Yet from an environmental justice perspective, the negative impacts have been evident in Goa, and resistance has been considerable. Goan activists and civil society groups have documented how repeated violations of coal handling at Mormugao port, for example uncovered coal storage areas, causing coal dust to travel for miles,118 ‘blackening lungs, pushing up incidents of respiratory disorder . . . threatening fragile forests, paddy fields, countless streams and rivers’(Nair 2017b). Cases of bronchitis, sinusitis and pulmonary disorders have reportedly increased manifold, and the layers of coal dust that settle on fields and plants may damage photosynthesis, affecting crop yields and biodiversity (Nair 2017a). Inadequately covered rail wagons spill coal along their journey through the state and release fugitive dust emissions. The increased movement of trains and trucks with heavy loads also threaten old heritage buildings (Nair 2017b), and the channel dredging and capacity expansion at MPT coupled with riverine 117
118
See Vohra and Ashwini Kamat, Three projects and massive coal corridor worry Goa, (2020). Accessed 17 Jun 2020: https://www.civilsociety online.com/environment/three-projects-and-a-massive-coal-corridor-worrygoa/ See Centre for Policy Research, Closing the enforcement gap: community-led groundtruthing of environmental violations in Mormugao, Goa, Delhi, 2018 Accessed 17 June 2020 at: https://cprindia.org/sites/default/files/Closing%20the %20Enforcement%20Gap-%20Community-Led%20Groundtruthing%20of% 20Environmental%20Violations%20in%20Mormugao,%20Goa.pdf
India’s New Coal Geography
139
coal transport threaten to destroy the livelihoods of local fishing communities (Jamwal 2017). Coal has also been documented washing up on beaches, both in large chunks and as fine dust. The vibrancy of Goan civil society (Sampat 2015) has ensured considerable popular opposition to the integration of Goa into India’s new coal geography. Close to one third of Goa’s villages have passed resolutions opposing the movement of coal through their areas (D’Mello 2017), and different social movements have organised to stop coal-related infrastructural developments. This includes the Old Cross Fishing Canoe Owners Co-op Society, which is connected to the National Fishworkers Forum, as well as Goa Against Coal and Our River, Our Rights. The environmental appeals court – the National Green Tribunal – has been petitioned and cases have been filed in state-level courts; and the popular protests against coal led to the mandatory public hearing on environmental impacts for the Mormugao port expansion and road construction being extended to a full eight days, making it probably the longest ever public hearing in India. And, in the summer of 2020, protests against laying double tracks for railway transportation of coal erupted in many villages. Various state institutions have also interfered in the process. The Goa State Pollution Control Board has ordered reduced coal handling at Mormugao port, or has temporarily withdrawn its consent to operate, following breaches in pollution levels or excess coal handling. The Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority has expressed concerns about the consequences of dredging the approach channel to the port; and the High Court has admitted Public Interest Litigation against coal, even if it has refused interim stays on coal handling.119 The integration of Goa into India’s new coal geography has thus been highly controversial and the negative environmental and social consequences evident. But the import and transport of coal continues with strong political support. The emergence of Goa as a coal hub within India’s new coal geography is illustrative of the uneven and varied manifestation of this geography and of the ways in which it appropriates, reassembles and adds to existing infrastructure to suit the needs of imported coal, often with environmentally destructive effects. For instance, rather than using a newly established port on ‘easy to acquire’ coastal lands, existing public sec119
See The Economic Times, HC refuses to stay coal handling at Goa port, The Economic Times, 2019 Accessed 15 September 2020 at: https://tfipost.com/iansnews/hc-ref uses-to-stay-coal-handling-at-goa-port/.
140
The Great Goa Land Grab
tor ports were used in Goa. Both in Goa and in several other states, private companies operating within public sector ports are in fact the key movers of coal. In this regard, Mormugao port resembles Visakhapatnam port in Andhra Pradesh, Chennai port in Tamil Nadu and New Mangalore port in Karnataka, where official ownership is with the public sector, but where privately operated ‘berths’ within these ports do the actual heavy lifting. The infrastructure put in place by the national Indian government over many decades is thus put to use in the new coal geography by private sector investors who are able to swiftly adjust to new opportunities for importing coal or for moving domestic coal from one coast to the other. While the overall extent of this form of ‘hidden privatisation’ – where formal ownership remains public while operations are carried out by private companies – is not known, it is striking that parts of India’s old coal geography have similarly been stealthily privatised, with many of Coal India’s officially public sector mines in central India now outsourced to private operators (Lahiri-Dutt 2016). Our Goa case is also illustrative of some of the contingencies and conjunctural specificities (e.g. the collapse of mining and the revenue crisis of MPT) that enable and shape the uneven integration of a region into India’s new coal geography. In this sense, more regionally focused empirical research is needed to understand the specificities for other regions and states. Unlike, for example, Goa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, the state of Gujarat follows a very different pattern insofar as its coastal coal infrastructure does not consist of a focused geographical agglomeration next to a major port. Instead, many power plants in Gujarat simply have their own ports. In contrast, although Goa has a major public port by national standards, its State Electricity Department does not have its own power generating facilities, but depends entirely on allocations made by the central government, with roughly 80 percent of the contribution coming from coal-based power plants outside the state. Specific state-level political economies are thus important in shaping how a region is integrated into (or is left out of ) the national coal geography. Lastly, the Goa case has illustrated the considerable political support for India’s new coal geography. The arrival of coal in Goa has been very unpopular among a broad section of citizens, and opposition has been significant. Goa arguably has India’s most vibrant, most active and most resourceful civil society. Class and rural-urban differences
India’s New Coal Geography
141
are less pronounced in Goa than elsewhere in India, and there is a long history of social movements from below centred on the preservation of land, forests and livelihoods, all of which continue to inspire environmental activism in the present (Sampat 2015). Yet, while the anti-coal campaigns in Goa might have succeeded in slowing down the transitions underfoot, they have not been able to stop coal in its tracks.120 This does not bode well for other states where the political support for coastal coal is equally robust, but civil society is weaker. As we argued earlier, Goa may not be a ‘typical’ case of how subnational regions are integrated into India’s new coal geography. While further research may indicate differently, there may in fact not be a typical sub-national case. Other states with significant coastal power – primarily Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu – all present different combinations of features that have enabled the new coal geography. In contrast, states with coastal locations and industrialised economies like Maharashtra, Karnataka and West Bengal, which could have been integrated into the new coal geography, have not extensively supported coastal coal power plants. Untangling the drivers of the uneven manifestation of India’s new coal geography is thus a complicated affair that requires in-depth studies at the intermediate and local levels. Conclusion: A new Indian Coal Geography Reinforces Fossil Fuel Dependence The development of a hitherto unmapped new Indian coal geography, located along the Indian coastline, dependent on imported coal and reliant primarily on the private sector, presents the emergence of a new resource landscape. This new energyscape is disconnected from the ‘old’ coal geography that was centred on extraction in the coal-bearing central-eastern heartlands, heavy duty railway transport and power production on the peri-urban fringes of mega cities. India’s new coal geography reinforces fossil fuel dependence, and, as such, represents a 120
This ability to ignore or fend off anti-coal protests in Goa is derived from the intimate nature of its dominant state-business alliance wherein the distinction between political and economic elites is blurred. Many political and bureaucratic careers in Goa are built on successful business ventures – in the real estate sector or in more or less direct involvement in the mining industry. It is well documented that some of Goa’s most important political families function as focal points for large networks that span across the government, the bureaucracy and industry, whose shared interests they both articulate and respond to (Parobo 2018; Da Silva, Nielsen and Bedi 2020).
142
The Great Goa Land Grab
transition to additional coal-based energy in spite of the rise of lower cost renewable energy solutions. While the prolonged Indian energy crisis from the 1990s onward paved the way for the establishment of the new coal geography, there was no clearly articulated government master plan driving its emergence and no coherent centralised policy approach that made it happen. What we have seen is, rather, a prolonged period of gradual and distributed experimentation and flexible adjustment by private and public sector companies, but also across national and state governments, at a conjuncture of energy crisis that created enabling conditions for the emergence of a new coal geography operating alongside the old one. The new coal geography is thus not simply the outcome of unleashed market forces as much as private sector investors who were taking the lead: private coal depended on state divestment and reduced government control over energy and coal, but it also crucially piggybacked on India’s political and bureaucratic structures for support, clearances and permits. Indeed, existing public infrastructure and extensive government support were (and continue to be) essential for making the new coal geography financially, politically and logistically possible. India’s new coal geography, thus, relies on deregulation, even as it looks for support from the same political and bureaucratic structures during initial establishment and continued coal operations. The private sector investors of the new coal geography, in this manner and in the words of Bear (2020, 19), sought to ‘accumulate capital and power from the long-term history of colonial public works and their reconstitution in the present’. While coal, thus, continues to be India’s favourite fuel for electrical energy, the reasons for this are not simply straight-forward pathdependence. The flexible and responsive public–private collaboration in the domain of coal energy that we have analysed in this chapter has managed to put in place coal transport and thermal power generation capacity (via old and new coal geographies) on such a scale that it has largely succeeded in overcoming India’s persistent electrical energy supply crisis.121 Coal energy, thus, continues to enjoy policy support, in spite of occasional statements to the contrary (Roy and Schaffartzik 121
Other persistent problems such as the equitable distribution of electricity to all citizens, including the poorest, and the inability to deal with the negative environmental and social consequences of energy production remain largely unaddressed at a national level (Bakker and Bridge 2006; Kadfak and Oskarsson 2020).
India’s New Coal Geography
143
2021). And very large public investments have already been sunk into the material and infrastructural systems that sustain the new coal geography, suggesting that it will not be easily abandoned.122 At the same time, it is very clear that a large part of India’s thermal power sector is far from profitable. Operations are characterised by low plant-load factors, renegotiated price-purchasing agreements, changes to lower cost coal supplies, reduced environmental control and hollowed out shareholder prices on the stock market. The state-business collaboration that is able to build and operate coastal coal energy infrastructure is, in these respects, a highly uneven one without clear winners. And yet the infrastructure continues to find enough support to remain operational while coal imports rise steadily.123 And as we move to the state-level, we are able to note how, in addition to the prolonged work of experimentation and adjustment between many actors, the consolidation of coal also depended on considerable on-the-ground work to retrofit existing, and adding new, infrastructure. In other words, even as India continues to rely on coal, which is the most conventional form of energy known in the country, it has taken an enormous amount of effort to establish the new coal geography. These efforts include large monetary investments by private and public-sector actors in infrastructure capable of handling millions of tons of coal and generating vast amounts of thermal power. But they also include the proactive support of political and bureaucratic structures across consecutive national governments and the different sub-national legislative bodies which are part of India’s system of federal governance. In our Goa case study, support from public authorities was apparent, with a few notable exceptions, as various civil society groups and actors objected to aspects of the new coal operations from the expansion of port facilities, to storage and transport solutions. With the spectre of energy crisis still in recent memory, it appears that Indian policy makers prefer to continue supporting the new coal geography, even when renewable energy is available at a lower cost. At a moment in history when climate change is evident and India’s domestic renewable energy sector is fast expanding, the well-entrenched 122
123
Further research would do well to connect India’s new coal geography to its various international supply chains to understand rearrangements in coal producing territories around the world and the political economy of coal trade. We also note that more than half the imported coal cannot be traced in our analysis of formal thermal power plants. Further research may be able to uncover additional coal geographies centred on the import of coal for various industrial purposes.
144
The Great Goa Land Grab
and expanding infrastructure and policy support, which underpins the new coal geography – and hence coal energy in India more generally – raises particularly complicated and uncomfortable questions about the country’s possibilities to transition to low carbon energy in the future: Is India’s new coal geography sufficiently robust to fend off the twin challenges of climate change and cheap renewables in the short to medium term? Based on the analysis in this chapter, the answer would seem to be a tentative yes. In relation to the increasing use of imported coal, it is noteworthy that India’s first domestic commercial coal mine auction took place on 18 June 2020 under the slogan Unleashing Coal. With this auction, the government aimed to attract new private investors to 41 domestic coal mines – many of them in biodiversity rich forest areas – and make the country self-reliant in coal.124 Tellingly, the prime minister had spoken of turning coal to diamonds through the auction process.125 Rather than a transition away from coal, the main energy-policy question in India today, thus, concerns the relative share of domestic to imported coal within the dominant coal-based energyscape. .
124
125
See Press Information Bureau, Unleashing coal: new hopes for Atmanirbhar Bharat, 2020 Accessed 18 June 2020 at: http://pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx? PRID=1630919. See Allowing coal auction in very dense forest areas will be ‘triple disaster’: Jairam Ramesh, The Wire, 2020 Accessed 15 September 2020 at: https://thewire. in/politics/allowing-coal-auction-in-very-dense-forest-areaswill-be-triple-disasterjairam-ramesh.
Part III
DYNAMICS OF POPULAR MOBILISATION: SEZs AND THEIR CRITICS
145
7. Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
I
2006, Goa’s Congress-led government introduced an SEZ policy for the state. The policy’s preamble expressed optimism about the anticipated benefits: ‘The concept of SEZ is expected to bring large dividends to the State in terms of economic and industrial development and the generation of new employment opportunities. The SEZs are expected to be engines for economic growth’.126 N
Even before Goa announced its state-level SEZ policy in mid-2006, India’s national SEZ Act of 2005 had elicited a favourable response from investors. By early 2006, 19 applications had been submitted to establish SEZs in the state. The government of Goa acted quickly to assist the developers by allocating land for the proposed projects and elaborating terms and conditions. But civil society groups mobilized themselves in opposition to the policy and their movement intensified in 2007. The mounting political pressure led the state government to take the exceptional decision to cancel all SEZ projects in Goa. The same state government that had introduced the SEZ policy went on to revoke it—no other state underwent so radical a turnaround. This chapter examines the trajectory of Goa’s experience with its SEZ policy and provides an explanation for the state’s unique experience. The manner in which the policy was initiated and implemented is addressed in the first section. The second section focuses on the anti-SEZ movement that emerged in Goa, explaining why the proposed SEZs were opposed and how the movement was built and sustained. The third section deals with the ‘scrapping’ of the SEZ projects and iden126
Goa SEZ Policy, 2006, in Government of Goa Official Gazette, 13 July.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
147
tifies the factors that influenced the state government’s decision to reverse its SEZ policy. This is followed by a discussion of the reasons why a complete closure of the SEZ issue has proved elusive. The final section summarizes the conclusions of the chapter. Initiating and Implementing the Goa SEZ Policy To appreciate the manner in which Goa’s SEZ story unfolded, it is helpful to understand seven key features of the process by which the policy was introduced and the projects advanced. First, the land for several SEZ projects was allotted prior to the introduction of the state’s SEZ policy. In early 2006, several months before the notification of Goa’s SEZ Policy in July of that year, the Goa Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) received applications from eight SEZ developers: Peninsula Pharma, Meditab Specialities, K. Raheja, Paradigm Logistics, Planetview Mercantile, Inox Mercantile, Atul Ruia Enterprises, and Maxgrow Finlease.127 Each developer requested the GIDC to allocate land to its project and the GIDC quickly passed resolutions to allot land to the eight developers. This all took place before the Goa SEZ Policy came into effect. All of the firms, except Peninsula Pharma,128 clearly indicated that the purpose for which they required land was to develop SEZs. The application submitted by Atul Ruia Enterprises requested the GIDC to acquire a specific parcel of land that it had identified, and then transfer ownership of the land to the company for a proposed Leisure and Entertainment SEZ. The GIDC passed a resolution to acquire this land. The seven other developers were allotted land that the GIDC already possessed. Meditab Specialities was allotted land in the village of Keri, near the city of Ponda in North Goa district,129 while Peninsula Pharma was 127
128
129
Application dates: Peninsula Pharma 2 March 2006; Meditab Specialities 27 Ma rch2006; K. Raheja 12 April 2006; Paradigm Logistics 12 April 2006; Planetview Mercantile 12 April 2006; Inox Mercantile 12 Apr il2006; Atul Ruia Enterprises 17 April 2006; and Maxgrow Finlease 2 May 2006. Peninsula Pharma stated that it was interested in setting up a 100 per cent exportoriented Biotechnology Park in Sancoale and, therefore, requested the GIDC to give it the status of an Export Processing Zone. However, the GIDC Board suo moto felt that it could be an SEZ and resolved to allocate land for ‘setting up R&D Centre/Biotechnology Park/SEZ.’ Source: GIDC (28 March 2006), Minutes of the 286th GIDC board meeting. In December 1989, the Goa government notified that 1,232,000 sq metres of land was to be acquired in Keri for an industrial estate. The land was to be allotted to Thapar-Dupont, which was planning to set up the Nylon 66 project. On 27 August
148
The Great Goa Land Grab
allotted land in the village of Sancoale in South Goa district.130 K. Raheja, Paradigm Logistics, Planetview Mercantile, Inox Mercantile and Maxgrow Finlease were allotted land in ‘Phase IV’of the Verna Industrial Estate, less than 10 kms from Sancoale.131 The second feature of note was the speed with which land was allocated to the SEZ developers. It took GIDC took just one day after receiving applications from Meditab Specialities and Peninsula Pharma to grant approvals.132 In the case of K. Raheja, Paradigm Logistics, Planetview Mercantile, and Inox Mercantile, resolutions were passed within a week.133 In the case of Maxgrow Finlease, it took 12 days.134 The GIDC passed a resolution to acquire the land on behalf of Atul Ruia Entreprises within two days of receiving the company’s request.135 The GIDC did not make public the selection criteria used in determining which applications would be approved. Previous experience in setting up an export-processing zone did not seem to be a necessary precondition for approval as two of the applicants were new enterprises. Peninsula Pharma’s application stated that the company was under formation. Paradigm Logistics was registered on 21 September 2005, just eight months prior to the date of its application. The GIDC’s procedure for scrutinizing the applications also appear to have been lax: six of the applications were incomplete. Planetview Mercantile and Inox Mercantile did not include required information, such as the date on which they were registered. Company seals were not affixed to the applications submitted by Peninsula Pharma, Paradigm Logistics, K. Raheja, Planetview Mercantile, Inox Mercantile and Maxgrow Finlease. Third, the state government actively sought to acquire land on behalf
130
131
132 133 134 135
1992, the GIDC took possession of the land, and in October 1993 allotted the land to Thapar-Dupont. The GIDC repossessed the land on 21 August 1997, following a public agitation against the project. This land was acquired by the Goa government through a notification dated 24 June 1998. It was initially acquired with the intention of allocating the land to Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. Bharat Petroleum was subsequently allotted land in the Verna Industrial Estate. As a result, the GIDC repossessed the land on 28 August 2001. Acquisition of 3,587,134 sq metres of land was notified for acquisition in January 2002 for the purpose of extension of the Verna Industrial Estate. It was acquired by the GIDC on 8 March 2004 and designated as Phase IV of the Verna Industrial Estate. GIDC Resolutions dated 28 March 2006. GIDC Resolutions dated 19 April 2006. GIDC Resolutions dated 6 July 2006. GIDC Resolutions dated 19 April 2006.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
149
of SEZ developers. Not only did the GIDC agree to acquire 988.42 acres for Atul Ruia Enterprises in the village of Allorna, near Pernem town in North Goa, but following the notification of the SEZ Policy, the GIDC approved the acquisition of land on behalf of three other SEZ developers: 218.34 acres in Betul for M/S Reteline; 324.14 acres in Quitol for Financial Technology India; and 17.54 acres in Pilerne for Crest Animation. As indicated in Table 7.1, the GIDC passed resolutions136 to acquire a total of 1548.44 acres on behalf of these developers (in two cases, the GIDC approved the acquisition of smaller acreage than requested by the SEZ developers). Table 7.1: Land Acquired on Behalf of Four SEZ Developers No. SEZ Developer (Sector)
Amount of Land Requested
Amount of Land that GIDC Resolved to Acquire
1
988.42 acres
988.42 acres
247.11 acres
218.34 acres
494.21 acres
324.14 acres
17.54 acres
17.54 acres
2 3 4
Atul Ruia Enterprises Pvt Ltd (Leisure and Entertainment SEZ) M/S Reteline Pvt Ltd (Food Park) Financial Technology India Ltd (Multi-product) Crest Animation (Animation Studio/ SEZ) TOTAL
1548.44 acres
Source: Data held by the GIDC, obtained using the Right to Information Act, 2005. Though the GIDC initiated the process of acquiring the land, it did not reach the stage of actually allotting it to the developers. The fourth notable feature of Goa’s SEZ story was the passage of the state’s SEZ Policy without publicity or debate. A 5 June 2006 cabinet meeting approved the Goa SEZ Policy 2006 and the policy came into effect when it was officially published in the state gazette the following month. There were no news reports or commentary concerning the 136
GIDC resolutions to acquire land: 1 August 2005 (M/S Reteline Pvt. Ltd), 19 April 2006 (Atul Ruia Entreprises), 19 September 2006 (Crest Animation) and 12 December 2006 (Financial Technology Pvt Ltd). In the case of Atul Ruia Entreprises, within two days of receiving the application, the GIDC had resolved to acquire land on its behalf.
150
The Great Goa Land Grab
policy in Goa’s daily newspapers, nor did deliberation take place in the state’s legislative assembly. There was no mention of SEZs in the Goa legislative assembly’s business of the house at any point during February to July 2006. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Manohar Parrikar, who was then serving as leader of the opposition, complained, as one local news report put it, that ‘the opposition legislators were not taken into confidence’.137 The language of Goa’s SEZ policy suggested that it was a new government initiative, when in fact resolutions had already been passed to allocate land for SEZ projects. Fifth, the state government skirted procedural norms in the process by which it allocated land for SEZs. In the cases of Meditab Specialities and Peninsula Pharma, rather than using acquired land to establish industrial estates that could be divided into plots for lease to firms— which was standard practice under state law—the GIDC granted the entire contiguous land area for the two SEZs. In the case of the five SEZ developers allocated land in the Verna Industrial Estate, the state government deviated from the purpose for which this land had originally been acquired. The Verna Industrial Estate had been created under the central government’s Inclusive Growth Centre (IGC) scheme, which attempted to promote industries in ‘backward areas’ by allotting land to small and medium-scale enterprises. The five SEZs that were granted land in this estate were too large to fit this description. The GIDC resolution authorizing the allocation of land in the Verna Industrial Estate specified that the amounts would be 791,732 sq metres (K. Raheja); 264,419 sq metres (Paradigm Logistics); 132,000 sq metres (Planetview Mercantile); 552,089 sq metres (Inox Mercantile),138 and 200,000 sq metres (Maxgrow Finlease).139 When the final lease agreements were executed, these amounts had been exceeded (see Table 7.2).140 The reason for this was to enable the developers to meet the 137 138 139 140
See ‘Parrikar’s Clarion Call to Oppose Proposed SEZs’, Navhind Times, 11 Oct 2007. GIDC (19 Apr 2006). Minutes of the 287th GIDC board meeting. Resolution No. 47/2006. GIDC (6 July 2006). Minutes of the 288 TH GIDC board meeting. Resolution No. 62/2006. This was done by attaching an additional schedule (‘Schedule I-B’) to Schedule I-A in the lease deeds of K. Raheja, Paradigm Logistics, Planetview Mercantile, and Inox Mercantile. In case of the Maxgrow Finlease, since the lease deed was executed much later than the other four SEZs, the additional land was allotted by including it directly in Schedule I-A of the lease deed.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
151
central government’s requirement of having contiguous land in their possession. Contiguity was provided by appending open spaces and roads to the industrial estate plots. This was a deviation from the GIDC’s existing practice of allotting plots only within the confines of an industrial estate. Table 7.2: Land Allotted to Five SEZ developers in Verna Industrial Estate (Phase IV) No SEZ As per GIDC Additional Land Total Developer Board Allotted through Resolution*
Final Lease Agreement**
1. 2.
K. Raheja 791,732 m2 Paradigm 264,419 m2 Logistics 3. Planetview 132,000 m2 Mercantile 4. Inox 552,089 m2 Mercantile 5. Maxgrow 200,000 m2 Finlease Totals 1,940,240 m2
274,651 m2 125,703 m2
1,066,383 m2/263.51 acres 390,122 m2/96.40 acres
103,331 m2
235,331 m2/58.15 acres
35,000 m2
487,089 m2/120.36 acres
3,445 m2
203,445 m2/50.27 acres
542,130 m2
2,482,370 m2/613.41 acres
Sources: * From respective GIDC resolutions. ** From respective lease agreements: between GIDC and K. Raheja and Paradigm Logistics respectively executed on 25 July 2006, and between GIDC and Planetview Mercantile and Inox Mercantile respectively executed on 2 August 2006, and between GIDC and Maxgrow Finelease executed on 23 May 2007.
In the case of K. Raheja, in addition to meeting the contiguity requirement, the additional 2,74,651 sq metres that was allotted through the lease agreement enabled the company to meet the minimum land requirement (250 acres, or 1,011,714 sq metres) for a ‘Service SEZ’. On the day the lease agreement was signed, the GIDC’s managing director issued a corrigendum stating that K. Raheja was establishing a ‘Service SEZ’ and not a ‘Multi-Purpose SEZ’, as the company’s original application had stated.141 The sixth salient feature of the process by which Goa carried out its SEZ policy was the application of discounted land premiums. 141
GIDC Managing Director (25 July 2006). Letter from MD of GIDC vide letter no. IDC/PARKS/VERNA PH-IV/9704.
152
The Great Goa Land Grab
In February 2006, two months prior to receiving the applications from the five SEZ developers that were allocated land in the Verna Industrial Estate, the GIDC decided to revise the premium rates of plots in all 21 industrial estates under its jurisdiction due to a ‘tremendous increase in maintenance costs’.142 The GIDC thereafter resolved to increase the premium rates in 18 of the 21 industrial estates citing a ‘constraint of land’ and market rates in the surrounding vicinity. However, the Board ultimately did not change the premium in Phase IV of the Verna Industrial Estate. The five SEZs were, therefore, charged the older rate of Rs 600 per sq metre. The GIDC’s reason for charging what amounted to a discounted rate was the lack of infrastructure in Phase IV. In August 2006, after 69 per cent of the land in Phase IV had been allotted to the five SEZs, the GIDC revised the premium in Phase IV to Rs 750 per sq metre. A March 2008 Report of India’s Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) calculated that the GIDC’s failure to apply the higher land premium from the outset resulted in a loss to the state government of Rs 369 million.143 Similarly, in the case of land allocated to Meditab Specialities and Peninsula Pharma in Keri and Sancoale, respectively, the GIDC used an approved formula to calculate premiums for non-industrial estate lands. This amounted to Rs 96 per sq metre for Meditab and Rs 934 per sq metre for Peninsula. However, when executing the lease deeds during March and April of 2006, the GIDC charged Meditab only Rs 80 per sq metre (a 20 per cent price reduction) and Peninsula Pharma just Rs 270 per sq metre (a nearly 70 per cent discount). According to the CAG, the differential between the premiums calculated using the approved formula and the premium actually charged resulted in a loss of Rs 154 million to the GIDC.144 A summary of the differential premiums charged in all seven cases is presented in Table 7.3. Another irregularity involved the GIDC’s failure to charge any premium for the additional land allotted to the Verna Industrial Estate SEZs beyond the amount originally approved. The following year, following a series of protests against the SEZs, the lease deeds were amended to include a premium of Rs 100 per sq metre for the additional land, which represented a huge discount over the Rs 750 per metre being charged 142 143 144
GIDC (7 February 2006). Minutes of the 285 TH GIDC board meeting. CAG (2008). Audit Report (Civil), Goa for the Year 2007–08, p. 132. CAG (2008). Audit Report (Civil), Goa for the Year 2007–08, p. 135.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
153
for the other portions of land allotted to these projects. The CAG report found that, since the lands were contiguous, the discount was not warranted, and cost the GIDC an additional Rs 343 million in foregone premium charges.145 Table 7.3: Rates at Which Land Was Allotted to SEZ Developers No. SEZ
Location Revised Developer rate
Rate at which land was allotted Area and rate charged as per GIDC board resolution
1.
Meditab Specialities Peninsula Pharma K. Raheja
Keri
4.
Paradigm Logistics
Verna Rs 750/ m2 2,64,419 m2 @ Ind. Est. ** Rs 600/m2
5.
Planetview Verna Rs 750/ m2 1,32,000 m2 @ Mercantile Ind. Est. ** Rs 600/ m2
6.
Inox Verna Rs 750/ m2 5,52,089 m2 @ Mercantile Ind. Est. ** Rs 600/m2
2. 3.
Rs 95.50/ m2 *
Additional area allotted and rate charged as per final lease agreement 12,32,000 m2 @ -NARs. 80/ m2
Sancoale Rs 934.20/ m2 * Verna Rs 750/ m2 Ind. Est. **
2,04,000 m2 @ Rs 270/ m2 7,91,732 m2 @ Rs 600/m2
-NA2,74,651 m2 initially free (Ph. IV) and then @ Rs 100/m2 1,25,703 m2 initially free (Ph. IV) and then @ Rs 100/ m2 1,03,331 m2 initially free (Ph. IV) and then @ Rs 100/m2 35,000 m2 initially free (Ph. IV) and then @ Rs 100/m2
Sources: * As per GIDC’s approved formula for computing lease premiums for its plots/properties outside industrial estates. ** While increasing the rates/m2 of all the phases of the Verna Industrial Estate during the 285th GIDC board meeting held on 7 February 2006 the rates/m2 of Phase IV of the 145
Since the deed for the Maxgrow Finlease was executed at a later stage than for the other four SEZs, the additional land was charged at the higher rate of Rs 600 per sq metre. See CAG (2008). Audit Report (Civil), Goa for the Year 2007–08, p. 134.
154
The Great Goa Land Grab
Verna Industrial Estate were left unchanged at a tentative rate of Rs 600/m2. In August 2006 after land had already been allotted to SEZs, the rates were revised to Rs 750/m2.
The GIDC also granted major, and recurring, rent concessions. Apart from the one-time premiums as discussed above, the GIDC also levies an Annual Lease Rent (ALR) on all its properties. In 2003 the GIDC began including relevant clauses in its standard lease agreement that allowed it to revise the ALR as the premium rates of the properties are revised. This clause was not included in the 30-year leases signed with the seven SEZs under discussion. The ALR would be fixed at a negligible level for three decades, as indicated in Table 7.4. Table 7.4: Annual Lease Rent Charged to Six SEZs No.
SEZ Developer
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Meditab Specialities Peninsula Pharma K. Raheja* Paradigm Logistics* Planetview Mercantile* Inox Mercantile*
ALR (in Rs)
Totals
492,800 274,928 2,375,196 793,257 396,000 1,454,496 5,786,677
Source: Data held by the GIDC, obtained using the Right to Information Act, 2005. * Excluding additional land allotted at the time when the lease agreements were executed.
The seventh feature of the Goa SEZ process was the marked increase— after the allocation of SEZ land—in government-supplied infrastructure, and permissible Floor Area Ratio (FAR), for the developers. The GIDC had originally justified the heavily discounted land premiums by citing the substandard infrastructure in the project locations. Nevertheless, the lease agreements included a clause requiring the GIDC to improve the existing infrastructure connections—such as roads, water, and drainage—leading to the boundaries of the SEZs. To make good on this promise, the GIDC took a number of actions. In March 2007 it floated a tender to construct a road linking Peninsula Pharma in Sancoale to the National Highway.146 In April 2006, the GIDC agreed to allocate two plots of land near Phase IV of the Verna Industrial Estate— 146
GIDC (9 March 2007). Minutes of the 295th GIDC board meeting.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
155
each measuring 50,000 sq metres—for the construction of housing for workers on the estate.147 Anti-SEZ activists alleged that this was intended for SEZ employees. In September, the GIDC floated a Rs 10 million tender for the construction of roads in Phase IV of the Verna Industrial Estate.148 The GIDC was in effect subsidizing additional infrastructure facilities that benefited the SEZs. Moreover, the state government modified the regulations governing the Goa Town and Country Planning Act 1974—again, after land had been allotted to the SEZs—to increase the permissible FAR, from 100 per cent to 150 per cent for SEZs in the information technology (IT)/ IT-enabled services (ITES) and biotechnology sectors, while reducing setbacks to 5 metres.149 These changes were initiated by the GIDC,150 though formally promulgated by state government’s town and country planning department.151 Proposed changes to the model building by-laws, dating from November 2004,152 would have assisted of developers seeking to build retail, leisure, and residential complexes in the Non- Processing Areas (NPA) of their SEZs. In sum, the process by which SEZs applications were evaluated and approved, land allocated and extended, leasing arrangements negotiated and executed, and regulations skirted and amended, was characterized by a series of striking irregularities. Many of the key decisions were taken prior to the state government’s announcement of its SEZ policy, which was itself approved stealthily. In 2007, many of the details outlined in this section were made public by activists who had used the Right to Information Act (RTIA) to obtain relevant government-held documents. The circulation of this information, including informed analysis of the anomalies contained therein, added fuel to the growing opposition to the SEZ projects. By this time, the GIDC had begun the process of acquiring properties on behalf of four SEZ developers, but the properties had not yet been formally transferred to the companies. The anti-SEZ movement sought to ensure that this eventuality was fore147 148 149 150 151 152
GIDC (19 April 2006). Minutes of the 287 TH GIDC board meeting. ‘Advertisement’, in Navhind Times, 28 September 2007. Direct beneficiaries would have included Biotechnology SEZs (Peninsula Pharma and Inox Mercantile) and IT/ITES SEZs (Paradigm and Maxgrow). GIDC (27 February 2007). Letter by GIDC to TCP vide letter no: GOA IDC/MD/S(I)/12904. TCP Department Goa (1 March 2007). Letter vide letter no. 27/13/ TCP-07/871 TCP Department Goa (1 March 2007). ‘Reply by TCP to GIDC vide letter no: 27/13/TCP-07/P T. FILE /877’.
156
The Great Goa Land Grab
stalled. Contesting SEZs By mid-2007, the information that had begun to circulate about the proposed SEZs was turning local sentiment—among both activists and ordinary residents—against these projects. The movement that emerged included a range of actors in civil society, which coalesced into two main groups, the SEZ Virodhi Manch (SVM), or Campaign Against SEZs, and Goa’s Movement Against SEZs (GMAS). The state’s main opposition party, the BJP, also played a crucial role, particularly in the beginning of the movement. This section will explain why SEZs were opposed in the state and examine the dynamics of the movement, including how it was built and sustained. Articulation of Resistance Using the RTIA, local residents of villages near the Verna Industrial Estate, concerned about the potential impact of the housing colony planned for workers from the industrial estate, stumbled upon information about the SEZs. They followed up with further RTI applications and collected many more documents pertaining to the SEZs. These included the applications for land, the minutes of GIDC board meetings, resolutions passed by the GIDC, and other relevant information. This information was then shared with other activists and civil society organizations. Attention was largely drawn to two aspects of the information: the employment projections and the amount of land allocated. The anti-SEZ movement latched onto the ‘potential’ job-creation figures cited by the developers in their applications. A total of 300,000 new jobs was projected. Some activists claimed that, given Goa’s population of approximately 1.3 million,153 and an estimated state-wide unemployment figure of 40,000,154 the SEZs would inevitably result in a huge influx of workers from outside the state. This would inundate the Goan population. The leader of the opposition, Manohar Parrikar, spoke of ‘a 153 154
Provisional results of the 2011 Census project Goa’s population to be approximately 1.5 million. The total number of persons registered in the Employment Exchanges in Goa was 101,425 in 2005–06, according to the Government of Goa (2006) Statistical Handbook of Goa: 2005–06 (Panaji: Directorate of Planning, Statistics and Evaluation), p. 182. However, it has been argued that this figure greatly overestimates unemployment in the state. Some claim that Goa predominantly has a problem of underemployment—cf. Government of Goa (2008) Economic Survey 2007–08 (Panaji: Directorate of Planning, Statistics and Evaluation), pp. 7–9.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
157
demographic invasion of Goa’.155 As a result, ‘Goans would become outsiders in their own land’.156 An opinion piece in a local daily newspaper, using a different employment estimate, summarised this sentiment: Into an environment that is crowded for space, short on infrastructure and struggling to meet health and education needs, the approved and pending SEZs could impose another 642,000 persons—if the claims of the SEZ developers are to be believed. For tacitly accepting this number alone the government of Goa should be interrogated. It is a ludicrous number for our state. Why so? For it is more than the total number of all people employed in Goa! The 2001 Census told us that 274,000 people were employed in rural Goa and 248,000 in urban which together is 522,000 workers. . . This alone reveals the recklessness of this administration in even considering the SEZ engine as one that is good for Goa.157 Opponents of the SEZs also highlighted the scale of the land involved. As one activist later recalled, the GIDC: . . . set a new record in terms of the area of land that was allotted to the 7 SEZs. . . from March 2003 to March 2008 the GIDC had allocated a total of 1709.48 acres of land. Of this, 949.13 acres were allocated to the seven SEZ developers. In other words, 55% of land which had been allotted over five years by the GIDC was allotted to seven SEZs within a period of only five months. . . Over the same period . . . the GIDC acquired 1074.17 acres of land. When one compares this with the land acquired on behalf of four SEZ developers, the GIDC had within a few months resolved to acquire more land than it had done over 5 years.158 Some of these claims were confirmed by the CAG in its 2008 report, which included an indictment of the state government’s decision mak155 156 157 158
See ‘SEZs in state would force demographic invasion: BJP’, Navhind Times, 28 August 2007 Statement made at a BJP rally in the town of Curchorem on 7 October 2007. See ‘Opinion: How the SEZ numbers don’t add up’, Gomantak Times, 8 October 2007. Interview with Franky Monteiro, activist from Loutolim.
158
The Great Goa Land Grab
ing.159 Calling Goa’s entire territory of 3,702 sq kms a ‘meagre land area’, the Council for Social Justice and Peace (CSJP) asked: ‘Are the People’s representatives (MLAs) so naïve or so opportunistic that they permit new land-gobbling projects which are undeniably against the needs of and benefits for the majority of the common people?’160 Anti- SEZ activists continually highlighted the issue of systemic corruption. One leading public intellectual commented that ‘SEZs by any name are a mega land grab for real estate with the government clearing the title of the land.’161 Concerns about in-migration of ‘non-Goans’ and the takeover of land were frequently framed as a threat to ‘Goan identity’. This garnered support for the movement by, perhaps, tapping into anxieties among the people of India’s smallest and least populous state. Indeed, a number of recent agitations against industrial projects in Goa were articulated in terms of a loss of the state’s unique ‘identity’. These included opposition to various tourism development proposals (Routledge 2000) as well as the Konkan Railway (early 1990s), the Thapar-Dupont Nylon 66 facility (mid-1990s) (Alvares), and the Meta Strips project (late 1990s) (ibid.; Sundaram 1999). At this writing, a campaign is being waged demanding ‘special status’ for Goa, which would prevent ‘outsiders’ from buying land in the state. The movement supplemented these arguments with allegations that the entire exercise of setting up SEZs reeked of a scam, and that the SEZs would remain outside the control of the local bodies of governance. The activists claimed to have in their possession documentary evidence, collected using the RTIA, which indicated that land was allotted to the developers with undue haste, that procedures had been flouted, and that numerous unwarranted concessions had been granted. One call for resistance to the proposed projects argued that the GIDC had ‘. . . resolved to waive off the Transfer Fee, Sub-lease Fee etc., to these Companies . . . without the matter being on the Agenda, thereby draining out the public Exchequer. . . .’ The plots, moreover, had been allocated based ‘on the whims and fancies’ of GIDC) board 159 160
161
See CAG (2008). Audit Report (Civil), Goa for the Year 2007–08, pp. 127–9. Council for Social Justice and Peace (2 December 2007), SEZs are not viable in Goa in NO to SEZ . . . . YES to PEZ, http://amkanakasez.blogspot. in/2007/12/sezs-notviable-in-goa-csjp.html, accessed 25 January 2011]. Sabnis Pravin (2008), ‘Knowledge SEZ?’, in Gulf-Goans, http://groups. yahoo.com/group/gulf-goans/message/20082, accessed 25 January 2011.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
159
members, without adhering to established regulations.162 In another broadside, a GMAS member claimed that ‘. . . [the] SEZs are not an Industry. . . Their beneficiaries will be real estate developers, large corporate houses, film stars, politicians and bureaucrats. . . It is a massive fraud inflicted on the peace-loving people of Goa’.163 The BJP held a press conference on 16 October 2007. Its organizers distributed documents that the party claimed as proof that the SEZs were a Rs 3 billion land scam.164 Movement leaders also alleged that, once operational, the SEZs would effectively remain outside the purview of locally elected government institutions, that is, the village panchayats, the municipal councils, and the state government. The parallel with Goa’s industrial estates, which since 2001 had been placed outside the jurisdiction of local elected bodies, was cited.165 Activists pointed to sections of the Goa SEZ policy that called for SEZs to be declared ‘industrial townships’ and autonomous self-governing municipal bodies.166 The SEZs, it was claimed, would be like ‘foreign territories’ within the state: ‘. . . the diabolical SEZs. . . are a ploy to create 18 foreign nations within Goa that seek to displace Goans and destroy the environment of Goa’.167 Arguments made about the ‘take over’ of land and ‘irregularities’ in the process of approving the SEZs resonated with many people and helped to build the movement. This was partly because about seven months before the anti-SEZ agitations began to gather strength, another movement mobilized around similar themes. The ‘Save Goa’ movement campaigned successfully against the government’s attempt to implement the Goa Regional Plan 2011, commonly known as ‘RP 2011’. The Save Goa movement alleged that the RP 2011 had clandestinely altered 162
163
164 165 166
167
See ‘Role of GIDC, in NO to SEZ . . . . YES to PEZ’, 6 December 2007, http://amkanakasez.blogspot.in/2007/12/fradulent-role-of-gidc.html (accessed 25 January 2011). Fr. Lino Florindo, ‘More on SEZs’, 27 November 2007, http://lists. goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2007-November/151704.html (accessed 25 January 2011). Florindo is a member of member of GMAS. BJP press conference held on 16 October 2007 in the city of Panaji. This was done through an amendment made to the Goa Industrial Development Act, 1965 in 2001. See provision 37A(c). The state government was to take appropriate steps to declare the SEZs as industrial townships, which would enable them to function as self-governing, autonomous municipal bodies. See ‘Goa wants PEZ’, in NO to SEZ . . . . YES to PEZ, 15 December 2007, http://amkanakasez.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive. html (accessed 25 January 2011)
160
The Great Goa Land Grab
the zoning regulations affecting large tracts of land to favour real estate and mining interests. Here, too, concerns over threats to the state’s cultural heritage and natural landscape, as well as apprehensions over potential alterations to village demographics, were articulated as a loss of Goa’s identity.168 The RP 2011 was eventually abandoned (‘de-notified’) by the state government in January 2007. This entailed withdrawing construction permits that had previously been granted. Movement activists often linked the SEZ issue to the controversies surrounding the RP 2011. Parrikar, for instance, argued that the SEZs posed ‘a threat bigger’ than the RP 2011’.169 Following the anti-RP 2011 agitation, there was a significant increase in people’s participation in Goa’s gram sabhas (village assemblies). In many parts of the state, village forums and civic action groups were established. These have acted like ‘guardians’ in their respective localities, many using the RTIA to unearth evidence of wrongdoing. Creating and Sustaining a Movement The initial information about the planned SEZs was first gathered by concerned residents of Loutolim village, which borders the Verna Industrial Estate. These included Franky Monteiro, Alan Faleiro, and Charles Fernandes. Subsequently, they began organizing small meetings and drawing in other activists and ‘action groups’, including an NGO called SEZ Watch. A seminar on SEZs was held on 27 August 2007, which led to the formation of People’s Movement Against SEZ (PMAS), consisting of villagers from the areas where SEZs were proposed. Matanhy Saldanha, a social activist and former MLA from Cortalim, where Peninsula Pharma’s SEZ was to be located, also took an interest in the PMAS. In October 2007, the PMAS split to form two factions: the People’s Movement Against SEZs (PMAS) and the People’s Committee Against SEZs (PCAS).170 (Subsequently each group re-named itself: the PMAS became the SVM, and the PCAS became the GMAS.) A major reason for the split was disagreement over how the group should be identified and with whom it wanted to be associated. The group that became 168 169 170
‘Goa Plan: People’s Protests’ (editorial), Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 51 (23–29 December 2008), p. 5205. ‘SEZs in state would force demographic invasion: BJP’, Navhind Times, 28 August 2007. See ‘The Konkan Packaging Company of Goa’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 6, pp. 10–11.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
161
SVM considered itself ‘a collective of people’s groups against SEZs’ and explicitly identified itself as being ‘apolitical’, meaning that it did not want to be associated with or share a platform with any politician or political party. The ‘apolitical’ tag was similar to the one used by the Goa Bachao Abhiyan (GBA), a federation of activists and groups that led the Save Goa Movement against the RP 2011. The SVM included village-level groups such as the Keri Nagrik Samiti and the Sancoale Action Committee, and received support from NGOs such as the CSJP) and Jagrut Goem, or ‘Alert Goa’.171 The GMAS did not fashion itself in any particular way, but its relations with political figures contrasted sharply with the position adopted by the SVM. The GMAS was led by Matanhy Saldanha, the former MLA, who remained a member of the United Goan Democratic Party (UGDP). Saldanha was perceived as being ‘pro-BJP’ because of his support for the party when it had been in power.172 The GMAS was willing to make common cause with political parties, including the BJP, the Shiv Sena, and the Goa Suraj Party. It also drew on the support of NGOs such as the Goa Peaceful Society and Utt Goenkara, or ‘Goans wake up’. As this brief overview suggests, the SVM and the GMAS were both loose, ad hoc collectives—federations of various activists and groups that had come together to oppose the SEZs. Each was built around the networks and social bases of its affiliates. The GMAS was able to draw on the BJP’s organizational network, which is present in all 40 assembly constituencies in the state. Similarly, the SVM was able to draw on the organizations that comprise the CSJP, which enjoys close connections with various Catholic parishes and village groups. The complementary way in which the SVM and the GMAS positioned themselves allowed each group to appeal to distinct sets of persons and organizations. An array of social affiliations was included in each group. Together, their combined constituencies represented a broad cross-section of political, and ‘non-political’, persuasions. This segmented form of organization explains how opposition against SEZs came to be comprised of diverse groups of people, thus creating a broad base for the movement. 171
172
Translated as ‘Alert Goa’. The group was launched in April 2007 prior to the state assembly elections to ‘identify the most corrupt and the worst among the candidates put up by the Congress and other non-BJP political parties and make efforts to ensure their defeat,’ while actively working ‘for the defeat of candidates put up by communal parties like the BJP.’ From October 2000 to March 2005.
162
The Great Goa Land Grab
While the BJP started expressing concern about the SEZs as early as the summer of 2007, it was during the run-up to a parliamentary byelection for the South Goa constituency that the issue began to become central to its political platform in the state. The BJP made SEZs the primary issue in its election campaign, which added visibility to the issue, raised public awareness, and boosted the anti-SEZ movement. Earlier in 2007, the MP for South Goa, Churchill Alemao, left the Congress Party and formed the Save Goa Front (SGF). Due to the ‘anti-defection’ provisions of India’s electoral regulations, this shift of party allegiance triggered a parliamentary by-election for Alemao’s seat. Voting was scheduled for 31 October 2007. During the election campaign, the BJP voiced its opposition to Goa’s SEZ policy and the planned SEZs themselves. The party stressed the ‘demographic invasion’173 and ‘land scam’ aspects of its critique.174 The BJP also argued that the state was unable to meet the SEZ’s requirements of water and electricity.175 These issues were voiced repeatedly at public meetings held throughout South Goa—in Margao (4 October), Sanguem (5 October), Curchorem (7 October), Ponda (9 October), Vasco (10 October), and Keri (12 October). An analysis of newspaper articles reveals the SEZ issue gaining wide currency from October 2007 onward, largely a result of media coverage during the final stages of the by-election campaign. The Congress Party countered the BJP’s allegations concerning the SEZ issue by referring to them as mere ‘electioneering’. The BJP responded by daring the (Congress-ruled) state government to withdraw its approval for the SEZs, saying that the BJP candidate would withdraw from the by-election if the government did so. As the date of the election approached, the Congress appeared to change its stand on the issue. Francisco Sardinha, the Congress candidate, began his campaign by announcing that the ‘state will not provide electricity or water to the SEZs.’176 The chief minister, who campaigned on Sardinha’s behalf made a similar statement. He said that, while the state government could not countermand SEZ approvals already authorized by the central government, the state would not permit the approved SEZs to burden Goa’s infrastructure.177 As the voting day grew near, however, 173 174 175 176 177
Statement made at a BJP rally in the town of Curchorem on 7 October 2007. BJP press conference held on 16 October 2007 in the city of Panaji. Statement made at a BJP rally in the town of Sanguem on 5 October 2007. See ‘Parrikar accuses GIDC of Rs 300 crore SEZ land scam’,’Navhind Times, 17 October 2007. See ‘No indiscriminate permissions for SEZs in state: CM’, Navhind Times, 19
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
163
Sardinha changed his position, stating that he favoured just two SEZs, one in each parliamentary constituency, and that Goa’s SEZ policy itself should be withdrawn with immediate effect.178 Finally, on the eve of the election, the chief minister addressed a public rally in Margao, where he said that the government would cancel the SEZs if they were found to be detrimental to the state’s interests.179 The Congress leadership had changed its position, committing itself publicly to a review of the SEZ policy and its likely impacts. Although the BJP lost the byelection,180 its campaign contributed to building opposition to SEZs and altering the ruling party’s position on what had become a major issue in the state. After the by-election, the BJP became less central to the anti-SEZ movement, which was largely sustained by the SVM and GMAS. When the BJP in Goa first began questioning the state government on the SEZ issue, in August 2007, the party was not entirely against the policy, but was critical of the large number of SEZ projects that were being proposed. It favoured having only one or two SEZs in the state.181 In October 2007, the leader of the GMAS—the group with links to the BJP and other parties—made statements warning of an agitation ‘if the government failed to scrap the proposed SEZs.’182 Some SVM activists interpreted this reference to ‘proposed SEZs’ as tacit support for exempting those SEZs that had already been ‘notified’, a position close to the one the BJP had adopted. The SVM’s demand for all SEZs, including those already notified, to be scrapped, as was evident from a memorandum submitted to the chief minister on 9 November 2007, in the wake of the by-election result.183 This may have galvanized the other anti-SEZ groups to follow suit, because subsequently the BJP, too, demanded the scrapping of the three notified SEZs.184 By 23 November 2007 the GMAS
178 179 180 181 182 183 184
October 2007. See ‘2 SEZs are more than sufficient for Goa: Sardinha’, Navhind Times, 24 October 2007. See ‘People’s interest supreme while deciding on SEZs: CM’, Navhind Times, 28 October 2007 The Congress won 118,583 votes to the BJP’s 77,681 votes. See ‘SEZs in state would force demographic invasion: BJP’, Navhind Times, 28 August 2007. See ‘BJP’s meeting on SEZ at Cortalim today’, Navhind Times, 14 October 2007. SEZ Virodhi Manch, Memorandum to the Chief Minister of Goa, 9 November 2007. See ‘De-notify Verna and Keri SEZs, demands BJP’, Navhind Times, 16 November 2007.
164
The Great Goa Land Grab
was also calling for the cancellation of all SEZs.185 While united in their demand to cancel all SEZs, the groups employed different strategies in mobilizing public opinion. Rather than dissipating the movement’s energies, this resulted in multiple sources of pressure on the state government. The BJP repeatedly claimed to be planning to take legal action against the GIDC board on the basis of the alleged irregularities in allocating land for the SEZs. However, it was the SVM that filed a complaint with the police on 22 October 2007, alleging ‘fraud’ by the GIDC board. After a third SEZ was notified in November 2007, both the SVM and the GMAS set deadlines for the government to scrap the SEZs, on 17 November and 20 November, respectively.186 When the government did not respond to the deadlines, beginning on 10 December the GMAS conducted two simultaneous week-long ‘yatras’ (roving awareness-raising campaigns), one in North Goa, the other in South Goa. The objective was to educate people about the ‘implications of SEZs’ for their localities and the state as a whole. Both the SVM and the GMAS conducted major public rallies—the SVM at Lohia Maidan in Margao on 14 December, and the latter at Azad Maidan in Panaji, the state capital, on 19 December 2007. ‘Scrapping’ the SEZs On 31 December 2007, Goa’s chief minister, Digamber Kamat, announced that the state government would ‘scrap’ the previously approved SEZs. This section of the chapter explains the factors that led the government to reverse its earlier decisions on these projects and to alter its policies regarding SEZs in the state. Intensification of the Anti-SEZ Movement On 6 November 2007, a week after the Congress candidate won the South Goa by-election, the Raheja SEZ was notified by the interministerial SEZ board of approval in New Delhi. This provoked anger among anti-SEZ protestors, who charged the Congress-led state government of not being serious about its commitment to review the SEZs. The anti-SEZ movement soon began showing signs of radicalization. SVM affiliated activists broke into some of the SEZ sites to stop construction work that they alleged was being carried out. On 7 Decem185 186
See ‘Anti-SEZ hunger strike to be held on Nov 23 in city’, Navhind Times, 22 November 2007. See ‘GMAS sets deadline to reverse decision on SEZs’, Navhind Times, 11 November 2007.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
165
ber 2007, they entered the Meditab SEZ site in Keri and prevented approximately 400 labourers from carrying out their work assignments. On 11 December 2007, activists entered the Raheja SEZ in the Verna Industrial Estate in an attempt to stop work underway at the site. A deadline of 19 December 2007 had been set by the GMAS for the state government to announce the scrapping of the SEZs. The GMAS’s leaders warned the government that a ‘Nandigram-like situation’ would ensue if prompt action were not taken, referring to the bloodshed and disorder that had afflicted a proposed SEZ in the state of West Bengal earlier that year. The government did not comply with this deadline. On 24 December 2007, stating that the agitation could take ‘an ugly turn’—strongly implying the possibility of violence—the GMAS issued a public appeal to tourists holidaying in Goa to leave the state by 28 December 2007.187 The ostensible purpose was to put pressure on the government by threatening the viability of one of the state’s major industries. Around the same time, the SVM warned the government that they would intensify their struggle using ‘peaceful’ means.188 The chief minister had announced in mid-November that a committee would be formed to prepare a detailed note on the SEZ projects in the state and the future of Goa’s SEZ policy. It was not until 12 December—almost a month later—that a committee was actually formed, after the anti-SEZ movement had intensified. Meanwhile, developments in Goa’s state legislature contributed to further political pressure on the state government. In the 40-member legislative assembly, the Congress-led coalition government headed by Chief Minister Kamat held 25 seats: the Congress had 16 members, the Nationalist Congress Party, three, the SGF, two, the UGDP, one, and there were independents. The BJP-led opposition had 16 seats: 14 BJP members and two from the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP). Goa has a history of unstable governments: between 1990 and 2005 there were 14 governments (Rubinoff 2000), with 30 cases of political defections (deSouza 2006). Soon after the by-election, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), a member of the Congress-led coalition, urged the chief minister to halt ongoing work on the SEZs.189 In Decem187 188 189
See ‘Anti-SEZ group asks tourists to leave state by Dec 28’, Navhind Times, 24 December 2007. See ‘SEZ Virodhi Manch threathens to intensify stir’, Navhind Times, 25 December 2007. See ‘Willy urges CM to stop work on SEZs’, Navhind Times, 13 November 2007.
166
The Great Goa Land Grab
ber, NCP leaders stated that they did not want even a single SEZ in the state.190 Churchill Alemao, the leader of another coalition partner, the SGF, was already on record stating that all of Goa’s SEZs ‘should be scrapped forthwith.’191 Alemao submitted a memorandum to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during his December 2007 visit to Goa asking for the central government to withdraw its approval for the SEZs planned for Goa. The prime minister’s response was ‘. . . that potential for industrialization in Goa was limited and it has to strike a balance between maintaining pristine natural beauty and the needs of industry.’192 The opposition to SEZs in Goa was clearly growing stronger within the state’s ruling coalition. Given the history of government instability in the state, it is likely that the anti-SEZ sentiments expressed by the two coalition partners carried substantial weight and influenced the eventual policy reversal. The Congress Party needed the allies to form the government. Their sentiments could not be brushed aside. Review Studies Suggest SEZs Unsuitable in Goa The committee appointed by the chief minister in December 2007 to review the SEZs included four members of the state cabinet, and was chaired by none other than the chief minister himself.193 As noted above, the committee’s formation was the result of pressure by the state’s fast-radicalizing anti-SEZ movement. Even as the committee was undertaking its work, the chief minister also directed the members of a Task Force charged with preparing a new regional plan—in lieu of the controversial RP 2011—to prepare a report on SEZs in the state. Also around this time, the executive committee of the state-level Congress Party organization to appoint a panel to study the SEZ situation in Goa. The Congress panel report, presented on 29 December 2007, stated that ‘SEZs in their present form were not viable in the state and were against the interests of the people’, a formulation very close to the CAG conclusion cited earlier. The Congress panel added that the government should explore the possibility of ‘de-notifying’ those SEZs 190 191 192 193
See ‘Take our SEZ stand into consideration, NCP tells govt.’, Navhind Times, 21 December 2007. See ‘Aleixo, Kavlekar, Luizinho involved in SEZ land scam, alleges Churchill’, Navhind Times, 25 October 2007. See ‘Two memorandums opposing SEZs submitted to PM’, Navhind Times, 28 December 2007. Headed by chief minister, Ravi Naik (home minister), Dayanand Narvekar (finance minister), Jose Phillip D’Souza (revenue minister), and Vishwajeet Rane (health minister).
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
167
that had already been notified. The review committee headed by the chief minister released a ‘White Paper on SEZs in Goa State’. This was largely a descriptive document, but in response to the ‘issues’ raised by those opposing the SEZs, the White Paper contained a section listing the many positive aspects of SEZs. However, it also stated that Goa was not prepared to host all of the SEZs that had been approved or were in the pipeline. The White Paper singled out the Metitab SEZ for particular criticism, finding that it would require large volumes of water and electricity. The report concluded that the requirements of the other six SEZ projects could in fact be worked out.194 The report of the Task Force, released on 30 December 2007, gave many reasons before concluding that SEZs were detrimental to the state.195 On the following day—on New Year’s Eve 2007—the chief minister announced that the state government had decided to ‘scrap’ the SEZs. Elusive Closure: The Impediments to Fully Reversing the SEZ Policy Despite the government of Goa’s decision to reverse its stance regarding the SEZs planned for the state, a complete closure of the matter proved to be elusive. This section discusses the reasons why ‘scrapping’ the SEZs turned out to be more difficult than had originally been foreseen. When announcing that the state government would be withdrawing its approval for the proposed SEZs—including the various land and other concessions granted by the GIDC—Chief Minister Kamat clarified that in the case of the three SEZs that had already been ‘notified’ by the board of approvals in New Delhi, the government of Goa did not possess the legal authority to take the requisite action. But he assured the protesters that ‘the state would urge the centre to de-notify’ these SEZs as well.196 As it turned out, the Government of India—in the form of the commerce ministry, which had primary jurisdiction over SEZ policy— 194 195 196
See ‘Govt unprepared to host SEZs, reveals report’, Herald, 30 December 2007. See ‘SEZs detrimental to Goa: Task Force’, Navhind Times, 31 December 2007. See ‘Govt scraps SEZs’, Navhind Times, 1 January 2008. Subsequently, the Goa government sent an official communication to the board of approvals informing the ministry of commerce and industry that they wished to withdraw all the SEZs that the state government had recommended, to cancel those formally approved, and to de-notify the three notified SEZs. See Office of Secretary (Industries) Government of Goa (7 January 2008). Letter to Union Commerce Ministry vide letter no. SI/SEZ/2007.
168
The Great Goa Land Grab
was extremely reluctant to acquiesce in the state government’s urgings. The first response to the state’s government request to de-notify the three SEZs came from the commerce secretary, who also chairs the SEZ board of approval. He announced that there was ‘no provision under law to recommend de-notification’. Notified SEZs had ‘become legal entities and cannot be de-notified’.197 The commerce secretary’s statement received wide publicity in the local press and prompted Chief Minister Kamat to travel to Delhi and meet with Union Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, who provided words of reassurance. There was a ‘provision in the SEZ Act for everything,’ he stated. ‘Goan people do not want SEZs. SEZs will not come to Goa. The Congress government will not go against the people.’198 However, the commerce ministry did not thereafter initiate the de- notification of Goa’s SEZs. Instead, whenever the issue was raised, the ministry proposed various options short of de-notification. In February 2008, it suggested that the government of Goa should compensate the three SEZs for the withdrawal of the prior approvals.199 This was repeated in June 2008, when officials from the commerce ministry claimed that ‘the Goa government’s stand of scrapping the three notified SEZs may cost the exchequer Rs 350 -500 crores.’ The Goa government, they added, should consider abandoning its demand for denotification.200 In October 2008, another suggestion was floated by the commerce ministry: that the Goa government allow the SEZ promoters to take up alternate projects in state.201 Finally, in January 2009, Kamal Nath himself advised the three SEZ developers to withdraw voluntarily from the state.202 None agreed. The Congress Party in Delhi showed a reluctance to intervene in the matter. Party spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi stated that the de-notification discussion was ‘an issue between Union Minister Kamal Nath and the state government. The Congress stand is that 197 198 199 200 201 202
See ‘Three notified SEZs in Goa can’t be de-notified: Centre’, Navhind Times, 3 January 2008. See ‘Centre not to impose SEZs on Goa’, Herald, 4 January 2008. See ‘Centre to hear Goa SEZ developer’s views’, Navhind Times, 26 February 2008. See ‘SEZ decision may cost govt Rs 500 crore’, Herald, 18 June 2008. See ‘SVM condemns Kamal Nath’s statements on SEZ’, Navhind Times, 6 October 2008. See ‘SVM to intensify agitation if police fail to register FIR’, Navhind Times, 9 January 2008.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
169
decision on the SEZs have to be taken together between the two.’203 Subsequently, the Goa government and the SEZ developers became embroiled in a complex legal dispute, which is discussed below. The commerce ministry would not comment on the matter, ostensibly because it had become sub judice. Return of Land Allotted to SEZs Stalled On 10 January 2008, after deciding to ‘scrap’ the SEZs, the Goa government issued stop-work orders to the three notified projects: K. Raheja, Meditab Specialities, and Peninsula Pharma. It was not until five months later, on 12 June 2008, that the state government directed the GIDC to revoke the land allotments that had been made to all SEZ projects in Goa. The GIDC duly issued notices to the seven SEZs, directing them to surrender the land back to the GIDC. This prompted the developers to seek judicial remedy at the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court (BHC). The three notified SEZs acted first, challenging the ‘stop work’ orders. They argued that they had made substantial investments in the SEZs. Subsequently, all seven developers (included the three notified SEZs) approached the BHC, challenging the GIDC’s order to surrender the land that had been allotted to them. The petition argued that the SEZs were notified by the central government and that the state government did not possess the powers to interfere. In response, the Goa government argued that it possessed the power to revoke SEZs under Section 3(6) of the SEZA, 2005. Up until this point, the court case involved the SEZ developers against the government. This changed in July 2008, when groups from the villages of Sancoale, Keri, and Verna, where seven of the SEZs had been allotted land, intervened. They were suspicious that the state was not serious about scrapping the SEZs and that the court case would be compromised. The villagers, supported by the SVM, filed three separate Public Interest Litigation (PIL) suits in the BHC, claiming that both the state government and the SEZ developers had engaged in procedural violations. The legal briefs alleged that the GIDC lacked the legal authority to allot land for the purpose of establishing SEZs, that the allotment of land was carried out in an arbitrary manner, and that some of the applicants were not registered corporate entities. They annexed to 203
See ‘Congress says Centre and state can decide on SEZs’, Navhind Times, 5 January 2008.
170
The Great Goa Land Grab
their petition the CAG’s 2007–08 report, which contained an account of the losses incurred by the state due to irregularities in the allotment of land. Their petition also alleged that the SEZ developers had committed many ‘violations’, such as undertaking work on their sites without obtaining the necessary permissions. The BHC clubbed all of the petitions pertaining to the SEZs together for joint hearings. On 15 June 2009, the government formally withdrew the state’s SEZ policy. The BHC then allowed the petitioners to amend their respective petitions ‘to incorporate the fresh developments on the SEZ policy.’ In their revised petition, the SEZ developers argued that the state’s revocation of its SEZ policy should not retroactively affect the land allotments that had already been made. The BHC issued its ruling on 26 November 2010, striking down the GIDC’s allocation of land to the developers. The court observed that ‘huge lands which are public properties were allotted to the said companies in a manner opposed to public policy.’ The ruling declared, further, that: ‘[t]he allotment of lands to the companies has been made in undue haste without proper scrutiny of their applications. The allotment has been made arbitrarily. Procedure adopted in the allotment is not fair and transparent. The allotments made by GIDC do not stand the test of reasonableness.’ The BHC directed the SEZ developers and the GIDC to maintain the status quo for a period of four months. That is, the developers were prohibited from creating third party rights, and the GIDC could not allot the land to any other party. The court did, however, permit the developers to submit fresh land allotment applications to the GIDC.204 Six of the seven developers—Meditab Specialities, K. Raheja, Paradigm Logistics, Planetview Mercantile, Inox Mercantile, and Peninsula Pharma— subsequently challenged the BHC’s ruling in the Supreme Court of India.205 The Supreme Court issued an order on 10 January 2011 requiring all parties to maintain the status quo until the petition is disposed. At this writing, the judgement of the SC is awaited, and the repossession of the land allotted to the SEZs has been stalled. *** 204
205
High Court of Bombay at Goa (26 November 2010). Judgement Pronounced in Writ Petitions: 349, 501, 507, 380, 436, 437, 438, 263, 310, 314, 316, of 2008 and 391 of 2009. Maxgrow Finlease did not approach the Supreme Court, but made a fresh application to the GIDC requesting land to establish an industry in the Verna Industrial Estate. Its application is currently pending before the GIDC.
Goa: The Dynamics of Reversal
171
The Goa government received several applications to establish SEZs prior to the adoption of the state’s SEZ policy. Land was hastily allotted to SEZ developers and anomalous concessions were granted. The result, as the CAG and other analysts have pointed out, was a substantial amount of foregone revenue for the state’s exchequer. The emergence of a civil society-led movement opposing SEZs in the state led the Goa government to reverse course: it not only withdrew permission for existing SEZs, but revoked its entire policy framework relating to SEZs. The movement argued that the SEZs were a threat to Goa’s identity: they would lead to the influx of large numbers of migrant workers. These were perceived as a threat given the state’s small size and population. The campaign against Goa’s SEZ policy benefited from the state’s history of successful movements opposing the allocation of land for industries and large infrastructure projects. Allegations of malpractices in the allocation of land to developers, and concerns that the SEZs would be outside the purview of local governance, added further fuel to the movement. Civil society groups, such as the SVM and the GMAS, operated separately from one another and, paradoxically, this allowed them to appeal to distinct sections of Goan society, and thus build a broad base for the movement. Amid signs that the anti-SEZ agitation was radicalizing, and that its tactics and strength might impinge on electoral considerations, the state’s Congress-led government felt compelled to ‘scrap’ the SEZs. A key factor was the role of the BJP, which made the government’s approach to SEZs a major issue in a closely watched parliamentary by-election campaign. The Congress had begun to face opposition on the issue from its coalition allies as well. Moreover, policy reviews, initiated by the Congress Party and the government, found that SEZs were unsuitable to Goa’s social, economic, and ecological conditions. The process of recovering the allotted land, and de-notifying the SEZs that had previously received both state and central government approval, has eluded closure. The matter is currently pending in the Supreme Court. As in many movements across India, the lines between legal contestation and political conflict have blurred.
8. Special Economic Zones: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
T
Special Economic Zone (SEZ) model for development is emblematic of concerns facing liberalizing India. SEZs are unique enclaves governed by legal and tax environments transcending usual national laws with a free market orientation. Spatially, the creation of SEZs enables a country to create advanced infrastructure and incentives that they are not capable of or interested in pursuing throughout the nation. A fast approval process for SEZs is intended to circumvent the notorious Indian License Raj system associated with proposing and running a business. SEZ policy was passed as a National Act in India in 2005, more specific rules were developed in 2006, and some states have adopted their own policies relevant to local conditions. Yet as states pursue this course the proposal and implementation of the zones has led to a range of localized resistances. HE
Affected communities, activists, social movements, and others critiqued the acquisition or transfer of land for SEZ development for facilitating corruption and unjust land transactions. As an example, violence used against West Bengal villagers protesting the SEZ land acquisition brought concerns about SEZs to national attention. In Nandigram, West Bengal, the state government approved an SEZ chemical hub in 2007. Affected villagers, facing displacement, protested against this action, and 14 community members lost their lives amidst extreme
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
173
police brutality incited by political parties (Banerjee et al. 2007 1487). Following the deaths and excessive use of force, ‘Nandigram’ became synonymous with the tension between development at the perceived expense of agriculture and livelihoods in India. Public contempt for this growing development trend heightened nationally in the wake of such violence. Current debates on land in India and internationally frame the context for resistance to SEZs. The SEZ conflict in India reflects broader apprehensions regarding acceptable forms of development, particularly land acquisition strategies, displacement of established residents, and replacement of family and community livelihoods for natural resource extraction, industrial enclaves, infrastructure projects, or other mega-projects. Baviskar, Sinha, and Philip (2006, 189) argue that postindependence, the Indian state adopted the term national interest to justify their domination over the use and management of natural resources, thus assuming ‘a state monopoly on safeguarding the public good’. They argue that the generalizing of ‘public good’ misses the nuanced ways that diverse peoples in India interact with their environments, experience development, and assess the best interests of their communities. This is especially problematic when land used for agrarian purposes is usurped for other development efforts. As a government committee has explained when land in India is diverted from agriculture, ‘the farmer is deprived of potentials and benefits, simply because the rate of compensation, and even the valuation process, do not capture the future potentials, inherent in the intrinsic value of land’ (Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Commerce 2007, 58). Communities and activists have individually contested the national government’s defining of public good in relation to corporate SEZs. Drawing empirical evidence from Goa, we argue that anti-SEZ activism remained localized and use this example as a caution against efforts to homogenize development protest. Although focused on Goa, there are broader implications for the study of the geographies of resistance and development in India and beyond. The multiplicity of the state can produce particular viewings of the state, dependent on the micro-politics of place. In turn, these perceptions shape the nature and form of social movement protest. Resistance is conceptualized as a localized tool to contest state power, dependent on how the state is perceived. Efforts to organize nationally
174
The Great Goa Land Grab
are hindered by disparate goals, aspirations, and politics. The findings reflect what Routledge (1993) documented as the localization of many place-oriented social movements without unifying into a broader resistance with the power to challenge the Indian state. These conclusions contrast with what Miller defines as the spatial and power shifts related to globalization and related reconfigurations of social movement organizing away from particular places and specific governments. ‘Traditional geographies of mobilization, rooted in localized places and the nation-state, appear to be in relative decline’ (Miller 2004, 224). In concert with Featherstone (2008, 8), the empirical evidence presented here details the importance of understanding the relational and contextual grounding of resistance. We argue that localization of the articulations and forms of resistance of the SEZ issue preclude national mobilization. Disparate Protest Despite the interlinked nature of land acquisition, displacement, and SEZs, national debates on these themes remain largely disconnected. Opportunities for resistance rooted in common concerns that transcend particular themes remain underexplored. Based on 140 interviews with national and Goa-based activists, politicians, corporate representatives, and journalists, we highlight here the incongruence of national SEZ activism and the particularities of resistance in the state of Goa. We argue that the lack of national unity in the struggle to oppose SEZs is due to the localized nature of many struggles and is shaped by dynamics at the state level and by particular political opportunities. The demands and interests of the various struggles are not homogeneous, as witnessed by the Goan example. Although there are common concerns about the rising political and economic clout of private businesses and related loss or transfer of land,206 efforts to organize on a national or regional scale have proved to be difficult due to the dispersed nature of struggles and their local attunement. Multiple efforts have been made to organize nationally or regionally, including People’s SEZ Audits, Citizen’s Report Card,207 and meetings. Despite these initiatives, 206 207
The colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 may be superseded by imminent land reform legislation, the Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill. A collective of citizens, activists, people’s movements, and community representatives contributed to a 5-year evaluation of SEZs entitled the Citizen’s Report Card on SEZs. The report card was proposed to be a resource guide released prior
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
175
national organizing has not been sustained and has not led to a collective critique of SEZs. Yet while attempts have been made to unify a myriad of anti-SEZ resistances across India, most of the movements have independently determined that the most effective way to tactically ‘offset their powerlessness’ (McAdam 1983) in relation to SEZ developers is to fight for justice at the state level. The minimal SEZ resistance in the state of Tamil Nadu exemplifies the parochial focus of protest. Vijayabaskar (2010) argues that there has been low opposition to SEZs in Tamil Nadu because the state’s political economy and caste linkages to land make farmers more amenable to sell their land and leave agriculture. The state policy ensures adequate compensation for acquired land, and some are eager to leave the rural-based agriculture, which may be associated with castebased oppression (Vijayabaskar 2010, 36). Levien (2011, 477–478) documents how the possibility of mass resistance to SEZs in the state of Rajasthan was quelled by the state government’s approach to land compensation. Given depleted water supplies for the farmers, some viewed the sale of their agricultural land as a road to prosperity. Further, the government made claims that the villages would receive enhanced infrastructure, constant electricity supply, and improved educational and health facilities. In place of a coherent critique of the broader challenges associated with the SEZ issues, social movements and communities, the primary sources for activist resistance focus on the most relevant aspects of their particular situation rather than addressing the fundamental SEZ policy or the proliferating number of SEZs proposed. Select activists do demand the repeal of the SEZ Act on a national scale, but most want specific concessions locally or the relocation of SEZs outside of their area. A national-level activist working on land and social justice describes efforts to bring together the anti-displacement and anti-land acquisition movements from diverse states: ‘It is difficult for it to get together because it is so vast, and we are looking at some hundreds of SEZs and it is all spread out’ (Interview 113, 13 March 2009). In part the to the 2009 elections, but due to various constraints the document was released after the election. The review, available in Hindi and English, collated a range of concerns raised since the inception of SEZs. The report condemned states for ignoring farmer’s demands related to forced land acquisition and resource grabbing. ‘Governments across the country, instead of initiating a dialogue, have used the force of state machinery, coercion and fraudulent means to subvert and suppress people’s protests’ (Citizens Against SEZs 2009, 1).
176
The Great Goa Land Grab
hobbling of national-level protest may be attributed to the tendency for protests to develop around immediate needs: ‘From the local point of view, they [anti-SEZ protests] are just struggles against forced acquisition of a resource or struggle to protect their land rights’ (Interview 113, 13 March 2009). This hobbling may further be attributed to the contextual differences among states as they are shaped by distinct SEZ policies, land acquisition processes, and protest ambiances. The state context for SEZ resistance is formed by the status of land reforms, political context, subjective perspectives on or viewings of the state, and the possibilities for freedom to protest without retribution. Further, the protest approach is influenced by state-level interpretations of national law. The SEZ Act is national, but state adoption of local SEZ law provides an alternate and more immediate political forum to contest the zones. While all these factors contribute to an understanding of the localized focus of anti-SEZ resistance, the example we use in this chapter centers on interactions with and viewings of the Goan state. Goan social movements shaped their protest in response to the land, development, and political sightings particular to the state, rather than connecting their struggle to national themes of development injustice. Collectively, these observations answer calls to understand the everyday social and political experiences of economic liberalization in India (Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011). The hypothesis advanced is that the changing viewings of the state frame the forms and acts of SEZ resistance and political engagements. The lack of a coherent critique of the SEZ model maintains activist struggles as ‘fire fighting’. Activists focus on pressing issues of the day, crises addressed as they arise, whether in response to violence, project clearance processes, or other mechanisms. This approach leaves many activists and their broader movements fatigued. The piecemeal approach can lead to small victories, but does not collectively question the underlying issues central to the SEZ policy and its underlying principles. The insular nature of SEZ resistance to date is a product of regional or local viewings of the state, particular political dynamics, and the range of actors involved in SEZ struggles. We focus here on protest as influenced by perceptions of the state in order to address the multidimensional shaping of resistance. The case of anti-SEZ protest in Goa emphasizes the multidimensionality of constructing resistance.
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
177
Viewings of the Accessible State We use the phrase viewing the state to reference how movement members perceive and interact with various aspects of the state machinery they contact every day. This idea draws inspiration from scholarly perspectives on how citizens see and engage the state (Corbridge et al. 2005; Fuller and Harriss 2000). Corbridge et al. (2005, 5) comment that ‘states are best thought of as bundles of everyday institutions and forms of rule’. These everyday institutions become forums for particular people or collectives to make claims and seek justice. Scholarship documents the sighting and understanding within Indian civil society of the ‘everyday state’ (Corbridge et al. 2005; Fuller and Harriss 2000). False separations among the state and civil society overlook the ‘everyday understanding of the workings of the state and its administrative procedures among ordinary people’ (Fuller and Harriss 2000, 24). Individual familiarity with the state may give people the ability to not only understand how the state influences their daily lives, but also the drive to expect a state response. The capacity for individuals to encounter and make demands on the state may be linked to their relative power and position. Personal or collective sightings of the state are not uniform, but instead depend on social power, historical relations, and other mediations (Corbridge et al. 2005, 8). To highlight this, Corbridge et al. (2005) explain how state engagements are relatively new for many of India’s poor, particularly those who previously lacked social power or political clout (7). Others view the state as a space for the pursuit of particular aspirations. Hibou (2004, 2) adopts a governmentality approach regarding the state as diverse actors and social power relations, which may also be viewed as a space for social change. ‘The modern state, however, serves both as an agent, and as an arena in which other social agents pursue specific visions of growth, democracy, and nationhood’ (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003, 6). Fuller and Harriss (2000) critique development efforts to conceptualize the state as a cohesive, altruistic entity with the ability to spur economic growth or alleviate poverty. They argue that this approach assumes a level of state consistency and neutrality in serving civil society. Instead, they argue, it is necessary to recognize how various aspects and levels of the state may serve contradictory purposes or goals, and how civil society may ‘penetrate it on all sides’ (Fuller and Harriss 2000,
178
The Great Goa Land Grab
3) thus blurring ideas of separate state and civil society. This work conceptualizes the state both as the agent of choice and the space for contestation with regard to ideal visions of citizenship, the economy, and rights. At various scales and forms, aspects of the state interweave and impact the everyday experiences of citizens. Following Fuller and Harriss (2000), we argue that the state is not a monolithic entity, but rather anti-SEZ resistances view and make demands upon distinct levels of the regional states or individuals within the state. Anti-SEZ resistance demonstrates that the respective regional states are the preferred forums to hold the state accountable to meet the aspirations and needs of citizens, while at times also contesting broader aspirations for the nation. The regional particularities and constitution of the policy have led most resistance movements to determine that they can more effectively contest the SEZ at the regional state level. Social movements may operate and gain agency working in a relationship with the state, they may work outside of the formal channels of the state to address state-level issues, or they may actively reject the state as representative of them or their concerns. Davis (1999) proposes a framework that details how space and distance of citizens in relation to the state influences how they develop their individual identity, and how they strategically organize as a collective. Engagement with the state may be seen as an enactment of citizenship, and as a means to keep the government accountable to the people. The nature of engagements with the state may include citizenship claims, attempts to alter discourse, and efforts to assert alternative programs in the public sphere. Via work to change the state, some movements may attempt to alter power relations among unequal entities. In the case of SEZs, this engagement has primarily been targeted at the state rather than the central government policy. Others theorize how social movements attempt to extend the state’s accountability to rational decision-making. Scott (1990, 74) hypothesizes the dual demands on the state for both increased state intervention and the need to be ‘open to rational accountability and general participation’. Scott concluded that the coupling of these demands is mutually reinforcing and only heightens demand among the public for state action. The state emerged as a changeable and accountable entity in his analysis. This approach acknowledges a degree of belief in the state as a legitimate representative of all constituents with a strong mandate to
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
179
intervene in affairs on behalf of the people. Various permutations on engagement/disengagement with the state can be constructed as calculated moves on the part of social movements. McAdam’s (1983, 752) concept of tactical interaction theorizes that when social movements lack institutional power, they create protest approaches that will ‘offset their powerlessness’. Their opponent may further adapt, and the movement then attempts new tactics. This approach may allow for strategic opportunism, but depending on how radically different it is from the movement’s core approach; it could cause alienation among the movement’s base or could leave them exposed to their opponent (McAdam 1983). Goan movements opposing SEZs attempted to change the state because of a political culture of accessibility. They could do so because of the state’s accommodation of protest. Their resistance was structured in relation to the regional state because they viewed it as a forum to air their grievances, and as an entity they could influence. This approach may be attributed to what Tilly (1989) describes as a widening of the political process. ‘Where movements see themselves as having routine access to government agencies they are likely to take their grievances there; where they do not, they will resort to other means’ (Tilly 1989, 313). The space and relations with the regional political system enabled social movement participants to perceive the state government as a negotiable entity. This further alludes to the distant position of the national state in the imaginations of those opposing the SEZs both in Goa, but also in the void of national anti-SEZ protest. SEZ Resistance in Goa The regional state of Goa provides an example of the localized nature of SEZ resistance, and a rare case of SEZ policy reversal. The government initially adopted the national SEZ approach and later abandoned it following public consultation and political pressure. On 5 June 2006, the state of Goa presented an official SEZ Policy. The four-page document addressed water supply, energy/power, state tax, and labor regulations specific to the state. The Goa government justified SEZs as a means ‘to bring large dividends to the State in terms of economic and industrial development and the generation of new employment opportunities. The SEZs are expected to be engines for economic growth’ (Government of Goa 2006). The policy notes that the National Act provides special provisions for a reduction of the minimum land requirement
180
The Great Goa Land Grab
for SEZs in certain smaller states, including Goa. The policy entrusts the SEZ Authority (constituted under sub-section (i) of Section 13 of the SEZ Act) with the responsibility of ensuring water and power supply to the zones. Further, the policy defines the zones as industrial townships. ‘The State Govt. will take appropriate steps to declare the SEZs as Industrial Townships to enable the SEZs to function as self-governing, autonomous municipal bodies’ (Government of Goa 2006). Goa received 17 applications for SEZs, and seven SEZs, totaling an area of 373.16 hectares, were initially approved by the state. Following the approval by the Goan state, the national government notified three SEZs in Verna, Sancoale, and Keri. On 31 December 2007, the Goa government became the first state to announce a plan to stop current and future SEZ projects in Goa. Former Chief Minister (CM) Digamber Kamat explained the government’s decision to halt SEZs, ‘in existing form after a long-drawn consultation process, which involved discussions, deliberations and consultations with different stakeholders’ (The Hindu, January 1, 2008). Drawing from land change uncertainties revealed during a regional planning process and a context of growing mistrust of the government, two social movements and others framed SEZs as a threat to the place, people, and resources of Goa. Embedded in the liberalized India landscape, social movement members subjectively viewed SEZs as an inappropriate form of development for Goa which threatened to alter local power relations, social systems, sense of place, and local governance. This led to an awakening of citizens, some of whom had never previously organized. Affected community members, church officials, politicians, activists, organizations, and others resisted SEZ promotion. They rallied under the banners of two distinct movements: SEZ Virodhi Manch (SVM) and the Goa Movement Against SEZs (GMAS), and developed specific strategies, identities, and ideologies of protest reflecting the state context. Their protest was not aimed at changing the national SEZ policy, but rather the state-level adoption of the policy. The composition and approach of the movements reflect their viewings of the state. Starting in 2005, GMAS rallied a diverse group of politicians, former politicians, urban based professionals, and retired persons to oppose SEZs. The former movement convenor explains how, ‘we have come together regardless of caste and creed to oppose SEZs in Goa. Our aim
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
181
is to save Goa for our future generations’ (Navhind Times, November 23, 2007). As with many other movements and organizations, GMAS has been described as the initiative of one individual, in this case the late Matanhy Saldanha. A GMAS member describes how the struggle became personality led, when Saldanha personally studied the matter and ‘individually met [potential supporters]. He picked up individuals who [had] some sort of inclination to the environment. Then it became a movement gradually, political parties and NGOs came together and it became a big movement’ (Interview 65, 1 December 2008). Saldanha was briefly the state’s Tourism Minister in 2004 in Manohar Parikkar’s208 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. His engagement with politics encouraged Saldanha to define the movement as a ‘political’ resistance, which targeted SEZ criticism at the ruling opposition party. If the struggle became a product of individual identity, it also garnered strength from Saldanha’s traditional base, the Fishworker (Ramponkar’s) Movement. This movement was started in the mid-1970s by Saldanha in response to the introduction of fish trawling methods in Goa. A GMAS member explains how Saldanha’s role with traditional fishers became a natural way for him to organize on a range of issues, including SEZs, and argues that these historical relationships allowed GMAS to have a more statewide approach in the struggle against SEZs (Interview 25, 19 August 2008). The diverse support base is exemplified by a respondent who asserted that ‘GMAS has people from all backgrounds and political persuasions. Matanhy’s group had people from all politically different backgrounds, NGOs, all people’ (Interview 25, 19 August 2008). Although GMAS lacked significant support in the SEZaffected communities, it drew strength in numbers from the Fisherworker’s Movement and opposition political parties. With this support base, GMAS viewed the state as a foe that could be openly contested and questioned in public forums. The movement led a 10-day yatra (traveling demonstration) throughout the state of Goa to spread awareness about SEZs, and held large-scale rallies in the capital city, Panjim, to caution against the zones. SVM also contested SEZs, but viewed the state in a distinct manner. SVM represents a diverse group of predominantly men, well educated, and residing in a mix of urban and rural locations. Many are professionals (including retired professionals) or religious figures, with a small mi208
Parrikar became CM of Goa again in March 2012.
182
The Great Goa Land Grab
nority reliant on village-based economies. Pravin Sabnis, an activist and corporate trainer describes how SVM drew members from ‘educated middle class professionals’ (Mumtaz and Sardar 2008). Addressing an SVM rally, activist Dr Oscar Rebello, called on the ‘Goan educated middle class to wake up and join the revolution to protect their motherland’ (Herald, December 15, 2007). Dr Rebello addressed politicians when he stated ‘you cannot buy us. We will fight to the very end to protect our motherland’ (Herald, December 15, 2007). Opposed to the political stance of GMAS, SVM adopted an ‘apolitical’ form of resistance. Their hesitancy in being an overtly political movement derives from their viewing of the state and member concern that political parties corrupt social movements. Many movement participants define apolitical as working without interaction from political parties or politicians. While movement participants may use political influence outside of the collective to reach the ends of the group, it is clear that there has been a concerted effort to avoid anything that will appear to be party political. Their stance reflects that in Goa, many conflate political as party political, and inherently deemed to be ‘corrupt’ or tainted. A villager with an SEZ proposed in his area explains ‘if it is political then something has to go wrong. Not even single Andolan (movement) has been successful in politics’ (Interview 71, 18 December 2008). Given the context of mistrust of that deemed to be political, SVM ensured that the movement did not appear overtly linked to political parties. The following section details how this protest reflected the Goan context, particularly how protestors viewed and accessed the state. Political Viewings in Goa The ‘situatedness’ (Harvey 1996, 363) of movements in the context for resistance may enable or disable a movement’s capacity to undertake particular strategies of protest and derive agency. For SEZ resistance in Goa, this context was diverse and individual movement readings of the space for protest were not homogenous. Conceptualizations and viewings of the diverse state influenced movement approach and agency. Movements have in turn altered the geographical context through their activism, in part by forcing various levels of the state to respond to civil society concerns. The movements in Goa, in concert with other factors, altered the political course through their activism (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996, 1634). At particular points, the movements took ad-
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
183
vantage of political opportunities and sought change. In so doing, they created space for democratic deepening through specific demands on individuals and institutions. In particular, protest was informed by an accessible state and a responsive CM. A state viewed as accessible is one where protest is permitted, and that is perceived to listen and potentially respond to social movement demands. A responsive CM may facilitate these processes by ensuring the police do not arrest or intimidate protestors, and by granting meetings with activists. Although simultaneously their adversary, the movements developed protest agency in relation to the Goan state. Resistance was structured to apply pressure on institutions or individuals within the government. The central government policy developed in New Delhi was not accessible or something the activists believed they could change, so the movements focused on the state government. For the most part, the movements maintained a localized focus on Goa, as few movement members were involved in nationwide attempts to question the SEZ model. The primary discourse was not against individual corporations applying for enclave status, but against a state system that enabled them to take advantage of land dealings. In this particular political climate, movements demanded and expected change from aspects of the state structure, in part, because the state was viewed as a responsive entity. Viewing the Small State Some social movement participants expressed that they perceived the state as an assemblage of people and institutions that they could alter through their actions. Living in a small state with a fragile government, these respondents believed that their grievances are heard and responded to by select individuals or institutions in the political system. This confidence was partially derived from a viewing of the small state as geographically close to the citizens. ‘Goa being small also, politicians basically carry [are responsible to the people] – if the people rise the politicians are quick to respond because they are bothered about [those who will be] their constituency in the future’ (Interview 25, 19 August 2008). In comparison with many other Indian states, Goa is geographically confined to a limited area. As a result, legislators in the capital city are a relatively short bus ride away for most in the state and people often make the journey. Legislators in Goa may also be more dependent on electoral support from key religious constituencies than those in many larger states, which in the case of the Goan resistance were well
184
The Great Goa Land Grab
represented. In contrast, legislators in large states with vast areas and large populations may be more distant from their constituents, both geographically and in terms of accessibility. The social movement members strategically took advantage of the proximity of lawmakers to apply political pressure on them. A movement representative explained ‘No government dares go against our interests, after all it’s a question of vote banks too!’ (Mumtaz and Sardar 2008). There was an explicit awareness of the politicalization of SEZs, and the potential electoral costs for the ruling government if they did not respond to civil society apprehension regarding the zones. Although the state appeared to bow to public pressure to stop SEZs, it may only be selectively responsive when there is a political advantage. In Goa, the government listens to the electorate when it is politically advantageous to do so, but in other circumstances may not be receptive to public demands. Anti-SEZ protestors based in the state south of Goa, Karnataka, described their government as distant, in contrast to the apparent accessibility of the Goan government. A struggle in the area of Mangalore, Karnataka, was geographically and linguistically distant from the state’s capital and had little impact on the SEZ policy. The physical and linguistic distance contributed to a perception among the SEZ displaced communities that even their regional state was not a productive place to protest the zones (Interview 10, 2 April 2008). An SEZ displaced farmer in Mangalore explained, ‘the panchayat [local governance system] has made it a point to register its protest. They wrote to the Chief Minister [of Karnataka], the governor. I have written to everyone but nobody bothers to reply’ (Interview 119, 2 February 2009). As a result, they expressed their frustration about the lack of political space available for them to voice their movement’s concerns to the state’s CM (Interview 9, 1 April 2008). Viewing Political Leadership The perceived closeness of the state to movements partially came through the accessibility of the former Goan CM. The particular CM, and his political fragility, appeared to be an important factor in the broader context for organizing. The political leadership at the time of the strongest SEZ protests influenced the course and shape of resistance for both movements. Interviewees argued that the anti-SEZ campaign would not have been successful in an alternate political land-
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
185
scape or with different political leadership. They pointed to the fragile nature of the former CM’s government, and how precarious political footing made the CM more likely to modify the state’s position. After being unanimously selected by respective central and local Congress leaders, Digamber Kamat was sworn in as the CM of Goa in June 2007 and remained in power until March 2012. Kamat originally was an Indian National Congress member, until he left in 1994 to join the BJP. In 2005, he left the BJP and returned to Congress. Kamat was described as the ‘dark horse in the chief ministerial race’ (The Times of India, June 8, 2007), and led a fragile government which survived multiple toppling bids. Kamat admitted his challenges at retaining the post of CM in the state after ‘there was an attempt to topple my government within the first three months of my taking oath’ (Business India, February 22, 2009, 72). Kamat previously served as a popular power minister in the Congress government led by Pratap Singh Rane. The SEZ policy formulated and passed under the Rane government was inherited by Kamat. Whether due to his political fragility or his personal demeanor, movement members subjectively viewed that there was space for nonviolent public protest against SEZs under his leadership. Further, he met with movement activists when meetings were requested. His apparent openness contrasts with the more repressive leadership of the former CM, Rane, a strong advocate of SEZs and one perceived to be unlikely to bow to public pressure. Some respondents have gone so far as to say that ‘if Rane were in power we never would have been successful’ (Interview 29, 29 August 2008). A movement member explained how previous ‘agitations all had to end up in violence because he [Rane] provoked and provoked and provoked. He would try to split groups and use police force. He was totally a dictatorial type chief minister’ (Interview 25, 19 August 2008). A movement supporter further described that SEZs ‘would not have been scrapped if Rane was in power, it would not have been scrapped if the BJP was in power. I give full credit to the corrupt Digamber Kamat government . . . He [Kamat] may be a lame duck, but he is responsive’. (Interview 38, 25 September 2008) Under Kamat, organizers were thus able to undertake specific agitations that may not have been possible or peaceful under a different political leadership.
186
The Great Goa Land Grab
Judicial Viewings Given political uncertainty, social movement members attempted to get judicial confirmation of the illegal nature of the SEZ land deals. In 2007 and 2008, SVM members presented three separate, but related court cases focused on the economic and legal inconsistencies associated with the land transfers and approval process for the SEZs. Filed against the Goa State Government, the Goa Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC), and SEZ developers, the petitioners argued that the state failed to make public announcements about the land transfers, that the applications lacked required government stamps, that land allotments were given prior to the legal time frame required, and that the allotments were given at rates well below market rates and rates outlined in official guidelines (Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c). A professional based in a potential SEZ village explains why the movement members decided to submit petitions to the High Court. Now we are looking forward to the justice from the courts because we know the moment this government is destabilized or some other chief minister comes in, or some other political party comes in, SEZs can be brought in through the backdoor and we don’t want to just keep fighting on the streets. (Interview 63, 29 November 2008) In challenging the zones from a legal perspective, the resistance members were able to frame SEZs as illegal and the associated land dealings as fraudulent. There was a sense among the movement that agitations alone were not enough, and that there had to be legal cases to put another form of pressure on the government. In turn, they felt the agitations must continue to portray widespread interest in SEZs and bolster the court cases. The legal cases also became a way to ensure continuity on any policy positions, despite potential changes in political power in Goa. While CM Kamat appeared to appease civil society with his decision to scrap SEZs,209 he was being a responsive politician and reflecting his 209
Kamat recognized that he would lose an important Congress vote bank among South Goa Catholics if he continued to support the SEZs. ‘The people who rose against the SEZ, a major chunk of this is minority community, which has tradi-
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
187
personal policy preference. Although the CM mollified a range of constituents with the decision to stop SEZs, the wording of his announcement allowed room for interpretation and legal ambiguity. In December 2008, CM Kamat announced the decision to scrap SEZs. He stated that ‘the government took the decision to do away with the SEZs in existing form after a long-drawn consultation process, which involved discussions, deliberations and consultations with different stakeholders that lasted many days’ (The Hindu, January 1, 2008). As a seasoned politician, Kamat appeared to have closely calculated his word choice. His usage of the term do away in place of stronger, legally binding terms, such as denotify, provided him with future flexibility in case SEZs re-emerged in a new form. The movement members were initially inspired by Kamat’s statement, but the sheen of excitement began to wear as the CM failed to take further action on SEZs. ‘Even when the CM announced the scrapping of the SEZs, he clearly specified that SEZs were scrapped in their present form. This meant there was a loophole wherein they [the state] could get the SEZs in some other form’ (Interview 63, 29 November 2008). Despite attempts to placate a range of actors and possibly meeting Kamat’s own policy preferences, the SEZ denotification process was marked by delays and ambiguity. In part, this stemmed from a lack of legal framework, nationally and regionally, for denotification of SEZs, as this was not included in the national or state policies. Legal uncertainties aside, movements perceived that the CM could have done more to definitively stop the SEZs. A Catholic priest detailed how ‘the government came to the conclusion that this [an SEZ] is not something that is conducive to the state. They have not with the same vigor pursued this matter of really getting it denotified’ (Interview 75, 6 January 2009). Concern remains that the land allotted for SEZs continues to be held by developers. If Kamat was serious about halting SEZs, he would have aggressively pursued the denotification process with the central government (Interview 139, 14 May 2009). Instead, a stalemate of legal uncertainty endured, partially due to political complications. Some activists acknowledged the various agents of power and the contionally voted for Congress. Catholics, Christians . . . They have traditionally been voting for the Congress because BJP is generally looked upon, perceived as a more communal party’ (Interview 29, 29 August 2008).
188
The Great Goa Land Grab
straints faced by the CM in the denotification process. At a movement press conference, it was noted that Kamat ‘has given us public and private assurance that this would be implemented. If he does not implement it, he will be cheating the people ... The government of Digamber Kamat is not able to fight the pressures’ (SVM Press Conference, 22 January 2009). Some of the pressures that the SVM members alluded to originate within Kamat’s party among those who may have major financial stakes in the SEZ process. Others more specifically cite political pressure for the delay in denotifying the SEZs, as they speculate that some in the government stand to lose money from land allotments if the SEZs are stopped. ‘They [members of his government] are pressurizing the chief minister, and that is why the policy is not denotified ... they are 2–3 cabinet members who have taken money for SEZ[s] who will not allow the policy to be scrapped’ (Interview 115, 18 March 2009). While being speculative, some respondents hypothesized that political pressure from within the CM’s own party delayed the denotification process. How movement members view the state and related space for protest is informed by the perceived accessibility of the Chief Minister and responsiveness of elements of the state. These engagements reflect how the movements or individuals view the state (Corbridge et al. 2005, 220). Selective state responses to protest demands emboldened movement members to make further demands in Goa. In contrast to a shrinking state, movement enactments reveal closeness to their state. The spatial closeness of this group of citizens to the state provided structure for movement identity, agency, and organizing approach (Davis 1999). Despite objections about the changing nature of the state, protest was framed to engage with and make demands on a familiar, accessible state. The regional state was viewed as an agent of change and an arena where movements made demands regarding place, democracy, and accountability. However, following recent state elections in Goa, perceptions of the state are likely to change and influence future protest. With the March 2012 BJP-led coalition electoral victory in Goa, the public will see how the party addresses SEZs when in power. Political Futures: The BJP Rule in Goa While former CM Kamat ‘scrapped’ SEZs, a legal battle continues regarding the status and rights of the corporations who invested in the notified SEZs. The Goan state has not revoked the 2006 Goa SEZ Pol-
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
189
icy,210 it has not cancelled land allotments previously made to SEZs, and its sincerity in halting SEZs is in question (Navhind Times, May 17, 2008). With the election of BJP leader Manohar Parrikar as CM, the political landscape for SEZ resistance may change dramatically. Parrikar vociferously campaigned against SEZs at the height of protests against the zones in 2008. He appointed the late Matanhy Saldanha, who headed one of the main SEZ opposition social movements, to serve as Tourism Minister in his recently formed cabinet. Parrikar was particularly concerned about the corruption associated with land transfers for SEZs overseen by the GIDC. In a 2009 interview with the author Parrikar explained, ‘the people heading the GIDC are not interested in industrial development, but they are only interested in kickbacks. If someone goes there with an application, I don’t think the applicant gets a real allotment properly’ (Research Interview, 8 May 2009). Overall, he expressed apprehension that the zones afforded rights and resources to corporations not enjoyed by the public. ‘The problem is that you take land for a particular use, then without obtaining proper comments from people you are converting the land for something else. You give extra benefits [to corporations] that are not given to normal people’ (Research Interview, 8 May 2009). Despite Parrikar’s apparent opposition to the SEZ model, it remains to be seen whether the new CM will proceed with removing the state’s SEZ policy and reclamation of the GIDC land allocated to SEZ developers. Skepticism endures about any ruling party and the likelihood that they will truly disband the SEZ model. In 2008, a GMAS supporter argued that ‘it [the SEZs] would not have been scrapped if the BJP was in power. I give full credit to the corrupt Digamber Kamat government . . . He [Kamat] may be a lame duck, but he is responsive’ (Interview 38, 25 September 2008). An SEZ-affected villager explained that ‘[they] cannot [have] faith [in the] BJP . . . because all [of them are] corrupt and ready to take a bribe . . . They are trying to pull our people, to make a divide and rule policy they have adopted’ (Interview 24, 2 August 2008). Beyond individual mistrust of particular political parties, many activists questioned whether the political parties, including the BJP, who led one portion of the struggle against SEZs, opposed the zones with sufficient vigor to challenge the Congress-led govern210
The SEZ Act does not include a provision for denotification, so it is not clear what the legal process for SEZ denotification entails.
190
The Great Goa Land Grab
ment. Parrikar and other BJP leaders dismissed the idea of SEZs in Goa, but was this an oppositional stance of convenience meant to highlight the weaknesses of the Congress-led government? Did the BJP support GMAS in an effort to re-energize their political base while questioning the authority of the ruling government? These apprehensions stem, in part, from the early role Parrikar played in encouraging SEZs in Goa when he previously served as CM. Under Parrikar’s chairmanship, on 29 December 2004, the GIDC approved land for a food park, a biotech park, and an SEZ prior to the approval of the policy (Times of India, June 12, 2008). The regional planning process in the state highlights many land uncertainties central to the SEZ resistance. Parrikar’s recent decision to revert back to the flawed Regional Plan 2001 drew strong criticism from activists common to both the SEZ and planning movements (Oheraldo, May 2, 2012). The current CM’s actions or inactions on the legal ambiguities associated with land allocated for SEZs remain to be seen. Conclusions The case of Goa exemplifies the changing and varied context for antiSEZ protest in India. With the recent election, the context for protest has been reshuffled and provides a different set of opportunities and platforms for various claims and resistance in relation to development, land, and the future of SEZs in Goa. The varied orientations of resistance toward the Goan state offer preliminary indications as to why the SEZ opposition faces challenges in national mobilizations. Anti-SEZ movements develop unique stances and approaches on SEZs as a result of the size of the state and associated access to government, the particular positions of politicians, the status of land reforms, and the potential for judicial decisions that would shape future opportunities. The variation among distinct places makes it difficult to unify organizing on a national scale. Social movements oriented their protest in relation to particular dimensions of the Goan state, as the central government was spatially distant in India’s capital, New Delhi. The regional state government was viewed as accessible and permeable. Movement protest demonstrated that the familiarity of the regional state governance institutions and individuals, although flawed, were preferable to the unknown of private business governance, potential ungovernance, or intervention from the central government. These findings indicate that SEZ resistance is shaped by
SEZs: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest
191
state-level viewings and tolerance for activism, which can also vary depending on context, issue, and movement composition. As witnessed in the political transition in Goa, the place and context for protest can rapidly change. However, the localization of SEZ resistance extends beyond the adaptation and response to state political turbulence. The themes addressed in this chapter reveal the incongruence of national anti-SEZ activism, while also indicating space for further geographical analysis of the space and forms of resistance in liberalizing economies. Such an approach could advance understandings of seeing the state (Corbridge et al. 2005) to demonstrate how viewings translate into particular claims, expectations, and strategies for resistance. Further, our research introduces the need to understand the implications of ‘fire fighting’ activism. Movements, communities, and activists with no or limited budgets attempt to address individual development injustices, but lack the time, space, or resources to thoroughly address the underlying issues fueling the fires. The uneven nature of development, distinct state-level land reforms, ongoing debates on land acquisition reform, the dubious use of ‘public good’, and conflated ideas of industrialization are key issues for a range of struggles throughout the country. The persistence of these issues will only further development cleavages in liberalizing India. The examples we detail here provide a preliminary understanding of dynamic viewings of the state and how they translate into spatially, politically, and thematically differentiated protest. This answers recent calls for contemporary examples of the everyday experience of economic liberalization in India (Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011), while also pushing for new understandings and interpretations of diverse activism. Caution is urged at efforts to homogenize resistance to the projects and policies of economic liberalization, as this example illustrates the power in localization of the politics of protest and contestation.
9. The Regional Identity Politics of India’s New Land Wars: Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
T
O attract industrial investments, boost economic growth, and cre-
ate a world class infrastructure, India passed a new Special Economic Zones (SEZ) Act in 2005. This act established a legal framework for the creation of geographic areas governed by distinct regulatory regimes in which taxes and other bureaucratic burdens on business activity were substantially reduced (Jenkins 2011; Jenkins et al. 2014). The initial response from investors was enthusiastic, and by 2016 there was a total of 416 formally approved SEZ projects across India, of which 205 were operational (Government of India 2016). This period also saw an escalation of extractive mining activities, coupled with a general thrust towards industrialisation and a booming real estate sector. All these activities entailed a swift transfer of land to Indian or multinational corporations or other investors, usually facilitated by the state through the exercise of eminent domain, and at times carried out by force.211 Yet these land transfers have been highly controversial as groups faced with dispossession and displacement organised to put a stop to the state-led expropriation of their land. As a result, India has over the 211
More than 45,000 hectares of land have been ‘notified’ for SEZs alone (Government of India, Department of Revenue 2014: v).
192
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
193
past decade been home to thousands of big or small ‘land wars’ (Levien 2013) in many states, including Goa, Maharashtra, Odisha, West Bengal, Haryana, and Andhra Pradesh. There now exists a considerable literature on India’s new land wars in which legal, political, and economic perspectives have tended to dominate the debate (see e.g. Bedi and Tillin, 2015; D’Costa and Chakraborty, 2017; Levien, 2013, 2015; Nielsen and Nilsen, 2015; Sud, 2014). This literature has been crucial in not just enhancing our understanding of the politico-economic drivers of land dispossession and its local ramifications, but also in mounting a broader critique of India’s current regime of dispossession (Levien 2013) that sees the control of land gradually move into the hands of the corporate sector and real estate developers. Alongside this literature, another strand that we return to below has focused on the mobilising identities that antidispossession activists have sought to tap into as they work to build a larger, public support base. In line with Baviskar’s (2008, 7) argument that the materiality of natural resources is always embedded in wider structures of meaning that cannot be distilled down to ‘the economic last instance’, this literature has reminded us how land, as a factor of production and a site of belonging and identification, bridges material and symbolic concerns (Bedi 2015b; Fay and James 2010). In this chapter, we seek to contribute to this literature by exploring how land, and its produce, are mobilised in anti-dispossession campaigns in the Indian states of Goa and West Bengal. That land and food concerns should figure prominently in such campaigns may seem obvious. SEZ entrepreneurs prefer areas which are well developed and these usually include cultivated and productive agricultural land that is thus targeted for expropriation (Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Commerce 2007, 60). Similarly, the dispossession-driven implementation of the SEZ policy in India coincided with record levels of global hunger and increasing food insecurity that pushed the urban rate of malnourishment in India to 70% in 2009–10 (Basu and Das 2014). India’s SEZ policy thus opened up a political space for oppositional movements to mobilise widely shared land and food concerns that were national or even global in scope. Indeed, case studies from around the world have analysed the agricultural implications of land grabbing (Bedi 2015b; De Schutter 2011; Franco 2012; Goldstein 2016; Kugelman 2012) and foregrounded issues of food security or food sovereignty (Edelman et al. 2014). The movements’ evocation of land
194
The Great Goa Land Grab
and food that we later analyse thus relate to broader structural transformations and critiques thereof – also emanating from within different Indian ministries and parliamentary standing committees – questioning the agricultural and food security implications of the SEZ policy and what has been called ‘the great Indian land grab’ (Sud 2009) more generally. And yet, as we show below, the two movements analysed here mobilised land and food not as emblematic of structural changes in the political economy, but rather first and foremost within a symbolic field in which they came to stand metaphorically for regional forms of belonging and identity under threat. While felt connections to the land is an often invoked identity marker in popular mobilisation, the anthropology of food similarly tells us how food is a key carrier of cultural meaning and signification (Jenkins 1999). Indeed, the sharing of a food culture is a basis for collective identity and commensality, and also a means of expressing inclusion and otherness (Fischler 1988). Ichijo and Ranta (2016) highlight the anthropological perspective on food and national identity when they argue that the ways in which particular people perceive their ‘food culture’ helps them imagine themselves as part of the nation. Importantly, as Ayora-Diaz (2004, 50) shows from Mexico, food performs this imaginative work not just at the level of the nation, but also at the subnational or regional level as ‘a political marker of regional identity’, which is what concerns us in the cases we analyse here. Such symbolic and political implications of food and land remain, however, under-theorised in the literature on India’s land wars, and it is by analysing the interlinkages that the movements examined here established in their public campaigns between the politics of land, food, and belonging that we bring out how appeals to a threatened regional identity-symbolically mediated by land and food – helped the movements to garner broad popular support in their home states. We subsume such appeals under the label ‘the regional identity politics’ of India’s new land wars. At the same time, however, we suggest that this parochial identity politics has also, in spite of its regional efficacy, contributed to consolidating rather than overcoming the often fractured nature of India’s current land wars. We return to this at greater length in our concluding discussion. We proceed to briefly contextualise the debate on India’s new land wars. We then provide two ethnographic accounts of how movements em-
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
195
ploy symbols and tropes of land and food to mobilise regional identities through discourse and practice in the contexts of West Bengal and Goa. These states have been home to some of India’s most intense recent struggles over land (on Goa, see e.g. Bedi, 2013b, 2015a, 2015b; Da Silva, 2014; Jones, 2009; Sampat, 2015; on West Bengal, see e.g. Banerjee, 2006, 2014; Banerjee and Roy, 2007; Majumder, 2012; Nielsen forthcoming; Ray 2008; Roy 2014), and we have selected them for comparative analysis because in crucial ways they illustrate the localised identity dynamics in India’s land wars. At the same time, the different demographics, size, and histories of the two states also allow us to identify key differences in the workings of regional identity politics, something which we seek to do in our concluding discussion. Before we proceed, two caveats are in order. First, we do not claim that the regional identity politics of the land wars in Goa and West Bengal is the sole reason for their relative success. As Sampat (2015. 781) writes with reference to Goa, the anti-SEZ movement’s success was the outcome of an ‘alliance of forces’; and, more generally, effective grassroots organisation, the ability to link up with (or stay clear of ) political parties, direct public action, and prolonged strategies of judicialisation have, as we have argued elsewhere (Bedi 2015a; Nielsen 2015a), been no less important. However, because the role of mobilising regional identities has so far not been sufficiently analysed we choose to foreground this aspect here. Second, we would like to stress that we will not concern ourselves with examining the multifaceted identity-defining relationships between different categories of ‘project affected populations’ and the land on which they live or the food they produce, nor will we interrogate the discrepancies that may often exist between what we with Guha (2000) could call the public and the private faces of antidispossession movements (see also Nielsen 2009). Our analysis is thus explicitly centred on what Scott (1990) would label ‘the official story’, or the ‘public transcripts’ of the anti-dispossession movements under analysis. These public transcripts, Scott reminds us, never tell the full story and may – in the context of social movement mobilisation – additionally obscure the fact that ‘the true range of participants’ interests and identities bears only a partial resemblance to the version espoused by [the] most empowered voices’, as Youngblood (2016, 6) puts it. Analyses that seek to peel the onion of such public transcripts undoubtedly contribute with valuable insights into the localised micro-politics of movement organisation and representation, and we have pursued
196
The Great Goa Land Grab
this line of inquiry in the context of India’s land wars elsewhere (e.g. Nielsen forthcoming). Here, however, our aim is primarily to understand the appearance of collective unity that is forged around public identity claims rather than the reality of differentiation that may exist on the ground, and to that end we focus in the main on the public symbolism and politics of land, food, and identity as they are invoked in activist discourse, representation, or practice at the regional scale. India’s New Land Wars The ways in which land in India has been made available for large industrial or mining ventures, SEZs, real estate, or new townships has often necessitated dispossessing and/or displacing people already living on the land. This has been done differently in different Indian states, thus creating an uneven pattern of compliance with and resistance to land dispossession across India’s federal geography (Bedi and Tillin 2015).212 As indicated, scholars and activists working on India’s new land wars criticise the policy of transferring land to corporate control on many accounts. Many justifiably see this as a ‘new enclosure movement’ (Corbridge et al. 2013, 210) and as evidence that advanced global capitalism has decisively moved from a phase of expanded reproduction to one of accumulation by dispossession, a process in which the Indian state is crucially involved (see for instance Banerjee-Guha 2013; Kapoor 2011; Levien 2011, 2012, 2013). The basic claim is, as Sud (2014, 45) puts it, that land is being taken from the poor, for the rich, with the collusion of the state. In a similar way, the legal regime that until January 2014 underpinned the state’s exercise of eminent domain — the land acquisition act of 1894 — has been the target of intense criticism from scholars and activists, who see it as a draconian colonial leftover designed for subjecthood rather than citizenship (e.g. Sundar 2011). A range of detailed case studies of particular land struggles, and of the anti-SEZ movement in particular (Jenkins et al. 2014), have recently enhanced our understanding of some of their complex, localised identity dynamics. Anti-mining protests in Adivasi (tribal) areas have, for exam212
While we have above identified some of the states where resistance to land acquisitions has been most fierce, land transfers have generally met with limited resistance in, for example, Tamil Nadu (Vijayabaskar 2014) and Gujarat (Sud 2014). The picture is more mixed in Andhra Pradesh (see for example Cross 2014; Oskarsson 2010; Oskarsson and Nielsen 2014; Srinivasulu 2014), India’s leading state in terms of setting up SEZs, where the nexus between political and business interests has been particularly close.
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
197
ple, often strategically foregrounded essentialised Adivasi identities to mobilise support from near and far (Padel and Das 2010), thus glossing over the considerable demographic complexity that exists in mining areas (Bedi 2013a; Oskarsson 2017). In other anti-dispossession movements, caste identities have similarly been a mobilisational focal point. From Haryana, Kennedy (2014a) shows us how the anti-SEZ movement there came to be dominated by landowners from the Jat caste who tend to monopolise social and political power at all levels. One strand of the anti-SEZ movement was built on a Jat khap panchyayat, or clan council, that is notorious for dispensing their own form of ‘social justice’ of which Dalits – the formerly untouchable castes – often are the targets. Conversely, in Tamil Nadu’s Thervoy, local activists mobilised a threatened ‘Dalit identity’ to stop a land acquisition for a Michelin car tyre factory that would have displaced several Dalit-dominated villages (Steur 2015). While appeals to a shared caste identity in both cases facilitated intra-caste mobilisation and cohesion, they also tended to alienate potential local supporters from other castes, thus narrowing the movements’ social base and geographical spread. Social movement scholars approach such identity appeals through the prism of ‘framing’ to bring out how the strategic deployment of particular symbols and identities contributes to mobilising potential adherents and constituents; reinforce particular identities; garner bystander support; and affect ‘changes in hearts and minds’ (della Porta and Diani 2006; Gamson 2004; Snow 2004; Williams 2004). Unlike the cases discussed above, we detail how the Goa and West Bengal antidispossession movements sought to frame their campaigns by appealing to broader, more inclusive regional identities that promised to transcend questions of tribe, caste, or clan. They have done so, we argue, largely through the symbolic evocation of land and food as key identity markers. We thus offer our analysis as a first attempt at understanding how Indian social movements evoke the symbolism of land and food as a means through which to critique new forms of land dispossession. In both cases, the food staple rice is invoked to mediate an emotional attachment to land, and as emblematic of a shared regional-cultural food heritage and identity that is threatened by dispossession. The use of land and food staples to subsume a diversity of identities under a more widely shared regional identity thus potentially facilitates the kind of upwards scale shift that promises to take contention beyond its local origins and touch on the interests and values of new actors
198
The Great Goa Land Grab
(Tilly and Tarrow 2007, 95).213 Importantly, we seek to show how the regionalised nature of the movements’ identity politics is reflected in the regionalised nature of the scale shift they worked to achieve. Our analysis is based on Nielsen’s long-term periodic ethnographic fieldwork among local anti-dispossession activists in two villages in Singur, West Bengal between 2007 and 2009 followed by subsequent short field visits in 2014, 2016 and 2017; and on Bedi’s year-long ethnographic fieldwork on land, social movements and SEZs in Goa in 2008– 2009 and several subsequent field visits in 2010, 2012, 2015 and 2016. We both relied extensively on participant observation, interviews, and local surveys among SEZ fenceline communities214 (Goa) and dispossessed villagers (West Bengal). In Goa, Bedi completed 140 interviews with SEZ fenceline community stakeholders, activists, journalists, government officials, academics, and corporate representatives. Additionally, Bedi completed four community-level surveys in communities with industrial sites or SEZs within or close to their communities. In Singur, Nielsen carried out long-term close-up participant observation with local ‘unwilling farmers’, as well as interviews and village-level surveys. He also spent time with activists in Kolkata. Sonar Bangla From late May 2006, West Bengal became home to two of the most talked-about land wars of the past decade. The first erupted in the state’s Singur block, located some 45 kilometres from the state capital of Kolkata. Here, news about an impending land acquisition spread, leading to almost instantaneous protests from villagers, who feared that their land would be taken from them. It was soon revealed that the state’s Left Front government had entered into an agreement with Tata Motors – a leading Indian car manufacturer – to acquire and subsequently lease out 997 acres of agricultural in Singur, on which Tata Motors would then establish a new car plant. In the midst of fierce resistance, land acquisition notifications were circulated during the summer months of 2006. The payment of the cash compensation to which 213
214
We say ‘potentially’ to stress that successful social movement mobilisation does not necessarily correspond with maximised or solidified shared identity among movement participants (Youngblood 2016). The Goan SEZs involved little fresh land acquisition as most of the land allotted to SEZs was already in possession of the government. Fenceline communities therefore refer to communities living adjacent to the planned SEZs whose agitation was principally directed against what Sampat (2015) calls ‘anticipated dispossession’ in the backdrop of accumulation processes already underway.
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
199
land owners were legally entitled commenced in September the same year, even as anti-dispossession activists sought to sabotage the payment process by laying siege to the local Block Development Office. The police responded by lathi charging the demonstrating villagers. Many were arrested, and one activist subsequently died from his injuries. The land in Singur was finally de facto acquired and fenced in December amidst much violence. Yet the movement to reclaim the farmland continued, now led by the flamboyant regional politician (and current Chief Minister of the state) Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamul Congress (TMC). In late 2008, she spearheaded a siege of the factory site in Singur, in the wake of which Tata Motors announced that it would relocate its factory to Gujarat. The second land war occurred in Nandigram, 125 kilometres southwest of Kolkata. In January 2007, news had spread that as much as 14,500 acres of land would be acquired from 27 moujas (revenue village) in Nandigram for a chemical hub and SEZ, to be operated by Indonesia’s Salim Group. On hearing this news, villagers immediately gathered in front of the local panchayat office for more news, but the pradhan ostensibly refused to share any information. Later, a police force appeared and allegedly started firing on the demonstrating villagers without any provocation (Roy 2008, 74). But as more villagers joined the protests, the police retreated and one police vehicle was burnt. From then on Nandigram was in effect a ‘liberated zone’ controlled by the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC – Committee to Resist Land Eviction) which spearheaded the resistance. This situation persisted until March when the police – with the active and violent assistance of party cadre from the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) eager to see the BUPC defeated and the industrial project carried through – re-entered Nandigram with full force. The result was 14 deaths according to the official story, but as many as 50 according to unofficial ones. The state’s Chief Minister publicly defended the police action as ‘necessary to bring back rule of law’. Yet the public outcry over the police atrocities in Nandigram acquired such force that the state government was eventually forced to cancel the SEZ-project and chemical hub. In activist discourse, the industrial projects planned for both Singur and Nandigram were ‘framed as the displacement of “peasants”’ (Roy
200
The Great Goa Land Grab
2007, xlii), that is, as causing the displacement of rural people earning a living as small farmers, sharecroppers, agricultural labourers, and others who ‘still identify with farming as their primary form of identity and occupation’ (Roy 2007, xlii). Activist discourse often stressed the intimate and close relationship between ‘peasants’ and their land. One activist fact-finding mission report, for example, wrote that ‘for the people of Singur, their land is their life and part of their culture. It is a place for learning and worship’ (Lahiri and Ghosh 2006, 12). It added that ‘for generations the local people cultivated the land and most of them cannot think of any other occupation beyond agriculture’ (Lahiri and Ghosh 2006, 13): The survival and livelihoods of the peasants are closely related to the land and the agriculture that they practice. They come from generations of farmers and their skills and knowledge have been acquired through the decades of understanding, working and sustaining the land and the surrounding natural resources. These are what they know and do well. Their skills are not suitable for other occupations. (Lahiri and Ghosh 2006, 14) Nandigram was often represented in similar ways, with the added layer that its historical connection with the anti-colonial struggle and the tebhaga movement in the 1940s were stressed as evidence of ‘the indomitable spirit of the... chasi-samaj’ (Manthan Samayiki 2007; see also Gangopadhyay 2008), that is, of ‘agriculturalist society’. As Gardner (2012, 98–101) has shown, ‘land’ in Bengal is filled with emotional significance and has deeply resonant meanings within Bengali culture as the source of belonging and nurture. In this context, the images of ‘the peasant’, ‘the village’, and ‘the land’ that are visible in the representations outlined above invoke, in the popular imagination, powerful images of Sonar Bangla, a ‘Golden Bengal’ of fields of plenty (Roy 2011, 271). The idea of Sonar Bangla has its roots in the anti-colonial struggle and ‘conveys to the mind the image of a rich fertile and prosperous land inhabited by a peaceful agrarian community, living in harmony with its pastoral surroundings’ (Guhathakurta 1997, 197). It thus encapsulates the idyllic, idealised, pastoral image of rural Bengal that had developed among a host of predominantly Calcuttabased Bengali nationalist writers since the 1880s. In this powerful pas-
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
201
toral image – created largely for and on behalf of the bhadralok, the educated urban middle classes – ‘the village’ is the true spiritual home of the Bengali nation where the Bengali rural ‘folk’ evince all the qualities of the Bengali ‘heart’, another category essential to the romantic nationalism of the time (Chakrabarty 2002, 127–128). Here, the ‘eternal nature of the Bengal village’ stands as a vigilant and compassionate mother, a bulwark against the contingencies of history. In other words, ‘dispossession from this land is tantamount to exile and motherlessness’ (Panjabi et al. 2009, 45). While the frame of Sonar Bangla enabled the otherwise localised land wars in Singur and Nandigram to tap into and resonate with widely shared regional cultural meanings and identities also in urban areas, the latent gendered qualities of this frame points us towards the symbolic importance of food. In popular representations of both land wars, the trope of ‘the land’ as mother, and of motherhood more broadly, figured prominently. This is not particularly surprising insofar as ‘the village’ was, in the romantic nationalist imagination, part of a gendered chain of signification that linked the pastoralised landscape of rural Bengal to the sacred motherland of the Bengali nation, iconised by the figure of the idealised mother (Sen 1993). A particularly interesting illustration of the symbolic and political significance of motherhood in the context of the land wars in Bengal can be found in activist documentary films produced by urban activists supportive of the Singur and Nandigram movements. One of the earliest of these was the anthropologist Dayabati Roy’s documentary Abad Bhumi (Right to Land) that portrays the early weeks and months of the Singur movement. Abad Bhumi opens with a series of brief, almost snapshot-like images from Singur. Within 25 seconds we see footage of three women in a paddy field transplanting saplings; an elderly widow boiling rice in the husk outdoors; and a younger woman squatting on a white concrete floor stuffing rice into a large bag. This connection between women and rice is a recurring image that we return to below. In Abad Bhumi, footage of women from Singur marching in rallies, shouting slogans, waiving brooms or transplanting saplings reappear with regular intervals. When women appear as interviewees, they are as a rule (albeit with a few exceptions) surrounded by children of various ages, thus underscoring their status as mothers. When women speak about land, they do so using a non-economic discourse that con-
202
The Great Goa Land Grab
strues land in a manner that closely follows the symbolic registers of Sonar Bangla, that is, as a source of sustenance and identity, and not as property. The women explain that they are willing to occupy their fields along with their children and drive out the intruders with sticks or brooms; one women says that Tata will have to poison them to stand any chance of dispossessing them; and another says that she is ready to lay down her life so that her son may live to cultivate the land in the future, thus emphasising her status as mother of a male child. In her follow-up documentary, Unnayaner Name (In the Name of Development), Roy reports from both Singur and Nandigram. Women are again depicted transplanting paddy saplings and boiling and storing rice; and marching in rallies, waving brooms, shouting popular movement slogans, singing, and proclaiming that they will rather ‘give blood’ than relinquish their land. In addition, the film also depicts women extensively as victims of police atrocities. In its depiction of the horrendous violence that engulfed Nandigram during much of 2007, women appear on several occasions as weeping mothers grieving their dead sons. Still, they insist that they are ready to give blood and even sacrifice their husbands and sons, thus again underscoring their status as wives and mothers of male offspring. Such representations of village women as the embodiment of an undying spirit of self- sacrifice do more than simply convey an empirical fact about women’s fearlessness when faced with land dispossession. They conjure up powerful symbolic images of village women-as-wivesand-mothers as the last line of resistance in a situation where the rural peasant household that is the foundation of Sonar Bangla is threatened with annihilation. This chain of signification is, in turn, in important ways enabled by the obvious symbolic and material association that is repeatedly established between village women and paddy/rice. Transplanting paddy and boiling and storing rice are tasks that are as a rule carried out by women, and so at one level the visual juxtaposition of rice and women merely reflects ordinary and routine practices of everyday rural life. But the lush, green paddy fields that we repeatedly see in the films are also concrete manifestations of Sonar Bangla in all its abundance, fertility and prosperity. This close link between paddy and prosperity is reflected in language since, as Greenough (1983, 840) notes, ‘wealth’ (dhan) and ‘paddy’ (dhan) are in Bengali closely related in sound and sense: Paddy wealth is what enables one to feed oneself
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
203
and others, and thus stands for both abundance and the continuity of key social relationships. And the ceremonial exchange of cooked rice links kin to kin, mankind to the gods, and the living with the dead. The lush paddy fields in Singur that are threatened with extinction by being converted into a car factory thus appear as both the foundation of the well-being and prosperity of the individual family and of a regional Bengali identity and sense of belonging. In this rendering, land dispossession represents a grave cultural and social rupture that threatens to destroy key identity-defining social relationships at the regional scale. Generic constructs such as Sonar Bangla that implicitly foreground the prosperous peasant owner-cultivator of course gloss over the multiplex forms of rural stratification along the lines of caste and class that, as shown in other studies, characterised the project affected population in Singur (Nielsen 2015b). Yet by mobilising the symbolism of land and food to tap into the potent imagery of Sonar Bangla, the Singur and Nandigram land wars could connect with a sympathetic and very influential urban intellectual elite who want ‘the Sonar Bangla of Tagore be preserved and protected’ (Dutta 2007). The efficacy of Sonar Bangla becomes all the more clear when contrasted with how, in Bengal, the protests of people displaced in urban areas – for instance, slum dwellers, squatters and informal vendors evicted as part of urban ‘beautification’ drives – have never garnered broad, popular support to anywhere near the same extent, even when they have invoked ideas of belonging and identification with the land. In the popular imagination, Kolkata is a ‘gentleman’s city’ in which the presence of the poor and the homeless is at best ambiguous (Roy 2007, xlii). While Kolkata’s identity is thus not upset by the dispossession of the urban poor, ‘the peasant’ and ‘the village’ are foundational to Sonar Bangla and to a broader regional Bengali identity, however romanticised. Amka Naka SEZ, Amka Zai PEZ Nationally, the events in Singur and Nandigram became synonymous with the violence associated with land acquisition and dispossession. Community stakeholders and (some) politicians frequently evoked ‘Nandigram’ to express that the nature and scale of state violence witnessed in West Bengal would not be tolerated elsewhere in India, including in Goa. Goa has a vibrant history of environmental activism that goes back many decades and in which identities and relationships around land
204
The Great Goa Land Grab
have formed important refrains for mobilisation (Sampat 2015, 775– 776). Land-related protests in Goa, however, gained national notoriety after the state became the first in the nation to officially reject the SEZ model. Agitations against SEZs in Goa began in 2007, following the passage of national and state-level SEZ legislation. More specifically, it was the government’s registration of three SEZs in Goa that triggered statelevel protests. The Goan government transferred land to SEZ corporate developers in 2007, a period already marked by land contestations arising from highly dubious regional planning practices on the part of the government. Goan law requires that draft Regional Plans outlining land use planning – including agriculture plans – be submitted to the public for review. When the government at the time sought to pass the ‘Regional Plan 2011’ without transparency and public review, they were met with resistance from a wide range of actors. Simultaneously, rising food prices highlighted the state’s agricultural vulnerability to a concerned public. With citizens thus already mobilised around land matters, the politicians and officials implicated in transferring Goan lands to SEZs in 2007 soon came under public scrutiny, and a concerted campaign by political and civil society caused the government to partially backtrack on SEZs. On 31 December 2007, the Goa government announced a plan to stop all current and future SEZ projects. The anti-SEZ resistance in Goa may be characterised as a struggle of self-defined ‘average citizens’ to defend land, assert identity, and challenge perceived government corruption and irregularities in land matters. Visible in the opposition to SEZs, both past and present, are key organising tropes prominently represented by references to Goan pez, a rice gruel staple food, and to ‘Goan identity’. In the context of Goa, pez and Goan identity allude to familiar ideas and resources that are claimed to be shared by all Goans, seemingly across class and religious divisions. Although the general Goan public was already critical of the state’s ambiguous role in land deals even prior to the SEZ policy implementation, the use of these organising tropes helped to bring diverse constituents together around familiar and relatable ideas even if, as Sampat (2015, 772) reminds us, calls for a Goan identity may not resonate with equal and uniform valence across social location. These ideas will be reviewed in turn, and then we will reflect on how they functioned as organising tools to both represent and protect identities, lands, and foods presumed to unify ‘true’ Goans. The two major antiSEZ movements were the SEZ Virodhi Manch (SVM) and the Goa Move-
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
205
ment Against SEZs (GMAS). Each group will be presented in more detail in relation to the discourses most closely associated with their activism. Environmental struggles in Goa have historically rested on a mixed social base (Sampat 2015, 775) and the SVM similarly remains a loose movement composed of SEZ fenceline community stakeholders, Catholic priests, and urban activists which garners support from Hindus and Christians from distinct socio-economic, caste, and class backgrounds. Emerging from efforts to contest the earlier deeply flawed regional land planning process, the movement effectively transformed their concerns into a broader critique of rapid land, agriculture, and demographic changes in the state. Movement discourses, protests, presentations, and press statements contest how the average Goan lacks the agency to make decisions about land use, development, and industrialisation. The movement invoked and promoted the idea of ‘the common person’ in a range of ways, including in the frequent use of terminology that evoked something customary for many in the state. A common reconceptualisation, or play on words, of SEZs in the context of popular protests was in the form of PEZ, which has two meanings. As explained above, pez is a traditional rice gruel meal and a staple diet of people in Goa. It is also called canji or nivol, and is prepared with rice and water. Traditionally, farmers would have their pez in the early morning before setting off to the fields; other adults would have it as a mid-morning snack that would keep them going until breakfast, while children would rush home to consume it during school breaks. Pez is also eaten when people fall sick or to treat a fever, when the rice gruel is used to soothe the digestive system (Malkarnekar 2016). Pez became a rallying term for organising against SEZs. One of Bedi’s respondents described pez as ‘something common to all of us’, and SVM movement members emphasised how this quality cut across religious and caste and class differences within Goan society. As one SVM activist explained, while pez may be seen as the poor man’s simple and nourishing diet, it is also used by the more wealthy segments of society in times of illness (Wass 2011, 88). For that reason, pez became a rallying term to reinforce an imagery of the ‘common concerned citizen’, seemingly unmarked by class or caste. A vivid example of the use of ‘pez’ in the anti-SEZ campaign can be found in a protest verse written by Dr Manoharrai Sardessai in Konkani
206
The Great Goa Land Grab
for an anti-SEZ meeting in the city of Margao: Amka naka SEZ amka zai PEZ (We don’t want SEZ we want PEZ) Goenkara tuka kitem zai? (Goans, what do you want?) SEZ zai kai PEZ zai? (Do you want SEZ or PEZ?) Goenkar mhuntta “aik Sorkara Maka SEZ naka PEZ zai” (Goans are saying, ‘listen government I don’t want SEZ, I want PEZ) Amka naka SEZ, amka zai PEZ (We do not want SEZ, we want PEZ) Goenkarank raupak kitle haal (Goans have to face so many problems) Bhaileank mat SEZ mahal (But for outsiders SEZ is a palace) This poem illustrates the second usage of the term PEZ, namely ‘Peoples Economic Zone’. This concept stands in contrast to the private corporate developer SEZ model, even as it asserts an active interest among ‘the people’ in economic development. Through this play on words, SVM showed how they wanted development to be determined by and for the people of the state, in reflection of Goan culture, identity, and land-use preferences. SVM similarly titled their protest blog ‘No to SEZ... Yes to PEZ’ and also used ‘pez’ discourses to sway politicians in other contexts. One such instance occurred during a protest on 28 August 2008, a time when the SEZ policy had been scrapped but the land at SEZ sites remained in legal limbo (Bedi 2015a). Around 50 SVM members stood in silent protest at the Panjim entrance of the Mandovi Bridge which leads to the state Legislative Assembly Hall. The organisers chose this location to encourage the Members of the Goan Legislative Assembly (MLA) to ‘walk the talk’ regarding SEZ de-notification. The MLAs were en route to the Assembly Hall for the afternoon talks of the Monsoon session. The protestors witnessed two MLAs divert their cars away from the protest (there is an alternative, but longer way to the Assembly), while another MLA directly passed but turned his eyes away. After the MLAs had thus bypassed the demonstration, around 20 policemen with lathis came to the area. Posters and banners held by the protestors included phrases such as ‘Amka Naka SEZ, Amka Zai PEZ ’, and ‘Save Goan Identity, Do Away with SEZs’, seeking to reference the cultural connection of Goans to land.
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
207
While the ‘pez’ discourse and imagery was thus clearly visible in the SVM’s campaign, the other major movement opposing SEZs, GMAS, more frequently invoked ideas and images of Goan identity. The party political mobilisation against SEZs in fact began with GMAS, which was officially initiated in October 2007. GMAS included an unusual alliance of opposition political parties and activists. The unknown implications of SEZs combined with concerns about in-migration, job insecurity, and unaffordable land provided the basis for organising resistance to SEZs around the relatable, yet nebulous idea of Goan identity. Following in the footsteps of the organising efforts in 2006 to halt the unpopular regional plan – a campaign which, incidentally, also drew on ideas of Goan identity – some anti-SEZ organisers similarly framed the SEZ issue as a threat to Goan identity. GMAS argued that SEZs would change the state’s ‘unique’ demography and place. The movement arose and generated publicity on the premise that Goa is a special place that requires protection from people, interests, industries, and governments that threaten this idealized vision of Goa (Bedi 2015a; 2015b). GMAS claimed that SEZs would inevitably result in a huge influx of workers from outside the state and would inundate the Goan population. The then leader of the opposition, and current Chief Minister, Manohar Parrikar, spoke of a ‘demographic invasion’; and concerns about inmigration of ‘non-Goans’ and the takeover of land by outsiders were frequently framed as a threat to ‘Goan identity’ (Da Silva 2014, 118–119). As with the discourse of Sonar Bangla in Bengal, the invocation of ‘Goan identity’ is far from a novel organising trope in Goa. Indeed, the historically constituted idea of a ‘Goan identity’ (and related perceptions of land, food, people, and nature) that is somehow distinct from the rest of India has and continues to be routinely deployed to mobilise political action. Used in conjunction with demands for ‘special status’ for Goa – a status granted by the federal government to select states which, among others, guarantees that only long-term residents will be able to purchase land or property – ‘Goan identity’ is symbolically used as short-hand to reference popular concerns over the growing scarcity of affordable land for native Goans; illicit agricultural land conversions; and the influx of labour migrants from other parts of India. Some individuals involved in the anti-SEZ movement to an extent played upon a ‘Goa for Goans’ discourse that captured local anxieties about influxes of both outside capital and migrant labour (Levien 2013, 377; Sampat 2015, 782), although this discourse was far from uniformly subscribed
208
The Great Goa Land Grab
to by all movement supporters. When used in such contexts, ‘Goan identity’ indexes something unique in the state’s culture, language, and soil. As one activist told Bedi, Goan identity revolves ‘around a particular lifestyle which talks about agriculture, fishing, about music’ (interview, May 2009), and often people draw on the historical legacy of Portuguese colonialism to frame how their identity is distinct from ‘Indian culture’ more generally. During Portuguese colonialism, and after, ‘Goan identity’ was used to provide a unifying collective value. Some activist respondents attribute this perceived Goan ‘uniqueness’ to the prolonged impact of Portuguese colonisation which ‘influenced our culture here, we became a totally different kind of people, closer to western societies, like a mixture’ (interview, November 2008). The colonial construct of Goa as ‘Goa dourada’, or Golden Goa, an enclave of apparent prosperity and leisure created by Portuguese mercantilism and Catholicism, in many ways embodies this view of Goa as fundamentally different from the rest of India (Trichur 2013, 17–23). According to Rubinoff (1998, 31), ‘all Goans, whether they be Hindus, Christians or Muslims, recognize a common oneness that distinguishes them from others on the Indian subcontinent’. While Rubinoff (1998, 20) maintains that the eventual political and economic integration of Goa encouraged the area’s assimilation into India and thereby diluted the area’s unique cultural identity, the trope of a Goan identity under threat remains alive and well in political discourse. For some Goans, the geographical landscape of Goa has come to embody the identity of the place. Formerly filled with paddy fields, hills, forests, and sweeping views of the rivers and the Indian Ocean, many now literally see traditional Goa and Goan identity seeping away as landscapes are transformed by mining, SEZs, urbanisation, real estate development, industrialisation and infrastructure development (Nielsen and Da Silva 2017). Some of the descriptions of land and identity in the context of the anti-SEZ mobilisation indeed echo romanticised ideas about an ideal Goa that is now rapidly fading away. A social movement activist explained that ‘I think that Goan identity for me comes from the land, the culture, each land has its socio-economic, cultural fabric ... you are attached to a land, and that land expresses itself to you physiologically, and socially’ (interview, December 2008). When land is thus seen as intrinsically linked to the ‘cultural fabric’ and iden-
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
209
tity of a place, certain social and internal reactions and relationships are created and may become particularly salient in the context of land dispossession or agricultural loss. These discursively projected concerns resonated well with more general anxieties about land loss, particularly for SEZ fenceline communities. In a household survey conducted by Bedi with 200 villagers, the respondents were questioned if land availability – i.e. the perceived ability to access, purchase, farm, or otherwise use land – was a problem in their village. Within three SEZ affected villages and one not affected by SEZs, 72.5% of the respondents identified land availability as a problem. Many respondents also identified threats to Goan identity as an issue. These more widely shared concerns about land provided a broader platform for the anti-SEZ resistance among the general public. Overall, both anti-SEZ movements sought to encourage regional identities that would resonate with key constituents, while also amplifying their message to a broader audience. The construction of these identities synthesising land, food, and ‘Goanness’ helped create a strong mobilising force in opposition to SEZs. Discussion and Conclusions In concert with other social movements in India, the two cases of antidispossession mobilisation presented above illustrate how movements construct and reinforce identities to encourage solidarity and cohesion, and generate a collective vocabulary of contestation (Guha 2000; Ray 1999; Routledge 1993). Both in West Bengal and Goa, movement activists and supporters worked to emphasise particular discourses, symbols and identities to encourage solidarity internally, and to mobilise the sympathy of a larger public. As social movement scholars have long argued, such attempts to construct identities reflect efforts to assign meanings to ‘the struggle’, and to connect it to broader social processes (della Porta and Diani 2006). What is of interest here is how movement organisers, who articulate the discursive space of opposition, have more specifically presented and projected the movement’s distinct regional identities by invoking land and food as salient regional identity markers. In West Bengal, implicit emotional appeals to protect an idealised Sonar Bangla iconised in the peasant, the rice fields, and the Bengali mother, were visible. In Goa, the trope of motherhood was much less salient – unlike in Bengal, where the idea of land as ‘mother’ was cemented during the anti-colonial movement, it was the Konkani
210
The Great Goa Land Grab
language rather than the land that, in the nationalist movement in Goa, became synonymous with the iconised figure of the mother (Perez 2011, 119) – but appeals to protect a unique ‘Goan identity’ rooted in the landscape, the soil, and the pez were made in a comparable manner. In this way, popular mobilisations that emerged out of similar structural transformations found expression in distinctly regionalised ways. In a country as diverse as India, this may not come as a big surprise. Even the agrarian populism of the Indian new farmers’ movements of the 1980s whose scale of reference appeared to be unambiguously national insofar as they posited a generalised, fundamental opposition between an exploitative ‘urban India’ and an exploited ‘rural Bharat’ as the main contradiction (Brass 1995), have been shown to be deeply inflected by regional histories, symbolism and identities in their campaigns (Youngblood 2016). Organising opposition in both geographies thus involved creating connections and forging solidarity across disparate actors at the regional scale. Idealised and distinctly regional visions of land, food, identities, and belonging generated the visual and sensory means for people to feel connected to their place, thus underscoring the place-specific orientation of identity formation in social movement campaigns and symbolic vocabularies. Place specific processes and organising potentials mediate these identities and shape movement agency (Routledge 1993, 27), and in both cases we see how historical and geographical contexts create possibilities, boundaries, and fissures for the creation of movement identities (see also Featherstone 2008, 7). By invoking land and food to successfully elide or evade potentially contentious issues of caste, class, religion, and gender – if not in practice then at least at the level of public discourse and symbolism – both movements were able to mobilise a larger public around widely shared ideas about regional belonging and identity. Yet there were important differences as well which underscore what Mody (2014) calls ‘the primacy of the local’ in India’s new land wars, that is, their inflection by specific and distinctive regional identities and concerns. Hence, while the invocation of a Bengali peasant identity as a focal point for mobilisation – and as a symbol that could bridge the rural–urban divide – in West Bengal reflects the key role of the owner-cultivator in the potent image of Sonar Bangla, the figure of the peasant has never occupied quite the same pride of place in constructions of Goan identity.
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
211
And, unlike in Bengal, rural–urban differences are not particularly pronounced in Goa and are hence easier to bridge. In contrast, given the smallness of Goa an equally encompassing ‘Goan identity’ could be mobilised partly in opposition to non-Goans staking claims to Goa’s land. In Bengal, the trope of the outsider was less salient, even if there is a long history of representing the Bengali peasantry as oppressed by the machinations of non-Bengali imperialists and monopoly capitalists (Roy 2007, 183). Lastly, in both states the regional identity politics that the movements espoused could be successfully channelled into the domain of electoral politics, albeit in very different ways. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee’s regional Bengali nationalism easily incorporated the land wars there into her political campaign to protect ma, mati, manush, or ‘mother, motherland and mankind’ (Chakrabarty 2011, 155). This slogan draws together many of the potent symbolic aspects of the land struggles in the state as discussed above: ‘Ma’ as ‘synonymous with Bengal’, that is, as synonymous with Bengali identity, culture and history; ‘mati’ standing for land not just in an economic sense, but as something people are wedded to, around which their lives revolve; and ‘manush’ referring to humanity and humanism, threatened by ‘brutal state repression and killing’ (Gupta 2012, 95). In Goa, it was the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that emerged as the most important political champion of the antiSEZ movement. They achieved this, however, not by foregrounding the overarching Hindu identity that is otherwise at the core of the BJP’s politics, but rather by endorsing the popular anxieties related to an evaporating Goan identity, which on the surface is unmarked by religion. While the land wars in Goa and West Bengal were relatively successful in fending off land dispossession, they largely remained regionalised in scale and scope in spite of concerted efforts by usually educated middle-class activists in those and other states to link localised conflicts into a nationwide anti-SEZ campaign (Cross 2014). Indeed, as Levien (2013) writes, while some umbrella organisations, such as the National Alliance of People’s Movements, have attempted to bring India’s many disparate land struggles onto a common national platform, they have found the task extremely difficult ‘given the heterogeneity of these movements, their internal contradictions, and the overwhelming imperative felt by each movement to stop their particular project’ (Levien 2013, 367). While there are several contextually specific reasons for why this should be the case, the state scale at which land acquisi-
212
The Great Goa Land Grab
tions are carried out in India provides an important explanation. Processes of state rescaling in India over the past 25 years have rendered the subnational or regional scales increasingly important (Kennedy 2014b). In the context of land dispossession, it is noteworthy that India has no singular national policy for land use and no specific national state department that coordinates its administration. Rather, land related policies fall under many different departments and are split between the national and the subnational governments. The latter may in fact actively resist national dictates, adapt them, or formulate their own regional land policies and practices based on the local political and economic context (Sud 2009; 2014). In addition, it is the regional state governments and their affiliated agencies that are the key actors in executing land acquisitions. For this reason, most anti-dispossession movements have determined that the most effective way to proceed is to fight their battles precisely at the regional state level (Bedi 2013b; Levien 2013; Ren 2016). As we have indicated above, the ways in which such battles shape up will depend on the historically produced regional political systems in which they are embedded, and on the very different ways that activists ‘see the state’ (Bedi 2013b). What the identity politics of the movements in Goa and West Bengal share, however, is precisely their regional scale of reference. Regional identities as articulated through land and food are, we have argued, potent mobilising tropes that can garner broad popular support among a regional audience to fight a regional war. But, they are likely to be less efficacious in other contexts, and may not travel well. Rather, such scaled orientations produce a situation in which the regionalised articulation and forms of resistance to land dispossession may in effect preclude national mobilisation (Bedi 2013b). As Levien (2013, 369) writes, anti-dispossession politics has been, and will likely continue to be, led by local, single-purpose organisations that make strategic use of supra-local alliances as expediency demands. While this may frustrate activists working to transform the many localised land wars into a unified national force by framing them with reference to national or global structural transformations, food security, or land grabbing, the regional scale may be exactly where the future of India’s land wars lies: when the current pro-business national government recently failed in amending the current national legislation underpinning the exercise of eminent domain in ways that would make the acquisition of land for private investors easier and swifter, it instead encouraged the subna-
Land, Food and Popular Mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal
213
tional states to formulate their own investor-friendly land laws. With key legal mechanisms of land dispossession thus engaged in regionally differentiated ways, the mobilisation of land and food within the framework of a regional identity politics is likely to remain a key feature of India’s present and future land wars.
10. Judicial Justice for Special Economic Zone Land Resistance
T
context for land resistance in liberalising India is dynamic. As the state, both at the regional and federal levels, promotes capital investment, lines between public and private are blurred. Land is central to efforts to promote capital investment, as new industries, mines, large-scale agricultural projects and infrastructure initiatives all require vast amounts of land, a resource that is in short supply in modern India. Given this shortage and broader concerns about the corporate–state nexus, land transfers and acquisitions provide opportunities to scrutinise and contest state action, inaction or irregularities. Contemporary land dispute activists draw on historical forms of nonviolent resistance including sit-ins (dharnas), street protests and land occupations. Recently, some movements expanded their tools of resistance to judicialise their struggle, in response to the scale and pace of land deals and ambiguous state response (see Nielsen 2015). Knowledge gleaned from right to information (RTI) requests provided movement members with evidence to support their claims in state or federal courts.215 Recent land resistance in Goa exemplifies the tenuous positioning of nation states when implementing economic liberalisation policies and projects (Radcliffe 2005, 291). 215
HE
After state-level policy on RTI, the idea was codified in national law in 2005 as the Central Right to Information Act. RTI is a mechanism which allows certain people to reconceptualise their rights as citizens, their ability to audit government officials and their active participation in how they are governed (Jenkins and Goetz 1999, 603).
214
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
215
The Indian government promoted Special Economic Zones (SEZ), introduced through legislation in 2005, as engines of economic growth for the nation. The inauguration of zones stirred a range of land conflicts (see Bedi 2013; Jenkins, Kennedy, and Mukhopadhyay 2014; Levien 2011; Oskarsson and Nielsen 2014). A review of SEZ resistance in Goa affords the opportunity to examine these broader trends in one locale, particularly efforts to seek land resolution via the courts. Tensions flared in Goa with the establishment of SEZs, peaking with broad public protest in 2007. Widespread resistance in the state compelled the government to formally announce the end of SEZs. Despite government claims to have ‘scrapped’ the unpopular zones, social movement members suspected that legal uncertainty would allow the zones to reappear in a new ‘avatar’ and that fraudulent land zoning deals would go unpunished. While not a homogenous entity, elements of the state thwarted efforts to legally address the status of SEZs and land allocated for the zones remained with corporate developers. Individual, financial interests in maintaining this SEZ land ambiguity furthered delay on the SEZ matter with the state politically muddled in an ‘in-between’ place of inaction. To diversify their resistance and potentially force accountability, the SEZ opposition turned to the judicial system. In 2007 and 2008 SEZaffected communities in Goa filed three separate but related public interest legislation (PIL) court cases, based on information acquired from RTI applications. The petitions highlighted the economic and legal inconsistencies associated with the SEZ land transfers and approval processes. Awareness of state inaction shifted efforts of the anti-SEZ protesters from demanding action from the state to seeking justice for development and land inequities via the judicial system. This resistance modification and expansion came in response to state foot dragging on proceeding with legal resolution of the zone status and subsequent reallocation of SEZ land. Research details this shift in approach, and questions if and how the diversity of opposition tactics reflects broader changes in the context for land, anti-corruption and resistance in contemporary India. The research presented in this chapter derives from a year of ethnographic fieldwork comprised of participant observation at protests and anti-SEZ meetings, document and policy analysis, 200 household surveys in SEZ-affected villages and more than 140 interviews with social
216
The Great Goa Land Grab
movement members, government officials, activists, corporate representatives, trade union members and journalists.216 Drawing from theories of corruption and liminality, the chapter probes the changing patterns of intervention by anti-SEZ social movement members to ask what alternatives to standard forms of protest are available in the face of state inaction. Corruption and nation-state accountability are reviewed to understand the limitations of protest and to theorise why using the judicial system became a preferred mode of anti-SEZ resistance in Goa. To exemplify this, we examine the specific legal claims from the one site of SEZ resistance – the village of Keri. Drawing from Thomassen (2012), we apply Victor Turner’s notions of liminality, rituals and change to explore anti-SEZ protest transitions. Inferring Turner’s interest in applying ideas of liminality to political contexts, Thomassen analyses political revolution in relation to ‘inbetween’ states and responses to liminality. In the land conflict reviewed in Goa, this chapter argues that the ‘in-between’ status of the state in relation to legal land resolution changed the context for resistance. The subsequent renegotiation of opposition approaches represents the agency of social movement members to adapt in the face of state inaction on land issues. Resistance, in this altered form, contests political and social domination of land control in the state. Although ambiguity remains if court deliberations lead to tangible land changes on the ground, the act of engaging the judicial system signals a reframing of by who and how land is acquired and used in the state. Political powers in Goa now recognise that land proposals and actions will not be met with deference by civil society, but will be reviewed, scrutinised and directly questioned if not deemed to reflect a majority preference. Now, land negotiations are actively contested and scrutinised by citizens. The interventions discussed in this chapter represent a shift in the ritual form of protest and the degree of political engagement with the judiciary. The legal petition emanating from Keri village demonstrates how ideas of liminality help assess the perceived powerlessness of segments of civil society as they contest corruption. ‘Subaltern’ in the context of this chapter refers to the material situation and perceived powerlessness of movement members. The movement views the state as 216
Where these interviews are cited in this chapter, an interview number is used when the anonymity of the respondent is necessary.
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
217
an entity with the power to alter their land and place through the introduction of a project of liberalisation: SEZs. Contestation provides the potential to alter the power dynamic, with those affected possibly having an impact on decision-makers. Regional planning interventions are subject to popular resistance, with land transactions in the state highly politicised and carefully scrutinised. In concluding this chapter, we review why a lack of state response led movement members to turn to the judicial system for accountability on corruption, and how this shift reflects a continued interest in judicial justice despite contradictory assessments of the court, which is at once an elite and urban biased space (Rajagopal 2007, 163) or a people’s forum to contest ‘their miseries arising from repression, governmental lawlessness and administrative deviance’ (Baxi 1985, 107–108). Conduits for Corruption Globally, debates on corruption have become increasingly economically and politically relevant, particularly given increased media attention in contemporary times (Robinson 1998, 1). For example, in describing ‘crony capitalism’ in South Korea, Kang (2002, 3–20) details how corruption and economic growth may flourish together when a small contingent of government and corporate elites work in tandem to reduce transition costs and profit personally. Kang identifies two forms of state corruption. The first involves top-down predatory states in which officials make ‘donation’ demands from a weak business community. The second, ‘bottom-up corruption’, is fuelled by powerful groups who effectively focus their demands on the state. In the latter, those businesses or individuals wielding more economic influence receive greater advantages than their non-privileged business counterparts (Kang 2002, 16). This form of preferential privilege is central in the resistance to Goan SEZs and reflects broader national tensions in India. Regional, religious and rural inequalities in India are magnified by corruption and exacerbated by exclusive models of development. Corruption often takes the form of the diversion of public money meant to generate employment and income, or to provide social services, into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats’ (Outlook, January 31, 2011, 7). The new economic and power dynamics associated with liberalisation lead some state governments to bend rules to entice and accommodate corporations. States now compete with each other to attract
218
The Great Goa Land Grab
investment by providing preferential treatment to industries through reduced land prices and tax breaks (including SEZs). Such practices, coupled with efforts to woo industrial capital, quicken the ascent of industrial capitalists at the state level, while decreasing the former ‘dominance’ of rich farmers with the ‘capitalist class’ changing from a limited group to a range of individuals (Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011, 7; Chatterjee 2008, 56). Despite changing power relations, it is valuable to note that inter-state competition does not lead to homogenous experiences necessarily favouring capital. Rather, changing state and corporate dynamics around land acquisition must be contextualised in relation to social, political and economic diversity at the subnational level (Bedi and Tillin 2015). Sundar (2011, 183) suggests that to create an ‘investor friendly’ industrial locale in the state of Jharkhand ‘the government is willing to violate every rule in the book’. Jharkhand allowed companies to receive project clearance despite non-existent or shamefully poor engagement with affected communities via public hearings or consent from local governing bodies. On behalf of private corporations, Jharkhand acquired privately owned land and created district-wide land banks enabling companies to identify government land for industrial estates (Sundar 2011, 183). Calls for government accountability in the face of such corruption have come in the form of direct action, including street protests, sit-ins and hunger strikes. These forms of resistance by citizens, social movements and other interest groups seek a response from multiple levels of government. Civil society groups and individuals may scrutinise government actions and encourage frequent exchange between the public and the state (Robinson 1998, 9). In decreasing their distance from government, citizens may proactively demand a state that answers to the people. In particular, the emergence of corruption discourses may reify particular visions of the state. Gupta (1995, 394) notes how ‘the discourse of corruption helps construct “the state”; yet at the same time it can potentially empower citizens by marking those activities that infringe on their rights’. Through these articulations citizens acknowledge practices that they deem to be corrupt, while gaining strength to question or counter these activities. But when the state remains unresponsive or stuck in liminal inaction, resistance approaches may diversify protest tactics, alter their conceptualisation of the state and seek
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
219
solutions beyond the state. Jenkins (2007, 55) argues that efforts to deepen democracy can see public protest against corrupt politicians as one way to do this. However, while such protests may lead to temporary political change, corruption usually reappears in a different form (Robinson 1998, 9). Protest limitations and the persistence of corruption have persuaded some Indian actors to pursue legal avenues to resolve their claims and seek justice, at times in parallel with other resistance strategies (see Nielsen 2015). Judicial action is a response to state indifference to corruption or the inability of various elements of the state to end corrupt practices. The worldwide trend to the judicialisation of politics and the use of PIL are noteworthy judicial trends. With the advent of liberalisation and democracy, some Asian countries are moving towards the judicialisation of politics, with many regimes attuned to ‘the rule of law and. . . accountability and rights issues’ (Dressel 2014, 260). Judicialisation over the last two decades is defined as, ‘the reliance on courts and judicial means for addressing core moral predicaments, public policy questions, and political controversies’ (Hirschl 2008, 94). Comaroff and Comaroff (2007, 143) point out that political concerns formerly contested in public spheres, including street protests, boycotts and strikes, have migrated to judicial avenues. The Goa case highlights how judicialisation is one of a suite of protest tactics of resistance (see Nielsen 2015). The use of judicial approaches does not preclude the need for more visible forms of public contestation. It does provide an alternative given state inaction, and when movements are unable to mobilise street protests. While the courts of India have been active post-independence, the recent past reflects a new imperative for the judiciary to hold the central government accountable. This increasing judicialisation leads India’s higher courts to maintain a tenuous ‘balancing act’ between the ‘constraints imposed by institutional realities (the need to secure cooperation of the executive to enforce its judgments) with the demands for judicial action from such societal actors as the media, political parties, and civil society actors’ (Shankar 2012, 58). As ‘negotiators’ between disparate actors and interests, the judiciary can produce judgments that further liminal status, rather than providing legal clarity. The Goa SEZ litigation represents a civil society effort to overcome the state’s inability and unwillingness to clearly define le-
220
The Great Goa Land Grab
gal land status. While the petitioners sought a definitive answer, the Bombay High Court left legal ambiguity regarding land use, which will be detailed below. This example highlights the judicialisation of politics and land, but also serves as a cautionary example of the limitations of the courts as they attempt to fulfil a negotiator role in liberalising India. Further, the role of the courts is complicated by who is accessing the courts to demand accountability. Therefore, it is instructive to review the rise of the PIL in India. Following emergency rule in 1976, the Supreme Court allowed for individuals or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to file PIL cases on behalf of the broader public (NGOs in India 2013). PILs are a means to hold high-level public officials accountable to citizen demands (Corbridge et al. 2005, 2). Upendra Baxi (1985, 108) explained PILs as ‘social action litigation’ aimed at providing justice for millions of ‘impoverished Indians’. Despite the potential of PILs to hold public officials to account, they have been criticised as mechanisms for the urban middle class and/or elites to further specialised claims and interests. Chatterjee (2008, 58) observed: ‘There is now a powerful tendency to insist on the legal rights of proper citizens, to impose civic order in public places and institutions and to treat the messy world of the informal sector and political society with a degree of intolerance’. An example is ‘bourgeois’ environmental PILs criticised as tools to get the Supreme Court and High Courts to clear ‘pollution’ associated with factories and squatter settlements in Delhi (Baviskar 2012, 171). This class-driven litigation reflects specific conceptualisations of ‘environmental’ protection and the ‘rise of an empowered urban elite that styles itself as the “middle class” and that has come to monopolise the discursive construction of the “public interest”’ (Baviskar 2012, 172). As a result, bureaucrats may defend their distance from the public as a means to avoid ‘unmediated’ citizen requests or the dominance of special interests (Goetz and Jenkins 2001, 367). Although Indian social movements have consistently engaged with the Supreme Court since the 1970s, preferential elite treatment in contemporary judgments has made this a less reliable route to justice. The Supreme Court’s rulings: are increasingly characterized by an urban and elitist bias against the poor and the countryside. In a range of cases
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
221
involving conflicts between protection of the environment and workers’ rights/tribal rights/housing rights, the Court has chosen the former, without bothering much to balance the two objectives (Rajagopal 2007, 163). Despite these limitations, movements and individuals continue to seek justice via the courts because of the potential for a positive outcome. When petitioners are successful in the legal realm the results can be dramatic. Analysing recent court judgments on land acquisition from Delhi, Punjab and Haryana, Singh (2012) calculated that 97% of plaintiffs in High Court cases received higher compensation for their acquired land. The inconsistent response of the courts makes this path to justice risky, leading some social movements to seek this approach as a last resort. Following the Goan state’s announcement to ‘scrap the zones’, the general view in civil society was that the SEZ conundrum was resolved. However, the SEZ-allocated land remained in an ‘in-between’ state of legal ambiguity and associated social contradictions, with the state showing no sign of resolving the related corruption challenges. The liminal status of state indifference to legally ending SEZs and clarifying land inconsistencies pushed SEZ resistance in Goa to approach the High Court of Bombay. Theories of liminality help us to understand the form and nature of this resistance in Goa. Liminality and Resistance Victor Turner’s influential treatments of liminality in rites of passage provide the entry point for discussions on places, situations and states of marginality. Turner (1964, 3) defines liminality as a ‘period of margin’ within a broader societal ‘structure of positions’. Fixed points within the society may be conceptualised as a state that is a culturally recognised ‘physical, mental or emotional condition in which a person or group may be found at a particular time’ (Turner 1964, 4). In-between periods, or margins between societal or political norms, may enable the primacy of agency, the emergence of personalities and linkages between living and personal experiences (Thomassen 2012, 688). Liminality may lead to formative experiences which alter social and/or political structure. Thomassen (2009, 5) reminds us that liminality ‘serves to conceptualize moments where the relationship between structure and agency is not easily resolved or even understood’. The unknown
222
The Great Goa Land Grab
nature of the ‘in-between’ status may frame disparities in social or political structures, and responses emerging from stages of liminality may ultimately lead to a reconfiguration of power relations. Following a liminal phase, Turner and Schemer (1988, 26) hypothesises that there may be efforts to resolve conflict through ‘judicial and legal redressive action’. The ritualisation of legal systems may lead to rational conflict resolution or may further polarise parties. Turner and Schemer (1988) argue that ‘both religious ritual and legal ceremony are genres of social action. They confront problems and contradictions of the social process, difficulties arising in the course of social life in communities, corporate groups, or other types of social fields’. Turner’s position on social action recognises how inequities and inconsistencies within social spaces may lead to conflict. Legal rituals are one avenue available to those in the ‘betwixt and between’ state to address these social contradictions. When legal channels prove unsuccessful, they may return to ritualised behaviours and approaches (Turner and Schemer 1988, 26). In the Goan case, judicial intervention by the resistance was a response to the liminal nature of state indifference on SEZ resolution in which activists questioned state corruption. The period was liminal in that the state failed to definitively address land uncertainties, while appearing to privilege the SEZ corporate developers. The state’s inaction led movement members to clearly see that the state was not a space for land resolution for their resistance, and led them to seek alternate avenues to justice. This represents a shift in the social movement level of engagement and claim-making vis-à-vis the state, and their associated agency to work beyond the state. The next section reviews the context for this change, followed by a review of the legal petition claims. SEZ Resistance Goa provides a unique example of targeted SEZ development. There, the state government initially adopted the SEZ policy only to cancel it later following public consultation and political pressure. On June 5, 2006 the Goa state government issued an official SEZ policy and justified SEZs as a means ‘to bring large dividends to the State in terms of economic and industrial development and the generation of new employment opportunities. The SEZs are expected to be engines for economic growth’ (Government of Goa, 2006). The state legitimised the model as a positive development intervention with labour, eco-
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
223
nomic and infrastructure benefits. In contrast, some affected communities and social movements contested the SEZs as an unjust and illegitimate development model that would create or exacerbate social, economic and natural resource unevenness. Following pressure from social movements and other actors of political and economic influence, the government concluded that SEZs were not an appropriate model for Goa. On December 31, 2007 the Goa government became the first and only Indian state to announce a plan to ‘scrap’ current SEZ projects and deny future possibilities for such zones. Former Goan Chief Minister Digambar Kamat, of the Congress Party, explained that ‘the government took the decision to do away with the SEZs in existing form after a long-drawn consultation process, which involved discussions, deliberations and consultations with different stakeholders that lasted many days’ (The Hindu, January 1, 2008). However, by April 2015 the Goan state had not revoked the 2006 SEZ policy or cancelled land allotments previously made to SEZs. As a result, those resisting SEZs viewed the chief minister’s pronouncement as purely performative and unenforceable without legal pressure. Hence, the state government occupies a liminal state in relation to legal norms governing the denotification – a de-registration — of SEZs. An anti-SEZ movement leader in Verna points to the ambiguity of the chief minister’s wording: Even when the CM [Chief Minister] announced the scrapping of the SEZs, he clearly specified that SEZs were ‘scrapped’ in their present form. Which meant there was a loophole wherein they could get the SEZs in some other form. Till today we cannot trust politicians. We know that politicians backtrack on their word, they go against their promises. When we had enough information, we approached the High Court, we filed a petition in the High Court, through three separate litigations (Interview 63, November 29, 2008). Although the central government legally de-listed SEZs following developers’ requests in other locations, there is no provision in the law to legally end SEZs on behalf of state governments. However, this does not absolve states of the responsibility to push for national action on the dismantling of SEZs. The liminality derives from the letter of the law, but if pushed the central government would resolve this ambiguity. The lack of clarity regarding state-requested SEZ denotification is noteworthy, as the national government approved the cancellation of
224
The Great Goa Land Grab
the zones on behalf of SEZ developers. For example, the centre agreed to Reliance Industry’s petition to denotify 40% of its’ SEZs in Gujarat in 2013. In 2009, the national government approved the real estate corporation DLF’s appeal to denotify four SEZs in Haryana, Gujarat, Orissa and West Bengal, citing financial constraints. If the issue can be legally resolved for corporate SEZ developers, the same right should be granted to states pursuing denotification. In Goa, the issue appeared to be too contentious for many of the politicians involved in the former Congress government to push for a resolution. An opponent of SEZs describes how, ‘doing something specific [to legally end SEZs] will mean that heads will have to roll, based on an enquiry. . . But this present government is not showing any confidence or courage to do this — to really throw the SEZs out of Goa’ (SVM Press Conference, Panjim, January 22, 2009). An urban activist expressed frustration at the state government’s unwillingness to decisively respond to the SEZ land issue: We have been fighting this [SEZ] now for more than two years. We have been giving various deadlines and doing various actions from public meetings to dharnas [peaceful, sit-in demonstrations] in the police station. We have made presentations. The people have gone to court. While we have full faith in law and that justice can happen, the fact remains that justice happens based on arguments. There are the people who are spending their hard earned time and money. There are the SEZ developers who are using every loophole possible, every wrong argument. The government needs to decide which side it is on (SVM Press Conference, Panjim, January 22, 2009). Although the state is not a monolithic entity, state inaction on legal cancellation of the SEZs and reassignment of associated lands led to a perception of liminality. Social movement members presumed that the state government should be active in protecting and promoting the interests of its people and land. In the case of the SEZs, some politicians are caught between the powerful agents of corporate developers and government elites with the pull of corruption and alternate land uses, including areas for grazing, watersheds and small-scale industries, proposed by some civil society members. This creates a setting in which
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
225
the government cannot act on behalf of the majority of the public, but rather a particular elite set of interests who appear above legal culpability in relation to fraudulent land transactions. The legal ambiguity associated with dismantling the Goan SEZ policy enables state inaction while select social movements continue to demand change. Affected community members, church officials, politicians, activists, organisations and others continue to resist the governmental SEZ promotion. They rallied under the banners of two distinct social movements: SEZ Virodhi Manch (SVM) and Goa Movement Against SEZs (GMAS). While these movements have similar objectives and initially voiced their opposition to SEZs in comparable fashions, they work independently, each developing specific strategies, identities and ideologies of protest and have distinct bases. The movements remained separate, as GMAS was an overtly political force with strong opposition political party membership. In contrast, SVM, which is composed primarily of people from SEZ affected areas, self-branded as ‘apolitical’ and refused to share public platforms with politicians or political parties, whom they deemed to be corrupt (Bedi 2013, 44). It was solely members of SVM who presented the legal petitions discussed in this chapter. A brief review of GMAS contextualises the terrain of resistance in Goa. The GMAS was a self-described ‘politically oriented’ struggle against Goan SEZs. Starting in 2005 the group collected information on SEZs through RTI applications. GMAS was officially initiated in October 2007, and Matanhy Saldanha was elected as the movement’s convener (D’Silva 2008, 26).217 The group questioned the appropriateness of the SEZ policy and argued that the zones would change the state’s ‘unique’ demography and place. The movement arose and generated publicity on the premise that Goa is a special place that requires protection from any people, interests, industries or governments that threaten their idealised vision of Goa. GMAS members, including middle-class citizens, retired government employees, seasoned activists and opposition political party members, oriented resistance to challenge the power of the state government to implement the SEZ policy. GMAS protest was primarily centred on 217
The late Matanhy Saldanha was a tourism minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, a member of parliament, and a leader in the Fisherworkers Movement.
226
The Great Goa Land Grab
large-scale events over a limited time period. These rallies were interspersed with press statements designed to spread awareness about the SEZs both within Goa and nationally. On December 10, 2007 GMAS initiated a ten-day yatra (travelling demonstration) during which movement members visited every constituency in Goa to raise awareness about SEZs. The yatra terminated at a rally in the state’s capital, Panjim, on December 19, 2007. Following the death of the movement convenor and the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in Goa, GMAS no longer actively advocates on the SEZ issue. A BJP leader and former vocal opponent of SEZs, Manohar Parrikar, used the SEZ issue to critique Digambar Kamat’s Congress Party administration. Parrikar won the election for chief minister in 2012, and, in 2015, serves as the nation’s defence minister. The other main opposition group, the SVM, is a self-proclaimed ‘apolitical’ federation of village-level movements against SEZ development. The forum is supported by a range of individuals, organisations and other movements, including groups from the Catholic Church Diocese, the Council for Social Justice, the Jagrut Goem NGO and the Goa Bachao Abhiyan Collective. Village movements participating in SVM include Kerim Nagrik Samitee, People’s Movement Against SEZ and the Sancoale Action Committee. The majority of activists associated with SVM are educated and reside in a mix of urban and rural locations. Many are professionals, retirees and teachers; a small minority are reliant on village-based economic activities. A range of caste and religious backgrounds is represented. SVM employs a range of protest strategies to spread their anti-SEZ message and apply pressure on the state government. Initially, public protest rallies were a key form of visible resistance for SVM. The largest was held on December 14, 2007 when an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 people gathered at the Lohia Maidan historic meeting ground in Margao. On three occasions SVM members entered the fenced-off SEZ areas in Verna and Keri in protest. This became a way of recapturing a place that resistance members deemed to have been illegally given to the SEZ developers, some of which were originally acquired questionably through a communal land system. These resistance strategies contributed to the chief minister’s decision to scrap the SEZs, but state inaction on official deregistration of the zones and land redistribution led the movements to seek alternative justice.
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
227
Keenly aware of the political fragility of the Congress government and the fickle nature of civil society interest, a few individuals, primarily those in SEZ-affected villages, preemptively prepared PILs documents at the height of public protest. Far from the purview of public or consistent media attention, the mundane intricacies of the land ownership and legal de-registration processes were monitored predominantly by a core group of movement members. While social movements in India remain critical of the courts as ‘elite defenders of the status quo’ (Rajagopal 2007, 167), without the critical mass of public support, those impacted by the zones determined that legal action was a key strategy of resistance beyond the political realm. A Verna-based professional active in the anti-SEZ movement describes this approach: [N]ow we are looking forward to the justice from the courts because we know the moment this government is destabilized or some other Chief Minister comes in, or some other political party comes in, SEZs can be brought in through the backdoor and we don’t want to just keep fighting on the streets. . . Today we have sacrificed our professional lives, our personal lives in coming on the streets and fighting this battle. We don’t intend to do it for a lifetime because we have our family to sustain and we have our profession to continue. That is how we are only dependent on the high court judgement, so that it comes in our favour and we hope to win the case (cited in Bedi 2013, 47). A lawyer involved with the SVM PILs pointed to the role of the courts in potentially providing justice on this issue: Since government could not give answer or solution to the SEZ problem faced by the people, when the people also left expecting a solution from the government and after fighting enough in public --- agitations, coming on street, having up in arms. The only avenue left is knocking on the judiciary. We have challenged it on procedural irregularities. It shows that the government was over-enthusiastic in helping those capitalists, against the interest of their own subjects. Government has relaxed those laws just to help SEZ developers (Interview 63, November 29, 2008).
228
The Great Goa Land Grab
Despite the potential limits of the judicial approach, movement members viewed it as an important form of resistance. Limitations of their state-oriented discourse became apparent when the movement could not rally consistent numbers for public protest following the chief minister’s announcement to ‘scrap’ the SEZs. While the SEZ injustices did capture public attention and generate anger and discontent, the general population viewed the issue as resolved once Chief Minister Kamat made his declaration to end SEZs. A Catholic priest described how it was difficult to continue the resistance on the streets as ‘the local base is not there to support protest’ (Interview 2, March 29, 2008). He concluded that it was now a national issue to be pressed by the chief minister, rather than fought on the streets. A movement member from the Verna area observes that legal channels provided a forum to continue the SEZ debate, even when politicians stopped listening: ‘We also had to go to the court because there was nobody who was listening, though we were having a lot of meetings. We were just having meetings, and the government was least bothered. So we had to approach the court, because we had to stop this SEZ’ (Interview 63, November 29, 2008). Further, it became difficult to sustain media coverage of the SEZ issue. Many local newspapers, which actively covered the anti-SEZ protest at the height of the protest in 2007, refused to publish articles on the SEZs or land challenges associated with the Regional Plan process following the zone ‘scrapping’. The insightful earlier decision to prepare the legal cases proved a tool to push issue resolution beyond street protests, which were dependent on media coverage and political responses. Prior to reviewing the cases, we detail how organisers obtained information and then translated it into public documents of protest. For core group members, a main source of discontent with the SEZ model was the alleged fraud associated with land transfers and the overall lack of transparency of the government’s dealings in relation to the zones. Due to the complex nature of the land transfers, they were not frequently referenced in early protests. Initially, these concerns were expressed primarily by key organisers, mainly those who later became involved in court cases and RTI applications. Despite the intricate nature of the land transfers, organisers applied the information to developing resistance strategies. Organisers filed a series of RTI applications for land transfer details, attempted to register first information reports (FIRs) with relevant police stations and ultimately submitted
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
229
legal cases at the Bombay High Court branch in Goa. 218 Beyond the judicial realm, the premier criminal investigation agency of the Indian government, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), was seen as the only other solution to the SEZ challenge. In 2010 a member of SVM from the Verna area concluded that a ‘CBI or judicial enquiry into [the SEZ] land dealings and scam [are the] only resolutions to fraud and corruption’ (Interview 151, December 28, 2010). Apprehension regarding land shortages and land grabbing were realised in many ways as movement members filed RTI applications. The procurement of government land documentation via the RTI Act proved vital for affected villagers and supporters in understanding the extent of land transfers in their state and the associated fraud that RTI documentation revealed. Organisers, primarily associated with SVM, obtained documents that provided concrete evidence of land transfer irregularities. This evidence convinced influential individuals to join the movement. A villager from Sancoale, with a proposed SEZ, explained that a prominent Catholic priest ‘could not be convinced initially. He said it [SEZ] was wrong, but he never expected that there was fraud involved. The fraud we knew because we had the documentation of RTI. When we gave him the documents he was convinced’ (Interview 66, December 5, 2008). With this evidence, the individuals concluded that the land transfers for SEZs were not done in a transparent manner and that fraud was involved in the land dealings from the Goa Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) to the SEZ developers. Unsuccessfully, movement members used information from RTI applications to file FIRs at various police stations in Goa on October 22, 2007. SVM representatives tried to file criminal complaints against the ‘megafraud involved in the GIDC allotment’ for SEZ plots at the Curtorim police station, the Verna police station, the Crime Investigation Department, and the Directorate of Vigilance: ‘Criminal complaints have been filed in police stations and before other appropriate authorities exposing the fraud in the allotment and requesting revocation of the allotment and accountability’ (Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction 2007b; see Fernandes 2008). An organiser with the People’s Movement Against SEZs (2007) argued that the FIRs could not be ignored, and the CBI should launch an ‘inquiry in the interests of objectivity, transparency 218
FIRs are written or oral complaints submitted to the police by an aggrieved person (or on their behalf ) about an alleged offence.
230
The Great Goa Land Grab
and credibility’ (People’s Movement Against SEZs 2007). By April 2015, the FIR reports had not been registered by the relevant authorities, but SVM continues to push for government investigations. This moment represents a turning point for the movement, when it actively saw the police not responding to their demands as citizens. The unresponsiveness triggered the members to consider alternate forms of action. Information gleaned from the RTI documents also provided the basis for the three legal cases initiated by social movement members from Sancoale, Keri and Loutolim (villages with proposed SEZs within or on their boundaries). The petitions argue that the land dealings related to SEZs were marred by procedural improprieties, irregularities and deceit on the part of the state government and the GIDC. The allotment of land for SEZs in the state was ‘done in total violation of the provisions of the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 as well as the state’s own SEZ policy’ (Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction 2008a). Table 10.1 summarises the specific allegations of fraud and corruption included in each of the three petitions. In the following section, we detail the specifics of one of the court cases and highlight issues of caste, land and politics. We then review the broader themes and implications of this judicial intervention. The Politics of Land Four residents of Keri village and one resident of Loutolim filed a writ petition against the state of Goa, the GIDC and one of the SEZ developers, an Indian pharmaceutical company called M/s Meditab Specialities Pvt Ltd.219 The petitioners detailed a range of wrongdoings in the land allocation for the Keri SEZ, but remained sceptical of the judicial route. A movement member in Keri cautiously details the importance of the judicial approach to justice: We have put a high court case, on behalf of SVM and we have shown all the frauds. We can’t just agitate; we have to show the legal part as well. Simultaneously we are going for the high court for hill cuttings, illegal land occupation. Only because of the local people’s pressure are they ready to get the land back from the Goa Industrial Development Corporation. So most probably we will definitely be successful. The last part depends on government, they can cheat, they 219
The Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla bought the company in 2010.
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance can tell anything. They can sell the judge also (Interview 8, August 2, 2008).
Table 10.1: Common arguments from three petitions against the Goa state government, GIDC and SEZ corporate developers The GIDC failed to make public announcements, hold auctions or call for tenders prior to allotting land to the SEZ developers. The allotments were made within days of the government receiving the respective applications, and lacked supporting documentation. Five of the applications have the appearance of being penned by the same hand, and none of the applications have a company seal. The business developers were granted annual lease rent rates of 0.5% after the GIDC board agreed to set a minimum charge of 2% lease rent on all units in industrial estates from April 1, 2006. This was projected to cost the state a million rupees annually in lost revenue. Allotments were made at low, well below market, rates. The state allotted land to the corporate developers prior to formal approval from the Central Government’s Board of Approvals for SEZs, as envisaged in the SEZ Act as well as the state’s SEZ policy. Provisions were added to the lease deeds to allow the business developers to sublease or transfer part of the allotment without permission or additional GIDC-levied fees. The zones lack any environmental clearance from the central government or the local planning authority. The GIDC allotted a large amount of land, acquired for public purpose, to major companies, including real estate businesses for commercial use. The approvals showed little acknowledgement of the scarcity of water in the state. Additionally, some of the SEZ business developers dug bore wells in the SEZ areas without any permission or sanction from local authorities. Source: Summarised from: Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction 2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b.
231
232
The Great Goa Land Grab
The court case builds on previous land injustices in the area. In 1983, when DuPont Corporation proposed a Nylon 6,6 chemical plant in Keri on former communally-held land, Keri villagers resisted. Nylon 6,6 is made from two chemicals hazardous to both humans and ecosystems (Alvares 2002, 63). Over the next decade, community members and activists actively campaigned against the factory. The case provides an important context for the anti-SEZ PIL from Keri. Distinctively, in Goa portions of the land are managed using a collective system, or comunidades. Historically, these farming associations have been referred to in various ways, including comunidades agricolas and gamcarias (Afonso 2008). In a comunidades system, a collective of male village founders manage agriculture and other local affairs. The Portuguese rulers (1510–1961) codified the previous tribal system of collective management into laws that privileged the higher Brahmin castes favoured by the colonialists (Rodrigues 2010). When Goa was liberated from the Portuguese, half of the coastal paddy fields were owned by these comunidades (Sinha 2002, 30). The sale of land for the Nylon 6,6 plant raised concerns that comunidade land of religious, watershed and grazing value to the village had been sold by individuals. This provoked community protests. A Keri villager described how the land was communally held, ‘but somehow, the member of that comunidade belongs to a high caste and sold the land to the Goa government for the GIDC’ (Interview 8, August 2, 2008). He further explains how the SEZ site, ‘was comunidade land, but one individual put his name down [to register the land]. There was an agreement that people could have access for spiritual and other purposes’. However, this was not honoured. The contested nature of the site underscores inequities within the village regarding who has access to decision-making processes and power in relation to land and resources. In early 1995, villagers blocked the road to the planned plant when DuPont officials from the United States attempted to visit the site. The Americans ignored community attempts to engage in dialogue, and instead the police fired on the crowd and killed a youth, Nilesh Naik (Alvares 2002, 66). Following this, DuPont withdrew from the project and the land remained with various government bodies (including GIDC and the Goa Education Development Corporation) until ownership was transferred to the Keri SEZ, reigniting community concerns. The
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
233
grave of the youth, adjacent to the contested land site on a plateau, provides a physical reminder of the violence and unsettled nature of land in Keri. Christian and Hindu members of the SVM movement jointly hold meetings and pujas (Hindu devotional ceremony) at the site, to mourn his loss and to reclaim the place for the community. The active use of this place reminds villagers and other SVM members that the plateau remains of high value, and that the government will ultimately allow industrial development in Keri if the land is not returned to the village. Following unanswered appeals to the state government to return the land to village ownership, Keri residents filed legal petitions in support of their efforts. A major contention in the writ petition was that the GIDC allocated the land for the Keri SEZ prior to the state’s adoption of an SEZ policy, revealed in sequential meetings of the GIDC board. A the 285th GIDC board meeting on February 7, 2006, the board unanimously resolved to establish an SEZ at Keri. ‘It is pertinent to note that this resolution was approved in spite of there being no SEZ policy adopted by the State at that time’ (Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction 2008a). At the same meeting the GIDC agreed to fix a minimum rate for industrial land allocation of INR 150 (US$2.91) per square metre. During the 286th board meeting of the GIDC on March 28, 2006, prior to receiving an official application from Meditab and without the seven days’ notice to the board of directors, 1,232,000 square metres were allocated to Meditab (Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction, 2007a). An SVM supporter described how ‘the GIDC added more land to the land approved by Board of approvals in Delhi. . . Keri was allotted 300–400 acres, instead of earlier approved 130 acres’ (Interview 151, December 30, 2010). At the 287th GIDC board meeting on April 19, 2006, it was further decided that a 2% annual lease rent would be applied to all leases from that date. The writ petition highlighted that the Keri SEZ allotment was made on April 28, 2006, after these decisions were reached. Yet the allotment contradicts both agreements as it was given at a 0.5% annual lease rate of INR 80 per square metre. This meant that the ‘land which was allotted to Meditab Specialities Pvt. Ltd. was allotted at a rate. . . less than the token rate suggested by the Finance Department’ (Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction 2008a). The petitioners also alleged that the GIDC ‘transferred some land to
234
The Great Goa Land Grab
Cipla (Meditab) and earned huge profits since it was exempt from paying any transfer fees as well’. According to the petitioners this exchange demonstrated that the GIDC: acted in the most high-handed manner and allotted public land even without putting up an advertisement or calling for tenders or auctioning the said land to the highest bidder. Though the land was acquired from private parties and comunidades for public purpose the same has been allotted at throwaway prices to land sharks for commercial purposes causing the public exchequer loss of millions of rupees (Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction 2008a). Petitioners from Keri contested these transactions as corrupt, but also because of the geographical implications for their village. Spatially these zones were imagined and in some cases were quite distinct from the villages they bordered or inhabited. In the case of the Meditab SEZ on the Bhutkhamb plateau in Keri, the SEZ site was geographically isolated from the rest of the village by a large, high barbed wire fence. In creating an exclusive space, the SEZ corporate developer distinguished their land from the village with repercussions for the local community. Previously common grazing land, herders formerly relied on the fields now enclosed in the site to graze their animals. At the Keri SEZ location, SVM argued that a number of families were dependent on grazing and herding their cattle and goats on the plateau (SEZ Virodhi Manch, 2007, 18–19). Despite the large fence erected around the Meditab SEZ, as an act of defiance or out of necessity, a large hole was cut in the fence on one side of the site, so that villagers’ animals can cross the boundary imposed by the corporate developer. Respondents in the village further expressed alarm at possible bribes paid by the corporation to glean local support. Allegations surfaced that the company gave money to influential members of the village, some of whom were involved in the agitation against the Nylon 6,6 plant. A villager expressed concern, claiming that: ‘already company or government level people have given a lot of money. . . They have given two crore [US$393,817] for their committee. . . Once they have taken the money, they are keeping quiet’. The same villager describes how members of the Keri SEZ resistance were also offered bribes. He described how a representative of the industry gave ‘an offer of two crore
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
235
rupees. . . Suddenly they came in the evening, we want to meet you, we want to discuss with you. . . They said they are ready to do anything for the village, but don’t agitate or make a movement against us’ (Interview 152, December 30, 2010). While waiting for the court proceedings to churn through the lengthy legal system, a central government report bolstered SVM member morale. Central Government Review Prior to the final ruling on the court cases, two 2008 reports on SEZs by the central Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) criticised the fraud and corruption associated with SEZs. Reviewed by the Goa Legislative Assembly in early 2009, the CAG report on Goa acknowledges major discrepancies in land transfers related to SEZs in the state. The CAG review of GIDC reveals that the actions of the corporation lacked transparency, occurred in some instances without mandate, had major irregularities and cost the state significant losses in revenue (Comptroller and Auditor General of India 2008). The report highlights inconsistencies in the land allotment to SEZs in the Verna Industrial Estate, among others. The report states that, ‘allotments of land at Verna Phase IV to SEZs were irregular as the land was acquired for an industrial growth centre with financial assistance from the Government of India’ (Comptroller and Auditor General of India 2008). Common with one of the court cases, the CAG report highlights how the Goa government received a large grant from the central government to encourage small and medium industrial units in the Verna Industrial Estate. In turn, the GIDC allotted land acquired within the estate to SEZs, which is in contradiction to the mandate of the scheme. The CAG concluded that the state was required to refund the contribution of INR 10 crore [US $2 million] received from the central Government (Comptroller and Auditor General of India 2008). The CAG report on the GIDC, submitted to the government of India in June 2008, concluded that the GIDC strayed from its mandate in allotting land to real estate developers rather than entrepreneurs, the selection processes for SEZs lacked transparency and were not publicised, land acquired for small industries (under the central government scheme) may not be allotted to SEZs, the reduced allotment rates offered to SEZ developers resulted in a loss of government revenue totalling INR 94.12 crore (US$21 million) and there is a need for clarity regarding the GIDC’s role vis-à-vis the establishment of SEZs
236
The Great Goa Land Grab
(Comptroller and Auditor General of India 2008). The CAG report validated some of the claims made by movements via the FIRs, legal cases and public statements. In several interviews and public events, movement members acknowledged how the CAG findings regarding nefarious GIDC actions legitimised their protests. As expressed in a press conference, ‘The SVM stand has been further vindicated by the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, which exposed major discrepancies in acquisition and allotment of land by the GIDC with regards to SEZs in Goa’ (SVM Press Conference, Panjim, April 13, 2009). The CAG report bolstered SVM confidence to have their FIR cases formally registered by the police. An SVM representative explained at the event, ‘now the Comptroller and Auditor General has gone on record, and said to the newspapers. . . [the] entire thing is a fraud, the entire thing is exposed. We are definitely going back to the police, and make sure our FIR is filed’ (Interview 126, April 13, 2009). SVM called for direct action to be taken against GIDC staff: SVM also demands that all the officers of the GIDC, who are involved in the facilitation of the fraud should be placed under suspension and they should be prosecuted for their crimes. Similarly action has to be initiated against all the companies and government authorities who manipulated the process for getting approval for the SEZs in Goa (SVM Press Conference, Panjim, April 13, 2009). Despite the critical CAG report, there has been no action taken against individuals in the GIDC. Court Acknowledgement, Continued Land Uncertainty Although not definitively solving the liminal state inaction on SEZ land, the High Court judgments represented a victory for people against the GIDC and SEZ corporate developers. The cases, reinforced by the earlier CAG findings, attempted to mediate inequities and corruption perpetuated by elements of the state. Following state inaction on the SEZ issue, resistance members concluded that legal justice was an important tool to potentially stop the zones or similar projects from entering Goa through the ‘backdoor’. Petitioners questioned patterns of domination demonstrated through the land implications of SEZs, and utilised an alternate forum to expose associated corruption (Thomassen 2012, 682). The range of resistance strategies from protest
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
237
to judicial interventions reifies the state, while acknowledging the limits of state action. Shortcomings in land justice became apparent in the High Court judgement. In the Bombay High Court ruling in November 2010, the justices rejected the allotment of land for SEZs in Goa as illegal. The court used the term ‘public interest’ to justify the discontinuation of the SEZs, using terminology the Goa government had avoided. The court left room for the SEZ developers to reapply to the GIDC for land for lawful nonSEZ purposes. As a result, local suspicion remained that the corporations will repackage their developments and again attempt to acquire land, although it is unlikely that the plots would be as large as those initially allocated for SEZs. To challenge the High Court’s order, SEZ developers appealed the judgment and the cancellation of land allotments in the Supreme Court. By April 2015, the nation’s highest court had not reviewed the case, filed against anti-SEZ activists, the Goan and central governments. Prior to the scheduled hearing, the Supreme Court issued notices to the central and Goan governments to maintain the status quo. The cases provided a forum for civil society petitioners to demand their ideal state, and how this state should safeguard their land and regulate broader development processes. In these court cases individuals put forth their names as petitioners and became conduits for issues raised by the movements. In so doing, these individuals could have faced retribution or personal attacks. They also invested time, energy and financial resources in the numerous court cases. The mundane chores associated with gathering the documentation for the cases, meeting with lawyers and sitting in attendance in court allowed the SVM members to highlight the SEZ land inconsistencies and democratise the SEZ process. The legal petitions reflect a reification of the importance of state governance, despite frustration at state inaction. The legal petitioners described themselves as ‘public spirited petitioners of Goa (India) who believe in Good Governance and transparency and fair play in Administrative action’. Those named in the PILs argued that they ‘are interested in protecting the land of the State that was compulsorily acquired and transferred in the most high handed manner by defrauding the public exchequer’ (Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction 2008a). Through legal channels the petitioners attempted to hold the government account-
238
The Great Goa Land Grab
able. They argued that ‘no state or instrumentality of law can act in any manner which would benefit a private party at the cost of the State’ (Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction 2008b). In encouraging the state to be transparent, the movements perceived a broader space for justice and accountability. A villager from an SEZ area explains how earlier calls for justice ‘hardly got any response from government. It was only after [the] SEZ movement in Goa they started getting positive response and importance’ (Interview 67, December 7, 2008). Corruption and Land Acquisition The fraud highlighted in the court cases reignited past concerns regarding government corruption. A former member of a taskforce charged with regional planning in Goa describes how ‘everywhere there is corruption, but corruption should not dictate planning. Planning should try to nullify corruption. . . Corruption has become [a] culture of Goa’ (Interview 121, March 30, 2009). People perceived that politicians in the state were able to make substantial amounts of money in the promotion of development. A journalist notes: [That] there is a corrupt government in Goa is undeniable. It is not debatable, and they are willing to sell you down the river. For them, development means physical development, infrastructure. . . as in industrial infrastructure. Not roads, schools, health. No one opposes these kind[s] of things, but industrial infrastructure and huge projects. They love it because if it is percentage driven corruption then it means much more [money for select officials and elites] (Interview 3, March 29, 2008). This respondent not only questions how the government is defining development, but also claims that the nature of industrial and land transfers provided opportunity for some in the government to gain financially from lucrative transactions. A former government planner details how the perceived government corruption tainted the SEZ issue: ‘Land which was made available for SEZ [involved a] huge amount of corruption; in fact, [a] recent survey showed that Goa is the most corrupt state in the country. Because of this corruption the SEZ got a bad name’ (Interview 121, March 30, 2009). Transparency International India, a branch of the global anticorruption group, assessed the level of corruption in Goa at the level of
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
239
‘alarming’, the highest status in their four-tier corruption scale (Transparency International India 2008, 17). The SEZ resistance became public demonstrations against a state system that was deemed to be corrupt and not acting in the best interest of civil society. In many ways the SEZ corporate developers were not blamed directly by the resistance, as they were deemed to be taking advantage of an unjust system. The discourse on corruption deflects attention away from the corporate developers, to focus on the role the state plays in creating a business environment conditioned on bribes. The GIDC’s role in land acquisition in the state became a key public discussion point. Given the large scale of GIDC acquisition, resistance members and others questioned the necessity of future land acquisitions. They further doubted the unjust nature of the GIDC land acquisition --- for the singular purpose of transferring these lands to SEZs. Movement members made queries about the jurisdiction of the GIDC to move from its specialisation of acquiring land, constructing plots and leasing these plots out for industrial activities to SEZ real estate speculation. The GIDC changed the land purpose, from an education centre at one site and from smaller industrial estates at two sites, to accommodate the SEZ model, a move supported by some state officials. A Goa state industries representative explained that ‘land was definitely shifted. Land was acquired for industrial purpose[s]. SEZs are also industrial purposes; to that extent, government can defend itself in saying [it] will not give it for any other purpose’ (Interview 134, May 7, 2009). However, there was a perception among the petitioners that the GIDC sought to acquire more land without fully utilising the existing plots in industrial estates. It was reported that the GIDC had 118 plots that were not utilised, and only 97 plots were utilised for their original allotted purpose (Goan Observer, September 6, 2008). While some of these may have been tied up in legal battles, many respondents perceived that average citizens were not granted plots, while those with influence and political ties received plots immediately. At an April 2009 SVM press conference, a movement presenter explained how ‘an area of over 39 lakh [3.9 million] square metres [was] acquired by GIDC for Phase IV of Verna Industrial Estate in 1996 when the process of acquisition of 13.67 lakh [1.36 million] square metres for Phase III [was] not even complete’ (SVM Press Conference, April 13, 2009).
240
The Great Goa Land Grab
The transfer of GIDC land to SEZs led organisers to question the need generally for future land acquisition by the government body. An SVM movement leader detailed how the Regional Plan Task Force ‘has recommended that the GIDC does not need any further acquisition anywhere for the next 12 years; the existing land is sufficient for them to promote industrial areas. They also point out that about 30 percent of the shares allotted in 22 industrial estates are vacant’ (SVM Press Conference, April 13, 2009). Some argued that in allocating multiple industrial plots to SEZs, the GIDC demonstrated that they no longer require additional land for industrial expansion in the state. An SVM movement member explained that ‘we have objected on the grounds that already 65 lakhs [have] come up as industrial areas. . . GIDC has shown that they do not require any more land’ (Interview 115, March 18, 2009). Specific questions regarding the legality and transparency of land transfers for SEZs led to broader concerns that the GIDC was a corrupt agency. A Goa Chamber of Commerce representative said that ‘the major concern of the people was because it [GIDC] was misused [and] abused, and rampant corruption was there when it [GIDC] was allocating the land’ (Interview 112, February 20, 2009). A BJP representative claimed: ‘The people heading the GIDC are not interested in industrial development. . . they are only interested in kickbacks. If someone goes there with an application, I don’t think the applicant gets a real allotment. . . Unless he pays off [the GIDC], nothing [no land] is allotted’ (Interview 135, May 8, 2009). A movement organiser further insinuated that a system of fictitious allotments is utilised by individuals in the GIDC: Most of the bureaucrats who are in the [G]IDC. . . block most of the plots in fictitious names. Any person in the locality applying for a plot. . . say[s], ‘Oh sorry, they are sold out’. If someone from outside [Goa] calls [and] asks them in Hindi, ‘We are planning on setting up a small-scale industry. Is there any land available?’ they will say there is no land available. Someone who has taken a [GIDC] plot but. . . wants to sell it, and he is quoting [a] price, it will always be four to five times more than the regular price (Interview 115, March 18, 2009). While it remains unclear whether individual GIDC officers will be held
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
241
accountable, the public outcry led the state to alter the GIDC’s process of land acquisition for industrial purposes. Since late 2008, the GIDC stopped major land acquisition plans for industrial estates at five locations in the state and instead must orient future land transfers towards Goa’s broader regional plan. ‘The Regional Plan will be the model for IDCs land acquisition. But whenever we have expansion plans, there we will surely ask the state government to amend the plan to accommodate our needs’, stated GIDC Chairman Chandrakant Kavalekar (cited in Hindustan Times, September 27, 2008). Conclusions: Ambiguous Judicial Justice Discontent over land irregularities manifest in diverse forms of resistance in liberalising India. SEZ protests across India remain disparate (Bedi 2013), but common themes of structural inequalities and land discontentment emerge from resistance. While displeasure simmered in Goa regarding flawed and irregular land and regional planning processes, the SEZ land transfers represented a critical transformation. The scale and pace of the expansion of the zones led movement members, particularly the SVM, to rally the general public around land concerns. The state’s inaction following their ‘scrapping’ SEZ announcement generated a period of liminality. The lack of response affirmed for resistance members that they did not have access to structures of power related to land and place. Ultimately, resistance members judicialised their struggle as a means to assert agency, while attempting to alter structures of decision-making regarding land. Engaging with the legal system allowed petitioners to highlight social contradictions associated with land transfers (see Turner 1964, 29). Continued ambiguity, despite the High Court victory, could lead to a return to the status quo, although irregular land deals will not be without public scrutiny. The Bombay High Court judgments reflect the tension associated with land deals for SEZs and represent citizen efforts to ‘deepen democracy’ by making elements of the state accountable and politics inclusive (Jenkins 2007, 55). Through adopting legal discourses and practices, petitioners gained new awareness of the mechanisms associated with articulating their claims via the courts. The petitions mediated the in-between status of the state, and associated ramifications for those affected by the land, corruption and financial implications of SEZs. Petitioners perceived that previous resistance strategies could not sufficiently contest the culture of corruption related to land deals. Further-
242
The Great Goa Land Grab
more, land remaining with the state could be reallocated to the next avatar of SEZs in the state. In the wake of the Goa case ruling, many SVM members felt optimistic, and yet while the land remains with the SEZ developers they insist their land and anti-corruption struggle continues. The Goa experience provides the opportunity to explore the complexities of judicialisation. While it is true that the ‘judicialisation of politics is proceeding apace everywhere’, activists are not the only actors fetishising legal channels of action (Comaroff and Comaroff 2007, 148). Corporations also utilise courts ‘to create a deregulated environment conducive to their workings’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2007, 144). The inclination for a range of actors to judicialise engagements can lead to a perpetual state of litigation, as witnessed in the Supreme Court appeal by the SEZ developers. Legal entanglements can be costly, and not all can endure lengthy court battles over time. The judicial pendulum can swing for or against activists, and thus is a risky tool of resistance. In elevating the SEZ case to the Supreme Court, the SEZ developers test the financial and legal limits of the antiSEZ movement members. Particularly, since many of them are selffinanced. A retired professional from Sancoale explains how he spent his own money on the case, and how the proceedings stretched him financially (Interview 59, November 19, 2008). Further, the Indian legal system can be used against activists and movements. A related troubling trend is the use of ‘slapp-suits’ against activists by corporations. ‘Strategic lawsuits against public participation’ (slapp) suits are filed by corporations or their representatives against activists and scientists ‘not to get justice, but to threaten, intimidate and gag’ dissent (Down to Earth, June 15, 2008). These cases are not used as a tool of judicial justice or means to prove defamation, but rather a means to physically, emotionally and financially exhaust activists and professionals who critique particular industries. Thus, the judicial avenue is used by social movement members as an avenue to resolution cautiously, as they are aware that the legal system can be used as a strategic tool to burden them individually or collectively. Beyond these uncertainties, it remains untested if judicalisation will address the structural inequalities, irregularities and uneven power relations central to the Goan struggle and also permeating other land resistance in the country. Efforts to seek judicial justice could lead to one-off
Judicial Justice for SEZ Land Resistance
243
results, while leaving the structures and individuals responsible for the perpetuation of corruption in land deals untouched. If judicialisation proves unsuccessful at addressing these larger and more foundational land and corruption concerns, the result could be a retrograde return to the status quo.
Bibliography Abreu, S. (2014). The Struggle against SEZ in Goa. In S. Abreu & R. C. Heredia (Eds.), Goa 2011: Reviewing and Recovering Fifty Years. Concept Publishing Company. Adani Power. (n.d.). Tiroda Thermal Power Plant: Adani Power Limited. Adani Operational Power Plants. https://www.adanipower.com/operational- p ower-plants/Tiroda-maharashtra. Adnan, S. (2015). Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist Development in Neoliberal India: Mechanisms, Resistance, and Persistence of Self-Employed Labour. In B. Harriss-White & J. Heyer (Eds.), Indian Capitalism in Development (pp. 23–45). Routledge. AECOM India Private Limited. (2016). Master Plan for Mormugao Port, Ministry of Shipping, http://sagarmala.gov.in/sites/default/files/7.Final%20Master%20 Plan_Mormugao.pdf Afonso, A. (2008). Introduction. In A. de Noronha (Ed.), A. Afonso (Trans.), The Hindus of Goa and the Portuguese Republic (pp. xi-xlix). Broadway Book Centre. Aguilar-Støen, M., & Hirsch, C. (2015). Environmental Impact Assessments, Local Power and Self-Determination: The Case of Mining and Hydropower Development in Guatemala. The Extractive Industries and Society, 2(3), 472–479. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.03.001 Aguilar-Støen, M., & Hirsch, C. (2017). Bottom-up Responses to Environmental and Social Impact Assessments: A Case Study from Guatemala. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 62, 225–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2016.08 .003 Ahn, S.-J., & Graczyk, D. (2012). Understanding Energy Challenges in India: Policies, Players and Issues. International Energy Agency (IEA). Almeida, A. (2017, August 10). Privileging Investors’ Rights over People’s Rights. Herald. https://www.heraldgoa.in/Edit/Opinions/Privileging-investors%E2%80 %99-rights-over-people%E2%80%99s-rights/118735. Almeida, J. C. (2013). Goa: Administration and Economy before and after 1962. Broadway Books. Alvares, C. A. (2002). Fish Curry and Rice: A Source Book on Goa, its Ecology, and Life Style. Goa Foundation. Alvares, C. A., & Saha, R. (2008). Goa, Sweet Land of Mine. Goa Foundation. Ariza-Montobbio, P., Lele, S., Kallis, G., & Martinez-Alier, J. (2010). The Political Ecology Of Jatropha Plantations for Biodiesel in Tamil Nadu, India. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(4), 875–897. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2010.512462
Bibliography
245
Augé M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso. B&F Realty. (2015, November 12). https://bfrealty.in/. Baka, J. (2013). The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India. Development and Change, 44(2), 409–428. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12018 Baka, J. (2016). Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development, Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions. Antipode, 49(4), 977–996. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti .12219 Bakker, K., & Bridge, G. (2006). Material Worlds? Resource Geographies and the ‘Matter of Nature’. Progress in Human Geography, 30(1), 5–27. https://doi.org/ 10.1191/0309132506ph588oa Banerjee, A. V., Bardhan, P., Basu, K., Chaudhury, M. D., Ghatak, M., Guha, A. S., Majumdar, M., Mookherjee, D., & Ray, D. (2007). Beyond Nandigram: Industrialisation in West Bengal. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17), 1487–1489. Baneerjee, P. S., & Roy, D. (2007). Behind the Present Peasant Unrest in West Bengal. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(22), 2048–2050. Banerjee, P. (2006). Land Acquisition and Peasant Resistance at Singur. Economic and Political Weekly, 41(46), 4718–4720. Banerjee, P. (2014). Orissa and West Bengal: The SEZ Imbroglio. In R. Jenkins, L. Kennedy, & P. Mukhopadhyay (Eds.), Power, Policy and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones (pp. 272–303). Oxford University Press. Banerjee-Guha, S. (2013). Accumulation and Dispossession: Contradictions of Growth and Development in Contemporary India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 36(2), 165–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2013.804026 Basu, D., & Das, D. (2014). Poverty-Hunger Divergence in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 49(2), 22–24. Baviskar, A. (2008). Introduction: Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power. In A. Baviskar (Ed.), Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power (pp. 1–12). Oxford University Press. Baviskar, A. (2014). Public Interest and Private Compromises: The Politics of Environmental Negotiation in Delhi, India. In J. M. Eckert, Z. Ö. Biner, C. Strümpell, & B. Donahoe (Eds.), Law against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law’s Transformations (pp. 171–201). Cambridge University Press. Baviskar, A., Sinha, S., & Philip, K. (2006). Rethinking Indian Environmentalism: Industrial Pollution in Delhi and Fisheries in Kerala. In J. R. Bauer (Ed.), Forging environmentalism: justice, livelihood, and contested environments (pp. 189– 252). M E Sharpe. Baya-Lafitte, N. (2016). Black-Boxing Sustainable Development: Environmental Impact Assessment on the River Uruguay. In J.P. Voss & R. Freeman (Eds.), Knowing Governance: The Epistemic Construction of Political Order (pp. 237–255). Palgrave Macmillan.
246
The Great Goa Land Grab
Bear, L. (2020). Speculations on Infrastructure: From Colonial Public Works to a PostColonial Global Asset Class on the Indian Railways 1840–2017. Economy and Society, 49(1), 45–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2020.1702416 Bedi, H. P. (2013). Environmental Mis-Assessment, Development and Mining in Orissa, India. Development and Change, 44(1), 101–123. https://doi.org/10.111 1/dech.12000 Bedi, H. P. (2013). Special Economic Zones: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest. Contemporary South Asia, 21(1), 38–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/0958 4935.2012.757582 Bedi, H. P. (2015). Judicial Justice for Special Economic Zone Land Resistance. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45(4), 596–617. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2015. 1048406 Bedi, H. P. (2015). Right to Food, Right to Mine? Competing Human Rights Claims in Bangladesh. Geoforum, 59, 248–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014. 08.015 Bedi, H. P. (2019). “Lead the District into the Light”: Solar Energy Infrastructure Injustices in Kerala, India. Global Transitions, 1, 181–189. https://doi.org/10.1 016/j.glt.2019.10.005 Bedi, H. P., & Tillin, L. (2015). Inter-state Competition, Land Conflicts and Resistance in India. Oxford Development Studies, 43(2), 194–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13600818.2015.1035246 Bennike, R. (2017). Frontier Commodification: Governing Land, Labour and Leisure in Darjeeling, India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40(2), 256–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2017.1289618 Bhan, G. (2016). In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship, and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi. Orient BlackSwan. Bhat, S. (2010). Natural Resources Conservation Law. Sage. Björkman Lisa. (2015). Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai. Duke University Press. Bornstein, E., & Sharma, A. (2016). The Righteous and the Rightful: The Technomoral Politics of NGOs, Social Movements, and the State in India. American Ethnologist, 43(1), 76–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12264 Borras Jr, S. M., & Franco, J. C. (2011). Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis. Journal of Agrarian Change, 12(1), 34–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2011.00339.x Borras, S. M., Franco, J. C., Gómez, S., Kay, C., & Spoor, M. (2012). Land Grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3-4), 845–872. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.679931 Brass, T. (Ed.). (1995). New Farmers’ Movements in India. Frank Cass.
Bibliography
247
Bridge, G. (2010). Resource Geographies 1: Making Carbon Economies, Old and New. Progress in Human Geography, 35(6), 820–834. https://doi.org/10.1177/030913 2510385524 Bridge, G., & Gailing, L. (2020). New Energy Spaces: Towards a Geographical Political Economy of Energy Transition. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(6), 1037–1050. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x20939570 Brown, B., & Spiegel, S. J. (2019). Coal, Climate Justice, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition. Global Environmental Politics, 19(2), 149–168. https: //doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00501 Cardoso, A., & Turhan, E. (2018). Examining New Geographies of Coal: Dissenting Energyscapes in Colombia and Turkey. Applied Energy, 224, 398–408. https: //doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.04.096 Cashmore, M., & Richardson, T. (2013). Power and Environmental Assessment: Introduction to the Special Issue. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 39, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2012.08.002 CEE (2013). Research Project on Assessing Quality of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Compliance of Environmental Clearance (EC) Conditions and Adequacy of Environmental Management Plan (EMP) of Mining Industry in Goa. Centre for Environmental Education, Goa, October. Central Electricity Authority, CEA Annual Report 2017–2018 (2018). New Delhi; Government of India. Central Electricity Authority, CEA Annual Report 2018–2019 (2019). New Delhi; Government of India. Central Electricity Authority, Monthly Report of Import of Coal January 2020 (2020). New Delhi; Government of India. http://www.cea.nic.in/reports/monthly/coa l/2020/coal_import-01.pdf. Centre for Policy Research (2018, December). Closing The Enforcement Gap: Community-Led Groundtruthing Of Environmental Violations In Mormugao, Goa. Centre for Policy Research --- Namati Environmental Justice Program. Centre for Policy Research --- Namati Environmental Justice Program. https: //www.cprindia.org/system/tdf/policy-briefs/Revised%20Groundtruthing %20Report.pdf?file=1&type=node&id=7591&force=1. Chako, P. A. (2016, December 5). Cnt and Spt Amendment Bill 2016. Indian Currents, 28(49). http://www.indiancurrents.ORG/CNT-AND-SPT-AMENDMENT-BIL L2016-1444.PHP. Chakrabarty, B. (2011). The 2011 State Assembly Election in West Bengal: The Left Front Washed-Out! Journal of South Asian Development, 6(2), 143–167. https: //doi.org/10.1177/097317411100600201 Chakrabarty, D. (2002). Habitations of Modernity Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Permanent Black. Chakravarty, S., & Negi, R. (2016). Exploring Urban Change in South Asia: Space, Planning and Everyday Contestations in Delhi. Springer.
248
The Great Goa Land Grab
Chakravorty, S. (2013). The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence. Oxford University Press. Chandra, V. K. (2016). Regional Plan for Goa, 2021: A Participatory Approach. In A. Kumar & P. Prakash (Eds.), Public Participation in Planning in India (pp. 117–127). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Chandra, K. (2015). The New Indian State: The Relocation of Patronage in the PostLiberalisation Economy. Economic and Political Weekly, 50(41), 46–58. Chandra, R. (2018). Adaptive State Capitalism in the Indian Coal Industry. Dissertation, Harvard University. Retrieved from https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/h andle/1/41127494/CHANDRA-DISSERTATION-2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAll owed=y Chatterjee, E. (2011). Dissipated Energy: Indian Electric Power and the Politics of Blame. Contemporary South Asia, 20(1), 91–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/0958 4935.2011.646072 Chatterjee, E. (2019). The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism. The Journal of Asian Studies, 79(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/s00219 11819000573 Chatterjee, P. (1997). Development Planning and the Indian State. In T. J. Byres (Ed.), The State, Development Planning and Liberalisation in India (pp. 82–103). Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, P. (2008). Democracy and Economic Transformation in India. Economic & Political Weekly, 42(16), 53–62. Chen, J.-C. (2013). Sustainable Territories: Rural Dispossession, Land Enclosures and the Construction of Environmental Resources in China. Human Geography, 6(1), 102–125. https://doi.org/10.1177/194277861300600107 Chen, J.-C. (2019). Grounding Urban Natures. In H. Ernstson & S. Sörlin (Eds.), Grounding Urban Natures (pp. 323–361). The MIT Press. Chowdhury, N. (2014). Environmental Impact Assessment in India: Reviewing Two Decades of Jurisprudence. IUCN Academy of Environmental Law EJournal, 5, 28–32. Colvin, R. M. (2020). Social Identity in the Energy Transition: An Analysis of the “Stop Adani Convoy” to Explore Social-Political Conflict in Australia. Energy Research & Social Science, 66, 101492. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101492 Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. (2007). Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Social Anthropology, 15(2), 133–152. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0964-0282.2007.00010.x Commission on Illegal Mining (2012). Report of Justice M B Shah Commission on Illegal Mining of Iron and Manganese Ores in the State of Goa, Part I, II and III , Ministry of Mines. Government of India.https://www.mines.gov.in/ViewData/ OldArchives?mid=1333 . Corbridge, S., & Harriss, J. (2000). Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy. Polity Press.
Bibliography
249
Corbridge, S., Harriss, J., & Jeffrey, C. (2013). India Today: Economy, Politics and Society. Polity Press. Corbridge, S., & Shah, A. (2013). The Underbelly of the Indian Boom. Economy and Society, 42(3), 335–347. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2013.790655 Corbridge, S., Williams, G., Srivastava, M., & Véron, R. (2005). Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India. Cambridge University Press. Cross, J. (2014). Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India. Pluto Press. Da Silva, S.J.S., Gonsalves, W. & Parida, S. (2013). The Politics of Regional Planning in Goa. Paper presented at the national conference on India’s Political Economy in Transition: The Crisis of Governance, Democracy and Development, organised by the Department of Political Science, Goa University, 21–22 December. Da Silva, S. J. S. (2014). The Dynamics of Reversal. In R. Jenkins, P. Mukhopadhyay, & L. Kennedy (Eds.), Power, Policy and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones. Oxford University Press. Da Silva, S. (2019). The Dynamics of Land-Use Planning: A Case Study of Goa. Dissertation, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani. Da Silva, S., Nielsen, K. B., & Bedi, H. P. (2020). Land Use Planning, Dispossession and Contestation in Goa, India. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 47(6), 1301–1326. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1822822 Datta, A. (2015). New Urban Utopias of Postcolonial India. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5(1), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820614565748 Davis, D. E. (1999). The Power of Distance: Re-Theorizing Social Movements in Latin America. Theory and Society, 28(4), 585–638. D’Costa, A. P. (Ed.). (2010). A New India?: Critical Reflections in the Long Twentieth Century. Anthem Press. D’Costa, A. P., & Chakraborty, A. (2017). The Land Question in India: State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition. Oxford University Press. De Schutter, O. (2011). How Not to Think of Land-Grabbing: Three Critiques of LargeScale Investments in Farmland. Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(2), 249–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2011.559008 De Souza, H. (2015). Eat Dust: Mining and Greed in Goa. Harper Litmus. della Porta, D., & Diani, M. (2006). Social Movements: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing. D’Mello, P. (2017, November 20). In Goa, 54 Village Councils Vow to Stop Coal Trucks Passing Through Their Streets. Scroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/858460/in-goa54-village-councils-vow-to-stop-coal-trucks-passing-through-their-streets. D’Mello, P. (2018, September 12). Goa’s Environment Faces Problems from Infrastructure Boom. Mongabay. https://india.mongabay.com/2018/09/goas-environm ent-faces-problems-from-infrastructure-boom/.
250
The Great Goa Land Grab
Desai, M. (2011). Land Acquisition Law and the Proposed Changes. Economic and Political Weekly, 46(26/27), 95–100. deSouza, P. R. (2006). Political Nomadism and the Party System in India: The Struggle between the Fence and the Field. In P. R. deSouza & E. Sridharan (Eds), India’s Political Parties (391–396). Sage Directorate of Industries, Trade and Commerce (2017). Response Given in Goa Legislative Assembly to Unstarred Question No 10 “Projects Approved by Investment Promotion Board,” 7 August 2017. Dongre, S. M. (2013). Research Project on Assessing Quality of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Compliance of Environmental Clearance (EC) Conditions and Adequacy of Environmental Management Plan (EMP) of Mining Industry in Goa: Report. Centre for Environment Education, Goa. http://www.indiaenvironme ntportal.org.in/files/file/EIA%20Report%20Final_151013.pdf Dressel, B. (2014). Governance, Courts and Politics in Asia. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 44(2), 259–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2013.870827 Dubash, N. K., Kale, S., & Bharvirkar, R. (2018). Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States. Oxford University Press. Dubash, N. K., Khosla, R., Kelkar, U., & Lele, S. (2018). India and Climate Change: Evolving Ideas and Increasing Policy Engagement. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 43(1), 395–424. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ102017-025809 Dutta, S. (2007, December 25). Nandigram: The Gujarat of Sonar Bangla. Mainstream, 46(1). D’Silva, J. (Ed.). (2008). A Celebration of Peoples Struggles. Ramponkars. The Economic Times. (2014, August 14). Adani Power Buys Lanco Infratech’s Udupi Thermal Power Plant. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy /power/adani-power-buys-lanco-infratechs-udupi-thermal-power-plant/a rticleshow/40200946.cms?from=mdr. The Economic Times. (2019). HC Refuses to Stay Coal Handling at Goa Port. https: //tfipost.com/ians-news/hc-refuses-to-stay-coal-handling-at-goa-port/ The Economic Times. (2019, January 28). Thermal Coal: India’s 2018 Thermal Coal Imports Grew at Fastest Pace in 4 yrs. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/i ndustry/indl-goods/svs/metals-mining/indias-2018-thermal-coal-importsgrew-at-fastest-pace-in-4-yrs/articleshow/67718101.cms?from+mdr. The Economic Times. (2019, October 7). Thermal Coal Import Likely to Cross 200MT in 2019-20.https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/indl-goods/svs /metals-mining/thermal-coal-import-likely-to-cross-200-mt-in-2019-20/a rticleshow/71480990.cms. Edelman, M., Weis, T., Baviskar, A., Borras Jr, S. M., Holt-Giménez, E., Kandiyoti, D., & Wolford, W. (2014). Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty. Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 911-931.
Bibliography
251
Edenhofer, O., Steckel, J. C., Jakob, M., & Bertram, C. (2018). Reports of Coal’s Terminal Decline May be Exaggerated. Environmental Research Letters, 13(2). https: //doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa3a2 Edwards, G. A. S. (2019). Coal and Climate Change. WIREs Climate Change, 10(5). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.607 Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction. (2007). Writ Petition: Miss Swati Sridhar Kerkar and 4 Others v/s State of Goa and 2 Others, High Court of Bombay at Panaji Goa. Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction. (2008a). The Humble Petition of the Petitioner, High Court of Bombay at Panaji Goa. Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction. (2008b). Writ Petition: Franky Monteiro and 4 Others v/s State of Goa and 6 Others, High Court of Bombay at Panaji Goa. Extra Ordinary Civil Writ Jurisdiction. (2008c). Writ Petition: Lawrence Fernandes and 4 Others v/s State of Goa and 2 Others, High Court of Bombay at Panaji Goa. Fay, D., & James, D. (2010). The Anthropology of Land Restitution: An introduction. In D. Fay & D. James (Eds.), The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: ’Restoring What was Ours’ (pp. 1–24). Routledge. Featherstone, D. (2008). Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global Networks. John Wiley & Sons. Fernandes, A. (2003). Aggrandiser Government and Local Governance. Economic and Political Weekly, 38(27), 2873–2879. Fischler, C. (1988). Food, Self and Identity. Social Science Information, 27(2), 275–292. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901888027002005 Fogelman, C., & Bassett, T. J. (2017). Mapping for Investability: Remaking Land and Maps in Lesotho. Geoforum, 82, 252–258. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2 016.07.008 Frankel, F. R. (2005). India’s Political Economy: 1947-2004: The Gradual Revolution. Oxford University Press. Fuller, C. J., & Harris, J. (2020). For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State. In C. J. Fuller & V. Bénéï (Eds.), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (pp. 1–30). Social Science Press. Gamson, W. A. (2019). Bystanders, Public Opinion, and the Media. In D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (pp. 242–261). John Wiley & Sons. Gangopadhyay, B. (2008). A Tradition of Resistance. In G. Ray (Ed.), Nandigram and beyond (pp. 55–68). Gangchil. Gardner, K. (2012). Discordant Development: Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh. Pluto Press. Gellert, P. K., & Ciccantell, P. S. (2020). Coal’s Persistence in the Capitalist WorldEconomy. Sociology of Development, 6(2), 194–221. https://doi.org/10.1525/so d.2020.6.2.194
252
The Great Goa Land Grab
Ghertner, D. A. (2015). Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. Oxford University Press. Ghosh, A., & Lahiri, D. P. (2006). Our Land, their Development. In IMSE (Ed.), Battle of Singur: A Sordid Story of Violation of Human Rights (pp. 9–30). IMSE and PCFS. Ghosh, D. (2016). “We Don’t Want to Eat Coal”: Development and its Discontents in a Chhattisgarh District in India. Energy Policy, 99, 252–260. https://doi.org/10.1 016/j.enpol.2016.05.046 Gidwani, V. (2013). Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons. Social & Cultural Geography, 14(7), 773–783. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2013.800222 Gidwani, V. K. (1992). ‘Waste’ and the Permanent Settlement in Bengal. Economic & Political Weekly, 27(4), PE39–PE46. Global Energy Monitor. (2020, July). Coal Plants in India (power stations). Global Energy Monitor. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n1q3RVVqjE8I01 MpmZECviUY9QTSOnwmf7Sj1y8TlYI/edit#gid48949133. GMR Group. (2020). International Coal Assets. International Coal Assets — GMR Group, GMR Energy. https://www.gmrgroup.in/coal-international/ Goa Plans to Attract 6 mn Tourists in 5 yrs. (2012, June 30). The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/goa-plans-to-attract6-mn-tourists-in-5-yrs/. Goetz, A. M., & Jenkins, R. (2001). Hybrid Forms of Accountability: Citizen Engagement in Institutions of Public-Sector Oversight in India. Public Management Review, 3(3), 363–383. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616670110051957 GoG (2017a). The Goa Requisition and Acquisition of Property Bill, 2017 . Government of Goa. Panjim, 1167–1175. http://goaprintingpress.gov.in/downloads/1718/1 718-19-SI-OG-0.pdf. GoG (2017b). The Goa Compensation to the Project Affected Persons and Vesting of Land in the Government Bill, 2017. Government of Goa, Panjim, 1148–1151. http://goaprintingpress.gov.in/downloads/1718/1718-19-SI-OG-0.pdf. Gokhale, N. (2016, March 8). Disaster Airport: Goa’s New Runway in Mopa will Run the Ecology Over. Catch News. http://archive.catchnews.com/environment-ne ws/green-clearance-to-goa-s-mopa-airport-is-a-joke-here-s-why-14574586 02.html. Gokhale, N. (2017, April 3). The Sea Breeze will Bring More Coal Dust into Goa – if the Government has its Way. Scroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/832741/the-sea-bre eze-will-bring-more-coal-dust-into-goa-if-the-government-has-its-way. Gokhale, N. (2018, July 9). Goa Allows Dirty Coal Handling Facility to Restart so it Can Study how Bad the Pollution Actually is. Scroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/8852 94/in-goa-company-allowed-to-resume-coal-imports-so-pollution-studycan-be-conducted. Goldman, M. (2010). Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(3), 555–581. https: //doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.01001.x
Bibliography
253
Goldstein, J. E. (2015). Knowing the Subterranean: Land Grabbing, Oil Palm, and Divergent Expertise in Indonesia’s Peat Soil. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(4), 754–770. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x155997 87 Goltekar, S. P. N. (2012). A critical study of Mundkar Act vis a vis socio economic situation in Goa. Dissertation, Goa University. Goodman, J., & Marshall, J. P. (2018). Problems of Methodology and Method in Climate and Energy Research: Socialising Climate Change? Energy Research & Social Science, 45, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.08.010 Goswami, R. (2008). The Konkan Packaging Company of Goa. Economic & Political Weekly, 43(6), 10–11. Government of Goa. (2006). Government of Goa’s Policy on SEZ . Industries Trade and Commerce Department, Porvorim. Government of India, (2007) The Functioning of Special Economic Zones. New Delhi: Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Commerce. Government of India, (2014) Performance of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Department of Revenue. Government of India. Government of India. (2016). List of Notified SEZs. Ministry of Commerce and Industry. http://www.sezindia.nic.in/ Government of India. (2019). Environmental Clearance Database. Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change. http://environmentclearance.nic.in/ Government of India. (n.d.). Import of Steam Coal 27011920. Ministry of Commerce. https://commerce-app.gov.in/eidb/Icom.asp. Greenough, P. R. (1983). Indulgence and Abundance as Asian Peasant Values: A Bengali Case in Point. The Journal of Asian Studies, 42(4), 831–850. https: //doi.org/10.2307/2054767 Grubler, A., Wilson, C., Bento, N., Boza-Kiss, B., Krey, V., McCollum, D. L., Rao, N. D., Riahi, K., Rogelj, J., De Stercke, S., Cullen, J., Frank, S., Fricko, O., Guo, F., Gidden, M., Havlík, P., Huppmann, D., Kiesewetter, G., Rafaj, P., Valin, H. (2018). A low Energy Demand Scenario for Meeting the 1.5 °C Target and Sustainable Development Goals Without Negative Emission Technologies. Nature Energy, 3(6), 515–527. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-018-0172-6 Guha, R. (2000). The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. University of California Press. Guhathakurta, M. (1997). Sonar Bangla: Inspiration, Illusion and Extortion. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 23(1/2), 197–217. Gupta, A. (1995). Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist, 22(2). Gupta, A. (2015, September 24). Suspension. Society for Cultural Anthropology. https: //doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00090
254
The Great Goa Land Grab
Gupta, A., & Sivaramakrishnan, K. (Eds.). (2011). The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge. Gupta, D., & Kohli, K. (2017). Mapping Dilutions in a Central Law. Centre for Policy Research. Gupta, M. (2012). Didi: A Political Biography. HarperCollins. Haarstad, H., & Wanvik, T. I. (2016). Carbonscapes and Beyond: Conceptualizing the Instability of Oil Landscapes. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 432–450. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516648007 Hajer, M. A. (1995). The Politics of Environmental Discourse. Clarendon Press. Hall, D. (2013). Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Global Land Grab. Third World Quarterly, 34(9), 1582–1604. https://doi.org/10 .1080/01436597.2013.843854 Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2004). The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession. Socialist Register, 40, 63–87. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315251196-10 Harvey, D. (2017). Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Oxford University Press. Harvey, P., & Knox, H. (2015). Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Cornell University Press. Herald (2015, May 31). The Treasure of Tiracol Displayed to the World: From Barren to Beautiful [Advertisement by Leading Hotels]. Hibou, Béatrice. (2004). From Privatising the Economy to Privatising the State: An Analysis of the Continual Formation of the State. In Hibou Béatrice (Ed.), Privatizing the State (pp. 1–47). Columbia University Press. Hindustan Times. (2015, July 15). States Can Pass Own Land Acquisition Laws if Centre Can’t: Jaitley. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/states-can-pa ss-own-land-acquisition-laws-if-centre-can-t-jaitley/story-oT9FwIQaks0fm jee7pKXAO.html. Hirschl, R. (2008). The Judicialization of Mega-Politics and the Rise of Political courts. Annual Review of Political Science, 11(1), 93–118. https://doi.org/10.1146/annu rev.polisci.11.053006.183906 Howe, C., Lockrem, J., Appel, H., Hackett, E., Boyer, D., Hall, R., Schneider-Mayerson, M., Pope, A., Gupta, A., Rodwell, E., Ballestero, A., Durbin, T., el-Dahdah, F., Long, E., & Mody, C. (2015). Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 41(3), 547–565. https://doi.org/10 .1177/0162243915620017 Huber, M. (2015). Theorizing Energy Geographies. Geography Compass, 9(6), 327–338. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12214 Human Rights Watch. (2012). Out of Control: Mining, Regulatory Failure, and Human Rights in India. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/06/14/outcontrol/mining-regulatory-failure-and-human-rights-india
Bibliography
255
Ichijo, A., & Ranta, R. (2018). Food, National Identity and Nationalism: From Everyday to Global Politics. Palgrave Macmillan. IEA. (2019). Coal Information 2019. OECD Publishing. Jamwal, N. (2017, August 31). Meet the Mega-Project That Goans Fighting ’Dirty Coal’ are up Against. The Wire. https://thewire.in/environment/mormugao-port-v asco-coal-iron-ore-adani-jindal-steel-dredging. Jenkins, R. (1998). Fællesspisning midt i Jylland: Når det drejer sig mere om spisning og drikning end om mad og drikke. Tidsskriftet Antropologi, 39, 37–52. Jenkins, R. (2011). The politics of India’s Special Economic Zones. In S. Ruparelia, S. Reddy, J. Harriss, & S. Corbridge (Eds.), Understanding India’s new political economy: A great transformation? (pp. 49–65). Routledge. Jenkins, R., & Goetz, A. M. (1999). Accounts and Accountability: Theoretical Implications of the Right-to-Information Movement in India. Third World Quarterly, 20(3), 603–622. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436599913712 Jenkins, R., Kennedy, L., & Mukhopadhyay, P. (2014). Power, Policy, and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones. Oxford University Press. Jensen, C. B., & Morita, A. (2015). Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 1, 81–87. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests201 5.21 Jones, J. D. (2009). Negotiating Development: A Study of the Grassroots Resistance to India’s 2005 Special Economic Zones Act. Dissertation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Kaag, M. & Zoomers, A. (2014). The Global Land Grab: Beyond the Hype. Zed Books. Kadfak, A., & Oskarsson, P. (2020). An (Urban) Political Ecology approach to SmallScale Fisheries in the Global South. Geoforum, 108, 237–245. https://doi.org/10 .1016/j.geoforum.2019.11.008 Kale, S. S. (2020). Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development. Stanford University Press. Kamat, A. (2020). Three Projects and Massive Coal Corridor Worry Goa. Civil Society. https://www.civilsocietyonline.com/environment/three-projects-and-a-ma ssive-coal-corridor-worry-goa/. Kang, D. C. (2002). Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines. Cambridge University Press. Kapoor, D. (2011). Subaltern Social Movement (SSM) Post-Mortems of Development in India: Locating Trans-Local Activism and Radicalism. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 46(2), 130–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909610395889 Kapur, D., & Vaishnav, M. (2018). Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India. Oxford University Press. Kaul, V. (2015, August 18). How State Governments are Supporting High Real Estate Prices. https://in.finance.yahoo.com/news/how-state-governments-are-su pporting-high-real-estate-prices-165616138.html?guccounter=1.
256
The Great Goa Land Grab
Kaur, R. (2012). Nation’s Two Bodies: Rethinking the Idea of ‘New’ India and its Other. Third World Quarterly, 33(4), 603–621. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2012. 657420 Kaur, R. (2015). Post-Exotic India: On Remixed Histories and Smart Images. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 23(3), 307–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/10 70289x.2015.1034134 Kaur, R., & Hansen, T. B. (2015). Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital, Novelty in Post-Reform India. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 23(3), 265–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2015.1034135 Kennedy, L. (2014). Haryana: Beyond the Rural–Urban Divide. In R. Jenkins, L. Kennedy, & P. Mukhopadhyay (Eds.), Power, Policy, and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones (pp. 170–202). Oxford University Press. Kennedy, L. (2014). The Politics of Economic Restructuring in India: Economic Governance and State Spatial Rescaling . Routledge. Kennedy, L., & Sood, A. (2016). Greenfield Development as Tabula Rasa. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(17), 41–49. Kenney-Lazar, M. (2017). Governing Dispossession: Relational Land Grabbing in Laos. Annals of the American Association of Geographers,108(3), 679–694. https: //doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1373627 Kirsch, S. (2014). Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and their Critics. University of California Press. Kohli, A. (2012). Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India. Cambridge University Press Kohli, K., & Menon, M. (2016). The Tactics of Persuasion: Environmental Negotiations over a Corporate Coal Project in Coastal India. Energy Policy, 99, 270–276. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2016.05.027 Kolstø, D. (2019). Amaravati: The Making of a Disaster Capital in Andhra Pradesh? Economic and Political Weekly, 54(20), 44–51. Kosambi, D. D. (2013). Myth and Reality. Popular Prakashan. Kugelman, M. (2012). The Global Farms Race: Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food Security. Island Press. Kuldova, T. (2014). Designing an Illusion of India’s Future Superpowerdom: Of the Rise of Neo-Aristocracy, Hindutva and Philanthrocapitalism. The Unfamiliar: An Anthropological Journal, 4(1), 15–22. https://doi.org/10.2218/unfamiliar.v4i 1.1097 Kulshrestha, S. K. (2012). Urban and Regional Planning in India a Handbook for Professional Practice. Sage. Kurian, V. (2018, January 22). Adanis to Focus More on Coastal Movement of Coal. Business Line. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/a danis-to-focus-more-on-coastal-movement-of-coal/article7949533.ece#:~: text=Adani%20Ports%20and%20SEZ%20will,more%20of%20the%20fuel%20i nternally.
Bibliography
257
Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2013). Gender (plays) in Tanjung Bara Mining Camp in Eastern Kalimantan, Indonesia. Gender, Place & Culture, 20(8), 979–998. https: //doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2012.737770 Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2014). Introduction to Coal in India: Energising the Nation. In K. Lahiri-Dutt (Ed.), The Coal Nation: Histories, Ecologies and Politics of Coal in India (pp. 1–36). Ashgate. Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2016). The Diverse Worlds of Coal in India: Energising the Nation, Energising Livelihoods. Energy Policy, 99, 203–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. enpol.2016.05.045 Lalchadaani, N. (2010, July 4). Igi’s Swanky Terminal 3 Takes India into Club Class. The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/IGIs-swa nky-Terminal-3-takes-India-into-club-class/articleshow/6126065.cms. Lerche, J. (2013). The Agrarian Question in Neoliberal India: Agrarian Transition Bypassed? Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3), 382–404. https://doi.org/10.111 1/joac.12026 Levien, M. (2011). Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India. Journal of Agrarian Change, 11(4), 454–483. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14 71-0366.2011.00329.x Levien, M. (2011). Rationalising Dispossession: The Land Acquisition and Resettlement Bills. Economic & Political Weekly, 46(11), 66–71. Levien, M. (2012). The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Dispossession in India. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3/4), 933–969. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.656268 Levien, M. (2013). Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic Zones. Development and Change, 44(2), 381–407. https://doi.org/10.1111/de ch.12012 Levien, M. (2013). The Politics of Dispossession: Theorizing India’s ‘Land Wars.’ Politics & Society, 41(3), 351–394. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329213493751 Levien, M. (2015). From Primitive Accumulation to Regimes of Dispossession. Economics and Political Weekly, 50(22), 146–157. Levien, M. (2018). Dispossession Without Development. Land Grabs in Neoliberal India. Oxford University Press. Li, F. (2009). Documenting Accountability: Environmental Impact Assessment in a Peruvian Mining Project. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 32(2), 218–236. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1555-2934.2009.01042.x Ma, J., & Weng, Y.-L. (2020, February 19). India to Stop Importing Coal from Fiscal 2023-2024. S&P Global Platts. https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-in sights/latest-news/coal/021920-india-to-stop-importing-coal-from-fiscal2023-2024 Majumder, S. (2012). “Who Wants to Marry a Farmer?” Neoliberal Industrialization and the Politics of Land and Work in Rural West Bengal. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 64, 84–98. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2012.640108 Malkarnekar, G. (2016, October 16). ‘Pez’ Soothes the Fever and the Brow. The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/pez-soothes-the-fe ver-and-the-brow/articleshow/54874130.cms
258
The Great Goa Land Grab
Manor, J. (2015). A Precarious Enterprise? Multiple Antagonisms during Year One of the Modi Government. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38(4), 736–754. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1083644 McAdam, D. (1983). Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency. American Sociological Review, 48(6), 735–754. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095322 McFarlane, C. (2011). On Context: Assemblage, Political Economy and Structure. City, 15(3-4), 375–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2011.595111 Menon, M., Kapoor, M., Venkatram, P., Kohli, K., & Kaur, S. (2015). CZMAs and Coastal Environments: Two Decades of Regulating Land Use Change on India’s Coastline. Centre for Policy Research. Meyer, D. S., & Staggenborg, S. (1996). Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity. American Journal of Sociology, 101(6), 1628– 1660. https://doi.org/10.1086/230869 Miller, B. (2004). Spaces of Mobilization: Transnational Social Movements. In C. Barnett & M. Low (Eds.), Spaces of Democracy: Geographical Perspectives on Citizenship, Participation and Representation (pp. 223–246). Sage. Ministry of Coal, The Expert Committee on Road Map for Coal Sector Reforms: Part 2 (2007). New Delhi; Ministry of Coal. Ministry of Coal. (n.d.). Production and Supplies. Ministry of Coal. https://coal.nic.i n/content/production-and-supplies Ministry of Power, Annual report 2003–2004 (2004). New Delhi; Government of India. Ministry of Power, Annual report 2006–2007(2007). New Delhi; Government of India. Ministry of Power, Report of the Working Group on Power for Twelfth Plan (2012–2017) (2012). New Delhi; Government of India. http://planningcommission.nic.in/ aboutus/committee/wrkgrp12/wg_power1904.pdf Ministry of Power. (n.d.). Ultra Mega Power Projects. Ministry of Power. https: //powermin.gov.in/sites/default/files/webform/notices/UMPP_Projects.pdf Mitchell, T. (2013). Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso. Mody, A. (2014). Karnataka: The Primacy of the Local. In R. Jenkins, L. Kennedy, & P. Mukhopadhyay (Eds.), Power, Policy, and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones (pp.203–238). Oxford UP. Mohammad, N. (2018, October 12). If Gujarat Power Plants Bailout is Approved, Consumers and Lenders will Pick up the Tab. The Wire. https://thewire.in/ene rgy/gujarat-power-plan-tata-adani Mohan, A., & Topp, K. (2018). India’s Energy Future: Contested Narratives of Change. Energy Research & Social Science, 44, 75–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018. 04.040 Mühlhäusler, P., & Peace, A. (2006). Environmental Discourses. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35(1), 457–479. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.0817 05.123203 Mumtaz, R., & Sardar, M. (2008, February 28). No More SEZs in Goa. One World South Asia. Münster, D. (2015). Farmers’ Suicide and the Moral Economy of Agriculture: Victimhood, Voice, and Agro-Environmental Responsibility in South India. In L. Broz & D. Münster (Eds.), Suicide and Agency: Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Destruction, Personhood, and Power (pp. 105–125). Ashgate. Murali, K. (2019). Economic Liberalisation and the Structural Power of Business. In K. Murali, A. Kohli, & C. Jaffrelot (Eds.), Business and Politics in India (pp. 25–49). Oxford University Press.
Bibliography
259
Nadakarni, S. S. (2015). Working of Goa Industrial Development Corporation During Open Regime: A Critical Study. Dissertation, Department of Studies in Commerce, Karnatak University, Dharwad. Nair, S. (2017, October 25). Coal on Move, 25 Tonnes a Minute, is Choking Goa, More is on the Way. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/co al-on-move-25-tonnes-a-minute-is-choking-goa-more-is-on-the-way-49 04963/ Nair, S. (2017, October 26). Coal Burying Goa: What the Toxic Train Leaves in its Wake. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/coal-burying-goa -the-toxic-train-pollution-vasco-port-mormugao-port-jsw-steel-vedanta-js w-group-mormugao-port-manohar-parikar-4906642/ Nair, S. (2017, October 27). Coal Burying Goa: All along the Road Route, the Black Dust Settles. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/goacoal-industry-jsw-mormugao-port-pollution-adani-group-coal-burying-g oa-4908209/ Nandi, N., Sarkar, S., Roychowdhury, S., Adhikari, A.D., Nandi, A., Helaluddin. (2007). Long Live the People’s Resistance against Aggression of Globalization! Long Live the People’s Occupation of Nandigram! Manthan Samayiki. http://sanhati.co m/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/full_report.pdf Newman, R. S. (1984). Goa: The Transformation of an Indian Region. Pacific Affairs, 57(3), 429. https://doi.org/10.2307/2759068 Newman, R. S. (2001). Of Umbrellas, Goddesses, and Dreams: Essays on Goan Culture and Society. Other India Press. Nielsen, K. B. (2009). Four narratives of a Social Movement in West Bengal. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 32(3), 448–468. https://doi.org/10.1080/00 856400903374335 Nielsen, K. B. (2015). Law and Larai: The (De)judicialisation of Subaltern Resistance in West Bengal. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45(4), 618–639. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00472336.2015.1040821 Nielsen, K. B. (2015). Mopa Airport Woes: Debating the Proposed Airport in North Goa. Economic & Political Weekly, 50(25). https://www.epw.in/journal/2015/ 25/reports-states-web-exclusives/mopa-airport-woes.html Nielsen, K. B. (2015). Community and the Politics of Caste, Class and Representation in the Singur Movement, West Bengal. In A. G. Nilsen & S. Roy (Eds.), New subaltern politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (pp. 202–224). Oxford University Press. Nielsen, K. B. (2017). Unclean Slates: Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession and ‘EIA Struggles’ in Goa. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40(4), 844–861. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2017.1370185 Nielsen, K. B. (2018). Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India. Anthem Press. Nielsen, K. B., & Nilsen, A. G. (2014). Law Struggles and Hegemonic Processes in Neoliberal India: Gramscian Reflections on Land Acquisition Legislation. Globalizations, 12(2), 203–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2014.937084 Nielsen, K. B. & Oskarsson, P. (2016). Development Deadlocks of the New Indian State. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(4), 67-69 Nielsen, K. B. & Oskarsson, P., Eds. (2017). Industrialising Rural India: Land, Policy and Resistance. Routledge.
260
The Great Goa Land Grab
Nielsen, K. B., & Wilhite, H. (2015). The Rise and Fall of the ‘People’s Car’: MiddleClass Aspirations, Status and Mobile Symbolism in ‘New India’. Contemporary South Asia, 23(4), 618–639. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2015.1090951 Oliveira, G. d. L. T. (2013). Land Regularization in Brazil and the Global Land Grab. Development and Change, 44(2), 261-283. Oskarsson, P. (2010). The Law of the Land Contested: Bauxite Mining in Tribal, Central India in an Age of Economic Reform. Dissertation, University of East Anglia, Norwich. Oskarsson, P. (2017). Diverging Discourses On Bauxite Mining in Eastern India: Life-Supporting Hills for Adivasis or National Treasure Chests on Barren Lands? Society & Natural Resources, 30(8), 994–1008. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2017.1295496 Oskarsson, P. (2017). The Nature of Bauxite Mining and Adivasi Livelihoods in the Industrialisation of Eastern India. In K. B. Nielsen & P. Oskarsson (Eds.), Industrialising Rural India (pp. 123–139). Routledge. Oskarsson, P., & Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2019). India’s Resource (inter)nationalism: Overseas Mining Investments Shaped by Domestic Conditions. The Extractive Industries and Society, 6(3), 747–755. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2018.11.006 Oskarsson, P., Lahiri-Dutt, K., & Wennström, P. (2019). From Incremental Dispossession to a Cumulative Land Grab: Understanding Territorial Transformation in India’s North Karanpura Coalfield. Development and Change, 50(6), 1485–1508. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12513 Oskarsson, P., & Nielsen, K. B. (2014). Development Deadlock: Aborted Industrialization and Blocked Land Restitution in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, India. Development Studies Research, 1(1), 267–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/216650 95.2014.967412 Pabreja, H., & Ram Mohan, M. P. (2016). Public Hearings in Environmental Clearance Process. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(50), 68–75. Padel, F. (2015). The Bauxite-Aluminum Industry and India’s Adivasis. In R. Halip, C. M. Doyle, & H. Tugendhat (Eds.), Mining, the Aluminium Industry and Indigenous Peoples: Enhancing Corporate Respect for Indigenous Peoples’ Rights (pp. 102–112). AIPP, FPP and IUCN. Padel, F., & Das, S. (2010). Cultural Genocide and the Rhetoric of Sustainable Mining in East India. Contemporary South Asia, 18(3), 333–341. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09584935.2010.503871 Panjabi, K., Chakravarti, P., K¯it¯a Va, Bhog, D., Manjrekar, N., & Salai, S. (2009). Textbook Regimes: A Feminist Critique of Nation and Identity. Nirantar. Pargal, S., & Banerjee, S. G. (2014). More Power to India: The Challenge of Electricity Distribution. World Bank. Parobo, P. D. (2015). India’s First Democratic Revolution: Dayanand Bandodkar and the Rise of the Bahujan in Goa. Orient Blackswan. Parobo, P. D. (2018). The State, Networks and Family Raj in Goa. Studies in Indian Politics, 6(2), 168–179. https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023018797408 Perez, R. M. (2011). The Tulsi and the Cross: Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter in Goa. Orient BlackSwan. Phadnis, A., & Majumder, A. (2016, March 21). Air Show Highlights Opportunities in Indian Aviation. Business Standard. http://www.business-standard.com/articl e/companies/air-show-highlights-opportunities-in-indian-aviation-11603 2000702_1.html.
Bibliography
261
Poulantzas, N. (1978). State, Power, Socialism. New Left Review Editions. Press Information Bureau. (2020, June 11). Unleashing Coal: New Hopes for Atmanirbhar Bharat. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1630919. Radcliffe, S. A. (2005). Development and Geography: Towards a Postcolonial Development Geography? Progress in Human Geography, 29(3), 291–298. https: //doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph548pr Rajagopal, B. (2007). Pro-Human Rights but Anti-poor? A Critical Evaluation of the Indian Supreme Court from a Social Movement Perspective. Human Rights Review, 8(3), 157–186. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-007-0004-8 Rajalakshmi, T. K. (2015, February 20). Ordinance Raj. Frontline. http://www.frontlin e.in/the-nation/ordinance-raj/article6852240.ece. Ramachandraiah, C. (2016). Making of Amaravati: A Landscape of Speculation and Intimidation. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(17), 68–75. Ramesh, J., & Khan, M. A. (2015). Legislating for Justice the Making of the 2013 Land Acquisition Law. Oxford University Press. Ray, G. (Ed.). (2008). Nandigram and Beyond. Gangchil. Ray, R. (1999). Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India. University of Minnesota Press. Ren, X. (2016). Land Acquisition, Rural Protests, and the Local State in China and India. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 35(1), 25–41. https: //doi.org/10.1177/0263774x16655802 Robinson, M. (2005). Corruption and Development: An Introduction. In M. Robinson (Ed.), Corruption and Development (pp. 1–14). Frank Cass. Routledge, P. (1993). Terrains of Resistance: Nonviolent Social Movements and the Contestation of Place in India. Praeger. Routledge, P. (2000). Consuming Goa: Tourist Site as Dispensable Space. Economic & Political Weekly, 35(30), 2647–2656. Routra, J. K. (1993). Urban and Regional Planning in Practice in India. Habitat International, 17(3), 55–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/0197-3975(93)90016-6 Roy, A. (2007). Calcutta Requiem: Gender and the Politics of Poverty. Pearson Longman. Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, InsurRoy, A. (2009). gence and the Idiom of Urbanization. Planning Theory, 8(1), 76–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095208099299 Roy, A. (2011). In A. Roy & A. Ong (Eds.), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (pp. 259–278). Blackwell. Roy, B., & Schaffartzik, A. (2021). Talk Renewables, Walk Coal: The Paradox of India’s Energy Transition. Ecological Economics, 180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolec on.2020.106871 Roy, D. (2008). Nandigram: Victory of the Subaltern. In G. Ray (Ed.), Nandigram and Beyond (pp. 69–86). Gangchil. Roy, D. (2014). Rural Politics in India: Political Stratification and Governance in West Bengal. Cambridge University Press. Rozema, J. G., & Bond, A. J. (2015). Framing Effectiveness in Impact Assessment: Discourse Accommodation in Controversial Infrastructure Development. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 50, 66–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar .2014.08.001
262
The Great Goa Land Grab
Rubinoff, A. G. (1998). In The Construction of a Political Community: Integration and Identity in Goa. Sage Publications. Rubinoff, A. G. (2000). Serial Elections: Tragi-Comedy in Goa. Economic and Political Weekly, 35(16), 1391–1395. Runhaar, H., van Laerhoven, F., Driessen, P., & Arts, J. (2013). Environmental Assessment in The Netherlands: Effectively Governing Environmental Protection? A Discourse Analysis. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 39, 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2012.05.003 Ruparelia, S., Reddy, S., Harriss, J., & Corbridge, S. (Eds.). (2011). Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? Routledge. Sampat, P. (2014). Right to Land and the Rule of Law: Infrastructure, Urbanization and Resistance in India. Dissertation, CUNY, New York. Sampat, P. (2015). The ‘Goan Impasse’: Land Rights and Resistance to SEZs in Goa, India. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 42(3-4), 765–790. https://doi.org/10.108 0/03066150.2015.1013098 Sampat, P. (2016). Dholera: The Emperor’s New Clothes. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(17), 59–67. Sanyal, K. K. (2014). Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality & Post-Colonial Capitalism. Routledge. Sareen, S. (2018). Energy Distribution Trajectories in Two Western Indian States: Comparative Politics and Sectoral Dynamics. Energy Research & Social Science, 35, 17–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.10.038 Scott, A. (1995). Ideology and the New Social Movements. Routledge. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. Yale University Press. Searle, L. G. (2016). Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India. University of Chicago Press. Sen, S. (1993). Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal. Gender & History, 5(2), 231–243. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.1993.tb0 0174.x Sequeira, N. (2015, April 16). Next Yachting Destination, Goa? The Times of India. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Next-yachting-destination-Go a/articleshow/46938322.cms. Shankar, S. (2012). The Judiciary, Policy, and Politics in India. In Dressel Björn (Ed.), The judicialization of politics in Asia (pp. 56–76). Routledge. Shiva, V., Jani, S., & Fontana, S. M. (2011). The Great Indian Land Grab. Navdanya. Shyamal, S. (2014). Engineering, Procurement and Construction: Making India Brick by Brick. Ernst & Young. https://fdocuments.in/document/engineering-procu rement-construction-making-india-brick-by-brickpdf.html. Singh, R. (2012). Inefficiency and Abuse of Compulsory Land Acquisition. Economic and Political Weekly, 47(19), 46–53. Sinha, A. (2002). Goa Indica: A Critical Portrait of Postcolonial Goa. Bibliophile South Asia. Sivaramakrishnan, K., & Agrawal, A. (2003). Regional Modernities in Stories and Practices of Development. In K. Sivaramakrishnan & A. Agrawal (Eds.), Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (pp. 1–62). Oxford University Press. Snow, D. A. (2011). In D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (pp. 380–412). Blackwell.
Bibliography
263
Somajayi, S., Somajayi, G., & Coelho, J. (2009). People’s Response to Environmental Challenges: Case of Goa Bachao Abhiya. In Environmental Concerns and Sustainable Development: Some Perspectives from India (pp. 101–121). Tata Energy Research Institute. Sovacool, B. K. (2016). How Long will it Take? Conceptualizing the Temporal Dynamics of Energy Transitions. Energy Research & Social Science, 13, 202–215. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.12.020 Srinivasulu, K. (2014). Andhra Pradesh: Land Acquisition and Popular Resistance. In R. Jenkins, L. Kennedy, & P. Mukhopadhyay (Eds.), Power, Policy, and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones (pp. 72–107). Oxford University Press. Steckel, J. C., Edenhofer, O., & Jakob, M. (2015). Drivers for the Renaissance of Coal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(29), E3775–E3781. https: //doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1422722112 Steur, L. (2015). Theorizing Thervoy: Subaltern Studies and Dalit Praxis in India’s Land Wars. In A. G. Nilsen & S. Roy (Eds.), New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (pp. 177–201). Oxford University Press. Sud, N. (2009). The Indian State in a Liberalizing Landscape. Development and Change, 40(4), 645–665. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2009.01566.x Sud, N. (2014). Governing India’s Land. World Development, 60, 43–56. https://doi.or g/10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.03.015 Sud, N. (2014). The Men in the Middle: A Missing Dimension in Global Land Deals. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(4), 593–612. https://doi.org/10.1080/030661 50.2014.920329 Sud, N. (2016). State, Scale and Networks in the Liberalisation of India’s land. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 35(1), 76–93. https://doi.org/10.1 177/0263774x16655801 Sud, N. (2020). The Making of Land and the Making of India. Oxford University Press. Sundar, N. (2011). The Rule of Law and the Rule of Property: Law-Struggles and the Neo-Liberal State in India. In A. Gupta & K. Sivaramakrishnan (Eds.), The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 175–93). Routledge. Sundaram, M. A. (1999). Paradise Lost? Industry in Goa. Economic and Political Weekly, 34(48), 3350–3351. Swyngedouw, E. (2006). Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) cities. Science as Culture, 15(2), 105–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/095054 30600707970 Talukdar, R. (2016). Hiding Neoliberal Coal Behind the Indian Poor. Journal of Australian Political Economy, 78, 132–158. Talukdar, S. C. (1962). Economic Development of Goa: Problems and Prospects. Economic and Political Weekly, 14(23), 917–920. Temper, L., del Bene, D., & Martinez-Alier, J. (2015). Mapping the Frontiers and Front Lines of Global Environmental Justice: the EJAtlas. Journal of Political Ecology, 22(1), 255–278. https://doi.org/10.2458/v22i1.21108 Thakurtha, P. G., & Bhattacharya, A. K. (2019). Contours of Crony Capitalism in the Modi Raj. In A. P. Chatterji, T. B. Hansen, & C. Jaffrelot (Eds.), Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (pp. 193–214). Oxford University.
264
The Great Goa Land Grab
The Indian Express (2012, June 30). Goa Plans to Attract 6 mn Tourists in 5 yrs. https: //indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/goa-plans-to-attract-6-mn -tourists-in-5-yrs/ Thomassen, B. (2009). The Uses and Meaning of Liminality. International Political Anthropology, 2(1), 5–28. Thomassen, B. (2012). Notes Towards an Anthropology of Political Revolutions. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54(3), 679–706. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0010417512000278 Tilly, C. (2006). Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. Russell Sage Foundation. Tilly, C., & Tarrow, S. G. (2007). Contentious Politics. Paradigm Publishers. The Times of India. (2013, July 21). Mopa Farmers Vow not to Part with Fields for Airport. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/mopa-farmers-vow-n ot-to-part-with-fields-for-airport/articleshow/21210302.cms. The Times of India. (2013, August 24). People for Mopa Garners Support in Mapusa. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/people-for-mopa-garners-su pport-in-mapusa/articleshow/22017354.cms. The Times of India. (2017, Aug 21). Govt Wants to Block Goans from Getting Justice at Ngt. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/govt-wants-to-block-go ans-from-getting-justice-at-ngt/articleshow/60150038.cms. Town and Country Planning Department (2017). Response Given in Goa Legislative Assembly to Unstarred Question No 18 ‘Change of Zone’, 24 July. Trichur, R. S. (2013). Refiguring Goa: From Trading Post to Tourism Destination. Goa1556. Turner, V. W. (1988). The Anthropology of Performance. PAJ Publications. Upadhyaya, M.L. (2015). Law on Agrarian Reforms. The Indian Law Institute. http: //14.139.60.114:8080/jspui/bitstream/123456789/3483/1/006_1984_Law%2 0on%20Agrarian%20Reforms.pdf. Upendra, B. (1985). Taking Suffering Seriously: Social Action Litigation in the Supreme Court of India. Third World Legal Studies, 4(6), 107–132. Vargas-Cetina, G., & Ayora-Diaz, S. I. (2004). Society for Latin American Anthropology: Food and Regional Identity. Anthropology News, 45(3). https://doi.org/10.111 1/an.2004.45.3.50.1 Video Volunteers. (2015, July 27). Save Tiracol Save Goa. https://www.videovolunteer s.org/savetiracol/. Vijayabaskar, M. (2010). Saving Agricultural Labour from Agriculture: SEZs and Politics of Silence in Tamil Nadu. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(6), 36–43. Vijayabaskar, M. (2014). Tamil Nadu: The Politics of Silence. In L. Kennedy, R. Jenkins, & P. Mukhopadhyay (Eds.), Power, Policy, and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones (pp. 304–331). Oxford University Press. https://doi.or g/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198097341.001.0001 Vijayabaskar, M., & Menon, A. (2018). Dispossession by Neglect: Agricultural Land Sales in Southern India. Journal of Agrarian Change, 18(3), 571–587. https: //doi.org/10.1111/joac.12256 Vohra, S. (2020, January 3). Go Goa Gone: The Harsh Reality Of How Goa Is Being Destroyed. Youth Ki Awaaz. https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2020/01/seven-t hings-i-learnt-following-an-anti-coal-movement-in-india/. Warner, K. J., & Jones, G. A. (2019). The 21st Century Coal Question: China, India, Development, and Climate Change. Atmosphere, 10(8), 476. https://doi.org/10 .3390/atmos10080476
Wass, G. (Ed.). (2011). Corporate Activity and Human Rights in India. Human Rights Law Network. Weinstein, L. (2008). Mumbai’s Development Mafias: Globalization, Organized Crime and Land Development. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(1), 22–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00766.x White, B., Borras Jr., S. M., Hall, R., Scoones, I., & Wolford, W. (2012). The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3-4), 619–647. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.691879 William, R. H. (2011). The Cultural Contexts of Collective Action: Constraints, Opportunities, and the Symbolic Life of Social Movement. In D. A. Snow, H. Kriesi, & S. A. Soule (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (pp. 91–115). Blackwell Publication. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470999 103.ch11 The Wire. (2020, June 20). Allowing Coal Auction in Very Dense Forest Areas Will Be ’Triple Disaster’: Jairam Ramesh. https://thewire.in/politics/allowing-coal-au ction-in-very-dense-forest-areas-will-be-triple-disaster-jairam-ramesh Wood, D., & Fels, J. (2008). The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World. The University of Chicago Press. Yadav, M., Singh, N. K., & Gautam, S. (2019). Commercial Coal Mining in India Opened for Private Sector: A Boon or Inutile. In R. A. Agarwal, A. K. Agarwal, T. Gupta, & N. Sharma (Eds.), Pollutants from Energy Sources: Characterization and Control (pp. 105–115). Springer. Yin, R. K. (2018). Case Study Research: Design and Methods (6th ed.). Sage. Youngblood, M. D. (2016). Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization. South Asian Studies Association. Zhang, Q. F., & Wu, J. (2017). Political Dynamics in Land Commodification: Commodifying Rural Land Development Rights in Chengdu, China. Geoforum, 78, 98–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.10.001
266
About the Authors
K
ENNETH B O N IELSEN is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, and the Leader of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. He works on land politics and the political economy of development in contemporary India, with a particular focus on the states of West Bengal and Goa. He is the author of Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India (Anthem Press 2018), and the co-editor of several books on Indian politics and society, the most recent being Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories, Contestations (Pluto Press 2019).
H
P LUMRIDGE B EDI is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Dickinson College. Her research examines how civil society and socio-environmental movements experience and adapt to natural resource and landscape modifications related to energy processes, climate change, industrialization, and agricultural transitions. She has carried out fieldwork in several parts of South Asia as well as in the United States. Her published work appears in Contemporary South Asia; Development and Change; Economic and Political Weekly; Energy Research and Social Science; Environment and Planning, A; Geoforum; Journal of Contemporary Asia; and Oxford Development Studies.
S
EATHER
D A S ILVA is an Assistant Professor at BITS-Pilani, Dept. of Humanities & Social Sciences, Goa Campus, where he teaches Development Studies and Political Theory. His research has looked at electoral politics and the politics of land-use planning in Goa. He completed his doctoral thesis on ‘The Dynamics of Land Use Planning: A Case Study of Goa’ in 2018. He has also worked at Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, assisting on a project assessing the State of Democracy in South Asia. In Goa, he has been involved in various civil society movements around land-related issues. OLANO