Land and Livelihoods in Neoliberal India

The book discusses important developments emerging around the land questions in India in the context of India’s neoliberal economic development and its changing political economy. It covers many issues that have been impinging the political economy in land and livelihoods in India since the 1990s, examining the land question from diverse methodological standpoints. Most of the chapters rely on evidence generated through primary surveys in different parts of the country. The book, via its diversity of approaches and methodologies, brings out new and hitherto unexplored and/or less researched issues on the emerging land question in India. The range of issues addressed in the volume encompasses the contemporary developments in the political economy of land, land dispossession, SEZs, agrarian changes, urbanisation and the drive for the commodification of land across India. The authors also examine role of the state in promoting the capitalist transformation in India and continuities and changes emerging in the context of land liberalisation and market-friendly economic reforms.

Deepak K. Mishra is Professor of Economics at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His research interests are in the areas of the political economy of agrarian change, rural livelihoods and agrarian institutions, and migration. He has co-authored The Unfolding Crisis in Assam's Tea Plantations: Employment and Occupational Mobility (2012), has edited Internal Migration in Contemporary India (2016) and has co-edited Rethinking Economic Development in Northeast India: The Emerging Dynamics (2017).

Pradeep Nayak has completed his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and was until recently Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India. He is a member of the Odisha Administrative Service and works as the Chief General Manager, Odisha State Disaster Management Authority, Bhubaneswar. He has contributed extensively to the study of land administration in India. Hispublication includes The State and Land Records Modernisation (2015).