Land for urbanization: Shifting policies and variegated accumulation strategies in a fast-growing city in eastern India

Land emerged as a critical element to understand India’s new urban transition and development-dispossession debate since it adopted the globalization policies in 1991. The land grab and land-based accumulation have been widely studied in leading cities in the backdrop of the neoliberal urban process. The relatively smaller, medium-sized cities contribute to comprehending this process’s sub-regional and local variants. In this paper, we study Siliguri, a rapidly growing city in West Bengal, a federal state that was a major epicenter of the country’s land debates in the recent past. Land is relatively scarce in Siliguri due to its location in the narrow land strip, India’s strategically important ‘Chicken-Neck Corridor.’ The land is also diverse, including tea plantations, defense, and forested land, protected through various legal arrangements. The growing demand-supply gap and land price speculation led to an emerging new political economy. At the local level, new legal and extra-legal mechanisms have taken care of alternative routes of land-based accumulation ranging from land liberalization, commodification, new enclosures, and land grabbing, which are orchestrated by the local business class, tea lobby with an ineffective legal state, land mafia, and shadow state agencies. All these suggest a complex, variegated land accumulation under a rapid urban transition process that marginalizes the indigenous landowning community and tribal population in the region.