Political economy of law, efficiency and adverse ‘inclusion’: rethinking land acquisition in India

With the escalated rate of land acquisition in India to produce viable development projects and essential infrastructure for ‘public purpose’, there is a compelling need to examine the intersection of institutions in the formulation and interpretation of land acquisition law. By exploring the paradigms of efficiency underlying the land acquisition law in India, the paper engages with institutions that legislate ‘public purpose’ and questions how it fosters the idea of development around the ‘public purpose’ as a hierarchized exercise where the ‘economic’ conflates with the legal registers. I argue that the emphasis on ‘efficiency’ has dominated the rationale of law-making, but it misreads the conflict over land in terms of ‘just compensation’ for dispossession or ‘infrastructure improvement.’ Also, it dismisses the sensibilities and concerns arising from the political-economic conditions related to space reconfiguration through the exploitation of land resources as there is no modelling of the ‘power’ of capital or the state. This analysis is achieved through a close historical examination of the land acquisition laws, amendments, intermittent ordinances and case laws. It further builds upon the definitive framework of the new land acquisition act formulated in 2013. Importantly, in India, law-making intends to replace the idea of ‘exclusion’ generated by dispossession from land resources as the form of adverse ‘inclusion’. Thus, the engagement with this construct is essential to critically unravel the dominant styles of thought and reasoning in ‘economics’.