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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 May 2025
The book started with a quote by a local farmer, ‘Development neither reaches us nor leaves us. It's an illusion’, where he argued that the many versions of development which Dholera has been promised since the 1960s have been contradictory to the needs and wants of the local population. While some of the development projects such as the Narmada canal still remain the demand of the locals, not everyone celebrates the more recent avatars such as the smart city or the international airport. In fact, the farmer implied, various versions of development keep being imposed without consulting the locals or trying to understand their needs. More importantly, none of these versions has been delivered. This does not mean that Dholera is off the map of new development endeavours so much so that he terms them ‘illusions’, as the standard of living of the locals has not seen any major improvement through such projects. For him and many Dholera natives, instead of improving their living conditions or addressing inequalities, such development projects instead create scope for more politics and often threaten to dispossess them of whatever they have.
The preceding chapters discussed the implications of these endeavours through a close study of the role of the state in the development and delivery of Dholera smart city or the impact of such projects on the entity of the state. This was done after I laid out the case of Dholera and how the changing narratives of development in such a small place epitomise the journey of the Indian state when it comes to delivering development to its subjects. The choice of concepts, theories or analytical lens was, to a large extent, informed and guided by the field. The state was explored analytically while neoliberalism and Hindutva provided the context. In doing so, the book contributed to the scholarship on all three themes. The starting point of the book was the multifaceted nature and the contradictory practices of each of the themes. At the same time, the book also involved the analysis of a set of processes and phenomena such as smart urbanism, real estate and farmers’ resistance.
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