Introduction

The past ten years has been a decade of land wars in India. Some of the most violent and contentious land conflicts were over the use of land-based financing: the state acquired surplus land, more than was needed for the actual infrastructural project, with the justification that property development on the surplus land can generate revenues and cross-subsidize the building of the new infrastructure. The conflicts over the building of new infrastructural projects, including tolled highways such as the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor and the Yamuna Expressway and new greenfield airports such as the Bangalore International Airport, are clear examples of this new type of land conflict.

Proponents of land-based financing see the mode of financing infrastructure as heralding a new paradigm of infrastructure provision: that of public-private partnerships (PPPs). The frenetic pace of 21st century urbanization in India generates new infrastructural demands that the fiscally strapped Indian state cannot meet by itself. $1.2 trillion dollars in capital investment for urban infrastructure, 2.5 billion square meters of roads to be paved (which is twenty times the road capacity added in the past decade), commercial and residential space equivalent to the built-up area of Chicago has to be added every year: these are some of the statistics that convey the giddying pace at which infrastructure has to be developed in India (Dobbs, Gulati, Mohan, Sankhe and Vittal, 2010). Advocates of PPPs argue that the public sector lack, by itself, lacks the capacity to mobilize such large-scale financial resources and it has to combine in new ways with private sector financing to meet these infrastructural demands. But infrastructure projects, as long gestation projects, hold little attraction for the private sector. The state, then, has to experiment with new incentives to rope the private sector into the infrastructural sector, and one such incentive is surplus land: the lure of high returns from property development on the surplus land can bring a reluctant private sector into the infrastructural sector. Surplus land, then, is the bait for the private sector to enter infrastructure, in the absence of which India cannot build the new types of infrastructure needed to propel a country with what Raj Krishna disparagingly called the ‘Hindu rate of growth’ into double-digit growth figures.