Rents and Rural Land Markets in India: Beyond Accumulation

The special session will host Dr. Mihika Chatterjee. Dr. Chatterjee is departmental lecturer at Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. We are lucky to have Prof. Dr. Sony Pellissery, Director, Institute of Public Policy, and Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy (CSSEIP), Bengaluru, as the discussant.

Abstract

Rents from speculation in rural land markets feature prominently in the accumulation strategies of large landholders in much of the Global South today. Rather than analysing outcomes of land rents based on dominant frameworks – welfare-reducing and growth-suppressing institutional failure (from neoclassical economics) or accumulation by dispossession (from critical geography) – in this talk, I will focus on the wider political-economic processes and social motivations of individuals that drive rents from speculation in rural land markets in western India. Based on long-term research in an agrarian district in Maharashtra, I argue that limitations within the labour market make working on and through commercial rural land a crucial mode for articulating class for rural male elites from the dominant Maratha caste. An interdisciplinary and qualitative analysis of men’s participation in rural land markets augments prevalent understandings of rents-as-profit by weighing up the potential of land to signal intra-caste mobility.

Speaker's bio:

Mihika Chatterjee is departmental lecturer at Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Her current research is focused on the politics of land dispossession and rural transitions in Western India. More broadly, she is interested in the political economy of late-industrialisation, land and water conflicts, and rural inequalities.

Discussant's bio

Sony Pellissery is Professor and Director at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy (CSSEIP). He is a public policy specialist with special interest in distributive justice. After his doctoral studies from Oxford University, he was serving as Associate Professor at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand, Gujarat. His works have been published in Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Social Policy, Gender and Development, Socius, International Journal of Social Welfare, Journal of Human Development, International Journal of Rural Management, International Social Security Review, Global Crime and Indian Anthropologist. Edited works include: Shame of It: Global Perspectives on Anti-Poverty Policies (Policy Press, 2013), Land Policies in India (Springer 2017), Transformative Law and Public Policy (Routledge 2019), Theorising Urban Development from the Global South (Palgrave MacMillan 2021), Caste Matters in Public Policy (Routledge 2022). He has won the India Social Science Research award (2009) and Ram Reddy Memorial Award for Social Science (2015). He serves on the editorial boards of International Journal of Social Quality, Social Policy and Society, and Town Planning Review.

Format:

The presentations will be typically 30 min long, followed 15 min discussion by the discussant and Q & A.

This session is a part of the larger project:
Expanding the frontiers of economics: Evidence from South Asia

This project aims to organise series of special sessions on emerging areas of research in Economics. By synthesising theoretical assumptions of sociology, psychology, anthropology and political sciences, a new generation of researchers are rediscovering the principles which govern the actions and interaction among ‘economic (hu)man’.

This will be a year-long project. In this series, we hope to ensure inclusivity across different schools of thoughts and across genders.