Highway urbanization and Land conflicts: the challenges to decentralization in India

Much of the urban growth in developing countries is taking place along infrastructure corridors that connect cities. The villages along these corridors are frenzied and contested sites for the consolidation and conversion of agricultural lands for urban uses. The scale of changes along these corrido...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Pacific affairs 2013-12, Vol.86 (4), p.785-811
Main Author: Balakrishnan, Sai
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Agricultural land
Business-government relations
Case studies
Cities
Conflict
Consolidation
Consolidation of Land Holdings
Constitutional amendments
Cooperatives
Decentralization
Decision making
Developing Countries
Freeways
Highway Urbanization
Highways
India
Industrial agriculture
Industrial districts
Jurisdiction
Karnataka
Land
Land Conflicts
Land consolidation
Land Conversion
Land development
Land purchases
Landowners
LDCs
Local government
Parastatals
Qualitative research
Regional Institutions
Roads & highways
Towns
Transnationalism
Urban agriculture
Urban areas
Urbanization
Villages
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Summary:Much of the urban growth in developing countries is taking place along infrastructure corridors that connect cities. The villages along these corridors are frenzied and contested sites for the consolidation and conversion of agricultural lands for urban uses. The scale of changes along these corridors is larger than the political jurisdiction of local governments, and new regional institutions are emerging to manage land consolidations at this corridor scale. This article compares two inter-urban highways in India and the hybrid regional institutions that manage them: the Bangalore-Mysore corridor, regulated by parastatals, and the Pune-nashik corridor, by cooperatives. It traces the emergence of parastatals and cooperatives to the turn of the twentieth century, the ways in which these old institutions are being reworked to respond to the contemporary challenges of highway urbanization, and the winners and losers under these new institutional arrangements. I use the term "negotiated decentralization" to more accurately capture the back-and-forth negotiations between local, regional and state-level actors that leads to context-specific regional institutions like the parastatals and cooperatives.
ISSN:0030-851X
0030-851X
1715-3379
DOI:10.5509/2013864785