Another question of sovereignty? Contestations and biopolitics around Delhi’s land readjustment policy

Keywords: Political Geography, Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Land Assembly/Readjustment/Pooling, Delhi
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 70

Abstract

Since the Indian real estate sector opened to foreign direct investment in 2005, there has been an upsurge in investments in land, as well as the modes and means for assembling it, both for urbanization and industrialization – developmental processes that often go together in liberalizing India. The concomitant rise in land prices and speculative practices have also spurred private land transactions and broker-led assembling practices in peripheral pockets of Delhi – the Indian capital territory, and a megacity believed to be the world’s second-largest urban agglomeration. Subsequently, corresponding land policy changes have also been undertaken, by the city-state's sovereign planning body – the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which amount to a radical shift in state engagement with the question of land as public good or private property. Despite such neoliberal transformations in land markets, Delhi's new land pooling policy, that reorients DDA’s land assembly to private enterprise has not yet taken off, since sanctioning in 2013, and informal urbanization is the predominant mode of the city's expansion. In this paper, I aim to genealogically trace the policy shifts around land assembly in Delhi, focusing on this new land policy introduced to accelerate housing provision for urban poor. Through a multi-layered analysis of its contestations and delays, I argue that any explanation for the ensuing policy deadlock must begin by recognizing the complex interplay between Delhi's (post-)colonial legacies, fragmented institutional sovereignties, biopolitical planning and land management practices, and the emergent politics of private land assembly in the National Capital Region.