 So I just think Let's give them another tour of this. We can wait for a few moments. Hello everyone, thanks very much for coming It's Friday evening 7 p.m. I think you should take that as a compliment. We've tried because of coronavirus to not invite too many people. For me it's an absolute pleasure to welcome you on behalf of SWAS. My name is Kenneth Bode-Nesson. He's currently an associate professor of the University of Oslo's centre of development of the environment. Before that he got a degree from the University of Copenhagen in Anthropology and then he did a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Oslo as well. I first became aware of this excellent work when I did an essay of his own cast and class dynamics and the undercurrents of cast and class in the Shimbu movement in Bengal, a militant protest against the CPM's policy of land acquisition. This was, I think, my very exemplary piece of deep and politically aware ethnography and it introduced me to his extensive list of publications, which I confess I've not read the entirety of and I think very few human beings will be able to read. These writings, if you go to his website you'll find that his writings cover many themes which I think are very much of interest to the people who are at SWAS, social movements, democracy, class and class politics, the tension between liberalism, industrialisation, land acquisition and also the politics of gender. If I'm not mistaken he has more than 25 published articles and he also writes extensively for Scandinavian newspapers. Among his books there are eight co-authors of which I'd like to specially mention Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India which he wrote with. And a very interesting book which I've not read but I'd like to cars, automobility and development in Asia, Wings of Change with R. B. Hansen and he's also written with Alvin Wilson, another so-called friend of our department, a book on social movements for the state of India. He's also written imagining an encounter in the Indian state just class and experience among co-authors of urban youth. I think that was brought to you first in 2011 and more recently he's written on land dispossession and everyday politics in India. So let's please welcome Kenneth Bonyerson today as he talks about land use, planning and contestation this time in Western India. Thank you so much, Tobir, for this extensive introduction and the many kind words and thank you also to Philipp for making this happen in spite of strikes and everything else. It's really nice to be here. Back home I work at a campus where everybody goes home at 4 p.m. sharp. So if you do anything after that time you won't have an audience at all so I'm very happy to see so many people here. Thank you so much. It's true I started out in Eastern India looking at land dispossession and social movements. Over the past five years I've kind of shifted to the other side of India working in Gola since 2014 and basically this talk builds on material from Gola. It's based on a very long paper that's hopefully coming out in general of present studies later this year a special issue comparing land dispossession in India and China co-edited by Mike Levion and Joe Andreas and a bunch of other people. So this is co-authored work and I've tried to condense what is a very long paper into a presentation that hopefully won't last more than 45 minutes. If I go overtime, Tobir, please tell me to wrap up and try to move through the slides quickly. If you see my phone flashed twice like that. Right, okay. I'll shut up. So without further ado, in 2015 the inhabitants of this small coastal village in Gola called Tirakoram were awakened by the arrival of men and machinery that were hired by leading hotel Private Limited, a five-star hotel company. The machines that you see here bulldozed a large part of the village orchard lands as part of leading hotels plans to build a new PGA standard golf course and resort on basically this area. Villages strongly opposed this project for many years triggering this attempt at leading hotels by sneaking in men and machinery at the dead of night protected by about 50 security guards. Now prior to the arrival of men and machinery this land in Tirakoram had been contested for many years. The village is home, as you can see, to a colonial Portuguese fort that's also a hotel. It includes all in all 16 different so-called survey plots of land according to official land records. The fort itself is survey plot number one and the remaining land that you see here is mostly tenants at land owned by our local landlord. Most of the village lands were for long shown in official land use maps as cultivable or orchards but things changed dramatically at least on paper when in 2006 this land suddenly appeared in official maps as a settlement area. The conversion of land in Tirakoram from cultivation to settlement made the value of the land increase dramatically and was in effect the outcome of requests impressed upon the state government and authorities by a private consultancy. Anticipating the land use conversion that was coming in this area and the concomitant increase in its value Margo's hotels and real estate, which is a subsidiary of leading hotels, moved swiftly and bought most of this land from the landlord. In current, oh, sorry, and then the landlord in turn paved the way for leading hotels by swiftly evicting most of his tenants. Now in official land use maps, most of Tirakoram is now marked as an eco-tourism zone. Local opposition from these tenants notwithstanding plans to build the hotel and the golf resort that will cover almost the entire village and the village lands are alive and well. The course is designed by Colin Montgomery. There will be a marina and 115 lice villas. So this presentation is not really about Tirakoram. It's not a localized case study of one land conflict. What I'll try to present is more the bigger picture of land use planning and its consequences in the state of Goa. So this is more of a vignette, but the aim of this presentation in itself is rather to give sort of a bigger picture of land use planning and its fallouts in Goa. Now as we all know, land grabbing has become a contentious public issue in most part of the world in recent decades. And we have now a large and global literature on the global land grab or the global land rush or whatever concept one prefers. That looks at how structural adjustments and neoliberal reforms on the openings of markets have been key drivers of land grabbing that allows corporate entities to gain control of land and its resources. Now in this context, India has I think been one of the global epicenters of land grab protests as controversial projects within the fields of infrastructure, real estate as in the case here, industry, mining and as I've played also solar energy and other renewables have triggered popular protests in many different parts of the world. A key conceptual distinction within the land grabbing debate in India has I think been accordingly made between dispossession as a directly coercive redistribution of landed wealth upwards in which the state plays a key role. And on the other hand, the ongoing and market-induced dispossession that results from the dull compulsions of everyday economic relations. And this is of course not a rigid distinction and there's a long debate on whether one can in fact distinguish the economic and the extra economic drivers of dispossession from each other, but it's a distinction that has been debated and that has become influential in debates about land grabbing and dispossession in India. We also have a large literature that has looked at many of the mechanisms that are available to states, bureaucracies and private investors when it comes to rendering land available for private investors such as leading hotels in this case. People have looked at the range of actors, the range of mechanisms and the range of imaginaries that work to enable land dispossession in particular contexts. As this short case illustrates, this may include machinery as we see here that bulldoze and raise lands, security guards and coercive evictions that forcefully kick people off their land, but it may also involve the police and politicians and investors, small-time land brokers and petty officials in control of land records and land conversion processes and of course the systematic manipulation of all kinds of information. Land dispossession also relies on what Tanya Lee calls inscription devices, that is those devices that are mobilized to establish forms of exclusion from land and to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate users and to inscribe boundaries onto space. Lee acknowledges the importance of mundane and everyday inscription devices such as axes and spades and plows and shovels, but he also pays particular attention to statistical picturing devices and graphic forms that render land investable and these may include maps, title deeds, tax registers, graphs and satellite images that enable land to be manipulated from a distance. Unlike many other land conflicts in India, protests centered on land in Goa have specifically focused on the regional land use planning processes in the state. In this paper we look at regional planning in Goa and particularly the regional planning documents that comes out of this process as inscription devices that are implicated in processes of land dispossession at the state level. As the Tira call case demonstrates, land use map and all kinds of official land classifications or sonings, as they're called in Goa, and the production and circulation and manipulation of these zoning categories are important parts of the processes that pave the way for land dispossession to take place in a specific location. In such we look at plans and planning processes as microcosms of contested terrains and as a kind of condensation of societies contestations over space. So at the risk of simplifying what is in fact a very complex relationship forming around land in Goa, we try to show in this paper that in the Goa case planning appears as a terrain of struggle between on the one hand an alliance between state and big capital that seeks to dispossess and convert land and on the other hand a more or less organized citizenry that seeks to use planning for alternative purposes. So in that sense the dialectic between manipulative planning from above and popular mobilization around planning processes is at the heart of this presentation. These opposing social forces that play out on the domain of land and land use planning. So what I hope to show now in more or less convincing ways is that the long-term trend in regional planning in Goa has been one in which planning documents and planning processes have functioned overwhelmingly as devices that facilitate the assembling of land for private investments even as the very same planning process especially when it's been combined with popular mobilization from below has also provided important opportunities for citizens to contest and reshape land governance in alternative ways. At times such popular mobilization has been spectacularly successful in exposing and putting an end to manipulative planning from above and yet by charting the creation, evolution, contestation and unraveling of many different successive plans for Goa, we argue that although regional plans were introduced to manage the state's resources in sustainable ways they have gradually and in a piecemeal way been enlisted into an elite project that seeks to commodify land although the lines of what we've seen in Xerocon and in other places. So based on this we hope to make sort of three contributions to debates on land and this procession in Goa. The first is in a sense an imperial contribution because we as far as we are aware do not have much systematic work on Goa's now more than three decades of experience with statewide land planning so we think the imperial narrative is in a sense a contribution in its own right to the land grab debate. We also try to use Goa as a diagnostic case and we do that very tentatively in light of statements from the central government that one of the solutions to the many land conflicts we've seen in India over the past decade and a half might be found in a more systematic, more encompassing form of state land use planning. Now Goa has had a statewide land use planning policy for nearly three decades and it has perhaps India's most enlightened and tech savvy and well educated civil societies. So perhaps the Goa case would illustrate what the fallouts might be if we have more centralized more encompassing state planning and also what it might demand from social movement when it comes to steering such planning processes along the lines of more popular participation in effective ways. Now the last contribution that we hope to make and this is where sort of the paper's place in this special issue maybe comes out a bit more clearly is to think about planning as inscription devices inspired by Tangali and aligning that with Mike Levin's arguments about regimes of dispossession in the Indian context. Now Levin uses the concept of regimes of dispossession to refer to a political apparatus that coercively redistributes landed wealth upwards. In other words he uses and I quote him the concept to highlight variation in the robbers and what they do with their loot. That's basically what the regimes dispossession concept intends to do. We try to align this argument with looking at planning as one of the mechanisms through which land is dispossessed and subsequently commodified. And I would like to hear eventually your views on whether this is a constructive fruitful alignment or whether you see any problems in bringing these different frameworks together. Please bear this in mind. Now I won't give you much context to the question of land dispossession in neoliberalizing India. I assume this would be perhaps a phenomenon that's well known to most of you so I think we ought to jump straight to the particular context of Goa. And I took the liberty of putting eight finger Eddie in the top right corner because that might be the kind of person that one at least sitting in the UK or Norway, the first things about when one thinks about Goa as this tourism paradise where people go for holidays and parties and to relax and enjoy. Which is also partly true. But there are many other things going on and Goa has been home to a number of controversies concerning land and its uses dating back at least to the early 1960s when we saw the first escalation of iron ore mining in the hinterlands of the state in the areas bordering the western gods. There are many drivers today that drive processes of land commodification and dispossession in the state. One of them is of course tourism. There are larger areas that are to be converted into results for tourist purposes. There's a much longer history of iron ore mining in the hinterlands which has been suspended for some years now but which is set to resume in all likelihood before too long. This is a standard mining landscape from the interiors of Goa. There's now massive infrastructure development. There's a new international airport coming up and I was there just a couple of weeks ago and the amount of work that's put into widening the highways across the state is just unbelievable. It's one big construction space particularly the highways that run in the west-east direction because the state is now a major hub for imported coal coming from Australia and South Africa which is then driven through the state into Karnataka to feed the steel industry. An enormous amount of infrastructure development and also the railways are expanding as well. And then there are of course the industries that have a longer history in Goa. And just to give you some indicators this is ground for iron ore exports from India being the main point of export of iron ore from India for many years. Here we have the preparation for the Beijing Olympics which registered a dramatic increase in iron ore exports mainly to China. We have land acquisitions for industrial states at a very low level for many decades and then kicking out very rapidly around the accelerating economic liberalization late 80s, early 1990s. And of course tourism and a growing number of houses in Goa that stand empty most of the year which are holiday homes for wealthy Indians and also for westerners who have homes that they hardly ever use. So to return to the analytical framing that we work with we are inspired by the regimes of this procession debate initiated by Mike Levion and because he's also co-editing this issue there's been a kind of a gentle pressure on us to engage that thinking to some extent in more or less creative ways and I think this is a good space to be open about this because that maybe invites another kind of debate if that's clarified I think earlier. So we follow Mike Levion and also Hall in questioning the relevance of concepts such as primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession the relevance of these at the current conjuncture. Hall on his part is very explicit about the confusion that arises when different authors use these concepts in very many different ways foregrounding variously characteristics or consequences or intentions that underpin these processes. Now Levion is perhaps more dismissive and simply asserts that land grabbing at a stage of advanced capitalist development requires an altogether different set of concepts than what is offered by classical Marxism and he begins by picking up on Harvey's work on accumulation by means other than expanded reproduction, ABD in other words seeing that as a step forward but still dismissing it as somehow vague to capital centric and to all encompassing to be of any use when it comes to understanding specific cases of dispossession in particular contexts. So what Levion tries to forward is a theory of how and why and when extra economic coercion and transparent state force in a sense become defining features of dispossession. That's in a sense what interests him which one might say is a very narrow field of interest but also a very perhaps clearly defined field of interest. Now to account for why a state is willing to dispossess certain people for certain purposes, at certain conjunctures and with references to certain normative reasons as well as the extent to which a state is more or less successful in doing so. He gives us the concept of regimes of dispossession that are socially and historically specific constellation of state structures, economic logics that are tied to class interests and ideological justification that generates consistent patterns of dispossession. It's a very long definition but that's more or less the way he looks at a regime of dispossession. Simply put he says India has seen a transition from an older Neurovian developmentalist regime of dispossession where the state would dispossess land for big dams, steel towns, some of the well-known examples from his works and to a more neoliberal regime of dispossession where the state is willing to dispossess people for very different reasons in a neoliberalizing setup where private capital plays an increasing role in the political economy. Now he speaks on the one hand of a new pan-Indian neoliberal regime but his empirical work which is located in Rajasthan I think points to a more specific state level regime of dispossession where such regimes are constituted by historically distinct and more state-specific processes within a broader federal state system. Now when one scales regimes in this way I think one can potentially look at comparatively to highlight variation in the robbers and what they do with their loot as Levyin says both across temporal and spatial axes. I mean one can look at a chronology transitions from one regime of dispossession to another or one can compare synchronically different regime existing at the same time at different state levels in different states in India. So it's against this kind of thinking that we argue for the central role of land use planning as one means of looting within a government state specific regime of dispossession and I'm very open to discuss this subsequently but this is sort of the starting point that we have that scaling these regimes at a state level hopefully opens up for some kind of comparison at a lower level of scale than the nation state which I think might be a sensible way of looking at this. So as specific forms of inscription devices planning documents and land use maps and all these classifications and graphs and charts and tables that make up these plans do not merely represent space and do not merely describe the space that exists within a state. They are prescriptive to the extent that they hold a certain power to create and convey authority over territory. They carry the weight of law in state machinery and they have real effects in real contexts in the historical case illustrated I think at the same time which we also try to show they are contested terrains once plans are made once they are made public they can be contested, challenged appropriated and rewritten multiple times in response to the workings of different social forces including those that emanate from social movements from below. So that's kind of the groundwork we move over to the more Goa specific cases of the experience with planning. Goa is I think unique in the Indian context this as far as I know the only Indian state that has a spatial plan that covers the whole state. The idea dates back to 1964 when the town and country planning department was set up to develop the state in a planned manner and this is the 1960s state led planning. Later in 1964 the Goa government passed the so called Goa Daman Indu Town and Country Planning Act which empowered the local government to create a regional plan for the whole state where development could only be undertaken without compromising the natural resource base of the state. Under this act Goa was to have a chief town planner who sits here in Panjim whose task it was to integrate the plan that was to be made with a so called land use plan that covered the whole surface of Goa state. The function of the plan was in a sense of the land use plan was to translate the abstract planning priorities into a concrete land use plan for the whole state. It took the form of a zoning plan that demarcated all areas for different human uses including agriculture, forestry, industry, settlement of various kinds and so forth. Now once this statewide demarcation exercise was complete and the land use plan was notified, the zoning of land for these different purposes was fixed and no development could be carried to the zones that contravened the zoning category of that particular plot. And to ensure a stability of the plan it was decided that these could not be changed for five years. The plans were fixed and could not be changed for a five year period. Not until 1981 did the actual process of creating the first regional plan actually begin and this process began in 1981 and the plan that was to be created was called 2001 and I will use that word now, the regional plan 2001 but bear in mind that this gets moving in the 1980s. So with an eye on having a plan that is supposed to be in effect until 2001. Through such planning exercises that began in the 1980s Goa has now had three different regional plans. RAP 2001 notified in 1986, RAP 2011 notified in 2006 and RAP 2021 notified in phases between 2010 and 2011. All these plans have had different sub-objects but they've also all had the overarching official goal of balancing economic growth with environmental protection and the protection of agricultural lands. And now we'll see to what extent they've been successful in achieving this. So the formal planning architecture in Goa as I mentioned dates back to the early 1960s and gradually evolves to the early 1980s when the planning process begins. So it has roots in a sense in an European thinking about the role of planning within the Indian nation state. On the other hand the notification of the first plan which happens in 1986 is in the midst of a liberalizing period of the Rajiv Gandhi that accelerates subsequently towards 1991 and beyond. So we have a planning process that comes out of the Nerovian era but gets implemented in the middle of increasing liberalization with interesting consequences I think. So when the first plan is notified in 1986 that's RAP 2011. The idea was that the plan and its land use map would be frozen at least until 1991. That didn't happen. There was a growing demand for land from many of these sectors we saw earlier mining, infrastructure, tourism all these sectors in a liberalizing setup where possibilities were growing. So within two years of the plan being notified we have a provision being made to the plan that opens the possibilities of the possibility for accommodating private requests for changes to the zoning of particular plots of land. More specifically an amendment made by the State Assembly in Goa empowered the town and country planning board to change the land use plan at any time it so fit in response to requests made by the public. That in effect eliminated in one stroke the idea of no changes for five years by this small insertion. Following this amendment a modus operandi would be that land use changes or requests for changes in zoning of particular plots of land would be made to the town and country planning department which would then notify, would either approve or reject this request. If it was approved the proposed zone change was made public in the Gazette and if no objections were received to this change it would then be notified once more in the Gazette as effectuated. So this in a sense is a modality of changing the uses to which land can be put by stealth that we know from many other Indian contexts which is in a sense a kind of informality from above where land use is changed through discretionary means that do not generate much public attention. I mean even not many people I think read the official Gazette all that often and even if they if one is an avid reader of the Gazette I think one needs to be a detective in order to piece all these small zoning changes into a bigger picture of what's actually happening to land on a higher scale than the other six. This is a table that one cannot of course at all read. But I put it up in any case so 1998 is when the unemployment is made to the Italian Coimbra Planning Act that enables these zoning changes by itself. Here we have a number of changes that are requested per year it goes on up to 2005 a total of more than 100,000 requests are made for changing land zoning the overwhelming amount of changes relates to land being converted from something else to settling which I think is an indication of land being used for real estate and also for tourism related facilities. Also a good number of new industrial projects are coming up in this period. So this is in a sense that exists for a full 17 years. It results in more than 20 square kilometers of land being resold that doesn't sound like much but in the context of Goa it's actually a fair amount of land that is being converted from mainly agriculture and to something else. Now we know a good and this is more about this in the paper the ways in which the town and country planning ministry is probably after the office of the chief minister it's the most wanted ministry in Goa. Enormous discretionary powers reside with the minister when it comes to re-zoning land and there have been a number of very large corruption exposures related to that department that have shown how land conversions have been used in a transactionalist manner between politicians and their sponsors and the electorate and different interests. We have more in the paper and of course as always with these things it's hard to know what are the rumors and what are the facts but the rumors are such a scale that we have quite solid indications that many things have been happening in this ministry. This practice of converting land by stealth between different categories stops in 2005 when Goa is put under president's rule. It's actually the governor that ordered the practice to be stopped. So it stops in 2005 following these large exposures also driven by activists and environmentalists in Goa. Now the two following regional plans have made much more popular protests compared to this first one where one had this practice going on for close to two decades with protests being limited to a relatively small number of civil society activists. Now we move on to the next regional plan, RP 2011 and work on this plan began in the late 1990s. It was outsourced to a daily based private firm called consultancy private services who then submitted a draft of this plan in 2005. A draft of the plan. Now this draft version of the land use plan was then open for public comments from November 2005 until August the following year. When that deadline passed it was notified as the final regional plan. So we have here a phase between a draft being presented and a final plan being passed and main final. And there's an opening here of some 10 months when the public can make comments and request to that initial draft plan. Now what we have here I think is what we see with this plan is another modality of intervention in the regional planning process by people in the town and country planning department. That is similar to the one which we had in the earlier regional plan but still somehow different. Rather than attempting to stealthily change the plan once it had been finalized, attempts were made to use the opening of some 10 months when the plan was only in a draft stage to rezone land and to respond to requests made by different investors. Now, zoning changes were thus woven into the drafting process but kept out of public view. And in the TIRACOL vignette that I opened with we know that a consultancy called Hansel Goehr Private Limited was involved in requesting that the survey numbers in TIRACOL were converted from orchard to settlement zones. And the same consultancy were directly involved in many other conversions during this window of opportunity. Now, the draft regional plan had in itself proposed to increase the area that was sewn for settlement by more than 11% when compared to the old regional plan. But when the plan was then notified as final there had been an additional increase in 21% in the settlement area in the state. I mean almost triple what had been envisioned in the draft. These included conversions of prime real estate locations in picturesque areas, hill slopes, agricultural lands and seaside areas. And we have a couple of cases here this is not the best resolution but this is the land use plan for in the draft plan for GOA 2011. And this is the final plan for relief on the draft plan. And all the red areas you see on this map are settlement areas that somehow appear out of the blue to the draft and the prime plan. And this is considerable and where are these increased areas they are all basically along the coast, many of them in the areas where Joe's ministry is located and where people want their home. This is another case from the very popular Baga beach. The idea is the same these red areas that suddenly emerge on the coast are increased settlement areas. So this is this green patch here suddenly appears as a settlement area coming out of draft plan to the final plan. And lastly the plan also operated with a four fold increase in mining areas that also somehow appeared out of the blue between the draft plan and the final plan. Again this is the red areas basically. Now in light of the growing public awareness of how the earlier plan had been tampered with within weeks of the notification of this final plan many civil society groups and individuals began studying the corresponding land use plan and raised apprehensions about these large scale changes that had been made to the final version. Now I think indeed the main difference between the earlier plan and this new plan that I think enabled a much bigger social mobilization centered on the planning process was that whereas the earlier manipulation of the first plan had taken place step by step over nearly two decades here we had an opening of ten months during which a large number of conversions were affected in a very short time span and we had much better maps which I think also enabled tech-savvy activists to more quickly piece together a picture of what's actually happening when it comes to land use in the state and the diversion of land from agriculture to other users. Again as I mentioned real estate developers and the mining industry were identified as the main beneficiaries of these land conversions and this time we had a much broader social mobilization that brought into its end but not just a handful of dedicated activists that brought a base of civil society and this coincided by a large with the mobilization against especially economic zones in Govan so one had other dynamics of mobilization many different things coming together at once. It ended with so much controversy that this plan was repealed. It was annulled and taken off the table and when that happened the old plan once again came into effect. It means that the Tirocol land which had suddenly become settlement land in this plan to the benefit of a hotel group now reverted to being orchards on which nobody could build the hotel so suddenly the land in Tirocol had no value for the developer. Now to speed things up and now it becomes as if this wasn't complicated enough it becomes even more complicated with the 2021 plan and what happens now is perhaps too complicated to explain. To avoid controversy now we've had two failed regional plans where different departments have sought to manipulate it enlisted somehow in elite projects of freeing up land for private investors. Now to avoid controversy one attempts to bring on board activists in the planning process to make sure that the design of these plans is truly participatory. This partly works all new kinds of zoning categories are created there's mass participation on a higher level than ever before high resolution maps are generated and taken to all village panchayats who then match these maps with the physical landscape and then provide feedback to the planners and ask for changes or confirm that the zoning corresponds with actually existing things on the ground. Again we have a kind of peculiar situation where new land zoning categories are suddenly introduced nobody really knows what kind of land belongs in which category along the way new categories are invented within existing categories and land mysteriously shopping from one category to another and openings made so that the tierical land which in the draft regional plan 2021 exists as an ecologically sensitive no development zone suddenly appears in the final plan as an eco-tourism zone because that's opened up within the ecological sensitive land category one includes eco-tourism zones so again the tierical land goes from being orchards to being an eco-tourism zone which lo and behold results in this kind of design this is sort of the 150 villas that are supposed to come up on this land I have more in this year but I think it's probably too it's probably too much I think right I can't see that I really I don't fully comprehend this plan myself I mean it's so complicated and what striking is that while you have the panchayats going around with high resolution maps to check whether things are depicted the way they actually are on the ground you have the town and country planning board inventing entirely new zoning categories and shuffling land between categories from more to less protected which creates another controversial situation in the sense that they end up having to freeze this plan it's not implemented the problems are too many and the protests are too much so in a sense what we try to show is that with this plan the ability of various departments industries to manipulate planning process in a way that allows them to free up land for non-agricultural purposes that kind of grinds to a halt the protests have been too many the activists are too good at what they do illicit ways of inventing new categories doesn't really work anymore and it certainly doesn't free up land on the scale that's required when it comes to the different demands that the activists have in Goa so what we see now I think is kind of a kind of a fourth phase in the planning process where new attempts are being made to circumvent the planning process altogether and it happens in different ways I mean amendments are made to the act that guides planning accepting all government projects from the planning process that they want as long as it's a government project on land there's also a reintroduction of the old clause that gives full discretionary powers to the town and country planning minister to approve of zoning changes on a case by case basis we filed right to information petitions asking for insights into what is the basis for some changes being granted and what is the basis for some changes that are not being given any answer to this and then we have the tabling of other acts that supersede or fully sideline the role of planning in determining menus Goa has an investment promotion act that allows things to be fast tracked and approved relatively quickly and we have these two new acts they probably sound pretty good compensation to affected persons and so on but in effect these two are doing I think of the 2013 Land Acquisition Act and more or less a return to some of the basic talents of the old 1894 Land Acquisition Act that gave the state much more power to acquire land as it saw fit so this is where the planning story ends in a way with four different faces of planning being first enlisted in various ways to free up land for commercial purposes and then more recently sort of new attempts at sidelining the whole planning process all together so just to quickly wrap up planning in the Goa context I think stands out as a key instrument used to convert rural land into private real estate and attractive investor locations in this sense I think planning has been an integral part of the evolution since the early 1980s of a distinct neoliberalizing Goa and regime of dispossession although Goa's planners crafted the state's planning architecture during the era of a more developmentalist regime of dispossession under Nehru and socialism the workings of the actual inscription devices that eventually flowed from this architecture could be to a large extent aligned effectively with the interests of state and private capital in a neoliberalizing context through different modalities of intervention in the planning process from above as such the Goa and regional planning process has been increasingly geared towards the production, circulation and grounding of inscription devices that facilitate land dispossession and commodification now these shifting modalities were shaped by the nature and contents of earlier plans by the capacity of different departments to enlist the plans and the planning process in a larger project of altering land use in the state by the degree of mobilization of counterforces in civil society and of course by the larger political economy of land although planning and its inscription devices begin by altering and manipulating land from a distance there are always tangible local implications within a span of just a few years the historical backwater went from comprising largely talented cultivated land and orchards to becoming a prime real estate and golf location targeted by global investors then overnight it reverted to a cultivable land of little value to investors before it then reemerged Phoenix like as a prime eco tourist site that was made physically transformable by a large team of security guards and heavy machinery in the paper acknowledged the important role of popular mobilization in shaping the planning process we also know the ability of different elites to introduce ever new modalities of intervention and new inscription devices backed by the force of law which in spite of temporary setbacks and concessions ensure that the uneven trajectory of regional planning generally aligned with elite interests now given that land and land decisions are politicized to a very high degree in goal and that the state has a highly organized environment civil society the ability of elite interests to effectively manage this possessive practices raises broader questions about the capacity of India's institutions to manage and mediate contested land use practices in India policy makers at many levels now claim that the solution to the contradictions and contestations that arise from multiple claims and often conflicting claims to scarce land can be found in more comprehensive and more systematic spatial planning while such a new planning setup is yet to emerge, I think the results of the Goan experience with encompassing spatial planning spanning three decades may indicate that the outcome of such an endeavor is unlikely to be a resolution of India's land question it may, as Tiro called and many other cases show, rather produce new forms of dispossession and contestation in the years to come Thanks very much K. It's momentous so as to take questions in trees I don't know where this tradition is coming from but there you are. So as you correct your book, I just gave some additional responses to your book, as usual fascinating material I just want to know a couple of clarifications maybe in your first slide there looks like a heritage written on your right and I thought these were protected in such a dispassion category where the transfer of heritage properties was not so straightforward so I'm just wondering what does it do to situations in which land use is being legally changed when there are heritage or protected properties within that for example this being the colonial Portuguese building I think these would be part of that and this slightly connected with that I mean you know, from what we know there's a rule of criminality and you know who has not been in a kind of mafia type situation in which you have, as you said shown some people's photographs that don't necessarily say that they belong to them but the confusion between mysterious money local sort of monsters and politicians of all parties who feel removed from one party to another so it's not sort of the state as much as it is individual but it may be the state but also individual politicians who play that role of mediating between one form of land use and that sort of thing but why do you think you're taking this in another position? Yeah I know I have a few questions but primarily some of it is related to maybe more recent trends so I'm not sure whether it's necessarily covered in your work at this point but I'm just curious in terms of how you would see for example when you're talking about social society mobilization how you would see that being as weakened or potentially set back by the challenges around internet shutdowns and blackouts and the challenges around communication and whether that has any bearing or not on the situation there also in terms of newer trends kind of wonder in terms of the state plan the overlay of the Belt and Road project so whether that has much influence and yeah and I guess just lastly in terms of I guess in terms of like newer trends whether along the sort of shorelines where a lot of development is happening whether you see that as some of it being even more say becoming even more challenging with the climate the kind of crisis and how that marginalizes communities and creates challenges for that kind of thing Thank you and if there are questions that you can give us I can't understand the question if you can find the feedback that can actually see that yes thanks let me start with the machines of dispossession that the concept likes we quite like I think in a sense your figures go out as well that there has been a major change in the way land was acquired before or after new legalization and so understand that Marius that before that it was mainly for public purposes after that mainly for profit and so that takes me to my question because I actually thought that legally you couldn't change you couldn't convert land use from one purpose to another unless there was a public purpose reason for it I mainly thought that you couldn't formally do it in India if it was just to increase profits for development and that was Indian legislation and state based legislation that there were rules around this so I am asking am I wrong can you state do whatever you want and change land use as you want to or does there have to be an argument around public purpose benefits public benefit related argument in order for land use changes to take place and if that is the case how is that done going obviously there is a lot of land use conversion take place next okay thank you so much these are really great questions so let me just look at my notes so the heritage I don't really have an answer to this but that fort is a survey plot of its own and I would seriously think that they are not going to raise that fort and build another villa on top of that but exactly heritage is a particular soaring category so I don't really have an answer to that question but I would assume that kind of structure was protected it's a hotel you can stay there if you want whether it might be a hotel within another hotel who knows what that construct might look like just to the regimes of dispossession before I return to your questions yes when I showed Mike this graph he was thrilled because that really supports this idea that we have a shift in acquisition I have another project that's where I'm trying to look at how many assets we have in Goa since 1961 30,000 maybe tracing all the different land acquisition notifications to see whether there's actually a transition and working my way back from here towards 1991 there's still an awful lot of land being acquired from a playground public park public sector irrigation extension all the old stuff that you would acquire land for so I too like that concept of a ratio of this I think it's good to think with we only have according to Mike one transition so based on that it's difficult to theorize about a transition if you only have one but I think intuitively there's a lot in it that I really like maybe just to clarify when it comes to a sowing change it's not an acquisition it's a change of song and I didn't say this but the practice has been from investors because they know that getting land converted is a thing you can do if you pay what the rate so they purchase the plots they need on the assumption that when they go to the TCP they will get that conversion of orchards into settlement it's a way of that's the order of things you have a market transaction first and then you have a sowing change so there's no direct dispossession but what people do is the increase in value that flows from the conversion of one to another I should have been clear about that that's probably a mission on my part thanks for all these questions there's a lot to follow up on what I think has been the case I was in Goa just last month and rather than internet closure which has not been a big thing there I think it's activism fatigue people are tired and also because many of these as you've seen in the planning process people have many partial victories along the way but it's rather rare that the big battle is won and you have a very limited number of activists who are extremely busy because they are involved in all of this tourism, coal, mining, roads, airports everything, forests, rivers and it becomes too much after some time, people run out of steam apart from some very dedicated ones so I think more than censorship it's probably the fatigue and also an increasingly assertive government I would say there's a BJP state government the former chief minister was also minister of defense at one point and also very powerful Goa and chief minister the shoreline yes, good question climate change the big thing that's produced by government of India I think so it's their own damn maps I mean climate change and rising sea levels it's not going to affect the coastlines as much as you might think but it affects the rivers much of this is very low lying land some of it we claimed the Kasan lands they're called and along the river bank that's where the big thrill is not so much the coastal areas so you might actually have a tourism sector that can save it in spite of climate change but where these areas where people live along the rivers they might be more in danger than the coastal zones Besen wrote not particularly important in its own right in India but what has been important is the Varad Malar and the Sakhar Malar two big union government projects that push for land based infrastructure and also the development of ports and seaways so what's happened is that there are plans afoot to nationalize the river banks and in that sense bring them under the control of the union government and not the state and there are big expansion plans at the biggest port in Goa, which is Moro Morao a very important port which is now a hub for coal coming in to western India for now for the steel factories in Karnataka but who knows eventually also perhaps for many of the private and coal based thermal power plants that are coming up so far not so many in this area but we have them in Gujarat and there are in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh so not built in road but sort of Indian equivalence of the same kind of thinking I think has an impact So I wanted to perhaps point you towards a whole body of literature which is really not sexy for an anthropologist but really helpful in the planning where there's a lot of comparative work looking at discussion and corruption flexibility, clientelism in the comparative analysis of planning system and you would be surprised to find out that a lot of what you describe happens in Britain, in Italy, in Greece and in France and there's a whole literature which doesn't take an aesthetic perspective that looks at these mechanisms and how they mobilize different factors which I think and which some of you are thinking there My question was about the notion of regimes of dispossession I wonder if you can elaborate a little bit on this because in the idea of regime there's the idea of time for continuity and intent by actors and I think in your talk I'm sure it's there in the paper we can get the sense of a long term sustained coalition and actors that are really geared towards the intent of dispossessing and I'm sure that within your state bureaucracy there are planners which are not corrupt are trying not to be and still try to move in any ideal versus a new generation of more corrupt men so there probably are tensions within the state and permanent disagreements which may mean this concept of a stable regime with a sort of one-sided intent of the state to dispossess might be more complicated in practice and in relation to this at the beginning of your talk you said that one of your arguments in the paper was that the social movements were mobilizing planning against in a rustic way so I wanted to ask if you could tell us more about this because that's actually really interesting in a way it counteracts the argument you've just made and I was wondering whether some of the social movement you look at builds alternative expertise in planning to mobilize the very same regulation that seeks to dispossess the input of the court's typical process of traditionalization building alternative evidence for example mobilizing motions of the public interest and for social movement to get involved you sort of put forward an alternative definition of that's the public interest building alternative evidence so are they mobilizing this very planning that dispossesses them successfully in some cases by using some of the clauses hidden somewhere in the law or just relying on a not corrupt court to judge in their favor by using the racing system I think I was allowed to ask a similar question I just asked that and now I do have a constellation of kind of thinking that going around about the title kind of conveys the dispossession without development so I was wondering so if you really call without development it is an accumulation, it is a dispossession but is it without the development then we go into a debate of whose development and how that is understood by the state so now if you understand state as a kind of you know machinery of the government interest then we also have to kind of put down that conception of development all together and say it is a regime of what you call dispossession but it is a regime of dispossession for accumulation so will you not agree with the changing the title in this dispossession for the sake of accumulation not for the development interesting job thank you my question actually pertains to you know the Kalutmishra had a judgment today on the land acquisition act of 2013 we are going against all this precedent so far he held that the landowner who refuses to accept the compensation which is until May 1st 2014 then would be refused a chance for that cancellation of the acquisition so I was wondering to what extent in your project has the right to bear compensation especially for the I mean thank you so much for both for the drawing our attention to that literature which I know exists and I don't mind if it's not sexy as long as it's useful I think but the main quality so regimes and stability I mean if we do have a kind of black box in the paper in the sense that none of us have carried out fieldwork within the planning apparatus and it's not easy but it's not impossible so potentially I mean Michael Goldman has done very good work in Bangalore on these issues and on the World Bank it's possible to get access to these domains where such decisions are made we don't have that kind of material so that the constellation of actors and the kind of networks that drive this and the intentions are in a sense not available to us and that's sort of as an anthropologist that's what I want to know when we don't have that kind of data so it's we try to always take a step back and see okay what we can see is the outcome of planning processes as they manifest in land use maps and documents and graphs and so Laden who has done most of this work I think he's trolled through all these cassettes and picking up these 2251 different notifications and has done the work on the mapping and all this so that's the kind of data we have but I agree with you that this is the kind of data we would have wanted what we do have I think we have another paper out on which also goes back to your point which I forgot to address about the individual strong politicians and I mean across India people will complain about their corrupt politicians but perhaps in Goa even more so I think the discourse of corruption is extremely strong there much more than I'm used to from other places I'm used to quite a bit of that but I think in Goa has 40 MLA's so a Goan constituency is among the smallest in India it's not 100,000 votes in a constituency it's less on the one hand that gives a closeness to the local politician they are much more accessible and they are much more dependent on a relatively small amount of votes in a constituency that makes them approachable on the other hand they also often function as key persons in a much bigger network so I think rather than the individual I mean what does an individual strong politician do I think to me he holds together a big network in a sense in Goa they span the bureaucracy of the mining sector the taxi unions the real estate sector so all these are meshes together which is why I think one can argue even though we don't have the insights that there are these sort of alliances and networks that also that makes having a foothold in the planning department extremely important so that's what I would probably I mean the regime discussion I think I think if I don't if my memory doesn't fail me I think my living ends this book about presenting this as a new research agenda what we need to know is how do all these regime look in different state contexts and I don't think as of yet anyone has actually really done that so this might be some kind of agenda looking at how can a regime look at a state level so there are many things that we so far don't know about Goa but these are some of the contours that we can outline yes, movements I think, I mean judicialization I think has been very useful in Goa in the context of mining and some other environmental struggles partly also against infrastructure I think what's happened because one might imagine was a kind of people's planning campaign now we'll do it ourselves the maps will make the plans and we'll throw it back at the government and tell them to obey their own rules that would be sort of the appropriation of the planning network by grassroots movements it's been done mostly to critique existing planning documents but I think what's happened in all of these cases is either a withdrawal or a suspension of existing plans before one reached a stage where people's planning campaign might have taken off and how to interpret that I'm a bit unsure but as far as I know part of the people's planning campaign would consist actually in these villages looking at the plans and looking at their own village and then coming up with these preferences but that would I think first and foremost lead to a withdrawal of an existing plan and a period of suspension you might say where no planning is really in effect because they're all withdrawn and then one reverts to an older plan that had also been withdrawn at some point so it's a different kind of social movement and context yes development I it's not the title of my book I think I see what you're alluding to it's a discussion that I think this is ongoing I mean how to think about development in a sense and accumulation processes versus distribution I hope yeah I was I hadn't heard about what you referred to now the right to fair compensation and I'm unaware of the extent to which that law has actually been applied across India and I know Indian chambers of commerce and these federations were extremely unhappy with that law because they claimed it made land acquisitions impossible so I don't know to what extent land acquisitions have been carried out under that act actually I know there are all kinds of state level modifications to that act mostly in the shape of dilutions of key provisions I think in the golden context these are rather than making a state specific version of the right to compensation act these two new acts were in a sense introduced to sideline the National Act which can be done with the ascent of the president even though it contravenes a union act last time thank you for that actually I'll just first comment I can assure you that I'm not sure that Goa is much more problematic in terms of what happens in the land acquisition and what you reported as disposition actually my broader question is about whenever I hear the term neoliberalism I wonder what it means what is it that you're comparing it with because at one level of course it presents it ends up becoming a dominant ideology thesis that you can actually explain a number of effects to one cause and that is very functioned so I wonder if through the term in both or through evoking the idea of neoliberalism which through which we explain universities and roads and all that and as soon as you say use the term neoliberalism the audience knows exactly what you mean so whenever you have a term like that I wonder what use it has anymore where we are completely agreed on what it is that we are talking about you don't even have to explain what it means so my question is that when this you know really historically not more than 9-10% of this kind of disposition that you're describing I haven't done in the private sector as you said 90% actually by the state as you said state city was there in the earlier instances of land acquisition there was almost no recompense at all there were no activists at all so I'm trying to understand what the difference is between the pre-neoliberal dispossession and the contemporary neoliberal this or the neoliberal dispossession because I'm really wary now of arguments which seem to me to take the state as a cipher and the state has itself nothing just it's like an elite takeover what will dominate you that is about government I think what would be really interesting not about the government but governmentality which is quite different what has happened to the state what's its relationship with private capital otherwise really this explanation I think it's a really fascinating project but the book that you describe really goes back to the very old of how we understand relationship between capital and land which if you look at contemporary work and real estate, cultures of real estate in India give you very different a country contemporary ethnographic work there's a very recent work in fact on cuts to real estate which give you really interesting ideas about the changing relationship of the state and its relationship with capital and so I think I'm struggling with the notion of what neoliberalism can actually tell us apart from a really a very old idea of what we think is a government ideology and how the state has been taken over because what ends up happening in your presentation in general ideal neoliberalism is that people are always being acted upon constantly and that's a the question we need to ask is not so much why shopping malls have environmental impact why do people love shopping malls that's an ethnographic question that neoliberalism has a term can't tell us so what do you think is the difference between the older modern in fact no one must compensate at all the indigenous population got thrown off in the steel cities there were no activists what is the fundamental difference yes these are big questions I mean on the one hand I agree with you I mean it's as if nothing happens in India anymore it all happens in India yeah I know I mean I I am fair my own sort of thinking about this goes probably back to Kohli's idea about the state the relatively narrow social basis of the pro-business turn of the state which I think probably gives the I mean his take would be it has a it's a narrow sort of social base of the state compared to what we've seen before and his yeah I think it I think you're right that it's important not I mean use of neoliberalism as a kind of blanket term but I think that's enough work or varieties of neoliberalism and its context specific manifestations from critical geography that I think allows us to retain it as a more or less useful concept I think the the going back to I mean the explanation that Mike offers in his book about the relative what it was maybe not so much an absence of protests under the old regime from people who were dispossessed but a lack of actors who were willing to pick it up in a sense and whether one would explain that with sort of the hegemonic role of the early post-independence Neurubian state I mean these are explanations that are around this was you had a state that carried over that kind of legitimacy from the pre-colonial independence movement why do people like shopping malls I think that's this is I mean something that interests me as well perhaps not really shopping malls but the sort of the aspirations that are that people have no and where they come from and also how they align with all contest the broader political economy and the kinds of ideas and images that produces I think that's an interesting research agenda and one of the things we talked about in I mean and that I've always been a bit uncomfortable with in this paper too is that in one sense it gives the impression of perhaps operating with a sort of more crude cruiser Marxist version of how things work now an evident state business alliance that acts upon and triggers certain kinds of social mobilization where people are not particularly the makers of what they do in life I think in this case it's not entirely without an empirical foundation I think this I mean I'm speaking now about the particularities of the Goan context I think that constellation is pretty strong in Goan what we do not cover in this paper and what I think requires more empirical work but which might also ethnographically answer some of the questions you pose now is a good number of everyday Goans that have also approached the town and country planning department asking to have their agricultural plots converted into settlement zones to set it off to build a bed and breakfast house all these kinds of everyday economic opportunities that also feed into a conjuncture that also has to do with the long decline of agriculture in the state and all the tenancy laws of the sixties that both freed up tenants but also at the same time undermine conservation bigger conjuncture I think and I think if one wants to look at these everyday aspirations and how they resonate with one or the other kind of hegemony I think that makes for interesting ethnographic projects it's not something we had the chance to do in this particular paper but I think we are put on the same page in terms of the ethnographic value of that kind of research in fact it might be just a point out of the corner just out I'm thinking there's a book called Landscapes of Aspirations which is a ethnographic related industry that's the arena soil in one of our fields can I just say thank you so much Kenneth for coming and for changing your travel plans to complete our strategy for the future thanks once again for coming with you and let's give a round of applause this is something that will go on after that I mean Kenneth use the challenge I mean I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I