Land and Agrarian Crisis: Property Rights, Dispossession and Tribal Displacement

Every agrarian crisis in India eventually comes back to one question: who controls the land? Property rights, forced acquisition, and the slow squeeze on tribal landholding are not separate problems. They are threads of the same story about how a neoliberal economy treats land as a tradable asset rather than a source of livelihood. Understanding this shift helps explain farmer protests, tribal resistance movements, and the messy politics of “development” that dominate the news cycle.

Why land sits at the centre of the crisis 🔗

Land is not just soil. For a peasant household, it is collateral, inheritance, food security, and social status rolled into one. For a tribal community, it often carries an even deeper meaning tied to ancestry, forest access, and self-governance. So when land use changes, or when land changes hands, the ripple effects touch far more than farm output.

India’s agrarian economy has faced mounting pressure since the 1990s reforms opened the door to private capital in sectors that once relied almost entirely on state investment. Infrastructure, manufacturing, and real estate all need land, and agricultural land is usually the cheapest and most available option. This has turned land into one of the most contested resources in the country’s development story.

The legal maze around property rights 🔗

Land is a state subject in India, which means each state has its own rules on ownership, transfer, and use. Two restrictions matter most for the agrarian crisis.

Converting farmland to non-farm use 🔗

Nearly every state restricts converting agricultural land into non-agricultural land without prior permission from a revenue authority. The idea is to protect food-growing land from being swallowed by real estate or industrial projects overnight. In practice, though, converted land is highly profitable, so landowners, developers, and local officials all have an incentive to push these approvals through. This creates a slow but steady conversion of farmland at the edges of expanding cities and industrial corridors.

Extra protection in scheduled areas 🔗

The restrictions get much stricter in Scheduled Areas, the tribal-majority regions notified under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution. Regulations passed under this schedule allow a state Governor to prohibit land transfers to non-tribals altogether. State laws vary in how strict this prohibition is: Jharkhand and Bihar rely on the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act and Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act, Odisha restricts transfers unless a competent authority approves them, while states like Maharashtra and Kerala allow conditional transfers subject to Collector or Gram Sabha approval. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana take the strictest stance, banning almost all transfers of tribal land to non-tribals, including between two non-tribals within the notified area.

These protections exist precisely because tribal communities have historically lost land through debt, fraud, and administrative loopholes. Laws like the CNT Act and SPT Act in Jharkhand require prior approval from a Deputy Commissioner before any tribal landholder can sell to an outsider, and any transfer made without this approval is legally void.

Corporate pressure on agricultural land 🔗

Even with these safeguards on paper, agricultural and tribal land face constant pressure from corporate demand. Some economists have argued that easing restrictions on land leasing and transfer would attract private investment and modernise farming. Critics counter that loosening these rules mainly helps companies access cheap land, water, and labour, often at the direct cost of the people who depend on that land for survival.

The SEZ turning point 🔗

The Special Economic Zones Act, 2005 is a good example of how policy accelerated this shift. It allowed the government to acquire land for a stated “public purpose” and then hand it over to private developers for what was, functionally, a commercial project. Research tracking four decades of land acquisition data found that acquisitions roughly doubled through the 1990s reform period and spiked again during the SEZ boom of 2005 to 2008, with land acquired for private capital straying further and further from any recognisable public purpose. High-profile conflicts like Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal became national symbols of how forceful land acquisition for industrial projects could trigger sustained resistance from farmers who had no meaningful say in the process.

Real estate and the FDI pull 🔗

Real estate has grown into one of the largest recipients of foreign investment in the Indian economy. Construction remains among the top sectors for FDI inflow, with tens of billions of dollars flowing in over the past two decades, and institutional investment in the sector has climbed sharply in recent years as global capital looks for opportunities in Indian land and property. This constant appetite for land, layered on top of industrial and infrastructure demand, keeps agricultural and tribal land under pressure even where legal restrictions exist.

Tribal land alienation: an old story with new triggers 🔗

Tribal communities have faced land dispossession since the colonial period, when the introduction of private property concepts allowed outsiders and moneylenders to acquire land that had previously operated under communal or customary use. That pattern has continued, just with new drivers. Tribal regions are often sparsely populated, resource-rich, and cheaper to acquire than land elsewhere, which makes them attractive for mining, industrial units, and infrastructure corridors.

How dispossession actually happens 🔗

Alienation rarely looks like open theft. It happens through indebtedness to moneylenders, fraudulent documentation, benami transactions where land is registered in someone else’s name, and outright administrative reclassification of tribal land as state-owned. In some cases, state governments have used industrial corporations as intermediaries to lease land to private entities, sidestepping the legal protections meant to stop exactly this kind of transfer. Courts have repeatedly struck down such arrangements, but the pattern keeps recurring because the underlying economic incentives have not changed.

What the safeguards were meant to do 🔗

The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, known as PESA, was designed to give Gram Sabhas real power over local resources, including the authority to prevent land alienation and to restore land that had been illegally transferred. The Government of India’s own Expert Group on Prevention of Alienation of Tribal Land documented how conversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural use in tribal areas has repeatedly displaced tribal peasants from ancestral property to serve public and private sector interests, even in regions covered by protective legislation.

The gap between the law and its enforcement is the real problem. Studies of tribal land issues across states show that state policy itself has frequently been responsible for land alienation, whether through weak implementation of restorative provisions, delayed restoration proceedings, or outright administrative circumvention of the rules meant to protect tribal landholders.

Land Acquisition Act, 2013: reform with limits 🔗

Recognising how outdated and one-sided the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act of 1894 had become, Parliament passed the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, commonly called the LARR Act. The new law aimed to guarantee compensation based on current market value, mandate transparent procedures, and require formal rehabilitation and resettlement support for displaced families, addressing decades of criticism that the 1894 framework ignored the people whose land was being taken.

On paper, this was a significant shift. In practice, the definition of “public purpose” remained broad enough to include acquisitions for private companies, and several states have since diluted implementation rules, creating exemptions for linear infrastructure, defence projects, and other categories that speed up acquisition at the cost of the consent and consultation processes the Act was meant to guarantee. For tribal households specifically, land acquired under this framework often cannot be replaced with equivalent ancestral land, since displacement severs ties to forest resources, common grazing land, and community structures that no cash compensation can fully restore.

What’s really at stake 🔗

The agrarian crisis is not simply about falling crop prices or rising input costs. It is also about who gets to decide what land is for. When restrictive laws exist but enforcement is weak, when public purpose becomes a flexible label for private profit, and when protective schedules meant for tribal communities get worn down through legal workarounds, the imbalance of power tilts further away from the people who actually live on and off the land. This is why land disputes so often escalate into sustained social movements rather than staying confined to courtrooms or legislative debates.

What do you think? Should the definition of “public purpose” in land acquisition law be narrowed to exclude private commercial projects entirely? And do you think stronger Gram Sabha powers under PESA are enough to stop tribal land alienation, or does the problem lie deeper in how development itself is designed?

References

1. https://telanganatoday.com/opinion-strengthen-tribal-land-rights-bridge-gap-between-law-and-reality
2. https://www.calj.in/post/from-protection-to-dispossession-how-jharkhand-s-executive–undermines-tribal-land-rights
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2012.656268
4. https://www.ibef.org/industry/real-estate-india
5. https://tribal.nic.in/downloads/Statistics/OtherReport/DevelopmentChallengesinExtremistAffectedAreas.pdf
6. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-5382-0_3
7. https://jgu.edu.in/jsgp/jindal-policy-research-lab/the-right-to-fair-compensation-and-transparency-in-land-acquisition-rehabilitation-and-resettlement-act-2013/