The ‘Goan Impasse’: land rights and resistance to SEZs in Goa, India

Abstract

Conflicts over land-grabs for industry, infrastructure and urbanization are on the rise in emerging economies. A slew of policy measures undergird such land deals in India but have encountered successful resistance from peasants and citizens groups. In Goa, resistance led to the revocation of the state's special economic zone (SEZ) policy and cancellation of all approved SEZs, many developed by prominent realty firms. As battle over three SEZs continues in the Supreme Court of India, there is hope that commons will be returned to local communities. There is, however, an impasse on the ground that begs resolution if the gains over SEZs are to be secured. The Goan Impasse can be resolved with egalitarian and ecologically appropriate rights to land- and resource-use for all that counter existing inequalities. This requires programmatic social movements reconstituting relationships around and to land and resources from below.

Keywords:

• infrastructure land-grabs
• special economic zones
• land rights
• social movements
• India
• Goa

Acknowledgements

This study would not have been possible without the gracious support and invaluable advice of Pravin Sabnis, Albertina Almeida, Franky Monteiro, Charles Fernandes, Agnel and Mariya ‘Emy’ Fernandes, Peter and Luizinha Gama, Swati Kerkar, Ramkrishna Zalmi and Solano Da Silva. Many others in Goa also generously gave me their time and shared precious insights and experiences. Thanks are due to Solano Da Silva for generously sharing drafts of his chapter, and to Albertina Almeida for a careful reading of an earlier draft. My dissertation group helped rescue protagonists’ voices from drowning in empirical details. Marc Edelman, David Harvey, Donald Robotham and Jeff Maskovsky shared insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, as did the Land Deals Politics Initiative Collective. Thanks are due to two anonymous reviewers and the editors of JPS.

Funding

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Land Deals Politics Initiative.

Notes

¹I use the term peasants’ groups here to refer to small and marginal land-owning farmers with less than 10 and two acres of land respectively, landless agrarian workers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, forest dwellers and other petty commodity producers. In India, peasants are also further stratified along ethnicity, religion, caste and gender lines.

Citizens’ groups here refer to coalitions of individuals, often concerned professionals and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that coalesce around contentious issues. They are not NGOs in themselves, and often do not take institutional funds or salaries, but are rather concerned people working voluntarily for campaigns who raise resources through individual donations.

²Several states enacted SEZ policies in consonance with the national law.

³Albertina Almeida helped frame this as use-rights. In an earlier work I have used this phrase to refer to contextualized, ecologically appropriate and egalitarian land- and resource-use rights that counter prevailing caste, community, gender and class inequalities (see Sampat 2013; also Borras and Franco 2010 for pro-poor land reforms).

⁴Adnan (2013) offers this as a generic concept for transnational, domestic and local processes of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession (distinguished as distinct phases) through direct and indirect mechanisms and institutions. Recent conceptual refinement has led some to describe land-grabs as only those land deals that are executed through ‘extra-economic force’ (see Levien 2012; Borras and Franco 2013; also Hall 2013 for an overview). My preference here is to go along with Adnan (2013) in contextualizing land-grabs within capitalist-facilitating accumulation that encompasses broader forces facilitating dispossession. I find the distinction between ‘extra-economic’ and ‘economic’ coercion unhelpful in the processes I describe below (there was little forcible acquisition in Goa), and prefer to think of coercion as the political aspect in political economy that may be deployed by ‘the state’ (and private actors) or ‘the market'. The distinction between extra-economic and economic coercion then emerges from a forced distinction largely between the state and the market that under conditions of capitalism is only heuristic.

⁵Land Matrix data show that 1,289,000 hectares have been acquired in 39 deals by Indian companies for agriculture in Africa and Asia (Rebello 2013; see also Grain 2008).

⁶The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Law 2013 was enacted in September 2013.

⁷A 2009 federal Committee on Land Reforms decried growing corporate investment in indigenous areas ‘as the biggest land grab of tribal lands since Columbus’ (GoI 2009, 160).

⁸The Indian economy was relatively insulated from the ‘global crisis’ in 2008–2011 by a combination of monetary policy, expanding domestic market and capital and a mixed bag of stimulus and welfare entitlements (see Subbarao 2009; UNDP 2011).

⁹This is not to imply that transnational capital of foreign origin has not invested in SEZs at all; Indonesian SALEM Group and South Korean POSCO are two examples of more controversial foreign investments in SEZs.

¹⁰Initially 25 percent, this limit was later raised on account of controversy.

¹¹Under the Indian Constitution, land comes under the jurisdiction of state governments. Acquisition for SEZs was thus initially undertaken by state governments through national or state-level acquisition laws, and state governments consequently bore the frontal brunt of anti-SEZ oppositions.

¹²The letter was backed by a circular to all states in October 2009.

¹³The provisions of India's Right to Information (RTI) Act 2005 significantly enabled research and I obtained copies of relevant public documents including this letter through its provisions. This law has been extensively used to obtain information, catalyze resistance and challenge SEZs in Goa and elsewhere in India.

¹⁴The onus for ensuring that no forcible acquisition was undertaken was left to the state governments, however, with no clear procedure for penalizing violations.

¹⁵SEZs are given final approval by an inter-ministerial BoA presided over by the federal Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Final notification is given when all land has been acquired by the developer and the SEZ is ready to start operations.

¹⁶Goa has a dedicated bench of the High Court of Bombay.

¹⁷Traditionally, gaonkars were considered the original inhabitants of a village, with collective ownership of land and resources leased for cultivation to ‘users’ through auctions. The income from auctions was equitably distributed among the gaonkari and the land could not be sold or converted for non-agricultural purposes. A share-holding system incorporated non-gaonkars. The gaonkari assigned fishing and market zones to fisherfolk; land to washers, barbers and gravediggers; land for crematoriums, housing and agriculture; and were responsible for the protection of fields, bunds, sluice-gates and other structures; and building and maintaining village temples and, later, churches. The Portuguese retained and legally codified this system as Comunidades. Anti-caste activists point out that Dalits, so-called ‘lower’ caste and indigenous communities and women, were not members of Comunidades, and whether traditional gaonkaris were more egalitarian is disputed. At present, Comunidades are present in every village and, in some villages like Loutolim and Verna, Scheduled Tribe members and women have shares in Comunidades depending on their economic capacity to buy shares. Comunidade areas have reduced considerably since 1961, with growing private fields, forests and orchards. The British colonial legacy of eminent domain supersedes Comunidades with land acquisition for ‘public purpose', including industrial estates (see Sridhar 2010).

¹⁸K. Raheja and Peninsula have realty projects in several Indian cities. CIPLA's company profile describes it as one of the largest Indian exporters of pharmaceutical products with ‘a strong presence’ in over 170 countries and ‘strategic arrangements’ in the U.S. and Europe (see K. Raheja Corp 2012; Peninsula Land 2012; CIPLA 2012).

¹⁹Geographically, Goa lies between the Western Ghats mountain range and the Arabian Sea (see also Figure 1).

²⁰Scheduled Tribes (STs) are indigenous communities noted in the Indian Constitution and historically oppressed by dominant Hindu upper-caste and other communities.

²¹A discussion of the frame of ‘Goan identity’ in the anti-SEZ agitation is taken up later in the paper. Goa was a Portuguese colony for 451 years, and its accession into India by the Indian military (that then ruled the state for six months) was controversial, with allegations of Indian imperialism. In 1967, an opinion poll was conducted by the GoI on Goa's merger with Maharashtra. A majority of Goans voted against the merger, consolidating Goa's status as a distinct political entity, albeit within the Indian union. Debates around the opinion poll articulated and mobilized a distinct ‘Goan identity’ and brought together the Hindus and Catholics threatened by a merger with Maharashtra (Rubinoff 1992).

²² Khazans are reclaimed from marshy mangroves by constructing dykes and sluice-gates.

²³This account is largely constructed from interviews with Goa Bachao Abhiyan (GBA) activists (also Savegoa 2012).

²⁴A recent report puts the number of such houses at 21.8 percent of Goa's total houses (Firstpost 2013).

²⁵This is not to ‘exonerate’ hierarchies within social movements, or to diminish the extremely necessary and important work of gender-, caste- and other community-based mobilizations for equity and justice.

²⁶Peasants from ST and Scheduled Caste (so-called ‘untouchable’) communities often tend the lands of upper caste Catholics and Hindus and/or have small holdings. Depending on their class status in some villages, they may purchase Comunidade shares to cultivate rice, tend coconut and betel-nut groves, grow fruits and vegetables, produce coconut oil and farm prawns and other shellfish.

²⁷Depending on a Catholic person's locality of origin, their ‘original’ caste can be determined and often, though not always, corresponds with their socio-economic status; Brahmin and ‘upper-caste’ Christians are generally better off than SC and ST Christians.

²⁸See Raghuraman (2013) for a discussion of the predominantly mercantile capital interests during and soon after Portuguese rule in Goa and Newman (1984) for an account of Goa's transformation into a bourgeois capitalist society post-1961.

²⁹Pez is rice gruel in Konkani but as an acronym here also doubles as People's Economic Zones.

³⁰I have deliberately avoided using the indicator ‘sic’ to resist privileging standardized English over local parlance.

³¹The caste and community affiliations of the individuals mentioned in this narrative are not explicitly disclosed given cultural sensitivities, but, needless to say, form major axes of inequality.

³²The TPP is a contentious poverty alleviation scheme that has typically allotted Comunidade lands for housing low-wage migrant workers in slum-like conditions near industrial estates. These workers often form captive ‘vote-banks’ for political patrons in return for favors like housing, access to water, electricity, etc. While class-bias is a likely factor in the opposition to TPPs, SEZs were to attract white-collar immigrants, indicating an underlying issue of overburdened local resources and infrastructure.

³³After anti-SEZ campaigners cried foul over a real estate scam, the Mindspace SEZ advertisement disappeared from the company's website. Campaigners, however, had taken its printouts and subsequently furnished them as court evidence. The company's website still advertises several Mindspace SEZs in different Indian cities. Fieldtrips to the Verna plateau reveal an area ideal for a premium realty project given its location atop the plateau, with sea breezes, pristine views of the Zuari river, proximity to the airport, the Verna Industrial Estate (VIE) and Margao and Panjim cities, and abundant groundwater and natural springs.

³⁴Construction workers across India are generally extremely poor and vulnerable immigrants from other states dependent on contractors and local residents for livelihoods and stay. In Goa, they are generally from rural Bihar, Jharkhand and Karnataka.

³⁵By law, SEZs are deemed foreign territories for all commercial purposes.

³⁶Soon after, at the peak of the Christmas–New Year tourist season, the GMAS announced that tourists should leave as a ‘Nandigram-like situation’ was developing in Goa (see discussion of other mobilizations below).

³⁷The latest census figures for migration had not been officially released as of January 2014, and were unavailable online until September 2014. This estimate is based on a newspaper account of CM Parrikar's speech.

³⁸Dollar figures are calculated at the 2006 prevailing rate of approximately USD 1 to Rs. 43.

³⁹Nandigram, in West Bengal, was the site of the Indonesian Salim group SEZ that witnessed mass violence through 2007 as local farmers, residents and opposition political parties resisted land acquisition by the state government, with violence peaking in November 2007.

⁴⁰See Heller (2005) for an account of such political pressures in Kerala.

⁴¹These ‘viewings of the state’ (Bedi 2013, 41) under CM Kamat's leadership may have enabled the anti-SEZ campaign's success, given the proximity with state actors in Goa and the ‘receptivity’ of CM Kamat. However, the role of Goa's vibrant history of environmental activism (that is checkered with violence) cannot be discounted in blunting the state's repertoires of repression. At the same time, anti-SEZ oppositions elsewhere have successfully mobilized despite violent repression, such as in Nandigram in West Bengal and Raigand in Maharashtra. In many of these areas and arguably in Goa, peasants’ and citizens’ groups risked their lives and livelihoods irrespective of state receptivity, to assert rights over land and resources.

⁴² Comunidade properties have considerably reduced post 1961, and while many villages still have functioning Comunidades, these are collective but private bodies. The political and administrative unit at the village level is the Panchayat, that in Goan villages may (or may not) have acquired other commons under its jurisdiction since 1961. The Panchayat is the official representative body for the entire village.

⁴³Recent rescinding of tax benefits by the Finance Ministry, and the global economic slowdown, have served more blows (see Mohanty 2010; Indian Express 2012, 2013; ET 2013). The number of formally approved SEZs was reduced to 576 by mid-2014 (GoI 2014), and a scrutiny of the minutes of recent SEZ board meetings shows growing requests by developers for project withdrawals or extension of approval periods as they fail to acquire desired land.

Additional information

Preeti Sampat currently teaches in the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Her research focuses on rights and conflicts over land and resources in India in relation to infrastructure and urbanization policy.