The immutably mobile wasteland: how wasteland development policies are shaping modern land politics in India

Developing wastelands, an official government classification for marginal lands, has been central to India’s economic development and industrialization goals since the late 1970s. Beginning with Social Forestry in the 1970s and extending through the current wave of biofuel, climate change and Special Economic Zone (SEZ) policies, wastelands have come to be defined through government and civil society efforts as ‘empty’, ‘vacant’ lands available for development. However, local users and their associated livelihood activities are obscured from these framings. Instead, agriculturalists are presented as a stock of surplus labor and potential beneficiaries of wasteland development programs. Further, a host of new government agencies, commissions and committees have been established to manage, monitor and review wasteland development. In this process, the concept of wastelands has become an ‘immutable mobile’ that carries through time and presently sits unquestioned. In this paper, I unpack the history of how this came to be and how it might be undone given the significance of wastelands to present day land politics in India.