ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter expands the discourse on three important aspects of land in India: ‘land question’, ‘neoliberal India’, and ‘socio-legal and judicial interpretations’. The ‘land question’ aims to be an overarching term to make ‘land’ more comprehensive and cohesive; it incorporates land as a property; resource; means to sustainable development; how people related to ‘land’ and its systemic associations – land governance, acquisition, market, and economic; and land rights. This chapter maps out changes, challenges, and manifestations in the social, legal, and judicial domains that signify the neoliberal era, and whether these domains are inter-linked and have circularity, or though they are not clearly inter-linked, whether they are influential regarding one another. The chapter outlines two themes: (1) socio-legal and policy perspective on ‘land’ and legal initiatives (programmatic and regulatory mechanism), and (2) evolving jurisprudence on the land question, and eight chapters organised under two themes. The first theme covers five topics – land titling, real estate in urban areas, forest land governance, land leasing, and bio-cultural narrative of land in Northeast India; the second theme is elaborated through three chapters – newly inducted land acquisition and rehabilitation and resettlement act of 2013, judgments of the USA and India related to land acquisition for economic growth, and environmental issues intersecting with the land question.
