ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I would describe the adoption of a liberalised economy for the investment of private capital in West Bengal. Paradoxically, implementation of the liberalisation policy rested on a colonial and/ or post-independence state acquisition law. The upshot of the execution of this policy was while the government assumed that there will be a creation of employment, just the opposite kind of outcomes occurred, namely, landlessness, food insecurity and political disempowerment of the peasantry along with dampening of the empowering process of land reform. The peasants resisted and bargained but finally, were defeated. Accordingly, I depicted and assessed this process of land management by a pro-peasant leftist government in the wider context of a liberalised economic order with the aid of a multisite ethnography, which emerged in anthropology in the recent past.
