The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence by Sanjoy Chakravorty, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013, xxx 273 pp

In contrast to ordinary transactions based on contracts, government land appropriation is an extreme case where the state forcibly and legally takes private ownership of land away from land-rights holders. In the last decade, this has increasingly become a major issue in India. Indeed, media attention on land appropriation cases involving violent actions, such as Nandigram, Kalinganagar, and Singur, have shocked the country. Some argue that the shortage of, and confrontation over, land for infrastructure and for mining and industrial sites is the most serious hindrance to further economic growth. Others contest that central and state governments, acting in the interests of profit-chasing private firms, are mercilessly attempting to displace citizens in the name of development. In response to this serious issue, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013 was finally passed in September 2013 and came into force in January 2014, replacing the century-old Land Acquisition Act of 1894. On one hand, the new act has been criticized in business circles as setting excessively high barriers for land appropriation; on the other hand, it has been condemned by human rights groups as not fully recognizing the substantial and procedural rights of residents. One problem in the debate is insufficient information about land markets and about the effects of projects that cannot be implemented without land appropriation. In general, while the states try to justify their actions by offering the bright prospect of economic development, the opposition tries to present the worst-case scenario. Thus, both sides have tended to fail in providing fair accounts and have contributed to the propagation of misinformation. In this book, the author has made a significant and important contribution to the understanding of the causes and structure of the problem, especially through offering objective information and explanations about changes in land markets. The book consists of ten chapters divided into three parts, “Present,” “Past,” and “Future.” Part 1 provides an overview of the current land acquisition problem. The author categorizes land acquisition disputes into two types: conflicts over a fair price and conflicts involving subjectively priceless lands for some, but not for others (Chapter 1). In both cases, until “as recently as a decade ago, the land-acquirer had the power to set prices and take land with impunity” (p. 18), while since the mid-2000s, better informed landowners have become able to resist land appropriation. In Chapter 2, gathering information about land prices from various cases and sources, the author reveals that in urban areas, buyers and sellers have sufficient information about land prices, while it is difficult to find any pattern in pricing rural land, and it is this absence of uniform patterns in price setting that suggests that rural land markets are going through a major transition. The Developing Economies 52, no. 3 (September 2014): 287–300 bs_bs_banner