Narratives of Waste

Urban Farm DB summary

This chapter analyzes the regional class and caste politics of large-scale land investment in Maharashtra, India, through the case of the Khed Special Economic Zone (SEZ), where peri-urban agricultural land was converted into urban real estate. Dominant agrarian castes, long invested in commodity agriculture and closely tied to urban capital, protested vociferously against land acquisition for the SEZ, while Adivasi ("tribal") and Dalit groups historically dependent on land classified as "waste" embraced the forced acquisition. Historic narratives linking poor land quality to the social backwardness of those occupying "wasteland" were leveraged by these lower-caste and lower-class groups themselves to frame land expropriation as a path into the urban economy. The chapter concludes that fictions of "waste" that had previously excluded the most socially subordinated groups from commodity agriculture became, in this case, an instrument of urban inclusion.