Beyond Zoning: India’s Corridors of “Development” And New Frontiers of Capital

Abstract

This article explores the postcolonial state’s experiments with logistics through the construction of industrial corridors. Through the concept of “corridor economy” it traces the shift from special economic zones to corridors, with a special focus on the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) to understand how land, labor, and capital are being organized through new governance strategies. By closely analyzing the violent labor unrest that broke out in the Maruti Suzuki plant in Manesar, an industrial center of prominence in the DMIC project, the article explores the ways the corridor economy model is being projected as the future of development. In so doing, the article positions this model as a neoliberal institution that marks new frontiers of capital and asks how the struggles crisscrossing the spaces of the DMIC reveal the paradoxical and heterogeneous political constellations of capital-labor relations and the transformations of the state form.

Placing Borders in Development

“…It involves de-and re-bordering processes, as in the case of the decentralisation of service provisions and the redefinition of the functions and responsibilities of sub-national jurisdictions 140 . It is also concerned with mapping poverty in ways that go beyond existing administrative boundaries, for instance through zoning territories based on their food economy 141 . It attributes agency for development to "communities" or households, understood as coherent units of people who inhabit bounded geographic spaces 142 .…”

Politics of circulation: The makings of the Berbera corridor in Somali East Africa

“…These comprise not only well-known capitalist and modern rationalities, such as those pertaining to capital accumulation, market forces, labour discipline and logistics. Non-capitalist rationalities may also characterize projects of circulation where they are either ‘translated’ or reorganized to benefit dominant actors (Tsing, 2015: 61), 5 or co-produced in the process of corridor-making (Dey and Grappi, 2015). As we show in the following, the projects that coincide around Berbera corridor encompass a lively cross-border livestock economy in a context of limited statehood, plural authorities and legal pluralism (see Little et al., 2015; Rasmussen and Varming, 2016).…”

The village as urban infrastructure: Social reproduction, agrarian repair and uneven urbanisation

“…As a consequence of Gurgaon's privatised urban development model, there is an absence of consolidated municipal government, public land or housing in the city, in this context low-cost housing, transport and infrastructural services -all vital for the city's lowwage industries -are provided by 'urban village' businesses. The iterative development of unregulated constructions on 'rural' land in the heart of what would become Gurgaon has provided industry cheap pockets of land to house their workforces and outsource the lower-ends of the value chain at a moment in which India's industrial sector has been rapidly reorienting towards lean production and informal, flexibilised labour regimes (Cowan, 2018b;Dey and Grappi, 2015;Mezzadri, 2016), and equally a terrain for alienated landowners to craft new livelihoods and transform themselves into urban residents. While Gurgaon's urban villages are commonly depicted as sites of poverty encircled by splendorous wealth, indicative of broader urban social inequality across the country, when recast as infrastructural nodes, Gurgaon's villages become more than simply 'wastelands' and residues of exclusionary urbanisation.…”