Disputing ‘market value’: the Bombay Improvement Trust and the reshaping of a speculative land market in early twentieth-century Bombay

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Urban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised ‘market value’ and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy.</jats:p>

Land, property relations, and urban planning: New histories from colonial India

“…She argues that through these changes new values were attached to land and a property market got shaped. She suggests that ‘what tied land acquisition by the Trust and private investment in land together was the role of court rulings on the methods by which the plots of land were valued (Tejani, 2020, p. 18).’…”

“…It became quickly clear that officers’ attempts to determine land values proved elusive at best. Any idea that there was an objective value to land was defeated (Tejani, 2020, p. 6).’…”

“…Focussing on the workings of the Bombay Improvement Trust, Shabnum Tejani (2020) charts the various valuation methods deployed by the trust members and the judiciary over a period of time (also Rao, 2013, pp. 32–36).…”