Land, Labour, and Under-Industrialization in Post-Reform India: Case Studies from Odisha

With some four decades of data to draw on, it is now clear that the post-reform period has failed to deliver on its promise of industrialization in India: manufacturing accounts for a declining share of the national product, and has failed to emerge as a driver of employment. In fact, the post-1990 period under-performs on a range of indicators when measured against the early post-independence period, while the benefits of what little industrialization there is continue to bypass the country’s poorest citizens and regions. Why? Two case studies from the Indian state of Odisha are presented in pursuit of this question: the Kalinga Nagar Industrial Complex in Jajpur, billed as India’s next Steel City, and POSCO’s captive steel plant in Jagatsinghpur, once the largest FDI project in India’s history. A broad history of the literature on industrial development and industrial policy is reviewed (structuralist, neoclassical, and neo-Weberian). This literature is counterposed to the radical political economy literature, from which I assemble an alternative framework for understanding under-industrialization in the Global South, drawing on extensive fieldwork carried out in the region in 2016-17. I argue that liberalization is incapable of delivering meaningful industrialization in low-income/developing countries because (a) it engenders forms of land- based struggle and resistance which, due the scalar nature of politics, disrupt land commodification processes, and (b) it robs, through mediated processes of exploitation, the would-be beneficiaries of what little industrialization there is.