Land Resource Conflicts in India with Its Implications for Food Security and Food Sovereignty

As farmland is diverted to other purposes in a fast-developing country such as India, the number of land-related conflicts is on a steady rise. The current model of land takeover--which depends on closed-door bureaucratic decisions taken without project-impacted persons' input--may not be sustainable for India. Recognizing the unsustainability of the current land acquisition model has prompted me to ask: how much land is absolutely required to feed, clothe, house, and provide a life of dignity to some 1300 million inhabitants of India? Acknowledging that food, fiber, and animal feed are basic needs, this paper focuses on three issues related to land and food production in India. First, I will examine the extent of farmland and common land acquisition in India during the period 1947-2016. Second, I will analyze the impact of land acquisition on food production in India. Third, I will examine two contrasting models of meeting food needs for India--the top-down model of "food security" and the localized, "bottom-up" model of "food sovereignty"--and spell out the implications of following each model for meeting the total food requirements of Indians at present and in the next twenty years. This paper builds on Gadgil and Guha's model of classifying Indians into three social groups depending on their circle of resource use: ecosystem people, ecological refugees, and omnivores. I argue that while land takeover by the Indian government from 1947-2016 has had a substantial impact on creating hunger and food-related dependency among some groups of ecosystem people (e.g. Adivasis), the government sponsored-agricultural revolutions have had the opposite impact on other groups of ecosystem people and especially on omnivores. Further, I will argue that a mixed model (combining features of "food security" and "food sovereignty" models) is necessary to meet urban and rural India's food needs, given the adverse population: fertile land ratio.