Breaking down the question
The command word is evaluate, and the question has two parts that must be given roughly equal weight: an assessment of the SEZ policy itself, and an analysis of the nature of the social response to it. The examiner wants a balanced judgement — the intended benefits and the actual costs of the policy — followed by a sociological account of who resisted, why, and in what forms. It sits squarely within the sociology of agrarian transformation, because SEZs turned on the acquisition of farmland and thus on the future of the peasantry.
A special economic zone is a demarcated enclave, treated as foreign territory for the purposes of trade and tariffs, in which firms enjoy tax holidays, relaxed regulation and world-class infrastructure in order to attract investment and boost exports. The SEZ Act of 2005 launched a wave of such projects in India. The sociological interest lies not in the economics of exports but in the transfer of land from cultivators to industry, the displacement it produced, and the movements of resistance it provoked at Nandigram, Singur and elsewhere.
How to approach it
Structure the answer in two clearly balanced halves. In the first, evaluate the policy: state its rationale and promised benefits, then set against them the empirical criticisms — loss of fertile land, displacement, inadequate compensation, revenue loss and speculation. In the second, analyse the social response: identify the agrarian classes involved, the character of the movements, and their varied outcomes.
Deploy theory to organise the evaluation. David Harvey's concept of accumulation by dispossession and Michael Levien's work on India's land-acquisition regime frame the SEZ as a transfer of assets from agriculture to capital, while Walter Fernandes's studies of development-induced displacement quantify the human cost. Use Singur and Nandigram as the anchoring cases. Conclude with a measured verdict on the policy and on what the resistance revealed about agrarian India.
Model answer
The special economic zone policy, given statutory form by the SEZ Act of 2005, was among the boldest instruments of India's post-liberalisation development strategy. An SEZ is a delimited enclave, treated as being outside the domestic customs territory, where firms are granted tax exemptions, streamlined regulation and superior infrastructure to draw investment, promote exports and generate employment. Sociologically the policy is significant less for its trade objectives than for its agrarian consequences, because it rested on the large-scale acquisition of land — often fertile, cultivated land — and thereby set in motion a profound transformation of rural society and a wave of popular resistance.
Judged on its own terms the policy had a plausible rationale. Its advocates argued that SEZs would attract foreign and domestic capital, create modern industrial and service employment, boost exports and foreign exchange, transfer technology and, through infrastructure and linkages, spur regional development. The Chinese success with special economic zones was held up as the model. For a country seeking to accelerate industrialisation and absorb surplus agricultural labour, the concentration of investment in well-serviced enclaves appeared an efficient shortcut.
Against this the evaluation must set a substantial body of criticism. The most serious was the acquisition of prime agricultural land. Because SEZs were sited near cities and along the coasts and highways, they frequently displaced multi-cropped, irrigated farmland, threatening food security and the livelihoods of cultivators. The displacement fell hardest on those with the weakest claims — tenants, sharecroppers and landless labourers who depended on the land but held no title, and who received little or no compensation. Compensation to landowners, fixed at distorted official rates, rarely reflected true market value or the loss of a permanent source of livelihood, and cash payments dissipated quickly, leaving families worse off. The policy was widely seen as a device for accumulation by dispossession, in David Harvey's phrase — a transfer of assets from the peasantry to corporate capital. Michael Levien has characterised this as a new regime of dispossession in which the state uses its coercive power of eminent domain to acquire land for private profit rather than public purpose. Critics further noted the enormous revenue foregone through tax concessions, the danger that SEZs would become real-estate speculation dressed as industry, the creation of dual enclaves insulated from labour and environmental regulation, and uneven regional spread. Walter Fernandes's research on development-induced displacement showed that decades of such projects had uprooted millions, disproportionately tribals and Dalits, with dismal records of rehabilitation.
The social response to the policy was correspondingly intense and revealing. It was, above all, an agrarian response, but its character varied with the class position of those affected. Landowning farmers resisted forcible acquisition and demanded fair compensation and a share in the gains; landless labourers and tenants, facing loss of work without any compensating title, resisted the destruction of their only livelihood; and both were often joined by political parties, civil-society organisations and intellectuals who framed the struggles as a defence of the peasantry against corporate encroachment.
The emblematic cases were Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal. At Singur, the acquisition of fertile farmland for a Tata automobile plant provoked a sustained agitation that eventually forced the project to relocate. At Nandigram, resistance to a proposed chemical SEZ led to violent confrontation and police firing that killed protesting villagers, becoming a national symbol of the human cost of land acquisition. Comparable mobilisations at Raigad in Maharashtra, at POSCO's proposed steel project in Odisha and elsewhere revealed a widespread refusal to surrender land. These movements were not uniform: some sought only better compensation, while others rejected acquisition outright and questioned the model of development itself.
The consequences were substantial. The resistance stalled or defeated several projects, reshaped state politics — the Nandigram and Singur agitations contributed to the fall of the long-entrenched Left Front government in West Bengal — and forced a rethinking of the acquisition framework, culminating in the more consent-based and rehabilitation-oriented Land Acquisition Act of 2013. The SEZ programme as a whole fell far short of its promise, with many notified zones remaining undeveloped.
Evaluated overall, the SEZ policy illustrates the central tension of agrarian transformation in a democracy: the drive to industrialise collides with the rights and livelihoods of a landholding peasantry. The policy was flawed less in its aim of promoting industry than in its coercive means, its neglect of the displaced and its indifference to the value of agricultural land. The social response demonstrated that the Indian peasantry, far from being a passive object of development, could organise, resist and reshape both policy and politics. The episode's lasting lesson is that development which dispossesses without genuine consent, fair compensation and secure rehabilitation will be contested — and that the terms of agrarian transformation must be negotiated with those whose land and lives are at stake.
Examiner's perspective
A thirty-mark evaluation demands balance and structure. The examiner looks for the two limbs of the question to be given comparable space: a genuine weighing of the policy's rationale against its costs, and a differentiated analysis of the social response by agrarian class. Answers that only attack the policy, or only narrate Nandigram, forfeit the higher band.
The strongest scripts organise the critique with theory — Harvey's accumulation by dispossession, Levien on the dispossession regime, Fernandes on displacement — and anchor the response in the concrete cases of Singur, Nandigram, Raigad and POSCO, noting that resistance ranged from demands for compensation to outright rejection. Crediting the consequences, including the 2013 land-acquisition law and the electoral fall of the West Bengal Left Front, shows command of outcomes. A measured conclusion that identifies the coercive means, not the industrial aim, as the flaw, and that reads the resistance as evidence of peasant agency, gives the evaluation its analytical maturity.