The Rentier Economy of Growth Infrastructures: Value Appropriation without Adequate Accumulation in India (Sampat, 2025)

Summary

"The Rentier Economy of Growth Infrastructures: Value Appropriation without Adequate Accumulation in India," by Preeti Sampat (Krea University), appeared in Antipode 57: 2438–2464 (2025). It extends a multi-year research program — an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellowship project with Erik Swyngedouw titled "The Rentier Economy: Value, Nature and India's Land Impasse" — examining how India's post-liberalization "growth infrastructure" projects (special economic zones, smart cities) extract land value while failing to deliver the manufacturing growth they were justified by.

The Three-Phase Pattern

The paper traces a repeating three-phase sequence: the inaugural moment of project announcement, which itself begins raising expectations and land values; the subsequent moment of land allotments to capital, transferring large tracts to developers and industrial users at favorable terms; and the third moment of development, lease, and sale, where the actual value appropriation is realized — often with minimal productive activity ever occurring on the land. The empirical anchors are Gujarat's Dholera smart city (facing sustained legal opposition from local peasants since inception, with a Gujarat High Court interim stay imposed in 2015) and special economic zones nationally and in Goa, where popular resistance led to official SEZ cancellation in 2010 and a developer-government legal battle that ended in an out-of-court settlement in 2019.

The Core Finding

Set against national data on manufacturing and construction, the paper's central claim, quoted from its abstract: "value appropriation from land rent intensifies, but anticipated accumulation from investments remains elusive" — India's manufacturing share of output has stagnated for decades even as construction activity, concentrated disproportionately in rural areas being converted for "growth infrastructure," continues to boom. The paper reads this as "value appropriation without adequate accumulation": land rent capture functions as the real economic engine of these projects, with the promised productive investment serving mainly as justification rather than materializing at scale.

Relation to the Georgist Case

This adds a large, distinct national case to the wiki's rentier and land value capture coverage, and a cautionary one: it documents land rent appropriation happening at scale without the public-investment-creates-genuine-value story the wiki's Henry George Theorem coverage generally assumes. Where the theorem's logic works when public investment genuinely raises land value by creating real productive capacity, Sampat's cases describe projects where the land-value uplift from mere announcement and allotment — not actual infrastructure delivery or productive use — is what capital appears to be capturing, a distinction worth keeping in mind when evaluating growth-infrastructure-justified land deals generally.

Nuances and Limits

• India-specific, drawing on a broader multi-year research program. The Dholera and Goa SEZ cases are the paper's central evidence; generalizing to other Indian growth-infrastructure projects, let alone other countries, would go beyond what this paper itself establishes.
• Abstract-level source (B-claim). The publisher page was blocked to this session, including via a reader-proxy route; this page is built from a well-corroborated WebSearch reconstruction of the paper's framework and case identification, not the paper's own statistical evidence or full argument.
• Specific land-price and investment figures were not independently obtained — the page describes the paper's qualitative framework and case selection, not its quantitative results.

Bears On

• Concept: Rentier — a large-scale national case of land rent appropriation via growth-infrastructure projects.
• Concept: Land Value Capture — a cautionary contrast: value capture by capital happening ahead of, not because of, actual infrastructure delivery.
• Concept: Henry George Theorem — a case where the theorem's public-investment-creates-value premise appears not to hold, since the land-value uplift precedes and outpaces actual productive investment.

See Also

• Rentier
• Land Value Capture
• Henry George Theorem
• Financialization of Land

Sources

1. Preeti Sampat (2025), "The Rentier Economy of Growth Infrastructures: Value Appropriation without Adequate Accumulation in India," Antipode 57: 2438–2464, published online 6 August 2025, DOI 10.1111/anti.70061. doi.org — fetch blocked (403) to this session 2026-08-31, including via a reader-proxy route; summary reconstructed from a WebSearch aggregation of the paper's abstract and author's related work — used for the three-phase land-appropriation framework, the Dholera and Goa SEZ case identification, and the "value appropriation without adequate accumulation" finding (B-claim; secondary description, full text and quantitative results not independently obtained).