The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor and Its Impacts on Agriculture: A Review of Academic Literature

The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) is a flagship infrastructure megaproject envisioned by the Government of India to lead the country's economic transformation. With estimated investment of up to US$100 billion, the plan seeks to build a globally competitive centre for manufacturing and trade served with world-class infrastructure and interconnected "smart cities." As the official discourse proposes DMIC as a panacea for India's jobs and infrastructure gap, a very different and critical picture is found through review of the academic and policy literatures. The research identifies a major and multifaceted impact on the agricultural sector, like socio-economic disparity, rising regional inequity, and escalating environmental challenges. At the centre of the problem lies the forced acquisition of holdings of farmland, resulting in the dislocation of farming communities which results to the loss of tradition livelihoods. Researchers have pointed out the shortcomings of the project's capital-intensive proposals in absorbing the dislocated communities, most of whom are unskilled, thereby causing a huge gap between the original intentions of the project and on-the-ground realities. Adding to that, the pilot project of the DMIC is often criticized as a fragmented and incoherent process, whose outcome hinges on the varied institutional capacities of various states. Such differential growth, along with a lack of proper public consultation and the sidelining of land laws, has resulted in social reluctance and litigations. The water and land requirements of the project lead urbanisations pose added stress on a very vulnerable agrarian ecosystem. In contrast to the recorded advantages for agriculture—in the form of expanded Agri-logistics and supply chains—the advantages are systemically theoretical and promotional in nature, with a conspicuous lack of experimental evidence supporting practical benefit for small and marginal farmers. Such a gap in proposed desirable benefits to relative identified undesirable effects is a key finding and a primary gap in the literature. As such, the DMIC is a salutary case study exposing the pressing dilemma between top-down infrastructure-led growth and the principle of fair, inclusive, and sustainable growth.