Abstract |
This chapter discusses the transformation of a village called Khora at the border of Delhi, Noida and Ghaziabad (both satellite towns of Delhi) to throw light on the peculiar form of capital accumulation happening over there. Khora has rapidly changed from being a sparsely populated village in 1971 with a total population of 656 to a census town in 2011 with a population of 189,410. While these are official census figures, the actual numbers living in Khora seem to be much more with newspaper and other media sources reporting around 1 million in 2013 calling it ‘Asia’s biggest labour colony’. Since the high-density development of Khora is essentially linked to the development of Noida, the author shows how accumulation in Khora is tied to the new town of Noida. Khora now is an intensely dense colony which is home to a labouring population ranging from factory workers, guards, domestic helps, auto-rickshaw drivers, rickshaw pullers, rag pickers, scrap dealers and collectors. One way to look at Noida, with the foreign investments and Export Processing Zones (EPZs) on one hand and places such as Khora on the other hand, is as a classic case of uneven development. The author also looks at the way in which spaces such as Khora themselves become nodes of accumulation for various classes ranging from the erstwhile owners of farm land to migrant workers and the ways in which the two modes of accumulation interact. |