Land acquisition and industrialization are interlinked with each other. In India, land plays a vital role in infrastructure development. Across the globe, land has intrinsic social, economic, emotional, and political values. The land value is an important factor due to diversification. India has seen faster economic development in the last decades. While developing, the country requires infrastructure, industrialization, and balanced growth in both urban and rural areas for which land is required. Land, being one of the most important finite resources is not only a piece of natural resource, which requires management and conservation; it is also an economic good and an important component of social formation. Practices and policies around land use vary considerably across the world and depend on physical as well as socio-economic and cultural factors. Improper land use and policies significantly affect the environment natural as well as socio-cultural and economic aspects of human communities.
However, use of agricultural land for industrialisation leads to a number of adverse socio-economic and cultural impacts in the rural societies. The district of Paschim Medinipur in West Bengal is chiefly an agriculture based district where more than seventy percent of the population lives in the rural area and among them majority depends on agriculture and agriculture related activities.
The findings revealed that the land acquisition which took place about two decades ago has worsened the socio-economic condition of the affected families and the people are also making attempts to cope up with the situation by adopting various strategies, some of which have further adverse effects on their socio-economic condition. Largely, land acquisition in the absence of proper rehabilitation and pre-project impact assessment has shown a downward spiraling effect in the study area.
