The state as land broker: India's AI data centres are rising on the fields of the poor

The farmers of Bhogapuram have found the protest of last resort: they stood shirtless before the mandal office, daring the state to take their land over their bare backs. The state, undeterred, is taking it anyway — 850 acres in Vizianagaram district for Reliance Industries' giga-scale AI data centre, allotted at a 25 per cent discount for a project valued at Rs 1.08 lakh crore. Listen to the arithmetic of this "development". The government holds barely 50 acres; it must acquire 800 more. Some 250 of those acres are assigned land — the kind of land given to the landless poor, which farmers cannot sell to private parties but which the state can simply "resume" after paying compensation. The farmers have boycotted the official meetings and approached the Andhra Pradesh High Court. The Collector's answer: the project will create jobs — but for whom? A hyperscale data centre, once built, needs electricity, cooling systems, engineers and specialised technical staff. It does not need the families who gave up their fields. At Tarluvada, where an IT hub is rising on Dalit families' D-patta land, the Human Rights Forum — citing company-submitted documents — counts just 1,725 permanent jobs against Rs 23,000 crore in subsidies. Compensation there was fixed at Rs 17 lakh an acre, raised to Rs 20 lakh after pushback, with payouts reportedly running at two-and-a-half times that. A cheque compensates for land as property, not the life built around it: food, seasonal income, livestock, inheritance, the small independence of a Dalit family pushed toward insecure labour. And consent? The authorities cite written agreements and revised compensation as proof the process is voluntary. But consent is meaningful only when people have full information, enough time, and the real ability to refuse — not when the meeting happens after the project has already been approved, and not when opposition leaders who visit the farmers are detained, as the CPI(M) alleged at Tarluvada in April. This is the old script with a new logo. Land was acquired for airports, then for industry, then for highways; now it is acquired for artificial intelligence. The Bhogapuram farmers put it plainly in Telugu: the airport already took thousands of acres and gave them no jobs and no proper compensation — "no matter how many crores we give, we will give our lives, but there is no point in giving lands." The Dravidian movement understood a century ago what the data-centre economy is relearning: land is not a commodity to be brokered between the state and capital over the heads of the tiller. Periyar's question — who owns, who labours, who profits — has never been more current. If the state wants to be a land broker for conglomerates, let it at least stop calling the eviction of the poor "development". Development that begins by dispossessing the tiller is not development. It is transfer — of land from those who have little to those who need nothing, subsidised by the public and sanctified by "jobs".