The project in question is a “smart city,” a concept that is very dear to Mr. Modi and unclear to Indians who have tried to find out what exactly it does. A smart city, it appears from the government’s sketches, is a cluster of high-rise buildings that shine in daylight and glow at night, and loom over waterways and handsome trains that have automatic doors. A smart city would be run and managed by software that would, among other things, suck human waste from buildings and send it at high speed to some other place.

Mr. Modi plans to build scores of smart cities and hundreds of other cities that are only marginally dumber. He also wants to develop many industries.

To achieve all this, Mr. Modi’s government needs a lot of land from Indian farmers. It is a messy process. He appears to know how messy it can be. Once, in a speech to Delhi’s elite, he expressed his amusement at the memory of a bunch of automobile executives who went to acquire land from farmers, “wearing ties and suits.” They were driven away.

Indian agriculture, despite all the homage that is paid by city dwellers to farmers, is mostly land aspiring to become real estate. Farming is the least productive industry in India, and farmers are among its most impoverished laborers, even though the sheer size of India and the fact that more than 60 percent of its land is used for farming ensure that it is a statistical giant in agriculture.

According to a study last year <http://www.lokniti.org/pdf/Farmers_Report_Final.pdf> of farmers by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 62 percent of farmers surveyed wished to quit farming and move to the city, and 76 percent of their children did not wish to be farmers.

The intellectuals and activists who oppose the government’s plans for efficient land acquisition despise the idea that anyone should be forced to sell his land and that hundreds of thousands of landless farmworkers should suddenly be asked to choose another profession.