Industrialising Rural India Land, policy and resistance

Part 1: Introduction

1. Industrialising Rural India

2. ‘The Dog that didn’t Bark’ (Very Loud) – Large-scale Development Projects with Little Protests in Nehru’s India

3. From State-led Development to Embedded Neo-liberalism: India’s Industrial and Social Policies in Comparative Perspective

4. ‘Should the Son of a Farmer always remain a Farmer?’ The Ambivalence of Industrialisation and Resistance in West Bengal

5. Coal as National Development in India: Transforming Landscapes and Social Relations in the Quest for Energy Security

6. A Different Story of Coal: The Power of Power in Northeast India

7. The Nature of Bauxite Mining and Adivasi Livelihoods in the Industrialisation of Eastern India

8. Resource Extraction in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum: The Continuing Marginalisation of Adivasi Livelihoods Despite Decentralisation

9. Rural Industry, the Forest Rights Act, and the Performance(s) of Proof

10. ‘We will need a Passport to Enter the Site’: Envisioning Land, Industrialisation, and the State in Goa

Heather Plumridge Bedi

Biography

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Patrik Oskarsson is a Researcher at the Department of Rural and Urban Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden.　

 

This crisply edited volume addresses compelling questions concerning the transformation of India’s economy: Why does development-induced displacement generate differing levels – and types – of political resistance? To what extent have so-called "tribal" communities been able to realize new rights accorded to them? How have India’s grassroots democratic institutions, and its diverse array of social movements, responded to the challenges posed by "extractive" industries, particularly mining? Some chapters address contemporary cases and confine themselves to a single region; others are broader in scope, temporally or geographically. Though diverse in their perspectives and preoccupations, the authors share one indispensible trait: they probe ambiguities, rather than wishing them away.

Rob Jenkins, City University of New York (CUNY)

The fast growing economy in India is somewhat of a paradox. The growth is in the service sector and in the building industry, not in manufacture, not in mineral production. Conscious of this, the Indian State and Corporate Capital now try to exploit every possible natural resource for their industrial production and exports.

For long the need for state land expropriation was beyond questioning. Now it is increasingly contested by people threatened by loss of land and forest. With education and political practicing of citizens’ democratic rights, and with laws to protect forest people, people now increasingly fight back with all possible means, legal, political, non-violent or even violent. India’s democracy is deepening and broadening bit by bit but not without many obstacles.

This book gives a balanced account of ground realities in many concrete case studies. It helps us to grasp the odds of a sustainable development and not just devastating destruction of human lives and of nature.

Staffan Lindberg, Lund University

India’s quest to industrialize has been a fraught one. This collection of essays by a new generation of scholarship ably captures the complicated plots and troubling narratives about popular resistance, dispossession, displacement, Special Economic Zones and the consequences of extractive industries. Industrialization, however, as the editors are keen to remind us, also announces new beginnings and debates for democracy, livelihoods and alternative imaginations over what constitutes meaningful development. Critiques and challenges are not without hope. This is a very significant contribution, refreshing, seminal, empirically rich and tells us, above all else, that environmental politics and the everyday worlds of the disempowered give us a full ring side view into how neo-liberal economic growth uncurls on the ground.

Rohan D’Souza, Kyoto University