Industrialising Rural India

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), USA 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, Sweden 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, Japan As the slogan of Make in India is amplified across the country, it sets in motion fresh waves of land alienation, cultural dispossession and ecological devastation. Industrialising Rural India offers a close and nuanced analysis of these processes, placing them within the nation's long engagement with capital-intensive development and its current quest for global power. Attentive to the diversity of temporal and spatial trajectories, this important collection helps us understand the complexities of state-led capitalism and appreciate all the more the resistance it encounters on the ground. Recommended reading for everyone interested in Indian political economy and ecology. - Amita Baviskar, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India