Privatisation of Natural Resource-Based Sectors, Ease of Doing Business, and the Law

In 1991, several sectors of the Indian economy which hitherto were more or less the exclusive domain of the public sector were opened up to private players, including global corporates. This was accompanied by a series of changes to the related policy, legal and regulatory regimes. This process has continued in the decades that followed. These policy, legal and regulatory changes, though mainly in the sectoral and financial domain have had significant implications for environmental, social and livelihoods impacts of activities in these sectors. This article proposes to trace some major changes in the legal, regulatory and governance frameworks which have had significant environmental, social and livelihood implications in three key sectors – water, electricity generation and coal mining. It shows how this shift in the legal regime has been driven mainly by the objective to promote “ease of doing business”, leading to neglect of social and environmental concerns. The article also documents how this thrust to prioritise business leads to more tolerance of non-compliance of environmental laws and creates pressure for their dilution. Last but not the least, the article highlights how compliance with environmental laws and regulations often needs actions that are under the purview of the financial and economic regulations and institutions. It argues for a proper understanding of this link and for designing sectoral, economic and environmental laws in a manner that they strengthen each other

Investment-induced displacement in central India. A study in extractive capitalism

India’s abundant natural resources are a key feature of its new found status as ‘emerging market’ that attracts foreign investments. As India’s output of these metals and their ores increases, investments pour into India to secure deals over mineral deposits and manufacturing plants. Apart from direct funding for new projects, the new investments pay for a large increase in deployment of security forces, multi-layered ‘briberization’, and ‘protection money’ funding Maoist outfits, in yet another unending war which is fundamentally a resource war around mineral and metal production – primarily steel and aluminum as well as coal and water. In this paper, we examine the mining operations in Central India where Vedanta Resources, a corporation that has become symbolic of neoliberal capitalism in India today, elicits huge new foreign investments to exploit India’s resources under the logic of emerging markets. If a quarter of postcolonial India’s Scheduled Tribe population was displaced by ‘development’ projects, this time it is foreign investments that are causing large scale displacement of indigenous populations

Timescapes of Himalayan hydropower: promises, project life cycles, and precarities

In this paper, we review the existing social science scholarship focused on hydropower development in the Himalayan region, using an interpretive lens attuned to issues of time and temporality. While the spatial politics of Himalayan hydropower are well examined in the literature, an explicit examination of temporal politics is lacking. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework organized around the heuristic of timescapes, highlighting temporal themes implicit in the existing literature. In three sections, we explore the temporal politics of anticipation that shape hydropower dreams, the intersecting temporalities and rhythms that modulate the life cycles of hydropower projects, and the ways that geological and hydrological time affect both hydropower development and broader Himalayan futures. Along the way, we pose a series of questions useful for framing future research given the significant climatic, geophysical, and sociopolitical changes underway in the Himalayan bioregion, calling for greater analytical attention to time, temporality, and temporal ethics in future studies of hydropower in the Himalayas and beyond.Austin Lord, Georgina Drew, Mabel Denzin Gerga

Mountains of Concrete: Dam Building in the Himalayas

The report discusses for the first time the linkages between climate change and dam-building in the Himalayas, and comprehensively analyzes the impacts of the dam building spree on the region's people, ecosystems, and economy.climate change, south asia, rivers, dams, India, Himalayas, ecosystems, economy,