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

Gendering Farmer Producer companies at the Agricultural Frontier of India: Empowerment or Burden?

Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) are driving agricultural frontier expansions in India. Their main objectives are to mobilize small-scale farmers to collectivize and organize in order to gain collective bargaining power, in the process empowering farmers and eliminating middlemen. However, they have not established any demonstrable success in achieving these goals. This chapter seeks firstly, to draw transnational connections between agro-ecological transformations in India and larger market/capital expansions through FPCs, contextualized amidst national development goals for farmer empowerment, changing labor patterns, and ecological degradation. In doing so, it will, secondly, explore the gendered dimension of FPCs in India by analyzing how the process of establishing women-only FPCs by using mandatory inclusion as a participation tool can serve to disempower and further burden women. While mandatory involvement of women farmers on their Board of Directors as an empowerment strategy can prove crucial to enhancing women’s decision-making roles, this chapter asks whether such an inclusionary approach remains meaningful to achieve FPC success in a context where external support for women’s empowerment is not provided

A Forgotten Adivasi Landscape: Museums and Memory in western India

This article focuses on processes of remembering, forgetting and re-remembering. It examines a fundamental tension between the project of retrieving an adivasi past, initiated by an adivasi museum in rural western India, and the social and material landscape surrounding it, characterised instead by fragmentation and separation from the identity of adivasi. The article reflects on a collaborative research project between the researcher, young adivasi curators and inhabitants of the area adjoining the museum. It shows how, while curators engaged in a project of recuperation, at the same time, they were distancing themselves from their traditional identity by joining reform movements and new religious sects. Processes of memory and forgetting, however, also co-existed. People held multiple identities and the process of retrieving the past also called for transformation and reform. The article is a timely contribution to debates about adivasi identity, social transformation and religious reform. It also offers a reflection on the new role of indigenous museums and their potential to address a ‘crisis of postcolonial memory’ (Werbner 1998). Finally, it contributes to discussions of methodology with a focus on the collaborative process of collecting and its role in eliciting or preventing certain kinds of memories

How Best to Ensure ' Land, Forest and Mineral Rights?

Traditionally, Adivasis have lived for centuries in resource?rich regions, with a resulting high level of food security combined with in?built cultural restraints against taking too much from their environment. Increasingly rapid invasions and dispossessions of Adivasi lands and forests have seriously undermined their food security to the extent that as many as half their population are now living in a state of chronic malnourishment. A key reason is that the minerals under Adivasi lands, forests and mountains have become objects of primary desire for the world's mining companies and metals traders