ABSTRACT
Tyre, automobile and petrochemical plants spring up with official sanction throughout the country, leading to a cultural and spiritual dislocation on a large scale. Flooding of paddy fields in rural areas of Orissa, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, for prawn cultivation by multi-national companies, has caused an irreversible transformation of the landscape. Traditional fisher people throughout the coastal areas in India are today forced to seek new occupations because their fishing waters are now exploited by mechanised fishing boats, denying them their regular catch. Mechanised fishing boats exhaust all the catch through their faster but unsustainable fishing practices, which will eventually lead to total dispossession of the landscape of a great majority of the traditional fish workers of India. Most of the people who have been displaced due to these projects have yet to be acquainted with the benefits of development. They have not even been offered proper rehabilitation. Today in the town of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, for example, once self-sustaining farmers are forced to live in slums and to pull rickshaws to earn their livelihood, after the Barghi Dam displaced them.
