ABSTRACT
The challenge of industrialisation has emerged as one of the most burning issues in India today. With an agrarian crisis believed to be looming large across substantial tracts of India, and with the country’s globally renowned IT and ITES sectors incapable of absorbing the large number of workers and migrants seeking a way out of a stagnating rural economy, rapid industrialisation is promoted by many as the quickest and most feasible way of ‘moving people out of agriculture’ while also rejuvenating an economy that has produced sluggish growth rates over the past several years. Nowhere is this as evident as in the current Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s spirited electoral campaign in the early months of 2014. Promising to transfer his ‘Gujarat model’ of development – enabled by an investor-friendly and pro-business regime – to the rest of India, Modi successfully captured the imagination of large sections of the Indian population, including the ‘neo-middle class’ (Jaffrelot 2015), who aspire for upward mobility and an improved quality of life. At the same time, the transfer of land from marginal rural communities and indigenous groups for industrial parks, mining ventures or Special Economic Zones have undoubtedly been among the most contested issues in India over the past decade. Such contestation has been common enough to generate ‘thousands of small wars against land acquisitions’ (Levien 2011: 66) across India. As critics have repeatedly pointed out (Banerjee-Guha 2013; Levien 2013; Sampat 2015) the large-scale dispossession, displacement and destruction of rural livelihoods and cultures that have historically accompanied industrialisation processes around the world appear integral also to the kind of development policy currently pursued in India. What Banerjee-Guha calls a new ‘multiscalar geopolitics of popular resistance’ (Banerjee-Guha 2013: 167) has thus been a close companion to many recent industrial ventures across rural India, even if one takes into account the considerable inter-state variation that exists across India’s federal geography. In Industrialising Rural India, we aim to shed light on what we believe are some of the most crucial dynamics and contestations currently at work in present day India. The questions we explore include: How have policymakers sought to strike a balance – over time and across sectors – between the idea that industrialisation is the way ahead for the nation, and the compulsion to protect
vulnerable groups unlikely to make a swift ‘transition’ from peasants to industrial workers? Who benefits and who loses from the current ways in which nature and resources are governed? And who gets to be heard and who is silenced in the uncertain struggles over land and social justice in the context of often top-down industrial change in rural India? In engaging these questions, we focus, first, on the making and remaking of economic and industrial policies over time, and interrogate their impact on rural lives and livelihoods; second, we analyse the consequences for land-dependent rural communities of how nature and society are governed in a context in which industrialisation is being promoted by political interests across the board; and, lastly, we engage with the myriad ways in which India’s rich democratic heritage and freedom of expression allows for disagreement and active contestation in a situation in which land transfers for rural and/or extractive industries are altering rural mores and livelihoods. Empirically, we take the reader into an abandoned car factory in rural Bengal and to the coal mines of Meghalaya; to the Adivasi areas in Jharkhand and Odisha, rich in natural resources and minerals; to the scrapped Special Economic Zones in Goa; and on a tour of key policy documents of the postcolonial Indian state. While we have aimed to cover the vast field of industrial development and change in rural India in a broad sense, several chapters focus particularly on new extractive industries (of coal, bauxite, etc.). While this is a reflection of the research agendas of several of our contributors, we also believe that rural industrialisation based on the intensified exploitation of nature represents one of the most important elements of the contemporary moment and that it therefore merits particular attention. In this introduction we contextualise the questions and cases outlined above, starting with a short overview of the shifting political economy of the Indian state and its industrial policies. We then move on to analyse why resistance to land dispossession for industrial purposes has increased in recent years. We briefly touch upon the impact so far of the Modi government’s policies on industrialisation and eminent domain, before we round off with an overview of the chapters that follow.
