ABSTRACT
Right now, hundreds of projects in India are threatening to dispossess communities from land and natural resources which they have lived from and cared for over centuries. Adivasi communities – and many non-tribal communities also – evolved a relationship with these resources based on ecological principles of long-term sustainability in the distant past: a set of relationships and a line of sophisticated development that is being dismantled or under threat of imminent dismantling, in countless places. This destruction is mindless, in the sense that the ‘developers’ have little understanding of the highly developed systems they are destroying. The displacing projects are of many kinds, but big dams, power stations and mining/metal projects are the main offenders. Ironically, as many have commented, it is still in the name of development that these highly sophisticated systems are being displaced and destroyed.
