The commercialization of the land in India is shattering the lives of millions of the country’s poorest, hungriest and most malnourished people.
The state has more or less abandoned rural people (70 per cent of the population) and turned the countryside over to corporations. Mineral extraction, dam building, infrastructure projects, water appropriation and industrial farming make up their burgeoning business portfolios.
The acclaimed author and political activist Arundhati Roy says the land and everything inside it is now owned “by the corporations, every mountain, every river, every forest, every dam, every water supply system”. Add to this the telephone networks and the media, and some say the judiciary, and the world’s largest democracy looks rather less democratic. Indeed, to the persecuted people in the forests and the urban poor crying out for justice, democracy is a city fable of little significance and no reality.
Land sympathetically and sustainably nurtured by the Adivasi people for generations is being violently taken from them in what Roy describes as “the biggest land grab since Christopher Columbus”. In varying degrees of intensity, conflict and resistance is taking place throughout the areas affected by the land appropriation.
(...)
The millions of mainly Dalits and Adivasi, made homeless and destitute, are forced to relocate to the slums and shanty colonies of small towns and mega cities where they are also unwelcome, all in the name of an apparently greater good. But as Roy says in Capitalism: A Ghost Story, “by now, we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After 20 years of ‘growth’, 60 per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90 per cent of India’s labour force works in the unorganized [unprotected and unregulated] sector.” Full story...
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The state has more or less abandoned rural people (70 per cent of the population) and turned the countryside over to corporations. Mineral extraction, dam building, infrastructure projects, water appropriation and industrial farming make up their burgeoning business portfolios.
The acclaimed author and political activist Arundhati Roy says the land and everything inside it is now owned “by the corporations, every mountain, every river, every forest, every dam, every water supply system”. Add to this the telephone networks and the media, and some say the judiciary, and the world’s largest democracy looks rather less democratic. Indeed, to the persecuted people in the forests and the urban poor crying out for justice, democracy is a city fable of little significance and no reality.
Land sympathetically and sustainably nurtured by the Adivasi people for generations is being violently taken from them in what Roy describes as “the biggest land grab since Christopher Columbus”. In varying degrees of intensity, conflict and resistance is taking place throughout the areas affected by the land appropriation.
(...)
The millions of mainly Dalits and Adivasi, made homeless and destitute, are forced to relocate to the slums and shanty colonies of small towns and mega cities where they are also unwelcome, all in the name of an apparently greater good. But as Roy says in Capitalism: A Ghost Story, “by now, we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After 20 years of ‘growth’, 60 per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90 per cent of India’s labour force works in the unorganized [unprotected and unregulated] sector.” Full story...
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- Plenty for few: India's economic miracle bypasses the poor...
- Murdered nun is fourth activist killed in India in 2011...
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