Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss the various ways in which ASM based livelihoods has come to be at the intersection of both formal and informal economy and the development in India.

Paper long abstract:

How can an ethnography of ASM in a small remote village in India help understand the dynamics of the changing rural in India? Given the scales of economic growth dependence on mode of production through exploitative labour conditions, this paper looks At the various ways, mostly illegal, that ASM has become a mainstay of a stationary tribal population. It discusses how the government regulatory frameworks of environment and poverty gets balanced or challenged in an extremely poverty context coupled with water scarcity. The mining in concern here are both stone quarries and diamond mining. Diamond stones are highly priced and only the tribal population has the skill and know how of how to extract such stones.