Contribution short abstract:

For the Tamil Dalit youth of Sriperumbudur already facing caste discrimination, the rapid industrial growth was not only a roadblock to their peaceful community, and economic survival but turned out as a threat to life; crime, restricted mobility and polluted natural resources becoming a reality.

Contribution long abstract:

"For the past two days, there is no drinking water, that guy is not delivering the water cans', Viji kept saying this lying on the ground even as I saw him consuming alcohol several times over two days. When rapid industrialisation changed the small rural town of Sriperumbudur to a satellite city in twenty years, the hope for Dalit community in Katchipattu village was a promise and hope'. This 'untouchable' community at one point was ostracized from the main town of Sriperumbudur due to the caste discrimination they faced, had been living in the lower strata of society for ages. The industrial boom in this town brought along massive public and private infrastructures in the form of highways, industrial enclosures, real estate spaces etc. This resulted in the Dalit community being locked in and their physical and social mobility restricted. Industrial growth polluted water bodies in villages and reduced water flow. Contaminated groundwater makes villagers rely on paid drinking water can suppliers, adding to the financial burden. Large manufacturing units caused the rise of temperature in Sriperumbudur. They are afraid their land will be grabbed in the name of development, the land which is already contaminated as well. It is the Dalit youth who is affected the worst. They are denied jobs because of their social tags on them and are forced to make illegal means for survival, in the meanwhile they are used as pawns by the power elites, leaving them to live a daily life of uncertainty.

Contribution long abstract:

Caste in the Anthropocene: Interrogating Anthropocene in South Asia

Since its inception two decades ago, the Anthropocene proposal has become one of the most influential ideas and defining concepts of our age. Highlighting significant evidence, the proposal suggested that human activities have started to have a significant planetary impact on the earth’s climate and ecosystems. Though Anthropocene is yet to be officially recognized by the International Union of Geological Science (IUGS), the international body that officially names and define the epochs, it has become one of the most influential ideas of our times. Subsequently, critical debates emerged as Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene and the black Anthropocene, etc. This paper engages caste, more than 3000 years old Indian system of hierarchy and exploitation that govern nearly one fifth of the world’s population, and ask what does it mean to be in the Anthropocene for caste societies? Drawing from the histories of global castes, ecology, political economy, climate vulnerability and emissions of caste this article inaugurates an introductory inquiry into caste in the Anthropocene. The article seeks for a caste inclusive Anthropocene from the Indian Subcontinent and beyond.

Ajmal Khan A.T is a post-doctoral fellow at the South Asia Institute, Harvard University.

Contribution short abstract:

In the countries in South Asia with just under half the population employed in agriculture, the recovery of the agricultural sector should be a top priority. Moving away from food systems typical of the Anthropocene, which focus solely on increasing food production, should become a key objective.

Contribution long abstract:

The current spate of droughts and floods in South Asia are not just a grave concern because they have destroyed the livelihoods of the affected communities, they also indicate that it might not be possible to eradicate hunger by 2050. The rising in the adversity imposed by persistent malnutrition could wipe of the successes of reducing poverty by half that was achieved in 2015, at the end of period of the Millennium Development Goals.

The need of the hour is to ensure that there is a move away from monocultures that demand increasing use of pesticides and fertilizers and a move to millets and other 'forgotten' crops that were overlooked for the favoured ‘large-grain’ crops of rice, wheat and maize that characterise the Green Revolution. This paper will examine participatory programmes in South Asia where community engagement for promoting these alternative crops has emphasised the stewardship of local communities.

This importance of these crops, that can withstand higher temperatures and use less water is particularly important for those communities that have had their lives completely disrupted by the natural disasters. By moving away from conventional agricultural methods that have characterised the Anthropocene, to agro-ecologically sensitive cultivation and sale of these alternative crops provides an opportunity for the fashioning of new value chains. Prioritising these agricultural commodities through the global value chain while also gaining the ability to access local and national markets to sell their produce at a fair price would also empower local communities.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper aims to narrate how unseasonal precipitation during the months of November and December in recent times has opened up new spaces of contentious political struggle between landlords, farmers, agricultural labourers, and inland fishers in Chellanam, in a southern Indian state of Kerala.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper explores how monsoon uncertainties are producing new forms of competition for fisheries resources between landlords, aquaculture farmers, agricultural labourers, and the inland fishing folks in Chellanam, an eroding coastal panchayat in the state of Kerala, India. The paper will contend that the unprecedented post-monsoon rainfall has weakened the marginal communities' rights to the spaces of agriculture/aquaculture production. Chellanam is a wetland located at the confluence of the Arabian sea and the Vembanad backwaters in Cochin. The farmers used to cultivate rice (April 15- October 15) and fish (October 16-April 14) in alternate seasons in the paddy fields of East Chellanam by regulating the flow and salinity of brackish water through hydraulic engineering. In this arrangement, once the annual aquaculture contract expires in April, the resources like fish, shrimp, and crabs become the community's common good. However, unpredictable monsoon has collapsed this rotational cultivation by making the hydraulic structures ineffective in maintaining the water salinity. In 2021, in response to farmers' plea for relief, the state government in Kerala extended the permission for lucrative prawn culture for one more month at the expense of paddy cultivation. This short-term fix for revitalising the economy has unintended consequences: the inland fishers and villagers lost a month’s fishing rights to the big-scale aquaculture farmers. Accordingly, by drawing on the more than human ethnography done for my Ph.D., this paper intends to narrate how fluid geographies of Chellanam are co-constituted and co-evolved with different actors navigating the socio-natural processes like changing climate.

Contribution short abstract:

Delhi is currently faced by a burgeoning waste crisis. By focussing on human and non-human relations around a landfill site, I examine multiple forms of dependences and recycling practices that sustain and reproduce liveable city spaces and processes of value creation.

Contribution long abstract:

Delhi is currently reeling under the burden of excessive increase in discarded materials—city’s trash, increasing the burden on landfill sites. The growing urbanisation and consumption pattern has disrupted city’s waste management processes. Decades of waste dumping, lack of formal recycling facilities and ecologically sustainable infrastructure (both human and technological) has had a deleterious effect on the everyday life of neighbouring residents and has led to visible socio-ecological (anthropocentric) crises around the landfills—in our case Bhalswa landfill, located on the north-west periphery of Delhi. The increase in fires and respiratory diseases, declining water quality, and oozing leachate in the surrounding water body is a result of above-mentioned processes. The effect of which is borne by marginalised human and non-human entities. The human entities such as waste pickers mostly from lower-caste communities and non-human entities (mostly animals) such as cows and pigs around the landfill site bear the burden of city’s detritus, while clearing city’s waste. Through a study of human and non-human relations around the landfill site, this paper will examine multiple forms of dependences and recycling/repair-work that sustain and reproduce liveable city spaces, and processes of value creation—both social and economic. In doing so, I examine the relations that humans and non-human forge with discarded materials and how the nature of these relations vary depending on the caste, gender, class and human-animal relations. For example, waste pickers are dependent on the landfill because of their everyday livelihood by converting waste in value; whereas milch-cattle dairy owners (mostly from dominant OBC communities) in the surrounding areas of the landfill leave their cows on the landfill for them to feed off the garbage and later sell milk produce of these cows in middle-class colonies. In both the cases there is a unique dependence on the landfill sustaining city’s metabolism.

Contribution short abstract:

Two narrative reviews on the impacts of environmental and climate stressors on social, economic, and health outcomes for girls and women in South Asia underscore that climate stressors exacerbate existing gender inequalities and that a longer-term view is needed to understand impacts.

Contribution long abstract:

We analyzed two narrative reviews of the literature to understand the salient environmental and climate stressors that are particularly relevant to social, economic, and health and well-being for adolescent girls and women in the South Asia context.

Short-term effects include those of the aftermath of extreme weather events (EWE), or what we refer to as sudden-onset stressors; in South Asia, these are largely floods, droughts, and cyclones, which are linked to gender inequitable outcomes such as early marriage, trafficking, and gender-based violence. Of the eight countries included in the review, most studies were undertaken in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The most common outcomes covered by studies included in the review were mental and psychological health, followed by sexual and reproductive health, and food security and nutritional status.

Longer-term effects, which are spurred by what we refer to as slow-onset stressors, included drought, temperature variability, and rainfall variability. Studies included in the review from the South Asia context cover outcomes including sexual and reproductive health, agriculture (with an emphasis in livelihoods, land ownership, and climate-induced livelihoods migration), and the social roles of women in girls in education and in household decision-making.

The results of both reviews help to elucidate pathways by which environmental and climate stressors exacerbate and create gender inequitable outcomes. More longer-term studies are necessary to capture the ranging effects of slow-onset stressors. Taken together, these reviews inform a need to incorporate a climate justice lens into existing gender and empowerment frameworks.

Contribution short abstract:

I propose the concept of 'climate reductive translations' to analyze how development actors create flawed causal narratives linking their interventions in the environment and societies of South Asia to climate change. Such misreadings exacerbate climatic threats and structural inequalities.

Contribution long abstract:

Perilously close to sea level and vulnerable to floods, erosion, and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for climate change adaptation. Yet to what extent do adaptation projects address local needs and concerns? Combining environmental history and ethnographic fieldwork with development professionals, rural farmers, and landless women, this paper critiques development narratives of Bangladesh as a "climate change victim." It examines how development actors repackage colonial-era modernizing projects, which have caused severe environmental effects, as climate-adaptation solutions. Seawalls meant to mitigate against cyclones and rising sea levels instead silt up waterways and induce drainage-related flooding. Other adaptation projects, from saline aquaculture to high-yield agriculture, threaten soil fertility, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Bangladesh’s environmental crisis goes beyond climate change, extending to coastal vulnerabilities that are entwined with underemployment, debt, and the lack of universal healthcare.

I propose the concept of 'climate reductive translations' to analyze how development actors create flawed causal narratives linking their interventions in the environment and societies of South Asia to climate change. Ultimately, such misreadings risk exacerbating climatic threats and structural inequalities.

Contribution short abstract:

Set against the backdrop of cyclical drought and industrialised sugarcane cropping, I examine the complex ways in which early marriage is used as an institutional means to produce and sustain a particular workforce of young wife-workers in the epicentre of India's agrarian crisis, Marathwada region.

Contribution long abstract:

Set against the backdrop of cyclical drought and industrialised sugarcane cropping, this paper seeks to make visible the labour and experiences of young women and adolescent girls in the context of a climate crisis. I use a multi-sited feminist ethnography to examine the complex ways in which early marriage is used as an institutional means to produce and sustain a particular workforce of young wife-workers in the historically drought-prone and caste-ridden Marathwada region in India. Here, on account of truant rainfall and plummeting water tables on the one hand, and unbridled sugarcane cultivation in the neighbouring districts on the other, nearly a million Dalit, Banjara and Vanjari families have turned into migrant sugarcane harvesters. Recruitments take place in pairs, mainly as married couples. Intense and more frequent droughts have led to an alarming rise in the number of commercially mediated marriages, including underaged couples, to form labour units. In this paper, I document the differentiated role and experiences of the young wives/workers; their gendered subjectivities and everyday labouring realities as they navigate their parched households and extractive sugar fields; the new kinship formations and market nexuses that have emerged, and how such transitions are shaped by and help shape the political economy of drought-induced migration. By demystifying the structural hierarchies and complex processes underlying these marriage/labour exchanges, the paper offers new political possibilities for studying the conjoined and compounding crises of environment, accumulation, and social reproduction.