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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Indigenous Peoples' epistemologies and self-governance structures fundamentally challenge dominant urban development paradigms in India.

Paper long abstract

My paper examines how Indigenous Peoples' epistemologies and self-governance structures fundamentally challenge dominant urban development paradigms in India. Through a comparative field analysis of Fifth and Sixth Schedule constitutional provisions governing tribal areas, I demonstrate that development outcomes are not merely technical matters but deeply political questions of who holds authority to define, design, and implement development.

The study reveals two diametrically opposed approaches: the Fifth Schedule's paternalistic model, which excludes tribes from decision-making and has resulted in “adverse inclusion”—integration accompanied by systematic land dispossession and marginalisation—versus the Sixth Schedule's Autonomous District Council system, which vests development authority in Indigenous communities themselves, enabling them to protect their interests while participating in governance. I foreground Indigenous epistemologies that understand land not as individual property but as collective territory interwoven with identity, memory, and sustainable lifeways.

This paper contributes a decolonial methodology by adopting “ethnographic refusal” and interdisciplinary analysis (history, law, sociology, politics) to centre Indigenous constitutional rights and knowledge systems. It demonstrates how returning land control and decision-making authority to Indigenous communities—what I term “self-autonomy in Indigenous urbanism”—offers not only justice but radically different, sustainable urban futures. The comparative cross-regional approach reveals which institutional arrangements enable genuine inclusion versus those that perpetuate exclusion despite inclusive rhetoric.

By interrogating whose knowledge legitimises development and demanding that Adivasis/Indigenous Peoples become primary stakeholders rather than subjects of development, this work charts practical pathways for dismantling extractive development models and reimagining urban futures grounded in Indigenous sovereignty and epistemology.