Paper short abstract:

The paper attempts to understand the predicament of adivasis in Eastern India in the context of globalisation. They currently find themselves confronting the world's most powerful multi-national mining companies in nexus with global corporate interests that are initiating massive landscape changes.

Paper long abstract:

The rapid development of economic globalisation since about 1980 has made dramatic environmental and social impacts in the Indian sub continent. These impacts can only be understood in terms of a historical perspective that includes the colonial and even eralier periods. I focus on the impact of globalisation in Orissa and Jharkhand, especially on the living environments of adivasi (indigenous/aboriginal or tribal) people specifically in terms of effects on the dynamic relationship between culture, landscape and religion. Since the 1990s the Indian Klondyke minerals rush is globally unparalleled. Currently local communities and human rights campaigners find themselves pitted against companies which because of the strategic importance of aluminium are integral to the needs of the global military industrial complex. There is a widespread ongoing corporate enclosure movement in Eastern India concerned with establishing property rights in resources. The key question to ask is why and how do state and civil society institutions allow such neo-liberal enclosures to proceed despite strong opposition from local communities as evidenced from the Kalignagar massacre in Orissa 2006. The paper attempts to answer these questions through a grounded engagement with actual places, peoples and ideoologies and uses the ideological frameworks of environmental history and political ecology to understand the impact and response to long term and widespread landuse changes in Eastern India in the context of globalisation.