Presentation short abstract

A Marxian political ecology study of the sponge iron belt in a central Indian state, showing how deregulation and extractive capitalism deepen metabolic rifts, create toxic labour ecologies, and provoke worker–community resistance for ecological and social justice.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how labour precarity and ecological degradation are co-constituted within the sponge iron belt of Chhattisgarh, a region central to India’s neoliberal industrialisation. Situating the analysis within a Marxian political ecology framework, it argues that the region’s integration into neoliberal extractive capitalism has deepened what Marx (1976) theorised as the “metabolic rift” a historically specific rupture between capitalist production, human labour, and socio-ecological systems (Foster 1999; Burkett 1999). Since the early 2000s, deregulation, cheap land acquisition, and state-led facilitation of private capital have enabled an unprecedented proliferation of sponge iron and power plants across Raigarh, Korba, and Durg districts of Chhattisgarh. This industrial belt has generated what Moore (2015) terms “cheap nature” and “cheap labour." Drawing on workers’ experiences, the study shows how polluted air, hazardous shopfloor conditions, and degraded forests embody what Malm (2016) describes as the coercive ecological violence inherent to fossil-fuel capitalism, where the labouring body is systematically exposed to harm as a condition of value extraction. Workers inhabit toxic ecologies where illness, debt, and dispossession become routine conditions of life, revealing the deep entanglement of ecological harm with labour regimes structured by informality and caste-class inequalities. The paper also foregrounds grassroots resistance from trade unions such as the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha to local environmental campaigns to demonstrate how workers and communities articulate alternative ecological and political imaginaries. By centring labour as an ecological relation, this paper contributes to broader debates on climate crisis, environmental injustice, and the uneven geographies of capitalist development.