Marginalization, Development and Resistance: Vol. 2 – Dalits and Adivasis (Essays in Tribute to S R Sankaran)

Description

Marginalization, Development, and Resistance, is a set of two volumes dedicated to the memory of S.R. Sankaran, a legendary civil servant with deep commitment to the poor. This tribute attempts to promote a meaningful debate on the development model in the country that, instead of improving the conditions of the poor, is causing their further marginalization, resulting in varied forms of resistance. This volume discusses the plight of the most marginalized among them – the Dalits and Adivasis – as well as issues relating to migration, manual scavenging, poverty, employment, ecology, and the agrarian crisis. The contributors to these volumes include administrators with long experience in policymaking and implementation, academicians involved in critical debates on the very essence of what constitutes development, and activists who are a part of resistance movements. Combining critical ideas, rich administrative experience, and people’s responses, these two volumes attempt to take the development debates in contemporary India forward.

This book brings out different dimensions of discrimination, exclusion and opression suffered by Dalits (SCs) and Adivasis (STs) and the failure of the State to deliver rights and entitlements to them. The Section on Dalits comprises issues relating to distribution of land, untouchability practices, manual scavenging, atrocities including economic violence. It also covers emergence of Dalit-literature as a relatively lesser visible form of resistance against humiliation, indignities and violence of caste based social order and its ideological superstructure.

The Section on Adivasis consists of different facets of their Marginalization such as disparities in human development between them and the rest of the population which remain unabridged, alienation of their land and mismatch between policy and implementation, alternative development model for them, their resistance against corporate plunder of natural resources, and the least known dimension, their exploitation, the adverse impact of excise policy on them. It also seeks to answer the question whether development intervention to support tribal subsistence economy can regulate its disruptive ethos and produce a consensual mode of accumulation? Also incorporated in it is the conceptualization of Adivasis’ version of Swaraj which goes beyond the ideological contours of Maoism.

K B Saxena is former Secretary to the Government of India, and presently Professor, Social Justice and Governance in the Council for Social Development, New Delhi.

G. Haragopal is presently an ICSSR, Natioanl Fellow with Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad and Fromerly Professor of Political Science and Dean of School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad.