Land, law and resistance: Legal pluralism and tribal conflicts over land alienation in Odisha

Abstract

Development, in its various avatars, has surely been the most powerful influence structuring the social and economic transformation in the non-western world in this century, especially after the Second World War and decolonisation (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003). The new face of development, starting from the mid-1980s under a broader framework of neo-liberalism and globalisation, has drawn attention to the other side of this transformation, i.e. its consequences on the environment, and the poor and marginalised who depend upon this environment for their livelihoods. The greater demand for natural resources by the process of development has led to the monopolisation of the resource by the state, and the narrowing down of the natural resource base for the survival of the economically poor and powerless, either by direct transfer of resources away from their basic needs or by destruction of the essential ecological processes that ensure renewability of the life-supporting natural resources (Bandyopadhyay and Shiva 1988; Gadgil and Guha 1992). Within this context of state resource capture, an effort to continue its project of rapid economic growth and deprivation of local communities of these resources, the state has often been successful in using the ideology of development as an effective instrument to legitimise exploitation.