For a long time, the British Empire saw the climate and the regional political strongholds of northeast India as insuperable obstacles to conquest.
The exploitation of the cheap manual labor provided by Adivasis and the appropriation of their indigenous environmental knowledge has enabled and equally influenced environmental governance at the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary since colonial times.
After traders from East India Company discovered Assam’s wild tea plants in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the commodification of this resource in the eastern border of Bengal radically transformed the ecological condition of the region.
Bengal’s essential character as a fluid landscape was changed during the colonial times through legal interventions that were aimed at creating permanent boundaries between land and water, with land given priority.
This issue of RCC Perspectives offers insights into similarities and differences in the ways people in Asia have tried to master and control the often unpredictable and volatile environments of which they were part
Content
Looks at the changing governance practices towards agro-ecological resources and the political response that it received from the agrarian community in colonial eastern Bengal.
Explores how the relationship of Adivasis to their surroundings was gradually reshaped under colonial rule in Bengal, leading to increased sedentarization of Adivasis through the extension of cultivation.
The Gangetic basin, traditionally famous for huge crop production and rice farming, has witnessed gradual alteration in the land-use pattern over the last hundred years.
The Bhopal chemical disaster on 3 December 1984 was the most tragic chemical disaster in history. Over 500,000 people were exposed to the toxic gas methyl isocyanate leaking from the tanks at Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide plant, many of whom died instantly or of the consequences. People living in the Bhopal area still suffer from toxic water and ground contamination today ; there is a very high number of aborts and disabled children. The company responsible for the incident never took full responsibility.
This paper discusses the economic and philosophical inadequacies that have characterized the Project Tiger scheme in India.
