By Sunil Amrith
In their incisive and exhaustively-researched book, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari provide an alternative perspective on India’s headlong rush to economic growth since the liberalization of the 1990s. Without denying the very real benefits that economic expansion has brought to India’s rising middle classes, and while recognising the progress towards poverty reduction among some sections of the population, they examine the other side of the oft-reported tale of India’s success: the impoverishment and neglect of rural India, rising social and economic inequality, a veritable “land grab” by the state and powerful corporations at the expense of local people’s rights and livelihoods—and they focus on the environmental costs of the pursuit of growth.
In the parts of the book most directly relevant to the research of the Coastal Frontiers project, Shrivastava and Kothari’s account of how coastal regions are changing provides much food for thought. The expansion of aquaculture for shrimp farming since the 1980s has altered the ecological balance of coastal regions—changing levels of salinity, encroaching upon mangrove forests, undermining the livelihoods of local fishers. Mining, too, is no longer confined to the “charred coal landscapes of eastern India” or the “radioactive uranium belt of Jharkhand”—large swaths of the Orissa coast are being targeted for sand mining for thorium. Port construction proceeds apace, all the way down India’s eastern seaboard: from the dozen new ports slated for construction along the Orissa coast to the Cuddalore-Nagapatrinam Petroleum Corridor proposed in Tamil Nadu. Churning the Earth charts the effects on the beaches of South Asia of the global trade in waste—the ship-breaking yard of Alang, Gujarat, is the world’s largest, followed closely by the facility in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The work is hazardous, the process is toxic; thousands depend on these yards for employment.
One of the key questions this project seeks to ask is whether a longer historical perspective might add something to our understanding of these changing land- and seascapes, and of the changing strategies that local people adapt—while many of these ecological shifts have accelerated since the 1980s, they have roots in colonial and post-colonial history, as Shrivastava and Kothari acknowledge at many points in the book.
Churning the Earth is essential, sobering, reading. The picture the authors present is not wholly bleak, however: the second half of the book focuses on their vision for a “radical ecological democracy.”