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BOOK REVIEW 
  

Industrialisation in India: the Many Worlds of Discord 
and Resistance 
 

Radhika Krishnan  
 
Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Patrik Oskarsson (eds.). 2017. Industrialising Rural 
India: Land, Policy and Resistance, London and New York: Routledge, ISBN: 
1138936715, 9781138936713; pp. 200, INR 3458 
 

The inter-linkage of rural livelihoods, 
local economies and natural resources 
has been a popular subject of academic 
research. Scholars have pointed out, for 
instance, the far-reaching impact of 
extensive forest transformations and 
agrarian change on rural communities. 
They have similarly spoken of the role 
of ‘common property resources’ – 
including vast grazing areas and forested 
regions officially designated as 
‘degraded’ – in sustaining rural 
livelihoods, especially in dry tropical 
areas of India. It has been pointed out 
that biophysical as well as economic 
stresses are somewhat countered in 
multiple ways through the socially-

mediated usage of public land and products available in the forest space. 

 
 Assistant Professor, International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Gachibowli, 
Hyderabad, Telangana 500032; radhika.krishnan@iiit.ac.in 

Copyright © Krishnan 2019. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.65  

mailto:radhika.krishnan@iiit.ac.in
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.65


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [160] 

Existing research has also delineated the social and economic impacts of the 
loss of these crucial ecological spaces.     

The journey from the field and the forest to the factory is thus rarely free 
from multiple contestations, especially when new capital-intensive 
technological regimes are introduced in a predominantly agrarian, or forest 
dependent subsistence economy. Historians and sociologists have given us 
several authoritative accounts of shifting technological landscapes in India, 
accounts which have usefully delineated tensions over land and livelihoods, 
resource (mis)use and alienation, nature and culture, power, decision-
making and bureaucracy. Industrialising Rural India, an edited volume, is 
situated within this well-etched out academic backdrop. What Kenneth Bo 
Nielsen and Patrik Oskarsson seek to do, as editors, is to provide readers 
with historical, cultural and deeply political insights into the vexed processes 
of land acquisition and policy-making in India today.  

This volume has been divided thematically into three sections on public 
policy and its evolution, governance and resistance.  In the section on 
policy evolution viz-a-viz development in India, Jørgen Dige Pedersen and 
Stein Sundstøl Eriksen offer us a historical perspective on the broad 
contours of public policy. Together, their essays attempt to introduce the 
reader to the evolution of State policy on industrialisation from the early 
post-independence decades of the 1950s and the 1960s, through the 
tumultuous decade of economic liberalisation, its aftermath, and to the 
present. Pedersen tries to explain the evolution of increased political 
traction enjoyed today by movements resisting the State’s land governance 
frameworks. For Eriksen, Indian economic policy is a somewhat odd 
admixture of neoliberalism and statism. This is a policy paradigm that fails 
to put in place effective social security cushions to soften the impact of 
primitive accumulation and industrialisation, he argues. Kenneth Nielsen 
and Sarasij Majumder on the other hand present for us a fascinating 
exploration of ambiguous (and even contradictory) aspirations of the Indian 
peasantry. In their study of the much-documented agitation in Singur, in 
West Bengal, against a car manufacturing unit, they tell us that the desire for 
and deep attachment to land (seen equally as material as well as 
social/cultural capital and embodiment of status and security) is matched, 
oddly enough, with the aspiration for respectable non-agricultural 
employment. This, the authors argue, could account for the ambiguous 
nature of resistance movements and the “contradictory and contextual” 
political rhetoric on industrialisation (p. 79).  

The following section on governance (of both nature and society) then 
takes this thread of ambiguity forward in interesting ways. Kuntala Lahiri-
Dutt speaks of the varied cultural and political universes embedded in the 



[161] Radhika Krishnan 

process of extracting coal in India. Her carefully delineated categories of 
“national”, “neo-liberal”, “statecraft” and “subsistence” coal alert us to the 
fact that coal has both material and aspirational qualities. Its myriad lives, 
characterised by distinctly different norms, values and actors, are shaped, 
she argues, through geographies and human interactions, through 
“biophysical heterogeneity, technology and social institutions” (p. 88). 
Bengt Karlsson also attempts an anthropological account of the life of coal, 
wherein he sketches the contours of “tribal” mining in Meghalaya. 
Exploitative, poorly regulated and privatised as this enterprise is shown to 
be in this account, coal mining is seen as the means through which a new 
indigenous elite emerges as a key social force. And like Lahiri-Dutt, 
Karlsson portrays the fuzzy boundaries between the “legal” and the 
“illegal”, as coal lends itself to the creation of political power. Oskarsson 
and Siddharth Sareen, in their respective pieces, bring in a different 
perspective to the debate on governance in relation to mineral extraction. 
They highlight the nature of governance in mineral-rich areas: buffeted by 
high-pitched, rhetorical arguments of pro- and anti-mining groups, 
characterised by chaos and symbolised by a loss of local control over 
resources.   

The final section offers an interesting ring-side view of resistance ‘from the 
trenches’. Prakruti Ramesh is particularly insightful in her reading of the 
anti-Vedanta protests in Niyamgiri and the Adivasi tryst with modernity and 
the attendant governance paradigms. Ramesh’s ethnographic study draws 
from and adds to existing academic work that underlines the ‘dark side’ of 
indigeneity as she documents particular inventions of tradition and 
performances of indigeneity which seek to safeguard the identity of the 
Dongria Kondhs as a “primitive”, forest- and land-loving community. This 
volume is a useful synthesis of academic work dealing with the challenges 
of industrialisation in rural India. The historical perspective, the articulation 
of the intriguing ambiguous aspirations of ‘New India’ and the equally 
compelling accounts of the social and cultural worlds of mineral resources 
are complemented by anthropological narratives of the complex world of 
mineral extraction, governance and resistance.  

The volume has perhaps consciously steered clear from analysing 
ideological and tactical differences (if any) on the question of industrial 
policy between the major political blocks in India. An essay on the varying 
political compulsions of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and 
the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance would have added a crucial 
element to this compilation. The reader would benefit, for instance, from 
an analysis of how different political parties establish their legitimacy 
amongst diverse political constituencies. In the same vein, a deeper insight 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [162] 

into the confluence (or not) between the electoral successes and industrial 
policy, into intricate negotiations and tensions that occur within the 
corridors of power would have enriched this volume. That being said, this 
volume is recommended reading for everyone interested in Indian political 
economy and ecology.  

 


