Observing Developmental Intervention in Mineral-rich Adivasi Subsistence Economy: An Ethnographic Account from West Singhbhum (Jharkhand)

Abstract

The shift of the political economy of development from the Nehruvian model to the Neoliberal market model has relocated the discourses and practices of development. A state becomes a facilitator, protector and advocator of the capitalist market economy and the praxis of development become a kind of governmentality that often privileges the specific class interest. In this neoliberalized era, cultural politics of the developmental intervention (DI) needs immediate attention because the state DI has a huge impact on the pre-capitalist mode of social formation. This article covers Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum to study the DI on local indigenous population who have sacral and subsistence kind of societal formation. This article tries to show why there is need to understand development and its nature in mineral-rich Adivasi regions. The main focus of this article is on exploring the pattern of state development intervention in the region of pre-capitalist social formation and what outcomes it has carried for commons. Through case studies collected from field areas, we try to show that the contemporary development process and practices are based on the premises of modernization and neoliberalization and it has been widely criticized for being exclusionary and biased in the mineral-rich pre-capitalist society. At the same time, we also try to demarcate these state developmental issues at epistemological level which helps to understand the nature of development intervention in Adivasi resource-rich regions.