Development, Displacement and Human Rights in an East Indian Steel Town

The project inquires into sociolegal conflicts arising out of the displacement of about 20,000 individuals for the construction of a massive industrialization project in Rourkela (Orissa/ India) in the 1950s. Influenced by an evolutionary teleology of modernization theories and development economics the post-colonial Indian state invested in heavy industries to effect an encompassing social transformation of the religiously enchanted, agrarian world of castes and launch its development into a modern, enlightened industrial society. The displaced in the ‘backward’ but mineral-rich peripheries of the post-colonial Republic were the first to be integrated into this society by offering them as compensation for their losses regular employment in the public sector undertaking and by thus turning them into model working class citizens of the nation-state. However, contrary to these modernist expectations the ‘steel town’ is constantly under threat of ethnic strife over land and labour that erupts at times violently. The project shall trace the actual results of legal struggles between the state authorities and the displaced people, their associations, the local parties and unions from their beginning in the mid-Fifties of the last century taking into account the legal, political and socio-economic conditionalities shaping these results. The relations between a state-legal approach to displacement and compensation and other forms of protest and resistance shall be investigated as well as the social organization of protest, i.e. the way relations of power within the associations of the displaced occur along the lines of class, age, gender, ethnic and urban—rural divides.