Mines, plantations, and militarisation: Environmental conflicts in Tinsukia, Assam

Abstract

Two large-scale environmental disasters in Assam's easternmost district Tinsukia, raised great passion and held much traction in local print, electronic and social media platforms in 2020. The National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) granted post-facto approval for opencast mining in Saleki Proposed Reserved Forest (PRF) under Dehing-Patkai Elephant Reserve in Assam. Later, the public sector company, Oil India Limited (OIL) reported a gas leak in Baghjan that resulted in a major blowout resulting in deaths and displacement in the area. In this article, we argue that these events constitute a tragic outcome of decades of appropriation of natural resources by the oil, tea and coal industry all of which depend on obsolete technologies of extraction. We focus on how this is happening in a place that has several disaffected, marginalised people who once relied on agriculture for their livelihoods. We argue that these two events are not aberrations in the global narrative of inter-governmental concerns for climate change. Instead, we believe that they are part of a global template of re-colonisation that continued long after the formal transfers of power that occurred in Africa and Asia in the 20th century.