Indigenous Communities and Development: The Mising People and Dam Construction in Assam, India

Much of the early literature on dams and Indigenous peoples focused on resistance and organized opposition to the projects, with an emphasis on threats to Indigenous life ways, sustainability, and their roles as custodians of nature. However, more recent scholarship highlights the complex ways in which affected populations respond to such projects. This article examines how Indigenous people in one community in Northeast India engage with a development project that dispossesses them, provoking opposition to the project, while also offering opportunities to enter the market economy and earn higher incomes. It discusses the case of the Subansiri Lower Hydro Electric Project (SLHEP) in Assam. The article argues that what appears to be a contradiction in how people respond to this project reflects a more complex response to the set of changes brought about by a growing neoliberal order and the place that Indigenous working people find themselves in. This is marked by the rapid erosion of the material life worlds of Indigenous peoples and a growing dependence on market interactions for meeting most basic needs, alongside growing aspirations and the precarity brought on by a crisis of social reproduction.