Join us for the fifth session in the InSAF India and London Mining Network webinar series, Deadline or Death Sentence: State Violence and Indigenous (Adivasi) Peoples’ Resistance in India. Watch previous sessions here.
Session 5 | Weaponising Land and Forest Legal Regimes for Sabotaging Indigenous (Adivasi) Land Rights in India
Date and time: Monday, 22 September 2025 at 2:30pm UTC (8pm India / 3:30pm London / 10:30am New York)
This series critically interrogates the Indian state’s 2026 “Maoist-free” deadline and its violent consequences for Indigenous peoples’ survival and self-determination. The first four sessions examined the intensifying state militarisation and counter-insurgency operations as tools to displace and dispossess Adivasis from their ancestral resource-rich lands, and the neoliberal shift in national economic and development policies more broadly.
The fifth session focuses on recent changes in land and forest governance legal regimes at national and local levels. The state claims these changes are necessary for ease of doing business in resource rich areas, but which sabotage the long Adivasi tradition of sustainable governing of their lands and resources (“jal, jangal, jameen”), much of it as common lands. In reality, land governance has been reduced to bureaucratic land administration in service of neoliberal capitalism. Our speakers will discuss the politics of two key aspects: the digitalisation of land records and the associated land bank policy and SVAMITVA scheme; and the piecemeal amendments in mining, environment, conservation, and biodiversity laws and dilution of the Forest Rights Act, 2006.
Speakers:
Dayamani Barla, Social Activist, Journalist and Convenor, Adivasi–Moolvasi Astitva Raksha Manch, Jharkhand, India
CR Bijoy, engaged in issues of resource conflict and governance, India
Watch the recording of the session below