Environmental Burden in Everyday Lives of Dalits: A Case Study of Sanand, Gujarat

Abstract

Under Buddhist philosophy, followed by Dalits and other marginalised groups, an organic relationship exists between environment, knowledge and society where natural resources are conceived as equal partners and their identity is enmeshed with these. However, this organic balance between environment, knowledge and society gets disrupted by certain kind of materialistic thinking which not only creates ecological imbalance but also social conflict, exposes people to a whole range of risks like dislocation, loss of livelihood, work burden for women, health issues, loss of culture to destruction of civil rights. Against this backdrop, this paper reflects on sustainable development and analyses environmental degradation caused by the proliferation of chemical and pharmaceutical industry by encapsulating how neoliberalism smartly appropriate caste system and its attendant inequality, resulting in pain and suffering of subaltern masses. Foregrounding the study in the four villages of Sanand Block, Ahmedabad district of Gujarat, this article discusses the politics of environmentalism, spells out ‘environmentalism of the poor’ and narrates the way subaltern communities manage to live with environmental burden.