Smart City for Whom? : Adivasi (Tribal) Claims Making against Land Acquisition

The paper is an attempt to situate the question of development and development-induced exploitation in Ranchi, the capital- city of Jharkhand in India. Jharkhand has been the vortex of extended struggles since colonial times around the questions of development and exploitation. In 2012, a village 15 kms outside Ranchi - Nagri, became the site of  vibrant protests, usually restricted to the interiors of the forested and mineral-rich state. The government, in contravention to the laws that protect tribal-land acquired agricultural land in Nagri for the creation of a knowledge hub in consonance with the plans of making Ranchi a smart-city . The Adivasi (indigenous-tribal) farmers had been engaged in cultivation of the land where the proposed construction was to happen but the state claimed that the land had been acquired 50 years prior. Consequently,  protests, led by women against this forcible acquisition erupted under the leadership of the ‘Nagri Bachao Samiti’. Nagri being a peri-urban area, the men were largely involved in non-agricultural activities, but it was the women who were directly involved and were economically dependent on agriculture. 
Not only the state and judiciary, but even the ‘sympathetic’ media and academic-discourses, framed the  resistances in the language of assimilation versus ecological-conservation; development versus primitiveness. The paper seeks to dislodge such easy binaries and question the ‘exceptionalism’ of Adivasi-political resistance. Instead it tries to situate how the adivasi (indigenous) identity and the question of exploitation was being (re)configured in these urban struggles over land and resources through a political-ecological lens.