Not just India’s hills, hit hard in recent times by extreme weather events, pockets of flatlands across the country are also rising against what many call ‘construction sans conversation’, anxious about ecological damage, displacement and loss of local culture
Across India’s plains and coasts, from Kerala to Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra to Tamil Nadu, a clutch of big-ticket infrastructure projects have run into a wall of resistance — in villages, farmlands and wetlands once assumed to be easy ground. The opposition is not only about land loss or displacement, but growing anxiety over ecological damage — flooding, deforestation, aquifer stress, coastal erosion — that locals say will come at too steep a cost. In state after state, this has given rise to a new geography of protest.