Every big dam, mine, or industrial project comes with a promise: irrigation for dry fields, electricity for growing towns, jobs for a young workforce. But someone almost always pays the upfront price for that promise, and in India, it has overwhelmingly been tribal communities living on the land these projects need. Looking at how displacement has actually played out for India’s Scheduled Tribes reveals a pattern that keeps repeating across decades and regions: land taken in the name of national interest, promises of compensation, and rehabilitation that arrives too late, too little, or not at all.
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How large is tribal displacement in India?
Displacement caused by development projects is not unique to India. Researchers studying developing economies have long pointed out that dams, mines, and industrial expansion uproot several million people every year, and some estimates put the annual figure at close to 10 million people during peak decades of infrastructure building. India’s own record reflects this pattern at national scale, but with an added layer: the people displaced are disproportionately tribal.
One widely cited academic estimate finds that between 1951 and 1990, more than 8.5 million tribal people were displaced by development projects, accounting for roughly 60 percent of everyone uprooted in that period, with dam construction responsible for the bulk of it. Drawing on the long-running research of Walter Fernandes, the same body of work places the cumulative estimate of tribal displacement closer to 21 million people once mining, industrial projects, and other categories of land acquisition are added to the count. The wide range between these figures is itself telling: India has never maintained a single, reliable national database tracking who was displaced, from where, and whether they were ever resettled.
Looking at displacement more broadly, one influential calculation suggests that around 50 million people were displaced by development projects in India between 1947 and 1997, with large dams alone accounting for 16 million of them and adivasis making up roughly 8 million of that dam-displaced population. Adivasi, meaning original inhabitant, is the term many tribal communities use for themselves.
Dams sit at the centre of this story because India has built an extraordinary number of them since independence. According to the Central Water Commission’s National Register of Large Dams, India now has more than 5,700 large dams, with over 5,300 already completed and several hundred more under construction, making it the world’s third-largest dam-building nation. Because dams, mines, and forest-based industries are typically located in resource-rich, forested terrain, exactly where Scheduled Tribes have lived for generations, the burden of displacement falls on tribal communities far out of proportion to their roughly 8.6 percent share of India’s population.
Development projects that reshaped tribal lives
The Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada
The Sardar Sarovar dam, built across the Narmada River, is probably India’s most documented case of tribal displacement. The project alone displaced more than 41,000 families, over 200,000 people, spread across Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, and more than 56 percent of those affected were adivasis belonging to communities such as the Tadvi, Vasava, Bhilala, and Rathwa. Government figures and independent estimates on the exact numbers have never fully matched. By the government’s own account, nearly 2.5 lakh people were displaced by the Narmada reservoir, half of them tribal, and while officials list all 40,827 affected families as rehabilitated, activists associated with the Narmada Bachao Andolan have disputed this, arguing that thousands of families across dozens of villages remain without proper resettlement even after the dam reached its full height.
The Hirakud dam in Odisha
Built on the Mahanadi river and completed in the 1950s, the Hirakud dam was one of independent India’s first major multipurpose projects, meant to control floods and generate power and irrigation for western Odisha. It ended up submerging far more land than originally planned. The reservoir eventually covered 325 villages and displaced about 26,500 families, roughly 100,000 people, many of whom are still waiting for the land and compensation promised to them decades ago. Sustained pressure from groups representing the oustees eventually pushed the National Human Rights Commission to direct state governments to act, but as one review of the project’s history put it, more than six decades after completion the state has still largely failed to fulfil its rehabilitation responsibilities toward the dam’s displaced communities.
The Bhakra dam in Himachal Pradesh
The Bhakra dam, built around the same period as Hirakud to supply irrigation and power to Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan, followed a similar trajectory in the hill communities of Himachal Pradesh. Tribal and hill families who gave up land for the reservoir received compensation that reflected the modest land values and administrative capacity of the 1950s, figures that were never meaningfully revised even as the dam went on to generate decades of benefit for downstream states. The grievance that recurs across both Hirakud and Bhakra is the same: compensation fixed once, at the time of displacement, with little regard for how far it would fall short of an adequate life afterward.
From forest and farmland to a cash economy
Displacement does more than move people physically. It pushes tribal households out of an informal economy they understand and into a formal, cash-based one they were never prepared for. Most tribal communities depend on agricultural land and forests both for food and for a wider set of resources: fuel, fodder, medicinal plants, fish, and grazing land. Development projects typically take the land but rarely compensate for everything that came with it.
Cash compensation itself creates a second layer of disruption. Tribal households accustomed to subsistence farming and barter often have little experience managing lump-sum payments, and money meant to rebuild a livelihood is frequently spent down within a few years, leaving families with neither land nor savings. This is compounded by the fact that Common Property Resources, the shared forests, water bodies, grazing grounds, and fishing areas that tribal communities depend on collectively, are usually left out of compensation calculations entirely. At the Sardar Sarovar resettlement sites, for instance, authorities made no compensation for the forest, fish, and water resources that displaced adivasi families had relied on in their original villages, even though these resources had effectively functioned as a safety net.
The cumulative effect of all this shows up in impoverishment statistics. Drawing on independent research into resettlement outcomes, one review notes that roughly 75 percent of the people displaced since India’s planning era began have ended up worse off economically than before displacement, a finding that lines up with what happened at both Sardar Sarovar and Hirakud: families who once controlled land, forest access, and their own labour became wage workers dependent on uncertain daily employment.
What the law tries to fix
For decades, land acquisition in India ran on a colonial-era law from 1894 that said almost nothing about resettlement or rehabilitation. That changed with the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, commonly called the RFCTLARR Act, which for the first time made rehabilitation and resettlement a legal obligation rather than a discretionary gesture. The Act requires compensation closer to market rates, mandates a social impact assessment before land is acquired, and includes specific safeguards for Scheduled Tribe families living in Scheduled Areas, including provisions meant to preserve their access to community resources after resettlement.
In practice, the gap between the law on paper and its implementation on the ground remains wide. A review of the Act’s outcomes several years after it came into force found that livelihood-dependent families, particularly tenants, women, and those without formal land titles, continue to struggle to access the entitlements the Act promises them, a gap that affects tribal households more than most, since customary and communal tenure systems rarely produce the paperwork that formal compensation processes demand. And since the Act applies only to acquisitions that came after 2014, it offers no relief to the families still waiting on unresolved promises from the Hirakud and Bhakra era.
What do you think?
What do you think? If a project genuinely serves the national interest, does that justify uprooting a community whose entire way of life is tied to a specific stretch of forest and river? And when compensation is paid only in cash, what would it actually take to replace everything a tribal household loses along with its land?
References
- https://www.arfjournals.com/image/catalog/Journals%20Papers/JSAR/2024/No%201%20(2024)/3_SN%20Tripathy.pdf
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00219096231168064
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03166-3
- https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1946496®=48&lang=2
- https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/displacement-and-development-construction-sardar-dam
- https://science.thewire.in/politics/sardar-sarovar-displacement-rehabilitation-narmada/
- https://www.landconflictwatch.org/conflicts/hirakud-dam
- https://www.epw.in/engage/article/hirakud-dam-and-plight-its-oustees
- https://dolr.gov.in/en/act-rules/
- https://www.teriin.org/article/rfctlarr-act-2013-are-outcomes-fair
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