Prajateerpu, Power and Knowledge

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Action Research, 2003

… Participation: Stories and …, 2008

The people's vision–UK and Indian reflections on Prajateerpu by KAVITHA KURUGANTI, MICHEL PIMBERT and TOM WAKEFORD 2 Introduction At a meeting held at the UK Houses of Parliament on 18 March 2002, a smallholder from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh stood up to ...

Action Research, 2004

Participatory processes for …, 2003

Economic and Political Weekly ( …, 2002

The Politics of Collective Advocacy in India, 2011

Reviewers comments: • ‘This is a long needed, finely researched, and admirably presented work of scholarship. It is required reading not just for scholars and researchers, but also those with any interest in the changing, emergent, future Indian society.’ Arun Agrawal, Professor and Associate Dean for Research, School of Natural Resources & Environment, University of Michigan. • ‘A very readable, succinct and excellent synthesis of the experiences of a number of organizations and advocacy movements. India’s dynamic and complex civil society is captured well and includes linkages at the local, national and global levels.’ Sushma Ganguly, Former Sector Manager, Agriculture and Rural Development, World Bank. • ‘…the strengths of the book are its lucid exposition, its coverage of a number of contrasting case studies, and its clear and unromantic acknowledgment of the limitations and constraints on activist action.’ Prof David Gellner. Asian Studies Review, 37(1), pp. 112-113.

In the summer of 2010, the Annual General Meeting of mining conglomerate Vedanta Resources found itself rudely interrupted by Na'vi protestors in Westminster, London. Vedanta, which sought to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri hills, came under severe attack for proposing to displace and dispossess the Dongria Kondh tribal populations living in these forested hills in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. Much like the Na'vi in James Cameron's celebrated fi lm Avatar , the Dongria Kondhs became a symbol of popular resistance against the avarice of multinational corporations and their growing alliances with national governments. 'We are', they declared in London, 'the real Na'vi.' Here, as in other movements in the Narmada valley and the forests of central India, the gulf between the local and the global, the cultural and the material, and the signifi er and the signifi ed, seems completely obliterated, leaving us with a fl eeting moment of global solidarity.

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2009