Suchergebnisse

Development process in Odisha (before 2011 Orissa) may have led to progress but has also resulted in large-scale dispossession of land, homesteads, forests and also denial of livelihood and human rights. In Odisha as the requirements of development increase, the arena of contestation between the state/corporate entities and the people has correspondingly multiplied because the paradigm of contemporary model of growth is not sustainable and leads to irreparable ecological/environmental costs. It has engendered many people's movements. Struggles in rural Odisha have increasingly focused on proactively stopping of projects, mining, forcible land, forest and water acquisition fallouts from government/corporate sector. Contemporaneously, such people's movements are happening in Kashipur, Kalinga Nagar, Jagatsinghpur, Lanjigarh, etc. They have not gained much success in achieving their objectives. However, the people's movement of Baliapal in Odisha is acknowledged as a success. It stopped the central and state governments from bulldozing resistance to set up a National Missile Testing Range in an agriculturally rich area in the mid-1980s by displacing some lakhs of people of their land, homesteads, agricultural production, forests and entitlements. A sustained struggle for 12 years against the state by using Gandhian methods of peaceful civil disobedience movement ultimately won and the government was forced to abandon its project. As uneven growth strategies sharpen, the threats to people's human rights, natural resources, ecology and subsistence are deepening. Peaceful and non-violent protest movements like Baliapal may be emulated in the years ahead.

Odisha has gone on from being the most underdeveloped Indian state to be the state that has recorded the highest decline in poverty among the states. We undertake decomposition analyses to assess the redistributive changes in poverty and inequality over the period 1993–1994 and 2011–2012 across regions and social groups, examining the NSSO Consumer Expenditure Survey data. We find that while Odisha has succeeded in substantially reducing both rural and urban poverty incidence, this change has not met desirable subgroup‐specific variations. Among regions, southern and northern Odisha have not kept pace with coastal Odisha in poverty reduction during the study period. The rate of poverty reduction for the Scheduled Tribes and the Scheduled Castes has been dismal. Overall, we found the growth effects on poverty reduction to be more prominent over inequality effects and population shift effects on poverty, although these effects varied in contexts. While inequality in urban regions rose, it declined in rural regions. While at the state‐level, the within‐group inequality has declined between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012 (coincident with the present Naveen Patnaik rule); the between‐group inequality has increased during the period. Rural Odisha has seen a reduction in both within‐group and between‐group disparities, whereas urban Odisha has fared the opposite.