Editorial: A geology of Marx?

Abstract

Not many would have heard of Neduvasal, a village in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu where, since February 2017, farmers and environmental activists have been protesting against the Central Government's decision to award contracts for development and extraction of hydrocarbons to 31 sites across the country, a vaguely defined 10 km2 of land in Neduvasal being one of them. While the government has maintained that the protestors are ill-informed about the nature of the project, given the history of the national oil conglomerate, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) extracting hydrocarbons in this fertile delta region for decades, fears of oil exploration and production taking over farmers’ fields, livelihoods and future is not unfounded. Against a context of broad rural distress, this particular area has retained a comfortable agrarian economy, but has been fighting environmental threats (mostly around groundwater pollution) from crude oil leaks and abandoned oil wells for a while. The particular proposal that triggered agitations early this year comes out of the Discovered Small Fields initiative, part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship energy policy (within the much trumpeted ‘Make in India’ enterprise) to reduce the country's dependence on oil imports by 10% by 2022. Within a 100 km distance of Neduvasal there are around 600 wells with only 200 in production. The remaining, barring a few that are used as injection wells are abandoned, resulting in the desiccation of nearly 2000 acres of fertile land (based on an estimate of roughly 5 acres per well), which have now been overrun by the invasive species Prosopis Juniflora, one that has triggered a parallel controversy around the ecology and economy of wastelands in India.