Cul de Sac of Rights: Denial of the Rights as a Corollary of Development

Abstract

Plachimada is known for the mobilisation of the Adivasis in the Palakkad district of Kerala, who resisted the operation of the bottling unit of Coca-Cola in their village as the company extracted, depleted, and polluted the groundwater in the aquifers, dispossessing them by confronting the people’s right to water. The paper aims to provide a nuanced perception of how the dispossession has expunged the constitutional rights of the Adivasis in a developed democracy like India per se Kerala. The study would explain the nature of the neoliberal development discourse and elaborate on the denial of rights by bringing out the interconnectedness of the setting up of the factory and the water stress felt by the Adivasis, leading to the denial of multiple constitutional assurances of the Adivasis of Plachimada. This would be set in the larger frame of how mega developmental projects funded by foreign capital depriving the affected communities of basic human rights like water and all the other rights enshrined in the constitution. The ethnographic data collected from the fieldwork during 2018-19 is analysed to understand how the dispossession led to the denial of constitutional assurance