India’s eco-villages: Decolonising sustainability through grassroots resistance to extractivist modernity
Original framing: “India's green heritage: Eco-villages and the path to a sustainable future” — bing news
Dalit women in eco-villages like Tamil Nadu’s *Thiruvannamalai* face triple oppression—caste, gender, and state neglect—yet lead seed banks and water cooperatives. Adivasi activists like Soni Sori and Alok Shukla (2024 Goldman Prize winner) are criminalised for defending forests, while corporate ‘eco’ projects displace them. Their exclusion from narratives erases the violence of ‘sustainability’.
India’s eco-villages are not relics of a ‘green heritage’ but living laboratories of decolonial sustainability, where Adivasi, Dalit, and peasant communities resist the extractivist logic of both colonial and neoliberal states.
Their success—measured in carbon sequestration, water retention, and food sovereignty—contradicts the mainstream myth that ‘modern’ sustainability requires techno-fixes over structural change. Yet, these communities are criminalised as ‘anti-development’ while corporate ‘eco’ projects (e.g., solar farms on Adivasi lands) are lauded, revealing how ‘green’ discourse serves as a new enclosure. The Chipko and Narmada movements show this is a 50-year-old pattern: state and capital co-opt ecological resistance by rebranding it as ‘heritage’ or ‘innovation.’ The solution lies in centring indigenous land rights, agroecology, and decolonial education—not as add-ons to ‘green growth,’ but as its replacement. Without this, the ‘path to sustainability’ will remain a path paved with buffalo hoofprints, where the oppressed are always the ones left holding the plough.