Abstract

Dispossession and forced separation of a section of people from the means of production are inextricably associated with state-led economic development. In an inherited post-colonial development paradigm, a ‘top down’ approach followed in India excluded the people living at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder as equal partners who with respect to rising ‘mainstream’ material expectations experience ‘dispossession’ by displacement. Radicalism based on this ground reality, a consequence of uneven development across social and economic categories and across regions, becomes a corollary that concerns both the state and the civil society. Rather than withdrawing from the system that evolved and got fractured over time, the paper opines, the state has to play a key role in development the beginning and base of which has to be to take into confidence the marginalized sections of the society like the tribal people, the downtrodden, and the poor as dignified and equal partners.