Extractive capital and multi-scalar environmental politics: interpreting the exit of Rio Tinto from the diamond fields of Central India

Third World Quarterly. 2021. Vol. 42. No. 8. P. 1770–1787.

Roy Chowdhury A., Lahiri-Dutt K.

Rio Tinto had been developing a diamond mining project in Madhya
Pradesh for a decade when in 2017 it hastily abandoned the project.
We analyse this counterintuitive exit through an ethnographic approach
nested within a qualitative case study framework. We argue that the
exit was caused by multi-scalar politics. Local protests over livelihood
and labour issues –pre-emptively rearticulated by regional civil society
groups through an ecological ‘framing’ – led to litigation. The national
forest bureaucracy posed regulatory hurdles, and a change in the
national political regime in 2014 brought to power a party that leveraged
national capital of a certain variety, which weakened Rio Tinto’s
political position. Lastly, a slump in the global diamond market created
economic uncertainties, finally leading to its exit. It has not, however,
deterred the government from facilitating investment by Indian
mega-corporate houses in mining diamonds, once again ignoring local
dissent. Under the current regime in India, the space for activism is
increasingly restricted, and that restriction, we contend, can lead to the
disarray in strategising alliances and goals between ecological and
social justice concerns.

Keywords: India, social movements, Extractive Industries, mining companies, Diamond, environmental civil society