This compilation is a rare attempt to apply gender analysis to development-induced-displacement and resettlement in the Indian context. It brings together leading scholar-activists, researchers and contributors from people’s movements to critique and draw attention to the injustices perpetrated during such processes. Facing up to the need to focus specifically on how displacement and resettlement affect social groups differently with regard to axes such as gender, class, caste and tribe, the articles show that disenfranchised groups are deemed dispensable and tend to be affected the most, and that women and children among them suffer disproportionately. Displaced by Development: Confronting Marginalisation and Gender Injustice argues that without differentiated analyses and programmes, displacement and resettlement will continue to intensify and perpetuate gender and social injustice. This work will hold the interest of a wide readership and will be a crucial source of information for those working in the areas of Gender and Social Policy, Economics and Development Studies, Sociology of Gender, Environment and Development, Migration Studies, Anthropology, and South Asian studies. It will also interest policy makers in development agencies, activists and non-governmental organisations concerned with forced displacement and migration issues.
Lyla Mehta is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Susex and has also been a visiting fellow at the Department of International Environment and Development (Noragric), Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She is a sociologist and her work has focussed on the gendered dimensions of forced displacement and resistance, rights and forced migration and the politics of water. Since 1991, she has conducted research on displacement and resistance in India’s Narmada Valley. She has engaged in advisory work on issues concerning displacement, gender, dams and development with various UN agencies and the World Commission on Dams and has also been active in advocacy and activist work on these issues with NGOs and social movements in Europe and India. She has recently co-convened a programme of research on the rights of forced migrants and their interface with policy frameworks for the Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty at Sussex University. She has authored The Politics and Poetics of Water: Naturalising Scarcity in Western India (Orient Longman, 2005), edited The Limits to Scarcity (Earthscan) and co-edited Forced Displacement: Why Rights Matter (Palgrave).