Capital’s Reach, Nature’s Loss: Reading Plachimada as an Environmental Resistance

Abstract

The struggle against the Coca-Cola plant in Plachimada, in the Palakkad district of Kerala, India, highlighted the livelihood challenges confronted by the residents, chiefly the marginalised sections, when the Coca-Cola plant extracted and depleted the aquifer and polluted the surface water in Plachimada during 2000 – 2005, challenging the people’s right to water. The adoption of Neoliberal development strategy facilitated the operation of the plant. This paper critiques the neoliberal developmental strategy as synonymous with capital expansion. The data gathered from the ethnographic study done during 2018-19 is used to analyse the impact of the ecological destruction, the resultant economic, social and cultural effect on the Adivasis and Dalits, dependent on common property resources and the counter narratives generated by people’s resistance. The study will be situated within the more extensive debate on development by the State and Corporations during Neoliberalism. The paper begins with a nuanced understanding of the neo-liberal model of development, the impact of the mass mobilisations by the affected communities and the environmental cost of the neoliberal development discourse. The paper explains how environmental loss created livelihood challenges leading to a mobilisation of the poor and dispossessed, thus, instantiating the significance of the environmentalism of the poor.