 That's all right. I will disturb you again. Okay, so yeah. So, thanks for inviting me and I think this is sort of the South Asia Institute in the low environment and development centre and so was who was inviting me. Thanks for that. Okay, so I thought about, let me situate this thing a little bit in the context of the part of India known as Northeast India and this is, I was just talking about that earlier, but one of the problems when you talk about Northeast is that we usually and also it's a bit tricky when you have a mixed audience with people who are from the place or worked on the place for a long time and people who are perhaps familiar with South Asia but not the region itself. So a lot of time you end up explaining a lot of the background. So you hardly come to the topic because there's so much context. I mean things like the in-aligned permits, the six schedule. I mean this is a lot of things that are very critical to understand sort of the colonial or the post-colonial context of Northeast India and as I said, you know, it's like a lot of times people who are familiar with the South Asian context but not the Northeast that is often a lot of misunderstandings. And say, for example, with the Citizen Amendment Act, there's been of course a lot of debate about that and I think for a lot of people in India, sort of the mainland India, it's been an issue of this new legislation that's perceived as anti-Muslim but in the Northeast in case there are other things as well that people are reacting to. So I think I've kind of seen my own, I have a few slides here that already. This is the map, it has to situate the place. So I've sort of situate my own work as sort of building up what we call the Northeast in Indian Studies, sort of establishing that as a feeler in its own right. And one of the, I mean, one of the scholars that's been very important in this field is Professor Sanjeev Baurour who's a political scientist at Bard College in the U.S. and he sort of has a series of three books that's been extremely influential in sort of establishing this field. And I just mentioned this book, it's the most recent one in the name of the nation, India and its Northeast and this is a book that is, I think, extremely important and available to read that I really would like to recommend. And Sanjeev is a friend of mine and I will come back to, I mean, we have had a discussion for now more than 20 years I think and we have a few disagreements that I've been bringing up because I think these disagreements are not only sort of of a personal nature but I do think they are pointing to something that is larger than that, sort of. But there are also, I mean, so I'm mentioning Sanjeev but I think what happened, I mean, there used to be this sort of general argument saying that there are no studies on the Northeast. I think this used to be right up until I say the last time, 15 years and now there is a range of new scholarship coming up by a lot of young people who are working from the region or also from outside the region but that is, I think this has also been possible through opening up of the area before it was very difficult that research is permission to work there but now, I mean, there's a lot of people working there and it's really a new sort of generation of scholarship coming up where you have very empirically grounded work but also very theoretically edgy stuff that is coming out which I find is really great to be part of that. I mean, a lot of new conversations going on which I find very important. And I've been privileged to work with Dolly Keacon who is a Naga scholar now based at Melbourne University and we have this new book that came out recently on migration from the region but I'm not talking about that today. I'm perhaps touching on it a little bit. But Dolly has also, so this is Living the Land is a co-authored book and Dolly has also, yes, recently released her which is based on the PhD work which is dealing with sort of oil and coal which is the topic for today. Yes, so I'm sort of thinking a little bit now about the whole controversy about coal in Northeast India and I think it's interesting again when we think about coal in the context of Northeast it's sort of a different story than the normal stories that we are engaging with. And I have this now because this is a group of friends from Norway and other places who are working on a new project but India's new call geography and this is a geography that is based along the coastlines and it's mainly based on imported coal from South Africa and other places where they are building new harbours, they're building new power grids and also new power plants and this is a quite recent development which again with all this huge investment in this new infrastructure it speaks to the fact that this will be a lasting thing. This will not, coal will have a long life still in India and this also sort of connects to the older geography of coal which is one that you have mainly in the East India and also other parts where you have sort of the state. The new geography is mainly private businesses that are financing and running this and the old geography is sort of the state run sector where you have these large undertakings where the coal are transported through railways to power plants in the big cities but again as sort of a public undertaking. In Northeast of course I really love this. This is a movie of painting outside the town of Margarita which is again a beautiful story about the name of Margarita but when you enter the town of Margarita you have this mural speaking about the excavating happiness from the depth of darkness and this is one of the larger coal fields where you have sort of an open pit mine huge mine where you have I mean modern tractors and whatnot to dig out the coal but when we have the story that I'm looking at here is what is known as sort of artisan coal mine or rat coal mine in the context of Megalaya and most of these mines are owned and run by indigenous, I mean the castles and the giant yes and the carousel the main indigenous groups in the state and it's been sort of largely an unregulated mining undertaking where it's sort of passed under the radar of all the national legislations relating to environmental protection of labour has not been imposed here as it has been sort of passed as a cottage industry which is under the because these areas are under the schedule where the indigenous and tribal peoples are supposed to govern themselves and they have all the rights to the land and also to the natural resources of these areas and it's been sort of, yes as I said it's been under, I mean this has been going on for there is a longer history to it but in the 90s it really took off in a big way and it's been criticised by a lot of people because of the environmental hazards but also for the plight of the labourers and a lot of the labourers in these mines it's horrible conditions, I mean it really people are crawling into these long tunnels of course you go down and then you crawl into these long tunnels and some of the labourers further down it's kids under the age of 12 even who are doing this very, very dangerous work so it's been criticised for the labour situation but also because of the environmental consequences and that has been debated for quite some time and eventually then and this came again to the fore when this was an accident in December 2018 when 18 or 15 labourers were caught and then eventually died in one of these tunnels and they tried to rescue them which was a pathetic attempt to rescue the labourers but before that, in 2014 there was this eventually the Supreme Court intervened under the natural green tribunal and put a ban on the rat hole mine and on the state and this was after a public interest litigation was submitted by a local organisation in Assam called the Old Dimasa Student Union because then they were complaining about that the water downstream in the Cochlear River was contaminated and so the natural green tribunal then was calling a ban or stop on old mining and then the argument was that you had to come up with the regulations but also eventually developed new sort of scientific mining methods and until then there was not supposed to be any mining no continuation of mining but one of the problems here was that they gave a sort of they allowed people to transport the already mined coal and that sort of gave people a window to continue actually mining and transporting our coal and the thing is that this intervention by the Supreme Court under this particular bench was everyone knew that it will eventually happen so already in my book that came out in 2011 in a book called Unruly Hills I was talking about that this will actually happen because it was so obvious to anyone that this was not really socially or environmentally sustainable and the way it happened was very similar to an earlier intervention by the Supreme Court where they put a ban on timber operations where there was large scale deforestation going on and eventually the Supreme Court came in and said you're not allowed to pattern more trees and the reactions to the ban and timber ban and now to this ban on coal mining was very similar so it was people coming up saying that this was actually a violation of the Sixth Schedule where we are supposed to have autonomy and also there was a lot of outcries saying that people are now starving because of there is no more income from it How far is this from Chaldea? This is central India, it's very different then I have to go back to show you the map and we can come back to that later on but it's a very different part of this North-Eastern India, this is North-Eastern India So the coal lobby was really, I mean, lobbying they went too early and were trying to lift the ban and instead of really going into it the whole political elite in the state was trying to lift this ban rather than look into it and what eventually happened then was that as I said, you know, they allowed people to transport coal that had already been mined but that opened up then so it was largely the mining actually continued as before so there was this activist Agnes Karsing and Amit Dasangman, there was a lot of other people also who went out to report or to document this illegal then mining and transport of coal and they were surrounded during one of these trips during one of the trips they were attacked by this is not a very nice photograph, sorry for that but during one of these trips they were surrounded and eventually really badly beaten up and almost killed and left in a forest by a group of coal miners and mine owners this was in November 2018 and eventually they were really particularly they were really badly beaten up but miraculously they survived and I think that really I mean a lot of things happened here sort of converged in this context and I think here I see this event along with some others that I'm coming to that it became sort of the turning point or a rupture of what the Danish geographer Christian Løhn calls an open moment where opportunities and risk multiply and the scope of outcomes widens and when new structures, structural architecture is erected and so this became a large outcry and I think it's important to think here that these activists, particularly Agnes Karsing she's sort of from a quite well known family in this state and I think the fact that these coal miners attacked her in such a way, I mean almost killed them was became sort of a wake up call for a lot of people I mean the extent to which the coal mafia that a lot of people talk about the coal mafia were ready to go to sort of to quieten the critique and this also triggered a group of activists in the state to compile these two volumes where they call the course of unregulated coal mining in Megalaya, a citizen report which was then submitted to the Green Tribunal and along with this so I think you know part of why I think also why they were attacked and why sort of there was a lot of violence it was a very tense situation emerging in a way and I think part of that this is also not a very good slide but one of the things that has sort of running up to this was this other bill that was there was, I can't find the word now was a controversy around the amendment bill of the Cassie Social Customs of Lineage Act of 1997 which was adopted in 2008 in July by the Cassie Hill District Council and the thing here with the bill which is sort of which you can read in there but the most controversial aspect of this amendment to this Lineage Bill was that if a Cassie woman marries a non-Cassie or a non-triple they will lose some of the membership in the tribe but also the rights that comes with that and this really and most of all the rights to all land because only people I mean in these states within the six scheduled areas of northeast India only people that belong to the scheduled tribes in those areas are allowed to all land and so they were also then if you marry and not only you but also your children will lose the right to all land in the state and this was really created a huge uproar among people and particularly among young women that felt that they were targeted by the act and Angus Cassie she was also one of the most vocal critics of this new amendment bill to the Lineage Act and she said for example and this is from an article in the Hindu the so-called tribal protectors who have destroyed forest and land through corrupt practices are now targeting women as if their marriage to non-tribals will make the tribal extinct several other prominent and less known women spoke out against what they saw as a toxic masculinity and attempt to curtail the rights and agency of women not least in their role as custodians of ancestral property bearing in mind that Cassie are following a matrilineal kinship where property and clan membership are traced from mothers to daughters matrilineal has increasingly been considered a nuance or an irritation to the indigenous elite whose power base is built on resource extraction above all on cold women as mentioned are in the forefront of the critique against the ruthless extractivism that dominated in the postcolonial period where the indigenous elite under the disguise of ethnic autonomy been able to take possession of huge tracts of land so as I said possession of huge tracts of land turning these to sites of large-gate logging and mining what we then had in the opposition against the amendment and against the coal mining is a larger struggle against the dominant mode of unsustainable resource extraction in the state that has led to the concentration of wealth, land and political influence in the hands of the indigenous elite while not directly articulating as an alternative program or a political vision I think it's apt to think this as a form of what Cassie had in terms of ultra-politics explorations in alternative modes of inhabiting and relating to earth and this is a point that I'm developing in another paper together with Nathan Walla who is also a local scholar when we look at how sort of the opposition against this lineage act also goes together with opposition against mining or the sort of extractive modality where sort of and also articulating a sort of alternative imagining, building on ongoing relations to and care for ancestral lands passed on by generations of women it's important to stress here that this is not a matter of urban indigenous intellectuals alone those these are certainly critical but perhaps most here the best example here is from the local opposition against uranium mining which uranium mining is another very controversial thing in the state but one of the main figures in the opposition so this is Ghazan Hajj ultra-politics one of the main figures in stopping blocking the uranium mining project and go ahead is this old woman named Spility Lingdor Langrin Mrs. Langrin holds the rights to most of the land in the area for the proposed uranium mine this is a long-standing issue and Mrs. Langrin has argued again and again that they do not want uranium to be mined telling a reporter recently we belong here and we won't give up our land until death and I also met her this is something 10-15 years ago and she was basically saying the same thing there were some test mining going on in the 90s and that brought a lot of people into the eye and she was saying that there's no more peace here so a lot of commotion and we don't want these people here and they were talking about all kinds of effects because of the test mining that's been going on and why she's been successful in blocking again this large uranium deposit sitting here is something that the Indian state of course wants and at some point they might be pushing this issue again but I think she got support also from the very powerful CASA Student Union so through that larger opposition they've been able to block the mining to go ahead but this has been really a source of irritation to the political elite in Sri Lanka who feel that they want to continue to build development through extraction but let me pause here a little bit and sort of get back to Suzanne Ibaruas booked in the name of the nation and I mean as I said you know suddenly it's a close friend of mine and we sort of debating back and forth for a long time and in one of the chapters, chapter 3 in the book where I mean he also quotes me a lot he starts off with a quote from anthropologist Anna Singh how do ordinary people get involved in destroying their environments even their own homes, home places this is a quote from her book Friction and he says that this question is highly relevant in the context of the megalaya called mining and here yeah and I mean I really this particular chapter I really sort of charred his soundly description of what was going on that coal mining has been really reckless it's been creating enormous environmental problems it has led to the formation of indigenous elite that now controls sort of through the the new tribal elite coming to power who really controls the state who then blocks all kinds of attempts to control it until then the national green tribunal came in but again then obstructing that and continuing with the coal mine so I really agree with his description which is also a description that he based on my work but I think one of the problems then is how he analyzes this why this happened and this is a quote from the book which I think we can sort of think a little bit more about ironically the coal bank is widely criticised by the megalaya on grounds that it has destroyed the livelihoods of indigenous people the language is stunning in the standard literature the rise of capitalist resource frontiers is usually associated with posing a threat to indigenous peoples livelihoods this is because resource frontiers make claims on the resources of the lateral subsistence commons and it eventually unmoors them from the commons yet according to one reporter nearly everyone in megalaya's coal country was critical of the NGTs the national green tribunals order and was in favour of coal mining these were clearly not voices of an indigenous community still moored to its subsistence commons so Sanip then goes on to make a more general claim about the northeast resource frontier beat about coal timber or hydro power which is one of the most contentious issues up in the state of Arunasapadas enriching the state recognised elites of ethnic tribal communities who enrich themselves through ruthless extraction and why that can happen is due to the fact that the colonial policy of creating excluded or partly excluded tribal zones in the frontier tracts have survived or been reinvented by the post-colonial state under provisions of the Sixth Schedule and through that the Autonomous District Councils as well as other arrangements for political participation and land ownership in the hillstays where these are exclusively resolved for people that belong to these particular scheduled tribes while I certainly shared his description of the problem with the indigenous elite and the ways through which they managed to enrich themselves through ruthless mining and logging I don't subscribe to his analysis while there are plenty of critiques within the indigenous communities to the function of the Autonomous District Councils few people from these communities would argue for scrapping these institutions they would rather see them in that case be replaced for other forms of indigenous governance or self-determination and however paradoxically it might sound colonial policies like the In the Line Regulation of 1873 this is again, I'm dropping these things we can come back to that later on what it means but for some people these colonial policies seems more attractive than some of the present ones for a lot of indigenous peoples in all these things as well as in other parts of the world I mean despite the fact that these colonial policies was based on ideas that these were people that were too primitive to be part of the larger mainstream so they have to be kept separate because otherwise they would be swollen upwards destroyed by the modern large mainstream society and this is again something that we see for example during the hill tracks during the height of the genocide in the hill tracks in the 80s and the 90s what the Dan Guerrilla movement the Shanty Bahini was actually arguing for they wanted to have this colonial regulation called the Regulation of 1900 which again was placing the hill tracks under a different regime where people from the plains were not allowed to move up there and settle there but Insanip's understanding such inclusivist arrangements is the cause of the problem and as he states for the northeastern case what is required is instead a politics of citizenship based not on memories of a real or imagined past of the future for the people who live in the region today so what Sanyip ultimately criticizes here is the idea that certain people are being recognized as indigenous peoples and as such his parents of certain exclusive rights to ancestral territories this is indeed a question that has been with us for the last three decades or so and I have myself written a lot about this earlier the idea that there are certain people that call themselves indigenous peoples and as such should be a right bearer this is something that has been debated in anthropology but I think I'm sort of mild the position that I'm taking throughout for quite some time now is that this is sort of a more pragmatic position that it's apparently a lot of people for a lot of indigenous people this is something that resonates with their history their experiences as well as their aspirations so people are running with this concept they call themselves and claim rights on the basis of being indigenous and I think this is something we have to recognize rather than I mean we pass the state over that it's a good or bad idea people are doing it, they pursue that type of politics in India but also of course elsewhere and I think with all political movements there are pros and cons there are difficult things but I think this has to be worked out on the ground you can't put that sort of movement back it's already out there and people are running with it as I said so I think if the 90s and the 2000s been about establishing indigenous peoples as sort of collective right bearers I think what is happening today and what I find interesting is some of the slides which I find interesting now is sort of a turn inwards but indigenous governance is more and more about how to live differently and how to live on the land differently and here I think one of the things I find very interesting is the turn towards indigenous food sovereignty where plants, seeds, heritage crops and also cuisines become part of how you build yourself how you are and how you live as an indigenous person and this is happening really globally this turn towards sort of as I said the ideas about food sovereignty and this is run by Caritas but they start looking at indigenous seeds in the northeast and I think here is an example of how the indigenous movement is also aligning with other global movements for say the slow food movement or other movements who try to curtail the power of the global agro industry that controls our food systems particularly the control of seeds is something that is really important to think more about and here again I think we can sort of come back to this to the anti-call movement in Megalaya and I think what they ultimately call for is to build a future beyond extractivism but yet building on safeguarding the specific rights of those with a longer history in the state and I think here also in the particular context of Megalaya it is very interesting to see how the matrilineum idea is also central to this rebuilding the fact that land is following through the female line and again ideas about women being not only owners but also custodians of land and I think building on that idea as a contrast to the extractivist modality and I think here coming back to that idea that Anat Singh is talking about in friction that resource front is being sort of not being at places where it is not yet settled they are open, they are violent, a lot of things and that also attract a lot of people that are trying to enrich themselves I mean a lot of fantasy about getting money quick money and I think this is also the earlier work that I mentioned about Dolly Kilken's work she is working on coal and oil in the Assam, Nagaland, Foothills and here is also how she is presenting that place is extremely violent place I mean there is a lot of unclearity about who owns the land a lot of people have fantasies talks about carbon fantasies people are fantasizing about which quickly and it is also a very masculine space where men are again and here is different from the Megalase case in the case of the Nagas it is a petrilineal society where the men have the land titles and again it is extremely destructive extraction going on people are just shoveling the whole mountains destroyed and sometimes people get lucky the coal miners talk about you have to have luck some people are striking on a coal seam and do actually manage to get rich in a quite short time and I think again, as I mentioned I think that the Megalase is something that really is important to think about because I do think that the matrilineal principle with ownership of land is with women this is also again, as I said something that gives women a space of maneuver and I think this is also what the district comes with this lineage people are trying to contain that women become sort of a blockage for future extraction one of the things then one of the things again that Dolly and I found in our work with the young indigenous migrants who are moving down to the big cities in Bangalore, Mumbai due to skills, English language skills and also certain types of inhibitors being able to get jobs in spas in restaurants, shopping centres and for a lot of these people they were really sort of vested with the home community and the ideas about ethnic homeland for the respective community but they felt that their own lives would not unfold in these spaces they felt that they were looking for a life outside of subsistence agriculture I mean agriculture, that was no longer the future but they really so they were looking for a different life but they still seem to be very attached to their home communities and the land back home and one of the things that I mean we were also struggling this was really hard working and resourceful persons and I think one of the things that Duncan Matui Rao was writing afterwards in the book is pointing to is that the coming 10 years might be the returns of these young people and I think this is something that we see as a possibility of sort of renewing the North Asian societies when these sort of young people are getting married and start getting children and perhaps moving back and I think that's sort of opened up a new I think a new possibilities for this week thanks so I don't know how familiar you are with all these stories but I think you can perhaps come back to some of the things that might be more difficult for those of you who are not so familiar with North East thank you for that I have a few questions so the first is on how we should look at the labor supply in the gold mines how that would be impacted by the current politics of the Citizenship Amendment Act and also the score for ILB because as we know a lot of the migrant laborers come from Bangladesh so how those debates sit together the other is on you mentioned the KSU being in support of anti-uranium movement of the anti-uranium movement however they've not really been very vocal against gold mining exactly so especially I don't know if you've heard the news but today itself there was a bombing allegedly conducted by members of the HNLC and they have basically formed this coal mining site and the articulation is basically not against environmental exploitation as such but it's against the gold mines being owned by non-tribals so we see that kind of politics also it complicates the matter sorry I have another one which is when we're studying coal mining as a phenomenon I think it's also important to study the lifeline of coal as such because it's not enough for us to understand where the coal is coming from where the extraction is happening but the supply where is the coal from we don't really know much about the movement we know that it goes into what kind of companies exist in validation we know LaFarge but we don't really know much there's some kind of a mythic facade over there and the last question is on you mentioned the material system being kind of subversive in terms of land ownership but we all know I come from the community and I know there are many limitations to the material system especially in terms of how it is custodian so it's really a symbolic power of the women who own land it's not really a real legal power that I have as a woman land owner to do whatever I want with my ancestral land and also the fact that patriarchy is really at the core of the matrilineal system in megania and how we maybe we have to rethink how matrilineal how matrilineal works you know in contemporary megania sure yeah this is a good question no I think but yeah I mean I personally hope that coal mining will be a closed chapter in a way I mean I think I hope that they are moving to a situation of after coal but I mean I'm not sure that it will happen because the idea that you can sort of I mean some people who are geologists are saying that you can't really mine coal in a sort of open pit mine because the seams are very different so I mean you'll be able to mine coal through this rat hole because you follow the seams which is again extremely dangerous it's horribly worse basically and some people are hoping that the idea that you can have more than scientific mining will never happen so in that way perhaps you can see but definitely I mean most of the laborers I mean few classes for example a giant that would do that type of work so it's mainly Bangladeshis and Nepalese and also some other you know people from other parts of India that are doing this type of work and I mean for some people then again you know Sydenya's work but it pays I mean they are if you work a whole season you can still make good money compared to if you are sort of you know agricultural labor perhaps so yeah so of course that would complicate the whole thing but we don't know exactly I mean there are still mining going on and transport and they are finding new ways to get into buying that new roads opening roads down to us and so so it's still going on but I think at some point you know this is becoming a nuance also I don't know how long this can go on in that way and again we might see sort of the closing down of the whole chapter I hope so I can't remember many parts but if that's the first thing I mean there's not debate but you know are women empowered in Meghalaya I don't know in a much earlier society are other class women more empowered than other women in India or South Asia more generally and you know what is this in terms of you know the land ownership I think it's I like this case and she's not the only woman who are actually who say not my land this is my land I'm assigning here and I think there is there is a lot of actually there are very few empirical studies that looks at who are actually deciding on land ownership because what is happening is that we people making money too before timber operations and then after coal operation they they are buying up land and that becomes what is known as self-acquired property which is sort of a new category which then can be given to you know if you have sounds you can hand it over to you and so separate from somehow the ancestral property which is possible for mother to daughter there's a lot of debate here and I mean we've been for this little paper idea we're not we were doing some she was doing some field work in her own family and her mother for example this is a very specific case her mother said this is my land I can give it to her whatever I want so I mean there are a lot to think about this but of course there is a power struggle in the family and there are in the community and in the villages but I'm not so sure to I suppose you know better than me to what extent males are actually in control of the because I think there are I mean it's not to say that the class of women they are living in a patriotic situation but I think the matrilineal principle gives them some room to maneuver and this is also what the district council, you know the tribal elites are trying to get rid of by saying that if you marry outside you know you lose the rights so I think there is a struggle there and I think that idea about that principle gives you some room what was the middle thing what was the middle question something about the case you had it's very very interesting the case you said the student unions in North East are a very strange animal in a way they are normal student union in that way they are engaged in politics and the case you are extremely powerful and a lot of the political leadership in the state comes from they have a history of being part of the student union and I mean for example the case you were also taking a stand on dogging so they were in favor of the support on the timber factory they've been very active in the anti against money but coal again and I think coal is too important I mean coal has been and also the insurgent groups have been financing the taxing the coal industry and I think this also goes from here she was supposed to get revenue so coal has been too difficult to target and this is again one of the really big problems here so it's a case you are not really submitting by a mental organization but they take cases where it somehow suits them and you don't really know when they will come out for or against them which is very tricky and most of them are not even students even though it's called casteism but they have a mass space organization that really reach out in the villages like the ham students this question isn't really a part of this particular presentation but in your book I really think you mentioned the possibility of using our forests as carbon sinks and I mean like we talked about the land rights and how they are integrated in every in every sphere with the cast of resources politics and everything but then a lot of others they are not fostered into medicine so how would and we also mentioned in the book about how they of course the world buy us resource led strategy so how would how would we in this climate change crisis how can we address to use the carbon sinks and the forests and we address climate change and also address the challenges and how they're not for the bad and for the bad yeah I need to give one of the most famous forests and which I was talking about in the book is this I mean the past this day I also had what you call the sacred forests the forests where you're not supposed to touch or and if you're going to fall ill or you should die perhaps one of the most famous one is Farah from the Shillom which is the capital of the state and then I don't know if that's in the book but I think it's in the later there's been a lot of investment a lot of different development agents wanting to invest because again you know by many years otherwise conservation is both the scene as of the anti-people from one of the conserved by it's a tiger and so on I guess why people are not adhering them on the past is you have an indigenous form of conservation and there's a lot of people jumping into that and want to support their efforts to preserve this area most recently they've been through these you know carbon offsets so they've been traveling parts so I think also I don't know if you're following this but I mean additional areas protected forests protected forests under this idea but you know that you now remember but this but I can't remember you keep them as carbon things you know you don't touch them you sit there and then the community are getting some money for that I think one of the tricky things with that is that of course when you do that you also somehow hand over the management and ownership outside so I think it's a very very tricky thing but I don't know if you have to answer the question that but I mean it is I mean coming back to to the quote from you know the Sami that bringing up the quote from Al-Azim you know how is it that people are ruined in the only environment you know the world I guess it's a big challenge for people in in Makhaldagya how do you because I think that the money you can get to Al-Azim before and to Khomeini is so much compared to what you can get to the business of agriculture and of course you know there's not so many jobs in the government sector there's not so much other things so many private things coming up so it's an extreme attraction I mean a lot of people are going there and Al-Azim it's not sustainable so I think something has to come up and that's what I find is sort of a society where you need to there's something that I wish again I think if you think about the enormous richness I would be noticing if you have in among the cars and other regions it's just the varieties of rice you have I think that is a potential to really improve I mean it's as well as an idea but we've seen how Nesfaz has ruined you know this local movement I'm sure you've been following how it's really you know kind of concentrated on the local elites like all the funding that's coming from the UN so I think that's a starting problem which is the same with the Red Plus Red Plus because they promoted community management of forests at the end of the day the people who are really in charge are the people helped by the organization from the US so not really and they also depended on the traditional Darbar institution which is like an all male body so what kind of I know this you know things come up and then they get sort of taken over and what is yeah this is the tricky thing but I you're still local but you're local yeah but there are also I mean of course there are there are also things happening that is not sort of reached which is just going on people are activating the same things and which I think is something that more people time rides are just continuing in that the same culture but in that sense are you looking at that as related from what Sikkim has done in terms of organic or are you looking at it this is what we are planning to do in this thing now this is not something I have done so far Sikkim is part of sort of very interesting but they are talking to people they don't seem to be so I mean again I don't know but I haven't really looked at it myself there was Thank you I'm not familiar with this issue at all and I found it very interesting I was just curious who is buying the coal ultimately and who are the direct benefactors because you are one because it would then help balance the autonomy of what is happening there in the region so the coal is going to waste even down to us where it's sort of a rail ahead and that's also I mean even if some of the coal mines are owned and some of the trucks are owned by local people most of the mines still goes there is different middlements in different ways so when it reaches down to coal deposits in Asama then it goes down to trains and then sold out by India I think most of it is used to industrial coal different industries so it's either of that or it goes down to Bangladesh in Bangladesh it's used also in the cement industry but also for other I mean it also depends on the country but it's used in different industries just because you told us that there's a kind of playful indigenous or direct significant food and that kind of stuff I want to talk to you if you discern any kind of wider kind of pan-Indian indigenous or direct significant I guess with a little bit of schedule and in a sense we have kind of a wider pan-Dalab or even like a pan-Eastern I mean I think the idea but I'm confirming it in some other papers but I mean that the first time it was used in mines there's a different organization in North East we start what did you run and so we say that we are also indigenous we have the same situation as the Malawites in other region it's not Australia and other indigenous we don't understand so it's different and then eventually also some of the indigenous organizations from Central India was also taking part in these attempts to sort of get a South Asia participation in these international forums and the whole idea about indigenous people in the right and U.S. wasn't a very critical platform for that kind of organization and I think that actually worked out among the Indian organizations that participated was that let us start with saying that the indigenous people of India is close to the whole the discussion, you know, by the state so we have the state of tribes and then state recognition there are some communities that are not state of tribes but would otherwise be recognized as indigenous so I think that was sort of the starting point I think that's been and that has been going on and I think nowadays so they hardly have different sort of regional conferences so they are working out things that have also been South India and Central India and I think by now it's quite established that the idea of indigenous peoples has been quite established though of course the Indian government has never recognized they are all because if the Indian government has all two of them either they are all indigenous or nobody is indigenous in India so they are saying they are very favored indigenous peoples' rights but it doesn't apply to India usually yes, it's been very tricky a lot of people have been criticizing having this argument with Alkar Shah who is at LSE and she's been sort of trying to argue about the resort side of the Indian 18 but I just saw her, I just bought a new book about it on the 9th March and she's using indigenous people to sit down in that book but yes, the fact that you are do you see the term indigenous peoples is also somewhat different and of course in Central India case a lot of people say that our devices are indigenous and our devices are more controlled and used the more these people don't usually use the term our devices because people have changed mainly as indigenous people so they will say either tribal or indigenous peoples this is a very good piece I think it's that movement of there are anyone that are indigenous and even as some past people are using now it's quite established we don't agree with that yeah I think there is a greater consciousness to deploy that term specifically for political reasons especially in light of the citizenship amendment act and also in terms of the historical militarization of the maybe the room is too cold if not then we will stop here thank you very much