Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
Any evidence that environmental/human rights groups are being funded by Western powers with the aim of stopping Indian progress? It seems pretty farfetched to me, and the US certainly has no reason to want to stop India - or for that matter China - from making economic progress.

The environmental and human rights issues exist, and people are involved in them for a wide variety of reasons. I happen to live in a tribal area with rich mineral deposits, and the community I live in would be obliterated if "progress" got round to digging us up, so I'm not at all averse to seeing folks local and foreign throwing kinks into that particular type of "progress"... looking at what's happened elsewhere, the degree of progress involved is quite debatable.
This is how it works in India. The likes of Medha Patkar, a renowned social activist reaches out to the people who are supposed to be affected by the building of a dam or a power plant. She stages protests, meanwhile encouraging people to build as much as they can on the said land. I've seen people creating three story buildings within two weeks of government declaring the project.

The project gets delayed for the jibber-jabber of the compensation meanwhile the country or the institution that financed the project enjoys a hefty interest. It doesn't exactly takes a rocket scientist to figure out who is hitting the jack pot here.

For the naxalites, it a different game, they are against the government because it neglected them. So, now when the government is trying to make up for it, they will blow up railway lines, kill government officials and school teachers and again claim that government is doing nothing to help the tribals.

If the tribals do get educated, their will be no innocent village folk to revere the didi (older sister) or dada (older brother), as the naxals project themselves to be.