My grandmother has been tending to her vegetable and flower garden for as long as I can remember — perhaps since the moment I first became conscious of the world around me. I never thought of it as a garden in the formal sense. It was simply her place. Every season had its flowers, every corner had its own plant, and she seemed to know instinctively when something needed more water, more sunlight or simply to be left alone. It was a small, ordinary part of our home, but it carried years of memory.

Then we decided to build a new cottage for our buffaloes. It made economic sense. The new structure would make things easier and, eventually, more profitable. But building it meant clearing the garden.

Within months, my grandmother rebuilt it somewhere else. The new garden was perfectly functional. Yet it did not feel the same. The soil was different, the sunlight fell differently and the flowers seemed reluctant to bloom in quite the same way. We gained something tangible. But we also lost something that was impossible to put a price on: continuity.

That small episode has stayed with me because it made me think about a much larger question. Across India, development often begins with a similar calculation. A road must pass through a village. A dam must submerge land. A mine must enter a forest. An industrial project requires relocation. On paper, the calculation is straightforward: land acquired, compensation paid, families rehabilitated. But for the person leaving, the calculation is rarely that simple. The 2013 land acquisition law itself speaks of a “humane, participative, informed and transparent” process and of making affected people partners in development. The question is whether our idea of development has become good enough to live up to that promise.

What We Leave Behind

India cannot afford to treat development as a choice between growth and stagnation. We need roads, electricity, irrigation, industries and jobs. Millions of Indians still need better housing, healthcare, education and livelihoods. The problem is not development itself. The problem begins when the benefits of a project are counted carefully while the losses of the people living where that project comes up are treated as an unavoidable footnote.

The Ken–Betwa River Linking Project illustrates this tension. The government describes it as a major intervention for the water-scarce Bundelkhand region, with projected irrigation benefits covering 10.62 lakh hectares, drinking-water benefits for nearly 62 lakh people and 103 MW of hydropower generation. These are substantial public benefits, and they should not be dismissed simply because the project has environmental and social costs.

What is Being Compensated?

But there is another side to the same project. According to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Phase I involves 1,913 project-affected families, including 648 Scheduled Tribe families. The government has emphasised compensation and rehabilitation for eligible families. That matters. But even when compensation is properly paid, another question remains: what exactly is being compensated? A house can be rebuilt. A field can be replaced. But can a village's memories, relationships and familiarity with a landscape be rebuilt with the same ease?

This is where the language of “rehabilitation” can become too narrow. Rehabilitation is often understood administratively: a new house, a new plot, compensation for trees and land, perhaps livelihood assistance. But for many communities, particularly tribal communities, land is not merely where economic activity takes place. It is where family histories, rituals, relationships and knowledge are rooted. Physical relocation may take a few months. Emotional relocation may take a lifetime.

The Memory of a Place

There is now enough research to suggest that this emotional cost is not simply romanticising the past. A study of the Sahariya tribal community in central India compared people who had been relocated from a wildlife sanctuary with those who remained in nearby villages. The researchers found significant mental-health costs among those who had been displaced, and importantly, these effects could not be explained entirely by poverty or loss of livelihood. The loss of homeland itself mattered.

That finding deserves greater attention in Indian policymaking. When an official rehabilitation document counts houses, hectares and compensation amounts, it may be accurately recording material loss while still missing something essential. What happens to the elderly person who no longer recognises the landscape around them? What happens to a child whose grandparents can no longer show them the place where they grew up? What happens to a community whose festivals, sacred spaces or traditional routes disappear?

Anthropologist Walter Fernandes spent decades documenting precisely this dimension of development-induced displacement. His work showed that tribal communities have historically borne a disproportionate share of displacement and livelihood loss associated with dams, mines and other development projects. In one widely cited assessment, Fernandes estimated that tribal communities, despite constituting a little over 8 per cent of India's population, accounted for more than 40 per cent of those displaced or deprived of livelihood in the datasets he examined. The precise historical estimates have been debated, but the larger question remains: who bears the cost when development arrives?

The point is not that every development project is unjust or that tribal communities should be frozen in a romanticised past. Tribal citizens need roads, schools, hospitals, digital connectivity and employment just as much as everyone else. The point is that those with the least political and economic power have often carried a disproportionate share of the disruption created in the name of national development.

A Country That Remembers

Perhaps India understands displacement better than it sometimes admits.

The Partition of 1947 displaced millions and left behind memories of homes, neighbourhoods and landscapes that could not simply be replaced after migration. Writers and historians have spent decades documenting how those memories survived through family stories, photographs, silences and inherited trauma. Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence, for instance, brought many of these intimate experiences of Partition into public memory.

Development-induced displacement is obviously not Partition, and the two should never be equated. But there is a common human truth worth recognising: people do not necessarily leave a place psychologically when they leave it physically. A house can be reconstructed. A neighbourhood can be recreated. But memory does not move so neatly.

This is particularly important when thinking about tribal communities. A forest is not simply an area marked green on a government map. A river is not merely a water channel. A hill can carry religious meaning; a particular tree can carry cultural significance; a pathway can connect generations. 

The Forest Rights Act, 2006 was an important recognition of this reality because it acknowledged the rights of forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers rather than treating forests only as state-controlled resources.

Yet implementation remains unfinished. Government data shows that between April 2023 and March 2026, more than 8.56 lakh forest-right claims were filed across India, while 2.34 lakh claims were approved and titles distributed during that period. These numbers show administrative activity, but they also show why recognition of rights cannot be treated as a technical exercise. 

If communities are expected to participate meaningfully in decisions over forests and land, those rights must become meaningful before major decisions affecting their lives are made.

What Does Growth Leave Behind?

There is an intellectual problem beneath the debate over development that is rarely confronted directly: we have become better at measuring what an economy produces than what it consumes in order to produce it.

GDP tells us the monetary value of goods and services generated within an economy. It does not, by itself, tell us how much natural capital was depleted to generate that output, how much ecological damage was accumulated, or what social costs were transferred to communities. 

A forest converted into a mine can therefore contribute to measured economic activity even as a stock of natural wealth disappears. The World Bank's work on changing wealth makes this broader point: national wealth is not exhausted by produced capital; it also includes natural and human capital.

This is where the idea of Green GDP becomes more than an environmental slogan. It asks whether economic accounting should recognise the depletion of natural wealth in the same way that a business recognises the depreciation of an asset. India has already moved in this direction through environmental-economic accounting, with the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation incorporating natural resources, ecosystems and their services into its statistical framework. The intellectual shift is important: a forest, river or wetland is not merely scenery surrounding the economy; it is part of the wealth upon which the economy depends.

But Green GDP has a limit too. Not everything valuable can, or should, be reduced to a monetary figure. What price should be placed on a sacred forest, an ancestral landscape or knowledge transmitted through generations? Economists can estimate ecosystem services; they cannot manufacture an adequate price for belonging. 

This is where Amartya Sen's conception of development remains relevant: development is ultimately about expanding people's substantive freedoms and capabilities, not merely increasing the quantity of goods produced. The question for India is therefore not simply whether we can create a better GDP number, but whether our conception of progress can recognise economic prosperity, ecological security and human dignity at the same time.

What a country chooses to measure is also, in some sense, a statement about what it chooses to value. Instead of asking only, How much will this project add to GDP?, policy must also ask: What natural wealth will it consume? What social relationships will it disrupt? Whose capabilities will expand, and whose might contract? These questions do not oppose development. They ask us to define development more intelligently.

Listening Before Building

Perhaps the biggest change India needs is not another policy but a different instinct. Before asking how quickly a project can be implemented, policymakers should ask whether it can be redesigned to reduce displacement. Before acquiring new land, can existing degraded land be used? Can infrastructure be built around communities rather than communities being moved around infrastructure? Can affected families become participants in the economic activity that follows rather than simply recipients of compensation?

This is where the Gram Sabha and community consultation must become more than procedural requirements. A person living beside a forest may know things that a distant consultant cannot easily see on a map: where water accumulates after the monsoon, which forest produce sustains the village, which areas have cultural significance or which routes are essential for livestock. The law already recognises the importance of local participation; the land acquisition framework explicitly provides for consultation with local self-government institutions and Gram Sabhas in applicable circumstances.

But consultation should not mean inviting people to a meeting after the essential decisions have already been made. If development is genuinely meant to improve people's lives, affected communities should have a meaningful role in shaping what development looks like. Participation must have the possibility of changing the project, not merely legitimising a decision already taken.

There is also no reason to romanticise tribal communities or freeze them in a picture of timeless harmony with nature. They deserve the same economic opportunities that development promises everyone else. The goal should not be to deny them development. It should be to ensure that development expands their choices rather than taking away the foundations from which those choices emerge.

A Different Imagination of Development

Community-led conservation, forest-based livelihoods, responsible eco-tourism and locally owned enterprises will not replace mining, infrastructure or large public projects in every situation. But they can challenge the assumption that the only way to generate economic value from a landscape is to extract something from it.

Tribal knowledge systems deserve to be treated as knowledge rather than folklore. Communities that have lived with forests for generations possess accumulated understanding of crops, medicinal plants, water systems and biodiversity. In a country increasingly confronting heat, water stress and ecological degradation, dismissing such knowledge simply because it did not emerge from a laboratory would be an intellectual loss as much as a cultural one. The United Nations' work on Indigenous Peoples and traditional knowledge increasingly recognises the importance of indigenous knowledge to sustainable development and environmental stewardship.

The answer, however, cannot be to preserve every landscape untouched. That would deny communities the opportunity to improve their lives and deny India the development it needs. The harder task is to find forms of development that create economic opportunity while retaining as much social and ecological continuity as possible.

Perhaps that is what inclusive growth should actually mean.

My Grandmother's Garden

When I see my grandmother tending to her new garden, I sometimes think about the old one. She rebuilt it. The plants grew again. There are flowers again. To someone passing by, nothing appears to have been lost. But I know something was. Perhaps that is what development policy often struggles to understand. 

The things that matter most to people are not always the things that are easiest to measure. We could have found another way to build the buffalo cottage. We could have reduced its footprint, shifted its location or tried to preserve at least part of the garden. We did not. We chose the easier route because, at that moment, the economic benefit seemed more obvious than the value of what we were removing.

It was a small decision in one household. But multiplied across thousands of villages, forests and communities, the same logic becomes a national development model. India will continue to build. It should. 

We need economic growth, infrastructure and jobs. India's latest national accounts estimate real GDP growth at 7.8 per cent in the April–June quarter of 2026–27, reminding us that growth remains central to India's economic aspirations. But precisely because India is growing, it has an opportunity to become more sophisticated about what growth means.

Perhaps the next generation of Indian development policy must therefore ask a slightly different question before every major project: What will this create, and what will it make disappear? Because compensation can replace a house. It can replace a field. It can even replace a livelihood. What it cannot easily replace is belonging.

My grandmother's garden eventually bloomed again. But every time she tends to it, I suspect she remembers the one that came before. Perhaps development should learn to remember too.

(The author is a Research Fellow, Society for Policy Studies and Editorial Consultant, South Asia Monitor. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at piyushchaudhary2125@gmail.com )