Chapter 1 introduces the terrain with a focus on how people resist the radiation burdens that they have been subjected to in and around the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in the peninsular region of Tamil Nadu. These burdens ranged from the biomedical, ecological, economic, socio-psychological, and political in terms of the authoritative mechanisms, severe policing and surveillance to which campaigners were subjected. After a discussion on national development and democracy, the chapter elaborates on how people reacted to the weight of the burdens by drawing upon India’s non-violent freedom struggle, and by mobilizing a Tamil and modernized version of Gandhian self-reliance and alternative proposals for the nation’s energy agenda. The chapter ends with a focus on a conceptual understanding of criticality—a multi-layered and multi-situated space to appreciate the ever-changing encounters, ruptures, and tensions of socio-political conduct from the everyday to the extraordinary, the ambivalent to the more outspoken and resistive.
Species diversity and habitat association of butterflies around 30 km radius of Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant area of Tamil Nadu, India
