Ghosh Calls Mega Port and Highway Ideological Assertions
Amitav Ghosh says large infrastructure projects in India, including the Great Nicobar mega port and the Char Dham highway, are ideological assertions rather than genuine development.
Development as a Colonial Mindset
The acclaimed author argues that these projects reflect a colonial mindset that treats nature as inert matter to be reshaped for profit, ignoring the complexities of the ecosystem and the rights of indigenous people.
Projects like the Great Nicobar mega port or the Char Dham highway in the Himalayas are not just creating the conditions for ecological disasters —they are ideological assertions. They reflect the same colonial mindset that treats nature as inert matter to be reshaped for profit.
The Great Nicobar plan, for instance, disregards the rights of indigenous Shompen people and threatens a Unesco biosphere reserve. These projects assume that ‘progress’ must mean concrete, steel and deforestation.
The long-term implications are clear: more erosion, more disasters, more displacement. We must ask: Who benefits from this ‘development’? And who pays the price?
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Historical Patterns of Exploitation
Ghosh connects these current developments to centuries of extractivism, arguing that the climate crisis is the culmination of patterns of exploitation that began under colonial rule.
The climate crisis is not a sudden phenomenon—it is the culmination of patterns of exploitation and extractivism that go back over centuries. Colonialism turned forests into timber, rivers into irrigation channels and entire ecosystems into plantations.
Postcolonial India inherited this extractive mindset, replacing the British Raj with corporate and state-led plunder.
Today, we see this in deforestation for mining, privatisation of water and megacities built on wetlands. The Adivasi and Dalit communities, displaced by dams and coal mines, are the first victims.
Meanwhile, the elites are insulated from the consequences. This is not just environmental degradation—it is a continuation of colonial violence, where the powerful sacrifice the vulnerable in the name of ‘development.’
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Climate Fiction and Reality
The writer, who argued for engagement with changing realities in his book The Great Derangement, critiques the term “climate fiction” for narrowing the scope of storytelling.
Nearly a decade ago, you posed an important question: ‘Where is the fiction about climate change?’ How do you view the current state of climate fiction?What I was arguing for in The Great Derangement is that writers should engage with the changing realities of the world. I was not calling for a new sub-genre called ‘climate fiction’. The problem with climate fiction is the phrase itself—because it foregrounds ‘climate’ over all other vectors of the planetary crisis.
Right now, biodiversity loss and geopolitical tensions may, in fact, be even greater threats than climate change. Moreover, to link fiction directly to climate change is to tie it to certain domains of scientific and sociological research. What is implied by this link is that fiction should be a mode of narrativising certain kinds of academic research.
The problem with this is that those fields of research are themselves often limited by certain assumptions, which means that those limitations will also circumscribe the fiction. Take for example, the idea that a certain ‘wet-bulb temperature’ will automatically lead to predictable kinds of human behaviour. This is a very typical behaviorist assumption, and it is laughably inaccurate in relation to real-world events.
