Abstract EN:

Through the Jens of a "State science" in the name of “public interest” to rural inequalities and the political struggles of social movement, this thesis reflects upon the chain of uprootings and regroundings which shape the sense of peasant existences in India today. On the Wainganga river, the Gosikhurd project leads to the displacement and resettlement of 93 villages, resulting in 83 000 people having to leave their land and homestead behind as the dam waters start to rise in the reservoir. Engaged since a few decades in a global perspective of agrarian development, the State of Maharashtra therein advocates a Green Revolution for Vidarbha, a region perceived as "backwards”. If this political orientation has already been subject to multiple analyses in diverse disciplines, few have simultaneously addressed the conditions of production of such a project and the inherent impacts of submergence on the population. Grounded in a qualitative and quantitative study which followed this double process over nine years ; this research entwines a sociology of public action and social movements, a rural ethnography and a political and social anthropology in order to account for the transformations and ruptures caused by displacement. When the Indian State plans to wipe a village of the map and relocate it, how does it organize the processes of land acquisition and compensation of agrarian resources? How does the peasantry adjust to the confiscation of its rural life style and to the uncertainty of its social “forth-coming “? Finally, what are the forms of opposition or “resistance“ that the project meets in the face of such dispossession ?