The language of geology, when wielded by neo-liberal states, is never 'neutral'. Terms like "geologically mapped", "auction-ready", and "investment-ready frontier" are not simply technical descriptors – they function ideologically, reshaping landscapes from homes and forests into reservoirs of future profit.

The June 2025 'Geological Survey of India (GSI) Handbook on Geological Potential of Northeast India: A hidden trove of mineral prospect beneath majestic landscape' is a case in point. Its bureaucratic and scientific veneer masks an underlying logic of extraction. The handbook quietly redraws the region – not as a complex tapestry of Indigenous people, histories and ecologies, but as a mineral-rich frontier primed for exploitation. GSI in the handbook admits that:

 “Despite [its] potential, mineral development in the NER has historically been limited by challenges such as difficult terrain, ecological sensitivity, limited infrastructure, and socio-political sensitivities.” 

That final phrase – socio-political sensitivities – is a code word for Indigenous assertions of land rights, fragile ecologies and a long history of resistance. In naming them, the document does not acknowledge them; it seeks to bypass them.

The handbook casts the Northeast as a mineral-rich periphery, “underexplored” and ideal for private investment. Since the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2015, the GSI has aggressively produced auction-ready data. It boasts:

“GSI has augmented resource for commodities like Rare-Earth Elements, graphite, vanadium, limestone, iron ore etc. and handed over 38 Geological blocks since MMDR Amendment Act, 2015 across  various states in the NER, contributing to the growing interest of stakeholders in the region's mineral sector." 

This handbook is an instrument of enclosure – reducing ancestral territories to acreage and ore grades. Corporations such as Vedanta, Oil India, Dalmia, Ambuja etc. are positioned not as partners in development but as beneficiaries of a 'state-led assault on local sovereignty'.

The danger is multiplied by climate rhetoric. Critical minerals, we are told, are essential for EV batteries and solar panels. Yet, clean energy for Delhi and Bangalore is underwritten by dirty extraction in the hills and floodplains of the Northeast. Green capitalism does not dismantle extractivism – it rebrands it, converting forests into carbon credits and community lands into auction lots while leaving pollution, displacement and violence behind.

The handbook’s extraction-driven territorial logic recasts every Northeastern state as a frontier meticulously catalogued for mineral volume and value, while erasing the region’s socio-cultural and ecological complexity.

In Arunachal Pradesh, GSI identifies 11 major mineral blocks, primarily concentrated in Lower Subansiri, Papum Pare, and Pakke-Kessang districts. These regions, identified for their rich deposits of vanadium, graphite and rare-earth elements, significantly overlap with the ecologically sensitive Eastern Himalaya biodiversity hotspot.

This landscape not only hosts rare and endangered species but sustains indigenous communities whose livelihoods and cultural identities are deeply intertwined with these ecosystems. Yet, rather than addressing these ecological and socio-cultural realities, the GSI reduces the entire region to mere potential tonnage and mineral valuation, effectively erasing indigenous presence and ecological sensitivity from its narrative.

Assam, the region's demographic heartland, is presented with even starker mineral arithmetic.

The GSI identifies Dima Hasao district as a major site of extraction, listing limestone reserves at approximately 1,490 million tonnes spread across multiple auction-ready blocks in and around the Umrangso, Panimur and Garampani areas. In Karbi Anglong, the handbook highlights the immense "strategic" value of rare-earth elements (REEs), detailing approximately 28.64 million tonnes of REE-bearing syenite specifically located in the Jashora and Samchampi-Samteran alkaline complexes.

Additionally, the silica sands of Nagaon district – particularly around Kaliabor and neighbouring tracts – amount to roughly four million tonnes, with significant interest already expressed by major corporate players. Iron ore deposits "with an estimated resource of 18.29 million tonnes … have been reported from the Chandardinga area in Dhubri district," the handbook says.

Yet, while meticulously listing these tonnages, the handbook conspicuously erases the Karbi, Dimasa, Tiwa and other Assamese communities whose lands and livelihoods are directly implicated. The Karbi hills, rich in biodiversity and ancestral agricultural traditions, feed critical river systems such as the Kopili and Dhansiri, sustaining the livelihoods of thousands of households.

In Dima Hasao, the limestone-rich hills underpin Dimasa customary practices like jhum cultivation and 'community-managed' forests, while silica-rich riverbanks in Nagaon sustain agriculture-based local economies. None of these essential local contexts appear in the GSI's analysis.

Instead, the document treats these areas merely as strategic mineral zones awaiting extraction, systematically omitting references to existing constitutional protections under the Sixth Schedule and entirely bypassing the need for community consent or consultation. These quantified reserves are not neutral numbers; they represent direct threats to the ecological integrity, cultural autonomy and economic security of Assam’s diverse communities.

Meghalaya – already scarred by decades of unregulated mining in Jaintia Hills, is targeted for further limestone extraction – with more than 6,600 million tonnes already documented, and 19 additional blocks proposed. Despite abundant evidence from India's Central Pollution Control Board (2012) highlighting chronic acid mine drainage and severe river contamination due to previous extraction, the handbook frames Meghalaya purely as an investment opportunity.

The degraded landscape and poisoned rivers that have devastated local livelihoods and biodiversity are never acknowledged – an omission designed to reassure potential investors rather than inform affected communities.

Extraction does not happen in a vacuum. It is scaffolded by a network of military-grade infrastructure: highways, bridges, railheads, and river ports that reach deep into landscapes once considered inaccessible or politically sensitive. The Trans-Arunachal Highway, the Bairabi-Sairang rail link in Mizoram and a flurry of new railheads in Arunachal Pradesh-Naharlagun, Pasighat, and the upcoming Bhalukpong-Tawang and Silapathar–Aalo lines, signal a coordinated push to open the frontier, not just for people but for resources and surveillance.

One of the most revealing projects is the under-construction Dhubri-Phulbari bridge – a 19-kilometre span across the Brahmaputra, which is set to become India’s longest bridge. Marketed as a development milestone, the bridge quietly creates a seamless corridor between Meghalaya’s limestone-rich Jaintia and West Khasi Hills – home to over 6,600 million tonnes of reserves – and Assam’s Dhubri river port, slashing haulage costs for bulk mineral cargo.

This is not mere connectivity – it is strategic sequencing. Across districts, infrastructure is laying the groundwork for extraction: roads anticipate rigs, railheads precede tenders. What unfolds is not decentralised development, but a logistical chain where asphalt clears the way for auctions and speeds dispossession.

The handbook frames security explicitly as an enabler of extraction. It emphasises that the Northeast lies at a critical geopolitical junction, sharing boundaries with China, Bhutan, Myanmar and Bangladesh, which the GSI strategically frames as "emerging frontiers in India's mineral security", creating a resonance of 'utopianism embedded in the logic of development' (large dams, four-lane corridors, railheads).

This framing is not new; it is a continuation and intensification of decades-old counter-insurgency logic. Since the 1950s, the region has cycled through armed movements – Naga secession, the Mizo uprising, ULFA’s Axomiya insurgency, successive Bodo, Karbi and Dimasa insurgencies – each wave met with Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, cantonments and counter-insurgency checkpoints that still pattern everyday life.

This persistent security footprint is now being repurposed to facilitate what the state euphemistically labels "critical mineral" extraction. The geographic convergence between mineral-rich zones and militarised territories is not incidental. 

In fact, in district after district, mineral wealth and military presence map onto each other. In such spaces, security becomes a facilitator of extraction, not a constraint. When the state encounters resistance – whether armed or civil – it often responds with securitisation rather than dialogue. The logic is familiar: resources must be accessed through new infrastructural thrust and protected through securitisation, especially when they are deemed “strategic.”

A striking new convergence is emerging in Dhubri district of western Assam. The handbook confirmed 18.29 million tonnes of iron ore in the district's Chandardinga area. Almost simultaneously, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced plans for a permanent Army camp in Dhubri – with the stated intent to curb communal flare-ups along the international border. On its own, a security installation to maintain public order might seem routine. Yet, the fact that heavy military infrastructure is being proposed in the very district where a large, newly mapped iron-ore deposit now awaits auction is too much of a coincidence to ignore.

Dhubri is not historically an insurgency hotspot; its sudden strategic upgrade suggests that even plains districts, once peripheral to conflict, are entering the orbit of militarised extraction. The territorial logic of resource control is clearly expanding – both geographically and politically – well beyond the Hill regions traditionally associated with prolonged counter-insurgency.

If large-scale dispossession unfolds in these already fragile and securitised spaces, the consequences could be incendiary – not only in terms of civil unrest, but also through the resurgence of non-state armed actors and the birth of new ones. Far from pacifying the region, intensified extraction risks igniting another cycle of violence, repression and insurgency; by the time parliamentary redress will be thought of, it might be too late. 

This trajectory is already playing out worldwide. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, lithium pumping has lowered water tables by up to 40%, displacing Atacameño herders. Philippine nickel mines, guarded by troops, have spawned mass evictions and hundreds of land-defender killings (Global Witness). Congo’s cobalt belt sees forced removals under military watch, while Indonesia’s nickel islands – Wawonii foremost – pit villagers, led by women blocking bulldozers, against armed security.

These global parallels illuminate a grim reality: the marriage of extractivism and militarisation, even under the banner of the "green transition," consistently yields ecological devastation, human displacement and conflict. What is unfolding in Northeast India aligns closely with this global pattern.

The blueprint provided by the GSI handbook does not merely represent economic policy – it represents a clear trajectory towards instability and violence, reflecting the enduring colonial logic of treating land as commodity and people as expendable. The Northeast, unless this roadmap is reversed, is set on a path that other frontiers have already travelled – a path where green rhetoric provides cover for old-fashioned imperial extraction.

Any serious conversation about “sustainable mining” in the region must therefore reckon not only with the ecological stakes, but also with the long histories of coercion and counter-insurgency that continue to shape the political economy of extraction.

A truly just transition for the Northeast would begin by upending the authority structure the GSI handbook presumes. Consent must precede extraction. Village councils, dorbars, and gram sabhas must hold binding power to veto or approve any mining proposal in public along with minuted assemblies conducted in local languages. Anything less recreates the colonial template under a green banner.

Second, constitutional and customary protections must become hard red lines, not bureaucratic speed-bumps. The Sixth Schedule, the Forest Rights Act and Article 371, recognise collective tenure and ecological stewardship. A just transition would suspend extraction unless these protections are expanded where absent and enforced where ignored.

Third, strategic minerals must be treated as commons held in trust, not commodities auctioned away. If REEs beneath Karbi Anglong are indispensable for a climate-safe future, their stewardship must rest with those who inhabit the hills—not distant shareholders. Community trusts or cooperatives should decide extraction volumes, technology, revenue share and ecological thresholds.

Fourth, non-negotiable ecological limits are essential. Watershed forests, elephant corridors, seismic fault belts and high-altitude wetlands must be declared permanent no-go zones. If hydrological models show pit dewatering will drain the Kopili headwaters, the project must die on the drawing board.

Finally, accountability must have teeth. Independent monitoring, criminal liability for environmental crimes, reparations for legacy damage and claw-back clauses for abandoned pits must be embedded in every licence. The Supreme Court’s Samata judgment (1997) barring private mining on tribal land without community rights must serve as a constitutional guiding star.

Anything short of this programme is not transition. It is the same colonial habit dressed in 'green', moving the costs of climate mitigation onto the bodies and forests of the Northeast while profits accumulate in distant megacities. A just transition begins where the handbook ends: with the recognition that land is more than ore, and people more than labour or obstacle.

Bonojit Hussain is a full-time farmer and a part-time researcher based in Baridatara village, Nalbari district, Assam.

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