Risk and Resistance Around India-based Neutrino Observatory: Understanding the Science War in Tamil Nadu

Introduction

On 4 April 2015, in the serene landscapes of the foothills of the Ambarappar hills (Bodi West Hills) of the Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu, more than 500 people from nearby villages, including Pottipuram, Chinna Pottipuram, T. Pudukottai, Ramakrishnapuram and Thimminaiyakanpatti, assembled and cooked Pongal ¹ in front of their local deity shrine, Ambarappa swamy temple. This annual festival of celebrating and worshipping Ambarappa swamy happens every year, usually, but in April 2015, it was not just a festival, but a strong statement of opposition by these villages against the construction of the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) in the Ambarappar hills. INO is a multi-institutional project which intends to construct an underground elementary particle observatory to detect neutrinos, with a rock cover of nearly 1.2 km, by drilling into ² the Ambarappar hill of the Western Ghats (see Figure 1). The project was jointly supported by the Department of Atomic Energy of India and the Department of Science and Technology, India. Other than these, twenty-one research institutions, including the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Indian Institute of Technologies and universities, took part in this project (Times of India, 2015).

OPEN IN VIEWER Figure 1.

Ambarappar Swamy Temple and the Ambarappar Hill of Western Ghats.

All of these hamlets, as mentioned above, come under the jurisdiction of the Pottipuram village panchayat in the Theni district of Tamil Nadu. Mostly marginalised communities populate these villages, including the pastoral tribal community, ‘Kaatu Naickers’ ³ of Chinna Pottipuram. On 27 March 2015, a week before the ‘Pongal’ protest, some people from the village of T. Pudukottai attempted to climb the Ambarappar hill to light the Vilakku Thoon, ⁴ which is a tradition for them in the holy month of the Tamil calendar, Panguni. They were stopped by the police and security guards of the INO construction site and were asked for permission to ascend the hill, a prohibited site now (The Hindu, 2015). It was reported that the local people were also mishandled by the police. This incident triggered the local population, and the following day they staged a condemnation protest in the main square of T. Pudukottai. These demonstrations ended in the Pongal celebration/protest in front of Ambarappar temple in April.

In the same period, litigations were filed against the INO project in the High Court of Madras and the National Green Tribunals by several organisations, citing loopholes in the environmental clearance for the project. In 2017, the Southern Bench of the National Green Tribunal rejected the environmental clearance given to the project. The residents of the Pottipuram panchayat celebrated this rejection before the Ambarappar temple. They burst crackers, performed Thevarattam, a local folk dance, and prepared Pongal before the temple (The Hindu, 2017). Furthermore, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu has been writing to the Prime Minister of India to shelve the project, citing the damage it could cause to the environment, wildlife and the local community (Radhakrishnan, 2025). Due to this opposition, it was not proceeded with any further, since then, by the nodal agencies, and the project was on hold. The local population and activists are claiming that the project is closed and there will be no developments henceforth, asserting that they will collectively resist any future revival attempts.

On the other side, the INO was framed by the scientists and the Indian state departments as an aspiring initiative by the government to advance science and subatomic particle research in Tamil Nadu and claimed INO as the ‘scientific and technological prestige of India’. One of the scientists from the Institute of Mathematical Science claimed that this project might push the Indian scientific community towards the Nobel Prize league (Gibney, 2016). Hence, the opposition to this project by the local population is often presented as a result of ignorance, superstition, pre-modern and political manifestations against the progress of the nation. Protesters are portrayed as irrational, misled, anti-development and, most importantly, as ‘anti-science’. There is a presence of developmentalist discourse among the scientific community, which invoked that the uneducated, superstitious rural masses are standing in ‘a realm of fantasy’ and blocking the way of national progress in science and technological development (Gibney, 2016).

When the conflict extended through the public sphere of Tamil Nadu, several organisations came in both supporting and opposing the Anti-Neutrino Movement of Pottipuram, Theni. Panchayat-level associations, local and regional farmers’ associations such as Vivasaayigal Viduthalai Munnani (Farmers Liberation Front), environmental organisations such as Poovulagin Nanbargal (Friends of Earth, Tamil Nadu) and Tamil nationalist organisations such as Naam Tamizhar Katchi have come in support of the movement against the INO project. Some of these organisations have understood and propagated this conflict as the fight between technocratic modern science and local epistemologies ⁵ of the people, especially the pastoral tribes of Chinna Pottipuram. However, this is not completely new to the environmental literature of India, as there is a recurrent ideological current in Indian environmental scholarship (Guha, 2024; Sinha et al., 1997; Tripathy & Mohapatra, 2022) that frames grassroots resistance to scientific and developmental projects as ‘anti-science’ or ‘post-science’, a label deployed with both negative and affirmative connotations.

From the perspective of project proponents, ‘anti-science’ signifies the allegedly superstitious, irrational or fanatical dispositions of local populations who are presumed to oppose projects without adequate comprehension of scientific principles. In contrast, movement organisations and sympathetic strands of the literature also describe these struggles as ‘anti-science’, but situate them within a discursive terrain distinct from dominant forms of modern scientific rationality (Galis & Hansson, 2012; Gillen & Ghosh, 2007; Naik, 2020; Parajuli, 1996; Sinha et al., 1997). Within this framing, such movements are articulated as expressions of resistance grounded in lived experience, through which local communities seek to defend customary practices, vernacular knowledges and ways of life against externally imposed developmental logics that are positioned outside dominant scientific rationality (Sinha et al., 1997; Tripathy & Mohapatra, 2022). Here, opposition is read as an assertion of alternative ways of knowing, grounded in lived experience and cultural attachment to land and ecology.

Despite their political divergence, both interpretive positions rest on a shared epistemological opposition between science and society, expertise and experience, modernity and its presumed others. Science appears in these accounts either as an autonomous domain whose authority is undermined by ignorance or as a hegemonic system confronted by epistemic alternatives external to it. Such formulations offer limited purchase in contexts where resistance unfolds neither as a rejection of science nor as a coherent assertion of autonomous indigenous epistemology. In the conflict around the INO project, scientific risk, environmental assessment procedures, legal processes and institutional credibility emerged as sites of contestation rather than settled foundations. Scientific authority itself appeared fragmented, internally debated and mediated, producing a conflict marked by dependence on scientific rationality alongside deep scepticism towards its institutional deployment. This tension provides the analytic ground for approaching the anti-neutrino movement as a ‘science war’, in which science operates less as a stable reference point than as a terrain of struggle requiring empirical and theoretical examination.

This article’s primary focus is to analyse the frames constructed by both sides and to understand the ‘science war’ unfolding in the context of this anti-neutrino movement, wherein various scientific institutions and civil society organisations have aligned themselves on both sides of the conflict. In this article, ‘science war’ is used as an analytic descriptor for conflicts in which scientific authority itself becomes the object of political contestation, rather than as a metaphor for generalised hostility towards science. Methodologically, this article draws on three field visits between 2023 and 2025, involving

semi-structured in-depth interviews with activists and residents of Pottipuram, Thevaram, T. Pudukottai and Cumbum and

Before discussing the central arguments of this article, it is necessary to provide an overview of the historical background of the INO project and the resistance against it.

INO and Anti-neutrino Movement in Tamil Nadu

The trajectory of neutrino research in India can be traced to the underground laboratories of the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) of Karnataka constructed in the 1960s. Originally developed for gold mining, the deep shafts of KGF, extending over two kilometres beneath the Earth’s surface, offered physicists a rare experimental environment shielded from cosmic background radiation. This natural insulation enabled the detection of weakly interacting subatomic particles that would otherwise be obscured by the noise of cosmic radiation at the surface. When the KGF mines were closed in 1992, these laboratories were also closed. Since then, Indian physicists consistently advocated for the establishment of a new underground neutrino facility, citing both the scientific potential and the symbolic prestige associated with high-energy physics research in India. These efforts eventually coalesced into the proposal for the INO in 2002. Importantly, the institutional leadership of this initiative was anchored within the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and TIFR, institutions with long-standing involvement in nuclear and particle physics. As a result, neutrino research became closely entangled with broader state agendas concerning nuclear science, technological modernity and national development. Two potential sites were initially identified, which are Singara in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu, and Rammam in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal. According to the project report, Tamil Nadu was considered particularly favourable due to the presence of charnockite, one of the hardest known rock types, across the Western Ghats. After extensive feasibility studies, reports and scientific consultations, Singara was selected in 2007 as the proposed site for INO.

The selection of Singara, however, provoked intense and immediate opposition from environmentalists, scientists and civil society groups. Critics emphasised that the site lay within the ecologically sensitive Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, an area recognised under UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme and known for its biodiversity, elephant corridors and tiger habitats. Environmental organisations such as the Tamil Nadu Green Movement and the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve Alliance raised concerns about the ecological risks posed by large-scale tunnelling operations, including the removal of nearly 700,000 tonnes of excavated debris. The opposition gained further momentum when international organisations, including the World Wide Fund for Nature–India, expressed reservations about situating a ‘mega-science’ project within a pristine ecological zone. In 2009, citing sustained resistance from environmental groups at local, national and international levels, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests denied environmental clearance for the INO project at Singara.

Following this setback, the project was relocated to the Theni district of Tamil Nadu. According to the INO project report, prepared by Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation Limited (TANGEDCO, 2010), Pottipuram emerged as the most suitable location, as it was presented as largely free from significant forest or environmental constraints. The terrain was described as relatively flat, facilitating the transport of construction materials and disposal of excavated debris, while the surrounding reserved forest was characterised as open scrubland with sparse vegetation. A key advantage highlighted in official documents was the availability of government-owned dry revenue land (‘poramboke’) for the surface facilities, which was framed as a means of avoiding forest land acquisition. However, the project reports were notably silent on the dependence of local communities on these lands for grazing and everyday livelihoods, despite multiple field visits conducted by project proponents. As mentioned in the project report:

The main advantage of the site is the availability of Govt. revenue Promboke land (dry) to an extent of 26.82.5 ha for the Project in Survey No. 4/1 of Pottipuram village …. However, as the site is barren land at the foot of the hill, all the infrastructure facilitation has to be created from the scratch. (TANGEDCO, 2010, p. 27, emphasis added)

Unlike the Nilgiris, Theni initially witnessed limited public opposition. This relative quietude can be attributed to the project’s preparatory status and the absence of visible construction activity, as well as the lack of strong, pre-existing environmental networks in the region. During this period, scientists associated with INO have interacted with people in and around Pottipuram, framing the project as a source of educational value, scientific prestige and indirect economic benefit. Assurances were also offered regarding continued access to grazing lands and ecological protection (Resident of T. Pudukottai, Personal Communication, 20 February 2025).

In 2015, the Government of India allocated ₹1,500 crore for INO, marking a decisive shift towards implementation. Opposition soon followed as Mr Vaiko, leader of a regional party, filed a public interest litigation in the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court, warning of severe environmental and human consequences. In the same year, Poovulagin Nanbargal, an environmental organisation, challenged the project’s environmental clearance before the National Green Tribunal. These legal interventions signalled the re-emergence of organised resistance in Theni. While local opposition in Pottipuram had remained largely muted until then, tensions escalated following the incident mentioned before in March 2015, when a villager was allegedly assaulted by police while attempting to access grazing lands and a hilltop folk deity shrine. This episode of everyday coercion and restricted access acted as a catalyst, transforming latent anxieties into visible protest and marking a critical turning point in the anti-neutrino movement in Theni.

Radiation Fear in Pottipuram

One of the earliest frames mobilised against the INO project in Pottipuram centred on the perceived risk of radiation. Several local and regional organisations argued that, as neutrinos are subatomic particles, the observatory could emit radiation and pose serious health risks to nearby communities. Others contended that the project, administered by the DAE, functioned less as a scientific observatory and more as a nuclear facility, comparable to a deep-mountain nuclear waste storage site. According to this view, the excavation and underground construction would significantly increase radiation risk across the region. Although neutrino observatories are not associated with radiation exposure in technical terms, the radiation-risk frame gained considerable resonance among residents of Pottipuram and across the wider Theni district.

The state, INO project proponents and several scientific organisations have rejected the claims by the movement organisations and tried to situate the pro-INO stand in scientific rationality. Especially, frames such as ‘Radiation fear’ against a neutrino observatory made it easy for them to term the opposition as irrational, ignorant and superstitious. Not just the state institutions but the organisations which were maintaining a closer tie with the government or aligned with the technocratic vision of development have supported the project, framing it as a matter of national scientific development. One of the prominent People Science Movement organisations of Tamil Nadu, the Tamil Nadu Science Forum (TNSF), ⁶ and the political parties such as the Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India–Marxist were in this category. They did not stop with just supporting the INO project. To ‘fix’ the unscientific and irrational beliefs of the people, TNSF conducted ‘awareness camps’ in the nearby villages to make them ‘understand’ the importance and significance of the INO in this locality (Villager, Personal communication, 20 February 2025). In the INO project, initially, they were in a dilemma whether to choose the pure science project or to side with the grassroots voices of the people. However, the official position of the organisation accepted the project and claimed that the ignorance around neutrino should be removed through awareness campaigns, in a similar way to its historic ‘increasing scientific temper’ campaigns.

Meera Nanda (1997, 2005), in her writings about ‘the science war’, has argued that critiques of modern science in India often slide into romanticised, anti-modern narratives, ultimately enabling regressive politics such as the Hindutva nationalism. For Nanda, the defence of ‘scientific temper’ is essential in a multicultural country like India to combat communalism, casteism and irrationality (Varma, 2001). The pro-INO organisations have used these ideas and created materials to claim the necessity of INO in Tamil Nadu. A Tamil book released by TNSF, titled Neutrino Project in Theni: Fears and Science, starts with this paragraph:

Science in India is facing two challenges now-a-days. One is the claim of scientifically advanced civilization in historic India, thousands of years before, which have jet engines, rockets and missiles and advanced surgical technologies. Another is the accusation on science, that it is the reason behind increasing diseases like cancer, ecological destruction, genetic disorders. Nobody is questioning the profit induced economic system of capitalism, which is the reason behind this. ⁷ (Venkateswaran, 2015, p. 1)

It represents movements against scientific projects such as the INO as analogous to fundamentalist narratives centred on imagined ancient scientific utopias in India. However, the anti-neutrino movement cannot be understood as a simple opposition between ‘science’ and ‘non-science’, as suggested by such portrayals. The salience of radiation risk in Theni was shaped by its temporal and discursive proximity to the Kudankulam anti-nuclear movement, which peaked between 2012 and 2014 in Idinthakarai following the Fukushima disaster. The anti-neutrino movement in Pottipuram cannot be fully understood without situating it in relation to this nearby and recent history of anti-nuclear mobilisation. Both are situated in Tamil Nadu, within a distance of a few hundred kilometres. Both involve perceived high-risk, high-investment scientific installations, promoted with minimal local consultation, with a claim of national importance and scientific advancements. The Kudankulam anti-nuclear movement began as early as 1988 and was shaped by fears of nuclear disaster, which were intensified by events such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 and the Fukushima disaster in 2012.

The dominance was also because of the fundamental epistemic features of radiation, which is the paradox of invisibility and omnipresence. It cannot be seen, smelled, touched or sensed, yet is feared as capable of infiltrating bodies, environments, reproductive futures and everyday life. For many communities in Tamil Nadu, the Kudankulam movement marks the first historical encounter with what Beck (1992) and Beck et al. (1994) conceptualise as the defining characteristic of late modern risk, that is, hazards that are scientifically detectable yet experientially imperceptible, and therefore fundamentally dependent on expert knowledge to be rendered knowable. Radiation thus constituted a novel epistemic object which is a danger without sensory evidence, a threat without immediate visibility and a harm whose temporality extends far beyond the present. This invisibility produced two simultaneous and contradictory epistemic effects. On the one hand, it undermined trust in state institutions and scientific authorities. Because radiation could not be verified through lived experience, people were forced to rely on official declarations of safety, but these came from the very institutions that are building and legitimising the project. Following Douglas’s (1992)work on risk and blame, invisibility intensified moral suspicion. What cannot be seen must be trusted, and what must be trusted becomes politically contentious when the state is perceived as secretive or dismissive (Douglas & Wildavsky, 2010). Invisibility therefore did not neutralise fear; it magnified it by collapsing experiential certainty into political uncertainty.

On the other hand, invisibility produced a second effect, that is, radiation became imagined as everywhere. Rather than confining danger to the reactor site, the impossibility of sensory confirmation expanded the spatial imagination of risk. The sea, mountain, food, air, children’s bodies, the womb and everything potentially became a carrier of the risk of radiation. This aligns with Beck’s argument that modern risks are not merely undetectable but also diffuse and boundary-less, disrupting traditional categories of proximity, locality and containment. However, the difference here is that, rather than a material presence of ‘risk society’, as proposed by Beck, it is discursively constructed by social movement organisations because of the limitation in the transparency and accountability of the state. In Kudankulam, radiation is thus simultaneously absent to the senses and present in imagination, that is, a danger that cannot be seen yet cannot be escaped.

This epistemic pattern does not end with Kudankulam but continues into the anti-neutrino movement in Theni too. Even though the INO was not a nuclear project, radiation anxiety migrated discursively from Kudankulam into Pottipuram, shaping public fears even before construction began. Here, risk memory (Beck et al. 1994; Douglas & Wildavsky, 2010) becomes crucial. Communities carried forward the lessons of Kudankulam that ‘if radiation was invisible there, it might be invisible here too; if the state underplayed danger there, it may do so again’ (Resident of Thevaram, Personal Communication, 13 June 2024). This reflects insights from Brian Wynne (1998) and Sheila Jasanoff (2004, 2005), who emphasise that people do not respond to official expertise as empty subjects; they do so through historically sedimented experiences of institutional betrayal, miscommunication and exclusion. Thus, radiation fear in Theni from the INO site did not belong to a technical category but a socially inherited and discursively constructed fear, produced through collective memory and inter-movement circulation of knowledge.

In this way, radiation in Tamil Nadu becomes both invisible and omnipresent. The politics of radiation risk in these movements is therefore not merely about scientific disagreements; it is about who has the authority to define reality when it cannot be directly perceived, and how communities negotiate life under conditions where danger feels everywhere and nowhere at once. In this way, the public sphere of Tamil Nadu was very much awake and threatened by the risk of radiation exposure in this period. The continuity between these movements has built a broader political consciousness in the public sphere of Tamil Nadu.

Risk for What?

While radiation fear remained as one of the dominant claims of the movement, organisations such as Poovulagin Nanbargal ⁸ (PN) and Vivasaayigal Viduthalai Munnani ⁹ (VVM) have involved themselves in the movement and created new discourses in opposing the INO project. PN has found that the project was planned within the boundaries of the Mathikettan Sholai National Park and that the tunnel of the observatory will be below the Mathikettan–Periyar tiger corridor. They have provided technical and legal assistance for these claims and helped to get a stay for the project in the National Green Tribunal. This strengthened the ‘ecological destruction’ frame, which adds up to radiation risk to the environment.

In a prominent addition, the VVM have claimed that the INO was not a sovereign observatory based in India but an extension project of the Fermilab of the United States ¹⁰ (Fermilab, 2018). Fermilab was in the process of starting a project called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment. In that project, high-intensity neutrinos will be beamed through the Earth’s mantle and received in a massive detector located thousands of miles away from the neutrino-beam accelerator (Fermilab, 2018). Through this claim, VVM questioned the need to give away their mountain and land for an experiment of the United States. The INO has opposed this claim initially, but in the subsequent debates, they have accepted that it might be the second stage of the INO project. When this frame got legitimacy and resonance, many other organisations have used a discourse of ‘neo-imperialism’ in the high-end science of India. A scientist and writer, Tamilselvan (2016), in a vernacular magazine wrote

In the eve of Independence, Sir. C.V. Raman and Homi. J. Bhabha have different visions about the future of scientific research in India. Raman wanted to have indigenous scientific research in the country, but Bhabha claimed that it will result in the isolation of India and wanted to collaborate with foreign superpowers. While the Indian Scientific Association followed the path of Bhabha and have been involving in doing sidekick works to the scientific research of other countries. Till 1991, it has been doing logistics works for the research of USSR and after LPG reforms, it is doing logistics work for USA. INO is an extension of this neo-colonial project in India, which has landed in the soil of Theni.

Severe criticisms about the INO project about its dependency on the Fermilab have been written by so many organisations in their articles, notices, pamphlets and wall paintings. In this way, VVM corroded the legitimacy of the state and its scientific endeavour among the people by putting this relationship between the INO project and Fermilab in the public sphere (Maaran, 2015). Wall paintings in Pottipuram by the VVM were made with quotes such as ‘Are we the lab-rats to your American experiments? We will turn Pottipuram into a warzone against this’; see Figures 2 and 3.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Source: VVM Archives.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Source: VVM Archives.

When this discourse of neo-imperial critique occupies the centre of the anti-neutrino movement against the INO project, the resistance has become not just the act of opposition to the project but also criticises the colonial and post-colonial scientific institutions of India. A member of VVM said in one of the interviews:

If they really wanted to do something good, like developing our district and placing it in the international scientific arena, when we asked whether they have MoUs with Fermi Lab, why did they refuse? They can be open and transparent, right? If they want to hide something with this much effort, we doubt their whole intention. We are not against any development. We want our people to have a better developed living, but we have to be consulted openly not brainwashed with their awareness programme. (Member of VVM, Personal Communication, 13 June 2024, emphasis added)

These claims further eroded the trust in the initiatives of the state and its scientific and developmental narratives. Further, the scientific community itself was split in this dispute. While some elite institutions such as TIFR led the project and dominant scientific organisations TNSF promoted its vision, several environmental researchers, geologists and members of science education networks have raised objections about the necessity of the project and its cost on ecology and local community development. A significant internal critique emerged within the TNSF itself. When the official position of TNSF leaned towards supporting the INO, a broad group of scientists and activists, especially those influenced by ecological Marxism and democratic science activism, left the TNSF and formed several local scientific forums. One of the important forums among them is the Galileo Science Forum (GSF), formed by a resident of Cumbum and stood as a stern opposition to the INO project supporting the anti-neutrino movement. The forum’s founder mentioned in the interview that:

Science is like a sword. It will be beneficial or destructive, based on who holds it. In Neutrino project, that sword is in the hand of a government, which is subjugating itself to the whims and wishes of western countries like America. And hence, Science is political. We can’t sacrifice a district in Tamil Nadu, for a group of scientists who lives in Madurai and Chennai to win their own Nobel prizes in Physics. As the same scientists are in the decision panel of the TNSF, they sided with the project. So, we left the forum. (Founder of Galileo Science Forum, Personal Communication, 12 June 2024)

This internal split within TNSF exposes how the understanding of science is a field of contention among the PSMs, marked with varying values, ethics and relationships to state power. The separated groups of PSMs have critiqued the lack of transparency, the exclusion of local communities from decision-making and the potential environmental fallout, as the project proposes to drill the Western Ghats, a UNESCO biosphere reserve, especially near a wildlife national park and a tiger corridor.

Adivasi Assertion in Pottipuram?

While the above-mentioned claims were contesting among one another to gain dominance or resonance in the larger public sphere of Tamil Nadu, the situation is very different at the local level. The in-depth interviews in the five villages under Pottipuram village panchayat have captured the dominance of livelihood and health risk claims by the people living in the vicinity. One of the residents of T. Pudukottai village has told:

Initially we have accepted the project, because they claimed that they are building a college here for students to do scientific research. They have promised that there will be no problem for us to graze our cattle in the mountain and its adjacent areas. Suddenly, everybody told that they were constructing some nuclear plant here. It will emit radiation and our people will be affected because of that. Our women will not bear children and our whole community will be gone. Also, they have prohibited us from entering our grazing lands, saying it’s a government property and we need permission to enter. (Resident, T. Pudukottai village, Personal Communication, 20 February 2025)

A village leader from Chinna Pottipuram, which is completely populated with the tribal community, has talked about the humiliation they faced with the police and security personnel in the project site. He shared:

They cheated us, saying that this project is for our benefits only. They promised that we will be allowed to graze our cattle in the hill. But they prohibited us from entering the places, once the construction has started. Beyond all that, they were treating our people in a very humiliating way. Police in the security duties have hit our people. How can they hit us? They said that we have to get permission to climb the hill. We have been ascending the hill since the dawn of the ages. Gladly, the project is closed now. We won’t allow it if it comes back, whatever the cost.(Village leader, Chinna Pottipuram, Personal Communication, 21 February 2025)

While the claims regarding restrictions on the community’s right to worship have been circulating outside the district, they did not constitute the initial or dominant concerns articulated by local residents. Such issues were recalled and discussed mainly when respondents were specifically prompted, and even then, they were mentioned alongside repeated emphasis on health, livelihood and self-respect. While Adivasi identity cannot be dismissed as irrelevant, it did not assume a central position within the movement’s discursive repertoire. Analysis of movement documents indicates that broader identities such as ‘Tamil’ and ‘farmer’ were mobilised more prominently than tribal identity. This pattern may be partly understood in relation to the relatively small proportion of tribal populations within Tamil Nadu, which has comparatively less mobilisation potential.

Whereas some prominent Indian environmental scholars have claimed that the native inhabitants of any biotic environmental habitat, like the forest (Adivasis), sea-shore (fish workers) and rural (peasants), have lived in harmony with their local environment. They are materially and spiritually connected to their local environment and have traditions and practices which will conserve the same. Bandyopadhyay and Shiva (1986) claimed that the cultural beliefs and practices of the indigenous communities existed in critique of the ecologically destructive modern development discourse and give us an alternative vision of sustainable human-nature development. According to them, the practices of Adivasis are described as exemplifying a life-enhancing paradigm, in contrast to a modern life-destroying paradigm, in which renewability is treated as the primary management objective. Through centuries of sustainable interaction with nature, deep knowledge and understanding of local ecological processes are understood to have been acquired, leading to the portrayal of indigenous communities as ideal managers of natural resources (Bandyopadhyay & Shiva, 1986). This traditional theorisation of Indian environmentalism has used the narrative of the enduring effects of colonialism on the state, modernity, science and wealth production of India and views them as an attack on the indigenous, ecologically friendly structures which existed in the precolonial period (Gillen & Ghosh, 2007). It tried to trace a downward spiral, as explained by Paul Greenough in his foreword (Baviskar et al., 2006), over the 200 years of colonial history of India, from ecological harmony to ecological disruption and exploitation.

However, in this case, the tribal community of Chinna Pottipuram was neither against science and modernity nor against the INO project from the beginning. Actually, they had accepted the project before the financial sanction was made by the Union Government of India in 2015. In the interview, they mentioned specifically that they have accepted the project because the state claimed to be building a college here for students to do scientific research. When asked about the villagers’ attitudes towards modernity and science, an activist recounted an incident from the hamlet of Chinna Pottipuram (Personal Communication, 15 December 2023). The residents had accepted loans from a state-run bank to replace the thatched roofs of their kucha houses with concrete sheets, embracing what was presented to them as a sign of modern progress. However, when a few villagers were unable to repay their loans on time, bank officials visited the village and treated the defaulters in a humiliating and undignified manner. In response, the very next day, the entire village collectively dismantled their newly installed concrete roofs and placed the sheets in front of the bank’s local branch, demanding that its officials never set foot in their village again. This episode powerfully illustrates how, while the community is open to certain forms of modern development, they prioritise community, dignity and autonomy over any material benefits, refusing to accept progress at the cost of their self-respect. Even the Pongal protest of 2015 in Pottipuram against the INO project was started only after the police mishandled the residents, who attempted to ascend the hill.

Several individuals from the community have been pursuing modern education in other regions of Tamil Nadu like Theni, Madurai and so on. They have organised protests in their villages demanding roads, drinking water and irrigation from the government, according to the locals. Even while arguing against the construction of the INO project, in the interviews, they have framed their opposition in the discursive limits of modern rationality like radiation, cancer, miscarriage, rights and self-respect. It does not allow us to categorise their claims or protest as ‘anti-modern’ or ‘anti-science’.

Science War in Tamil Nadu

The conflict surrounding the INO in Tamil Nadu, as proposed by this article, can be analytically understood as a ‘science war’, not in the sense of a confrontation between science and non-science or post-science but as a struggle within the discursive terrain of science, modernity, development and risk. Rather than escalating into an identity-based or culturally radicalised movement, the anti-neutrino mobilisation largely remained confined to debates over scientific claims, environmental risk, legality and the authority of institutions to define public interest. On 7 May 2015, a debate on the INO project was organised in Chennai, where Dr T. V. Venkateswaran (TNSF) and Dr Indumathi (Institute of Mathematical Sciences) argued in favour of the project, while Mr Sundarrajan (PN) and Mr Maaran (VVM) articulated the opposing viewpoint. The supporters have argued mostly about the scientific advancement of India and its people on the international stage of particle research. Dr Indumathi, who was one of the initial proponents, prime spokesperson and outreach co-ordinator of the project, claimed that the project has been accepted and approved by several scientific institutions such as the Geological Survey of India, Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History and Tamil Nadu Electricity Board through their reports.

These claims were challenged by representatives of PN and VVM using the same scientific parameters and evidence, particularly questioning the opacity of the procedures through which scientific institutions produced their reports. Their critiques highlighted emerging forms of techno-risk associated with particle research and nuclear technology that, in their view, remained unresolved by the scientific approaches presented by Dr Indumathi. Moreover, the two sides differed significantly in their cost–benefit calculations: proponents emphasised scientific advancement and prestige, while opponents prioritised ecological sustainability and livelihood security. Despite these differences, both operated within the framework of modernity, albeit with contrasting understandings and constructions of risk. Such contestation was enabled by public forums such as the debate and other legal and discursive spaces available in Tamil Nadu.

This trajectory can be productively interpreted using the framework of multidimensional environmentalism, proposed by Dwivedi (2001, 2006) and Baviskar (1995, 1997), which emphasises how environmental movements articulate diverse and shifting claims depending on political opportunities, legal contexts and perceived risks. Dwivedi (2001) acknowledges that the knowledge of local communities about their immediate environment has been sidelined in the dominant scientific and technological discourses. However, he argued against the construction of indigenous knowledge in conflict with the dominant scientific knowledge in the environmental movements of India.

Baviskar (1995) observed that the understanding of Indian environmental movements through the ‘development–resistance’ dichotomy by the middle-class environmental activists has resulted in so many conflicts with the local tribal leaders in the Narmada Bachao Andolan of Central India. Middle-class activists external to the region, influenced by the discourse of Adivasi assertion, advocated the complete acceptance of Adivasi lifeways as a solution to the environmental crisis. However, the differentiation of tribal society, the emergence of a tribal middle class less dependent on forests, and its aspiration for a modern lifestyle complicated this vision. Activists viewed this shift as a betrayal and accused tribal leaders of succumbing to the state’s dominant development discourse (Baviskar, 1997). Examining these tensions, Baviskar (1997) argued that environmental movements are multidimensional, with ideological coherence often remaining elusive in practice. They argue that environmental conflicts in India are rarely organised around a single axis of grievance. Instead, they evolve through multiple dimensions such as ecological, livelihood, legal, scientific and political, whose relative salience changes over time.

This multidimensionality is observed in the case of the anti-neutrino movement in Tamil Nadu, where the dominance of scientific and risk-based frames, rather than cultural or identity-based claims, is seen. It reflects both the nature of the project and the institutional arenas in which the conflict unfolded. Since the INO project was largely contested through courts, expert committees and regulatory institutions, the movement’s claims were shaped by the need to engage these formal spaces of decision-making. From its early stages in Theni, opposition to the INO project was articulated through concerns about radiation, environmental damage, wildlife corridors and procedural violations in environmental clearance. Even when these claims were contested or dismissed by project proponents as scientifically unfounded, they nonetheless structured the conflict within the language of modern risk and development. This did not mean that the movement uncritically accepted the authority of science; rather, it meant that science itself became the object of contestation. Competing scientific claims, expert reports, legal interpretations and assessments of institutional credibility became central resources in the struggle. Local residents and activists, many of whom had only primary or secondary school education, familiarised themselves with key concepts in particle physics and engaged in sustained discussions with scientists associated with the INO project.

Field interactions revealed tribal and agrarian participants articulating arguments involving atoms, nuclei, neutrinos and related scientific concepts. Some respondents in Pottipuram and Thevaram have maintained personal archives of a list of scientific articles that were published in international journals, which they cited to substantiate claims regarding radiation associated with artificial neutrino beams and detector technologies. Thus, the demand for scientific clarity and rational justification permeated the field of contestation within the anti-neutrino movement.

Within Dwivedi’s multidimensional framework, radiation fear functioned as a strategic risk frame, one that translated abstract scientific uncertainty into tangible threats to health, reproduction and everyday life, thereby enabling broader public resonance. At the same time, the state and pro-INO organisations responded by mobilising an opposing discourse rooted in scientific rationality, national prestige and developmental necessity. The emergence of internal dissent within organisations such as the TNSF, and the formation of alternative forums such as the GSF, further demonstrates that science itself was not a unified or uncontested domain. The resulting ‘science war’ was, therefore, not a binary clash between experts and laypersons but a conflict among multiple actors including scientists, environmentalists, political leaders, civil society organisations and local communities, each invoking different interpretations of science and development.

Crucially, the trajectory of the movement also explains why stronger cultural or identity-based frames, such as Adivasi assertion, religious symbolism or ethnic nationalism, did not become dominant. The elements of these frames were present, particularly in moments of protest and ritual action. However, they did not crystallise into the primary language of resistance. Dwivedi’s framework helps clarify this outcome too. One reason for this lies in the legal and institutional path through which the conflict progressed. Since the project was repeatedly stalled, scrutinised and eventually shelved through judicial and regulatory mechanisms, the movement’s energies were directed towards sustaining legal challenges and scientific critiques rather than mobilising broader cultural identities. In such contexts, overtly cultural or identity-based claims can be strategically sidelined, not because they are absent or unimportant, but because they carry less weight within formal decision-making structures. The anti-neutrino movement in Theni thus remained largely within the discursive fields of science and modernity, even as it drew legitimacy from lived experiences of marginalisation and exclusion, for mobilising the population in direct protest repertoires.

In this sense, the ‘science war’ in Tamil Nadu represents a specific configuration of environmental politics shaped by institutional opportunity structures. The conflict demonstrates how science can become both the object and the medium of political struggle, without collapsing into a rejection of modernity itself. Opposition to the INO project did not seek to abandon science but to challenge the manner in which scientific authority was exercised, insulated from local concerns and aligned with state-driven developmental agendas. The conflict remained a ‘science war’ precisely because science and development were the terrains on which legitimacy, risk and the future of the region were being negotiated. In doing so, the movement reveals how environmental resistance in Theni against INO operates not outside modernity but within its contested boundaries.

Conclusion

This article has approached the anti-neutrino movement in Tamil Nadu as a conflict unfolding within the terrain of modern science, rather than as a confrontation between science and its presumed outsiders, and shows that science itself became the medium through which political struggle was conducted. Scientific authority did not operate as a settled foundation that either commanded compliance or provoked outright rejection. Instead, it appeared as fragmented, contested and continuously negotiated across courts, regulatory institutions, public campaigns and movement discourses. Importantly, this analysis does not seek to evaluate whether the INO project should ultimately be supported or abandoned. Rather than advancing a normative position on the project itself, the article examines how opposition emerged through concerns over environmental impacts, livelihood risks, procedural transparency, scientific accountability and the uneven distribution of costs and benefits. The concept of a ‘science war’ helps capture this configuration without collapsing it into familiar binaries. The conflict did not hinge on a rejection of scientific rationality, nor did it crystallise around a coherent assertion of autonomous indigenous epistemology. Movements engaged science through expert counter-claims, legal procedures, environmental assessments and risk narratives that were legible within modern institutional frameworks. At the same time, these engagements were shaped by historically sedimented mistrust towards state-led technoscientific projects, intensified by prior experiences such as the Kudankulam nuclear controversy. Risk, in this context, functioned as a socially inherited condition rather than a purely technical calculation, carrying memories of institutional opacity, exclusion and uneven accountability.

Situating the movement within the framework of multidimensional environmentalism clarifies why scientific and legal frames remained dominant over cultural or identity-based claims. As the conflict was absorbed into courts, tribunals and expert committees, the movement’s strategies were oriented towards forms of argumentation that could circulate within these arenas. The relative marginality of Adivasi assertion and religious symbolism does not indicate their absence but reflects the selective translation of lived experience into languages that carried institutional force. This translation foregrounded science as an object of dispute while simultaneously relying on its authority as a resource for resistance.

By foregrounding science as a contested terrain rather than a stable reference point, this article contributes to broader debates on environmental movements, risk politics and technoscience in contemporary India. It suggests that resistance to large-scale scientific projects cannot be adequately understood through narratives of ignorance or epistemic alterity. Instead, such conflicts demand attention to how scientific authority is produced, challenged and negotiated within modern institutional arrangements. The ‘science war’ in Tamil Nadu thus reveals environmental resistance as an engagement with modernity’s internal tensions, where the struggle is less about rejecting science than about contesting who speaks for it, under what conditions and at whose cost.