A mineral-rich plateau in eastern India covering most of Jharkhand and adjoining parts of Odisha, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Bihar, made of ancient rocks, known as the "mineral heartland" of India for its coal, iron ore, mica, bauxite and copper, and home to many Adivasi communities.
The Chota Nagpur plateau is part of the ancient Peninsular block, built largely of Archaean granites and gneisses, with younger Gondwana rocks in down-faulted basins along the Damodar valley. These Gondwana basins hold most of India's coking coal, laid down in swampy forests more than 250 million years ago. Over long periods the plateau was uplifted in stages and eroded, leaving a stepped landscape of flat-topped plateaus, residual hills and deep valleys with waterfalls where rivers drop from one level to the next.
The region's people include large Adivasi communities such as the Santhals, Mundas, Oraons and Hos, whose histories include major uprisings against colonial land policies, such as the Santhal Hul of 1855–56 and Birsa Munda's Ulgulan of 1899–1900. Laws like the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 were passed in response to protect tribal land. After Independence the plateau became the centre of India's heavy industry, with steel plants, coal mines and power stations, while the state of Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar in 2000. This page treats the plateau as a resource region and its development dilemmas.
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