India is a country of vast dimensions and presents a rare diversity of situations - people, flora, and fauna. Indian settlements, their psychocutural and biophysical conditions bear a strong imprint of their history. The historical past has a direct bearing on the current access to and control over its resources. Currently, abysmal levels of poverty, the near total break-down in the governance structures, an intense pressure to liberalize the access to her wealth and enable global interests, and the threatening pace of degradation of natural resources provide for a state of flux as she enters the new millennia. Land is the most vital resource-base for any country to charter its course of development. Its use and ownership reflects the economic diversity within the country. The access to and control over land, and therefore the resources they contain, still continues to be highly inequitable. The promise of the Constitution of the Socialistic Secular Democratic Republic to create an egalitarian social order has remained rhetoric. The land reforms eagerly awaited with the freedom, rapidly petered into a stony silence. Forests, mineral resources and built infrastructure are owned and controlled by large monopolies. These inequities have reflected in the growing unrest among the society and today except for very small part of the country and only a few among her citizens are spared of violence in everyday life.