[Reader-list] The terrible price for India's economic progress

Tue Mar 14 21:54:53 IST 2006

The article below, amongst other things, inspired this post:
http://www.theotherindia.org/economy/but-why-are-we-reforming.html
Shivam

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India: The terrible price paid for economic progress

India's economic success is a modern miracle. But the dark side of the
boom has been its tragic cost to the subcontinent's most vulnerable
people. In a special investigation, Daniela Bezzi and Peter Popham
report from Kalinganagar, a village that paid a terrible price in the
name of progress

The Independent
Published: 11 March 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article350526.ece

It was dawn on 2 January 2006 when the quiet morning rituals of
Kalinganagar, a village in eastern India, were drowned in a noise like
the end of the world: a stream of bulldozers and excavators and
khaki-painted lorries containing more than 400 armed police came
grinding into the village.
For days there had been rumours that something was about to happen.
The village, surrounded by dense forest but only 50 kilometres from a
major iron-ore mine, already has three steel plants in its midst.
Tata, a major Indian company, wants to build another, much bigger than
the rest. The villagers, who belong to the indigenous Ho tribe, want
none of it: last year police broke up two protest rallies with tear
gas and rubber bullets.

Now the bulldozers and diggers went to work, levelling a paddy field
which occupied part of the site where Tata's planned new steel plant
is supposed to rise. The disaster was under way. Villagers at work in
the fields or tending their goats and cattle came running to see what
was going on, gathering at a football ground in sight of the fields
where the diggers were at work, guarded by hundreds of heavily armed
police.

An hour went by. The villagers debated what to do. They sent a small
delegation to the officials to ask them to stop work and negotiate. A
local magistrate who had accompanied the police was brusque. "You do
whatever you want," he told them dismissively, "and I'll do my work."
There was to be no parley.

Now a group of villagers walked towards the bulldozers. Their plan,
the survivors said later, was to persuade the drivers to stop, if
necessary by lying down in front of them. What happened next is
disputed: some of the protesters say the first injuries were caused
when one of them tripped a string attached to a buried charge of
dynamite or even a landmine. Enraged now, more protesters came running
towards the police lines shouting abuse (the police claim they also
fired arrows). And the police opened fire with tear gas, rubber
bullets and live rounds. The villagers ran screaming in all
directions. The police kept up the firing until the ground was strewn
with bodies.

By the time silence fell again on the site, 12 local people had been
shot dead and 31 injured. One policeman had been killed by the
protesters. Several of the villagers had been shot in the back. Some
of the casualties were a long way from the field of action. A
14-year-old boy standing outside his home was shot in the chest and
killed. A 27-year-old woman was killed by a bullet on her way to bathe
in the village pond.

The bodies of six of the dead were taken away by the police. When they
were returned two days later, the villagers claimed that hands,
genitals and breasts had been cut off.

This is the India where nobody goes, the wild east, the subcontinent's
heart of darkness. The three states of Jharkhand, Orissa and
Chhattisgarh contain more than 70 per cent of India's mineral wealth,
from coal to gold, from bauxite to uranium. They also contain many
million tribal people, those like the Ho villagers slaughtered in
Kalinganagar, people who arrived in the subcontinent long before the
Aryan invaders and who still worship their own gods and live in their
own style. And like indigenous peoples the world over, they are f
being ground under the wheels of development.

India is getting rich, but it is still incredibly poor. The famous
Indian IT industry employs about a million people - out of the total
Indian population of more than a billion. The bitter fact about Indian
growth, and what makes it qualitatively different from that in Japan,
China, Thailand or Malaysia, is that the overwhelming majority obtains
no benefit from it. In fact for many of the poorest, like the
villagers in Kalinganagar, it is an unmitigated calamity.

Professor Ram Dayal Munda, one of the most brilliant products of
India's tribal belt, identifies a crucial divide in India, akin to
Europe's old Iron Curtain. "Jharkhand," he said speaking of his own
state, "is the paradox of India today, with all its richness in land
and mineral resources and its backwardness at many other levels. It
represents the frontier, the dividing line between western and
eastern. Western India is well-fed India, from Punjab to Kerala, the
India that has already been westernised. Eastern India, the forest
land, the wild hunting land, is a region rich in natural resources but
where the most elementary human rights are violated."
The issue of the emancipation of India's indigenous peoples, Munda
says, was fatally fudged at independence - and they have been the
victims of development, not its beneficiaries, ever since. And as the
Indian economy slowly comes to the boil, a vast human and ecological
tragedy is in the making.

We are travelling with a man who has been watching all this happen and
who committed himself 18 years ago to doing everything he could to
stop it.
Bulu Imam is not the obvious candidate for such a role. He is a child
of India's native elite, the sort of people who are doing best out of
the boom. His conversation is larded with the names of old friends who
are chief ministers and senior civil servants and politicians in
Delhi. His grandfather was president of the Congress, the party of
Gandhi and Nehru, and India's first delegate to the League of Nations.
His father, Tootoo, was educated in Britain and raced Bentleys around
Calcutta race track when he was not out pig-sticking or hunting
tigers.

Bulu got the tiger-hunting bug, too: father and son did it as a
business, luring over American millionaires to try their luck in the
forests of Jharkhand, in the south of the state of Bihar. Put a whisky
in his hand and even today the shikar (tiger-hunting) yarns pour out
of Bulu till the cows come home.

Like all serious hunters, he got to know his chosen terrain
intimately. That meant for him principally Jharkhand, literally the
Land of the Forests.

A plateau the size of Ireland, Jharkhand rises out of the Ganges plain
like an immense apparition, and for many centuries it must have been
quite as frightening and forbidding as the forests of central Europe
in the Middle Ages. The dense sal forests (a widespread,
timber-yielding tree) were full of leopard and tiger and elephant and
cobra. The occasional clearings, with small mud dwellings abutting
paddy fields, were peopled by adivasis, literally the "first people"
who spoke neither Hindi nor Bengali, who worshipped Sing Bonga, the
sun god, and were dead shots with the bow and arrow. They were
rumoured to practise human sacrifice.

All that was before the arrival of the British. But although many
outsiders settled in Jharkhand during the two centuries after the
British redcoats first showed their faces, much went unchanged. The
villages remained as simple and tranquil, the forest as dense. And the
tigers were still plentiful. When he was a young man there were tigers
in the woods a 20-minute walk from his home in the town of Hazaribagh
(the name means "One Thousand Tigers"). And because shikar was his
vocation and his trade, he got to know the woods of Jharkhand
extremely well.

Shikar was eventually banned by the Indian government - to his
father's great disgust. Then one day in 1988 Bulu was asked to put his
knowledge of the forests to a special use: the English travel writer
Mark Shand wanted to ride an elephant across India and he needed a
guide. Bulu agreed, and for three weeks he led Shand and Tara, the
elephant, across the Jharkhand plateau, rarely using metalled roads.
Instead they travelled on dirt tracks and long-abandoned logging
paths. "I never looked at a map," he says of the experience today. "I
don't look at maps, I draw them. It was tough because in many places
the forest had grown back and we had to hack a way through. It was an
unbelievable experience."

After weeks in the forest, one day they broke out on the edge of a
vast open-caste coal mine. "We travelled through the mines for two or
three days," Bulu remembers, "using the shoulders between the mines
for a path. There was a 300-foot drop on either side, and the mine was
about 12 miles across: it was a series of mines all linked up. With an
elephant you go very slowly, and the landscape comes up to meet you."

The scale and the finality of the devastation such a mine wreaks was
brought home to him. Bulu knew that the government was planning
another vast mine like this one, to be called the North Kanpura
Coalfield. "It was here that I came face to face with what the new
coal field would really mean. The impact on me was tremendous." It had
to be stopped.

Thus began his long immersion in the history and prehistory, the
culture and the folkways of the plateau.

Five thousand or more years ago, Jharkhand's inhabitants made
enigmatic, superbly decorative carvings on many large rock faces in
the area, carvings that have never been properly examined by experts.
Two thousand years ago, Buddhists and Jains built temples and carved
devotional statuary at dozens of sites across the plateau. The sites
have yet to be properly documented, but even casual digging uncovers
the remains of ancient statues, often in excellent condition. Now, as
the coal field project grinds towards completion, one by one these
sites will be swallowed up, as if they had never existed.

And of course the villages go, too, without remorse and often without
compensation or rehabilitation. The adivasis in the Hazaribagh area,
as in many of India's tribal zones, decorate their simple mud-built
houses with exuberant painted images of birds and beasts. They have
lived in this region for many centuries, and until the coming of the
British had it all to themselves. Theoretically their possession of
the land is protected by India's Constitution. But Constitution,
tribal rights, and a long history notwithstanding, two dozen villages
have already been swept away like so much rubbish, their villagers
decanted into the slums of Ranchi, the Jharkhand capital, or
dispatched to Delhi to be domestics of the upper class. Many more
villages are in the firing line.

It was indignation provoked by a comparable though much smaller threat
in Britain - Rio Tinto Zinc's plan to mine on Snowdon - that gave
birth, in 1972, to Friends of the Earth; its first campaign success
was to stop Rio Tinto in its tracks. As the local head of the Indian
National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, Imam has been striving
for 18 years to generate a similar head of steam over the fate of the
plateau. But despite the support of foreign scholars and the listing
of the Jharkhand sites in the International Council on Monuments and
Sites (Icomos) Heritage at Risk World Report and elsewhere, the state
has not been deflected even an inch from its intention of sacrificing
a vast, historic area of outstanding natural beauty for coal mines,
dams, thermal power stations - and uranium mines.

A key component of India's "miracle" is the way the country is growing
more powerful. With the tests conducted in the desert of Rajasthan in
1998, India barged into the nuclear club; and this month, despite
those tests and to the horror of the nuclear disarmament lobby, it has
signed an agreement with the US to develop its civil nuclear
programme. And once again, progress in the Indian context comes with
appalling human costs. It was at about the time of those nuclear tests
that we first learned about the disaster known as Jaduguda.

The uranium for India's bombs came from Jaduguda, in Jharkhand, the
only uranium mine in the country (though several more are now being
opened up). The mine is located in the middle of a cluster of tribal
villages. Not close to a village, with high barbed wire fences keeping
the peasants well away, but in its midst. The pond at Jaduguda, we
learnt, where the hazardous waste is dumped and allowed to settle, can
be accessed by the men, women, children, dogs, cats and cows of the
village. (The mine's boss claims that the pond was closed to the
public, and some reports suggest that villagers may have cut their way
through the perimeter fence.) In the summer the pond dried out, and
some villagers used it as a short cut to get home. The village
children played tag on it. The mine produced no stink, no clouds of
filthy smoke, did not tear up the countryside and dye everything black
like an open-cast coal mine. A uranium mine was, it seemed, the sort
of mine you could live with.

Then the first deformed children began to be born in the village.
People of the village and the cattle they had washed regularly in the
water of the pond began dying prematurely of cancer. A child was born
with only one eye and one ear, mentally handicapped as well, unable to
walk, and he grew bigger but no heavier. Women became infertile and
their husbands abandoned them, and they began to be persecuted as
witches, the true aim being to steal their land. The Uranium
Corporation of India Ltd maintained that none of the village's health
problems were connected to their activities.

Jaduguda illustrates the way that India moves into the future: this is
the style of its progress. When the state wants to do something it
just does it. Land is requisitioned, the earthmovers arrive. If there
are rules to be followed - and, according to the Indian Constitution,
land f held by tribal people in tribal areas subject to the
Constitution's Fifth Schedule cannot by any means be transferred to
non-tribals - it is a sound bet that they will be ignored.

That's the way things worked under the lumbering, supposedly benign
and paternalistic socialist system that ruled independent India for
its first 50-odd years. And now the ground rules have changed; now big
business is in the driving seat. In what direction are things likely
to go? To the advantage of the poor and hapless, or to their
detriment?

Last October Jharkhand made business news headlines when Laxmi Mittal,
the world's number one steel-maker and third richest man, Indian-born
but now based in Europe, announced that he was making his first
investment in his native land: setting up a 12-million-tonne steel
plant somewhere in the state, at a cost of US$9bn. Jharkhand, Orissa
and Chhattisgarh have signed tentative agreements with more than 100
companies to build plants. If all came good, the total investment
would be more than $20bn.

"If even one steel mill came into the state it would make a huge
difference," said a man in the drinks trade in the Ranchi Club, the
former hangout of the British in Jharkhand's capital, taken over and
expanded by the local elite. "It will have a massive knock-on effect -
on taxis, hotels, every other business. It's happening already thanks
to the firms that have already moved here: for the first time
shopkeepers here are learning what it means to have money. With a
steel mill, the taxes the firm will pay will have a ripple effect all
over the state. We were in Malaysia recently on holiday, and we said,
God, India could be like this. Of course it may not be good for every
individual adivasi ..."

Five years ago Ranchi, the state capital, was a sedate, rather genteel
country town with many Christian mission schools, where bicycle
rickshaw was the favoured way to get around. Today it feels like some
raw place on the frontier. Rickshaws fight for space on roads clogged
with lorries and vans, the air is full of choking smoke, Main Road is
dominated by the aluminium-clad tower of the city's first swanky
hotel, Capitol Hill. Rising above the crowds of sugar-cane wallahs and
beggars are huge advertisements for iron bars, nails and wire - but
also for business suits. Thin young men riding bicycles with carts
attached to the back struggle to move their loads, which protrude far
behind the cart, of steel reinforcing rods for cement. Money is being
made here, a chaotically affluent city is being thrown together.

But then, two days into 2006, the bloody end to the protest at
Kalinganagar south of the Jharkhand border threw the whole jamboree
into question. At a demonstration held at Kalinganagar after the New
Year massacre, a woman on the platform put the adivasi case very
simply. "We are ready to give our lives but not our land," she said.
"Because without our land we will die anyway."

She wore a green salwar kameez (traditional dress) and a red headband
- the uniform of the Maoist guerrillas, who are now a big factor in
the struggle over how India should develop.

Called "Naxalites" after the town of Naxalbari in West Bengal where
their insurgency first broke out in 1967, the Maoists have had their
ups and downs, but they have never gone away. And today they are
stronger, more numerous and more ambitious than ever. And with the
opening up of India to foreign capital and the expected arrival of
millions of dollars of steel money, the dispossessed and those who
fear dispossession are rallying to their cause.

Inspired by dramatic Maoist successes in Nepal, the Indian comrades
have been swarming into virgin terrain. In November 2003 they were
active in 55 districts across nine Indian states. By February 2005
this had ballooned to 155 districts in 15 states, covering nearly 19
per cent of India's forests. The Home Ministry says they now have
9,300 "hardcore underground cardre" and possess 6,500 modern weapons,
including Kalashnikov rifles, Claymore land mines and modern
electronic equipment. They are, it is claimed, trying to carve out a
Compact Revolutionary Zone, a "red corridor of armed struggle",
stretching from the Nepal border in the north via Andra Pradesh right
down to Tamil Nadu in the south. The mineral-rich states of Jharkhand,
Orissa and Chhattisgarh are right in the middle of that band.
But can the villagers trust the Naxalites? "All the Maoists start as
ideologues with principles," said a senior Jharkhand policeman, "but
after a time they find that being a Naxalite is a functioning
business, fuelled by fear." Anybody who wants to do business in the
areas they control knows they have to pay up, he said. "They take a
levy from everyone, the coal barons, the mining companies. Those who
have been here a long time know exactly who to pay and how much in
order to stay out of trouble. Recently the Naxalites gave a press
conference over the Nepal border in which they issued a warning to the
multinational companies that are planning to set up in the state. That
was advance notice of money required ...
"Jharkhand is a treasure trove for the Naxalites because of the money
that can be extorted from the mining companies. The foreign companies
that want to come in will have to be prepared to do the same, if and
when they come into the state."

On 9 January this year as every year, the Munda tribe, one of the
biggest in the state and who once (as their legends relate) enjoyed
sole possession of the Land of the Forest, gather at a place called
Dombari Hill, to commemorate another in their long series of tragic
defeats. At the top of this steep, conical hill in 1900 a force of
adivasis led by their most charismatic and famous hero, Birsa Munda,
prepared to attack a British force that was far smaller but armed with
modern weapons. The two sides faced off in the darkness, then on a
muffled order the British charged up the steep slope with bayonets
fixed. Seven Mundas died in the ensuing rout.
The view from the top of the hill shows what the Mundas were fighting
to defend. In all directions dense forest stretches unbroken to the
horizon. Despite the military defeats and all their other reversals,
in this corner of Jharkhand the Mundas have succeeded in clinging on
to their land, and the culture and traditions handed down across the
centuries.

Ram Dayal Munda, former vice-chancellor of Ranchi University, was one
of the speakers at the Dombari Hill commemoration. What will happen,
we asked him later, as a result of the killings in Kalinganagar?

"The people will close ranks," he said. "They will increasingly see
themselves in opposition to the authorities. They will rebel. They
will be crushed. They will rebel again. There are 90 million adivasis
in India, and 20 million are on the road: lost, uprooted, displaced,
wandering around ..."

It was dawn on 2 January 2006 when the quiet morning rituals of
Kalinganagar, a village in eastern India, were drowned in a noise like
the end of the world: a stream of bulldozers and excavators and
khaki-painted lorries containing more than 400 armed police came
grinding into the village.

For days there had been rumours that something was about to happen.
The village, surrounded by dense forest but only 50 kilometres from a
major iron-ore mine, already has three steel plants in its midst.
Tata, a major Indian company, wants to build another, much bigger than
the rest. The villagers, who belong to the indigenous Ho tribe, want
none of it: last year police broke up two protest rallies with tear
gas and rubber bullets.