[Reader-list] Essar gets tribal spit on its face

[Nishant]

Essar gets tribal spit on its face
(http://merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=123539&catID=2&category=India)

Seby Rodrigues
 
07 October 2006, Saturday

 
Industry biggies that have signed up to set up mega projects in Jharkhand are facing the heat of violent opposition from the affected tribals. Essar Steel recently experienced their seething rage.

 
EVEN AS RED-CARPET welcome is being extended to corporate investors in Jharkhand, getting to the ground is not so easy. Essar Steel learnt this lesson recently on September 29 near the Chaibasa city. 
 
As part of a confidence-building exercise, Essar Steel organized medical camps in collaboration with the doctors of Chaibasa Sadar Hospital. The company had held one camp in Buzujol village with moderate success and emboldened by it organized another in Ulijhari. And, it is here that it got the taste of Adivasi revolt and was forced to beat a hasty retreat. 
 
Tribal chief Antu Hembrom, who was cooperating with the company, was caught and beaten up in front of company officials and the Jharkhand Police, and then tied and paraded through the city market, with women spitting into his face. 
 
Hembrom was also forced to give a written undertaking that he will not henceforth collaborate with the company. A pot was hung around his neck with a poster reading: “I am a land robber.” A garland of slippers was also presented to Hembrom, who is also the president of Manki Munda Sangh. He was forced to walk, carrying the poster and the garland, a distance of 4 km.
 
Essar Steel plans to set up a steel plant and make major investments in the state. It is among the 44 corporates that signed memorandum of understandings (MoUs) with the previous state government headed by Arjun Munda. The new government, headed by Madhu Koda, has upheld MoUs signed by the earlier government, but with a mild warning that “unnecessary” MoUs would be cancelled. It has, however, not spelt out the cancellation criteria. 
 
The quantum of investments in mining and other industrial plants are around Rs 66,000 crore. Among the major investors in Jharkhand, besides Essar Steel, are Tatas, Mittals, Jindals, Dempos and South African De beers. Each of these companies is finding it tough getting hold of suitable land for its project. 
 
A number of officials of these companies have been prevented — sometimes violently — from conducting surveys, as most such lands are inhabited by tribals and Dalits. 
 
A large-scale industrialization of Jharkhand has been planned. This will displace and uproot a large number of natives from their forest areas, where they have been living and farming for ages.
 
Essar Steel organized a medical camp in Ulihatu village, where the villagers were given ladoos to eat and some tablets to get cure of the various diseases identified by the doctors at the campsite. Essar then took signatures of the villagers on a blank paper. Nobody knows what happened to those blank papers on which the villagers’ signatures were taken. The company, in a press statement to the Ranchi edition of The Telegraph called it a “confidence-building exercise” with the villagers whom the company is trying to get rid of. 
 
But ironically it was the company’s confidence that got shattered when angry villagers refused to eat the ladoos and swallow the tablets.
 
Essar Steel is seeking land measuring 4,000 acres, which is estimated to directly displace about 15,000 persons near Chaibasa. The villages that are resisting Essar Steel project are Amita, Achu, Buzujul, Barizol, Katikutu, Ulijhari, Chinihatu, Kanki, Lokyahatu, Nakahatu, Sinderi and Ulihatu. All these villages are in West Singhbhum District’s Sadar Prakhand. 
 
Villagers were alerted when the company itself served letters to village heads (Mundas) before the state authorities could come out in its support. This was followed by a letter from the state authorities intimating plans for land survey for the company. Villagers then responded with letters of protest and demonstrations.
 
Essar is not the only company that is vying for the land in these remote villages. Prakash Industries and Rungta industries are also in the race to buy out land.
Essar officials were earlier chased away from Manoharpur district of West Singhbhum. The same land is being preyed upon by Goa’s Dempo Mining Corporation. And, they are facing an equally uphill task.
 
Corporates that are all set to invest in Jharkhand are finding the going tough in the initial stages and are keeping their fingers crossed on the fate that will befall them them in the future. Essar Steel is the first to have got the bitter taste. 
 
It is now an open battle of wits as Adivasis vow to fight until death. Tribals in Orissa have affirmed that they will not get cowed down even though if blasted by Tata’s landmines in Kalinganagar. 
 
The road to development of Jharkhand is as fraught with dangers as one saw earlier in Orissa on January 2.
 
(With inputs from Ashish Kudada, Ulijhari village, Sadar, West Singhbhum, Jharkhand.)


		
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