Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2002 Student Work

A shot fired, a son slain; lives and livelihoods at risk as India’s original tribes protest land takeover by multinational bauxite mining companies

By Raghuram Vadarevu

Rayagada, INDIA – As the sun ascends high above Bagrijhola, a village buried deep in a barren countryside in eastern India’s Orissa state, Pana Jhodia sits solemnly in the shade, cradling one of her two grandchildren.

The village men are at work in the sun-scorched fields, trying to coax an existence from perilously infertile land. Pana’s 25-year-old son, Raghunath, the only remaining man in his family, would have been there with them.

Raghunath spent his short life tending to his duty in the Jhodia tribe: Rise early to work the fields, maneuvering two bullocks to produce food from the family’s one acre of farmland.

Her son now is a memory. A single bullet fired by a local policeman in a nearby village in mid-December robbed Pana of her son, and consequently the only source of livelihood for her, his wife and two children.

``My son didn't die,'' says Pana. “He became a martyr.''

Pana’s son had left Bagrijhola to help plan a protest against a multinational mining project, which threatened to evict his village from the land where their ancestors thrived and their culture survived for centuries.

Raghunath’s death, and those of two other men, helped draw the nation's attention to this neglected corner of Orissa, where dozens of India's many forgotten tribes are fighting and dying to chart their own future amid the clamor of a rapidly globalizing and modernizing India.

They do not want to become the modern version of exploited and brutalized native peoples of the Americas.

These tribes, considered to be among the nation's “original inhabitants,” are trying to turn back the designs of the state government and a cadre of multinational mining companies to extract millions of tons of bauxite ore. The mineral would ultimately become the aluminum used in the beverage cans and cars in America and other Western countries.

Today, as the international community receives news of Orissa's annual cyclone-induced flooding and tales of government corruption scandals, the story of Pana's tribe, the Jhodia, and their battle for survival is unknown to Westerners and largely ignored by mainstream Indians.

PANA'S TRIBE LIVES in an arid wilderness where starvation deaths are common and where droughts come yearly like morose festivals. An undulating terrain of barren hills and scattered paddy fields encircles their village. Beneath the landscape are millions of tons of bauxite ore.

Discovered in the 1970s, the region holds 70 percent of India's bauxite reserves. It is a cache that has attracted a queue of foreign companies, including Norway's Hydro, Canada's Alcan, and India's Indal. They formed a $1-billion joint venture called Utkal Alumina International Ltd. in 1993.

It was two years after the Indian government in 1991 began an aggressive campaign to loosen restrictions on foreign investment and started to privatize state-owned enterprises. The result was a decade-long boom, which saw India’s economy rise to become one of the world's fastest growing.

During the economic expansion, the central and state governments marketed India’s mineral wealth, in part, to bring in valuable foreign exchange and jobs. This drive, scholars and human rights groups say, has increased the pressure on the resource-rich lands, and consequently, on the lands' inhabitants – India's marginalized tribes.

Pana's family belongs to one of those. Her village is near Baphlimali plateau, a low hill that is part of the Eastern Ghats mountain range. The bauxite ore mined from the plateau would produce 1 million tons of alumina annually for 30 years, the mining venture Utkal says.

So far, the company has acquired 90 percent of the 2,867 acres of land it needs for a township and a mineral processing facility, says B.K. Otta, the project manager. In all, he says, roughly 2,000 families will be affected and 147 will lose their land. The region's tribes and their advocates say the number is much higher.

Pana's village will have to be relocated to make way for the mineral processing facility, but the tribes here say they will not go. The government and industry say mining would do what years of government programs could not – develop the area by bringing in much-needed infrastructure and jobs.

The tribes in turn say they do not trust government and industry promises because they have seen the anguish of other tribes who were driven from their ancestral homes to make way for logging, dam building, and mining.

“We have always seen the crying faces of these people. They became refugees in their own land,” says Tripathi Jhodia, 25, an anti-mining movement leader who speaks with the furor of a trained activist. “How can we permit ourselves to be refugees in our land?”

Tripathi has been educated and trained to organize his tribe against the mining project by a local non-governmental organization, Agragamee. The group has done its part to raise awareness about the mining. It has organized “consciousness trips,“ designed to show the tribes the squalor of resettlement colonies of other industrial projects in Orissa.

Ola Lie, Utkal’s chief executive, says he understands the tribes’ basic desire to prevent a repeat of history. Consequently, he says, the company created a social development organization to bring education, health care, and sanitation to the villages. They have also drafted a resettlement and rehabilitation plan to be administered by the state government.

But doubt and distrust sown during years of inadequate government development programs, exploitation and corruption are blooming today.

PANA’S TRIBE, THE JHODIA, do not know how long they have lived in this arid wilderness; they say their ancestors trod here long before their grandparents. They have kept time by the changing seasons, passing on their rituals for generations.

But while their traditions have endured, the tribesmen say, they live on the edge of survival.

Just 17 years ago, they lived along a small river. Its waters helped them grow plentiful crops, including sugarcane, rice and sunflowers. In the mid-1980s, the government arrived to build an irrigation dam. The waters rose and the reservoir drowned the Jhodia crops and their village.

Now, the roughly 500 men, women and children of the Jhodia live within sight of that reservoir. Its waters do not flow out to the fields. The Jhodia’s home is a sleepy village constructed with each family's 5,000 rupees, or roughly $100, of compensation.

Beyond that infusion of rupees, this village by any measure has been forgotten.

The electricity lines never reached the village, stopping dozens of miles away. The reservoir sits within 500 feet of the Jhodia, but the village does not have running water. The arable land is miles away; the little food it generates is barely enough to feed the villagers and sell at the market.

The forests that had once covered the hills are now gone, replaced by a brown, Martian landscape. There is evidence of development stopped short of completion. An international project to reforest the region left behind only a hilltop of trees. Small irrigation channels are rare in the valley.

In the village, children attend a one-room schoolhouse, but the school’s single teacher rarely comes. More than half of the 90 school children do not attend. Instead, they work the fields. Sometimes, the children and the adults are stricken with diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis.

THIS LIFE, AND ITS cruel assault on the human condition, is common for India's tribes.

Since Independence in 1947, anthropologists say, India's more than 500 tribes, totaling at least 67 million people, have been living on the outskirts of society, forgotten only until the leaders call upon them to sacrifice land for the national interest. Some estimates say the tribes comprise 40 percent of the millions displaced by development projects since 1947.

“We don't understand what governance is,” says Tripathi Jhodia, the tribal activist. “Since long, we have been exploited by the government.''

These tribes are collectively called Adivasis, a Sanskrit word for "original inhabitants." Many scholars say Adivasis are the nation's native people, remnants of centuries-old tribes who fled to isolated jungles, river valleys and mountains to seek safety from the invading Aryan armies.

The Indian government does not recognize them as "native peoples." Some Indian anthropologists say that India's one billion people are all "native."

"If India accepts that these are indigenous people," says Virginius XaXa, an Adivasi sociologist at the Delhi School of Economics, "that is a problem" because the Adivasis would then be entitled to certain rights, including the right to land and self-determination under international human rights treaties, such as the Universal Declaration for Human Rights. A draft declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples is working through the United Nations.

Nevertheless, India's 51-year-old Constitution has provisions for Adivasi self-governance and protection for their land. Several government ministries are responsible for the welfare of the Adivasis, who speak varying languages, adhere to their own customs and religions. Many practice animistic religions; some are Hindu or Christian.

The Adivasis inhabit river valleys, dense forests and isolated mountain stretches from the Gujarat state on the Arabian Sea, east to Assam state, near Bhutan and Nepal. Their land is blessed – or cursed – with the natural resources - water, bauxite, gold, timber – sought by a nation and a global economy. This "geographic accident" is exactly what threatens their existence, says Pramod Parajuli, an expert on Adivasis.

"It's not like we are just going to kill Adivasis," Parajuli says. "They are in the hilly, forest areas where the minerals are."

Some scholars, including Parajuli, say this conflict over resources, land rights, and national interest may actually be beneficial in the long run for Adivasis. Parajuli says, “Globalization has actually opened up a crisis that I think has a positive dimension, to make these communities more aware and more confident about their own self-governance.''

IT’S ABOUT 10 A.M. in Bagrijhola village, and Pana’s leathery, brown face is serious. The wrinkles on her face are like a riverbed wizened by the sun.

“He became spontaneously conscious of what is going to happen,” she says of her son, Raghunath.

With the help of Agragamee, the villagers learned of the plight of other tribes and of their rights in the Indian Constitution to inhabit reservation-like regions.

The village became aware of other Adivasis in neighboring states who got the central government to carve out states for themselves just last year.

On Dec. 15, 2000 Raghunath and his uncle trekked across the Orissa landscape six miles to Maikanch village. They joined 1,500 other tribesmen, including the leaders of the anti-mining movement, to plan a protest for later in the month.

The newspapers reported that a local political leader, who had come the village to try to persuade the tribesmen to support the project, was assaulted. He filed a police complaint. The tribesmen say they also tried to file a complaint, but the police refused to accept it.

The next morning, the police arrived, looking for various movement leaders who were wanted on other complaints. It's unclear what happened next, but newspapers and eyewitnesses described the incident this way:

As the police platoon approached the roadside village, the tribesmen, fearing arrest, ran up a craggy hillside overlooking the village to hide.

The police rumbled into the village and found only women. They began to question them. A scuffle followed. An elderly woman collapsed and fell to the ground. The men, watching from atop the hill, thought the police had killed her.

Enraged, they descended from the hill. The police say the tribesmen shot bows and arrows at them. They tribesmen who were there deny it. Fearing for their safety, the police fired their guns toward the hill.

In a chaotic few moments, Raghunath was dead, hit in the torso. His uncle, Jamodhar, was shot dead in the chest. Another man was shot dead in the eye.

A few days later, 10,000 tribespeople, carrying traditional axes, spears, and swords marched dozens of miles to demand accountability for the shooting and to protest the mining. The state government is investigating the clash, and the mining project has been put on hold.

In Maikanch village, on the hillside, the tribes erected a small, three-domed monument – one dome for each victim. On the base is written in red letters – “Go Back UAIL.”

Meanwhile, in Pana's village, life continues. A message to the mining companies is scrawled in Oriya, the local language, in red – “Go back Indal! If you come, the area will be burning. Blood will flow like a stream. We are not afraid of death. We are afraid of losing our dignity!”

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