Features » January 18, 2010

India’s Trail of Tears (cont’d)

Precious metal

So what kind of money are we talking about? In their soon-to-be-published book, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartelj, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel write that the financial value of the bauxite deposits in the state of Orissa alone is $2.27 trillion (more than twice India’s GDP). That was at 2004 prices. Today, it would be about $4 trillion.

Beyond Orissa, expand the $4 trillion to include the value of the millions of tons of high-quality iron ore in the states of Chhattisgarh to the west and Jharkhand to the north, and the 28 other precious mineral resources, including uranium, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble, copper, diamond, gold, quartzite, corundum, beryl, alexandrite, silica, fluorite, and garnet. Add to that the power plants, the dams, the highways, the steel and cement factories, the aluminum smelters, and all the other infrastructure projects to estimate the scale of the operation and the desperation of the stakeholders. Often, if the mining company is a known and recognized one, the chances are that, even though the ore is still in the mountain, it will have already been traded on the futures market.

There are contracts on every mountain, river and forest glade. We’re talking about social and environmental engineering on an unimaginable scale. And most of this is secret. It’s not in the public domain. Our 24-hour news channels that are so busy hunting for macabre stories of Maoist violence–and making them up when they run out of the real thing–seem to have no interest at all in this side of the story. I wonder why?

Perhaps it’s because the development lobby to which they are so much in thrall says the mining industry will ratchet up the rate of GDP growth dramatically and provide employment to the people it displaces. This does not take into account the catastrophic costs of environmental damage. But even on its own narrow terms, it is simply untrue. Most of the money goes into the bank accounts of the mining corporations. A very tiny percentage of the displaced people get jobs, and those who do, earn slave-wages to do humiliating, backbreaking work. By caving in to this paroxysm of greed, we are bolstering other countries’ economies with our ecology.

When the scale of money involved is what it is, the stakeholders are not always easy to identify. Between the CEOs in their private jets and the wretched tribal special police officers in the “people’s” militias–who for a couple of thousand rupees a month fight their own people, rape, kill and burn down whole villages in an effort to clear the ground for mining–there is an entire universe of primary, secondary and tertiary stakeholders.

These people don’t have to declare their interests, but they’re allowed to use their positions and good offices to further them. How will we ever know which political party, which ministers, which MPs, which politicians, which judges, which NGOs, which expert consultants, which police officers, have a direct or indirect stake in the booty? How will we know which newspapers reporting the latest Maoist “atrocity,” which TV channels “reporting directly from ground zero”–or, more accurately, making it a point not to report from ground zero, or even more accurately, lying blatantly from ground zero–are stakeholders?

Too many questions about conflicts of interest and cronyism remain unanswered. What are we to make of the fact that the Minister of Home Affairs P. Chidambaram, the chief of Operation Green Hunt, was a non-executive director of the mining company Vedanta–a position from which he resigned the day he became finance minister in 2004? What are we to make of the fact that, when he became finance minister, one of the first clearances he gave to allow foreign direct investment in India was to Twinstar Holdings, a Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of the Vedanta group?

What are we to make of the fact that, when activists from Orissa filed a case against Vedanta in the Supreme Court of India, citing its violations of government guidelines and pointing out that the Norwegian Pension Fund had withdrawn its investment from the company alleging gross environmental damage and human rights violations committed by the company, Justice S.H. Kapadia suggested that Vedanta be substituted with Sterlite? He then blithely announced in an open court that he, too, had shares in Sterlite. He gave forest clearance to Sterlite to go ahead with the mining, despite the fact that the supreme court’s own expert committee had explicitly said that permission should be denied and that mining would ruin the forests, water sources, environment and the lives and livelihoods of the thousands of tribal people living there.

What are we to make of the fact that just around the time Prime Minister Singh began to call the Maoists the “single largest internal security threat” (a signal that the government was getting ready to go after them), the share prices of many of the mining companies in the region skyrocketed?

The mining companies desperately need this war. They will strike it rich, very rich, if the Indian government’s counterinsurgency operations successfully evict the tribal people who have so far managed to resist the attempts to drive them from their ancestral lands.

But whether the coffers of the mining corporations will overflow, or whether Operation Green Hunt simply swells the ranks of the Maoists, remains to be seen. 

This story was adapted from a longer article, “The Heart of India is Under Attack,” first published by The Guardian of the U.K.