ODISHA PEASANTS SAY NO ADANI

15-9-2014 12.10PM IST

Medhaj News: They wielded Oriya and English placards mounted atop young, green bamboos harvested from their lands for this overcast morning. (Turned upside down, these could double up as a counter to police batons, a villager had explained to me the previous afternoon: “We won't hit them first. But if they hit us, let them not expect us to take it lying down.)

As dawn's drizzle turned into pouring rain, the slogans rose to a crescendo through a canopy of black umbrellas.

“Adani Company (sic) Down Down. Down Down, Down Down.”

“We Can Die, But Not Give Up Our Land!”

Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were targeted too.

“Modi used to sell tea, now he wants to sell us to Adani”, one man hollered.

“Give us land, if you want to take our land,” chanted a gaggle of women farmers in bright sarees and rubber slippers.

As a correspondent took photographs, she was periodically asked: “Are you with us, or with the company?” It was a reflection of deep mistrust of the media among villagers, who alleged local journalists were routinely bribed by industry and did not report their side of the story.

The mutinous crowd turned into the open ground, framed against distant, blue hills. This was the bucolic site of an environmental hearing for a proposed coal mine, called by the administration in Chhendipada town, in the forested, mineral-rich Angul district of central Odisha.

More than 600 tense, but unusually restrained, police personnel and home guards—deployed at the ground since dawn with rifles, batons, tear gas and protective gear—looked on. The protestors started taking apart the rickety stage that the security forces were protecting. Some wrecked the loudspeakers, then the blue and red plastic chairs. Others dismantled the bamboo boundaries, erected to separate the officials from the locals during the hearing. Men and boys carted off these poles through the mud and slush.

This done, the crowd turned its attention to district officials and individuals, rumoured to be company representatives, who were attempting to leave, escorted by a tight ring of police.

Raucous protestors sat down on the winding lane leading out of the ground, insisting the officials could go only after formally calling off the hearing. Say it is cancelled because of people's strong opposition, they demanded. A fire tender had pulled up minutes ago, followed by a truck marked 'Riot Control Vehicle.'

Faced with this unyielding crowd, the district official weakly declared that the hearing was cancelled because the villagers were opposed to it—loud cheers broke out.

It was now 8.54 a.m. more than 90 minutes before the hearing was to officially begin.

Resource conflicts are an intensifying and under-acknowledged phenomena across the coal-rich farms and forests of central and eastern India; coal is used to generate over 60% of India's power. Few urban Indians know or think about these pitched battles unfolding almost every month in rural, often remote, areas of their country.

Take for example the proposed coal block, for which September 4's environmental hearing was first called, after ignoring intense protests, and then reluctantly abandoned—the third time this has happened in as many years.

Located in Angul district, home to one of the country's largest coal deposits, the proposed coal block contains an estimated 12 million tonnes of coal and a life of 48 years. The mineral lies beneath 7,500 acres of a thriving agrarian economy across nine villages. These are home to more than 10,000 people, whose education and relative prosperity put them in the rural middle class, with capabilities and resources to assert their rights.



(Below these lush paddy fields lie vast deposits of coal. Prosperous locals see no benefits from a proposed mining contract, one of 218 now put on hold by the Supreme Court)

The tract was marked out as the Machhakata Coal Block by the Ministry of Coal, one of several coal blocks created in this area, and was allotted in 2006 to MahaGuj Collieries Ltd, a public sector power company jointly formed by the Maharashtra and Gujarat state governments.

In 2010, Mahaguj signed an agreement with the Gujarat-based Rs 47,000-crore industrial conglomerate, Adani Enterprises Ltd, to mine the coal. The details of the deal have not been shared with the villagers whom the state is trying to evict. Neither is Adani mentioned in public documents like the mine's Environmental Impact Assessment report, released for the September 4 hearing.

The company's response to phone calls, texts and an email was that its officials were travelling.

Adani Enterprises—deeply linked in local perception to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, since he campaigned in its aircraft during elections this summer—is now the prime target of local protests, closely followed by IDCO–the Odisha government body with a violent track record of acquiring land from farmers for industry. In conversations, villagers also brought up the bloody fate of other displaced communities in the district, seeking rehabilitation from mining corporations.

In the villages earmarked for erasure, residents were quick to point out that the coal block that would displace them was among the 218 allotments declared “arbitrary and illegal” by the Supreme Court on August 24. These blocks had been allotted beginning 1993, when the state wanted to involve the private sector in mining, for power production and other captive uses. Hearing public interest litigation, the court held that the allotments “followed no fair and transparent procedure, resulting in unfair distribution of the national wealth”. The eventual fate of these allotments will be known in the coming days, when the court gives its final ruling.