Merinews, 13th April, 2008
k.Sudhakar Patnaik
MALI PARBAT is a hill, which falls under Eastern Ghats, that lies only kilometres away from the town of Semiliguda. Around it twenty-two villages with numerously high tribal populations, enjoy the hill’s four perennial streams, which feed the surrounding land used for agricultural cultivation. A proposed mining project by Hindalco to mine Mali Parbat’s rich bauxite, presence endangers not only to these people’s direct livelihood, but will cause an environmental catastrophe that will dry up the four rivers and make cultivation in its immediate surroundings impossible. It will force the villagers to move away from their ancestral land and look out for other livelihood options.
Industrial context of Orissa
Orissa has rich natural resources found in forest, rivers, land and minerals. For years now, the Orissa government has been trying to set up a state-wide programme, of rapid industrialisation based on a vastly increased scale of mining projects - primarily bauxite, iron-ore, coal and chromite - along with aluminium refineries and smelters, steel plants, plus coal-fired power stations and hydro-electric dams to power them.
The ides is that this will rapidly bring great wealth into the state in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI), which will quickly pay off Orissa’s foreign debt to the World Bank and other foreign multilateral institutions, at the same time. It will promote any overall development in the state, which has a high level of poverty and records of starvation causing deaths. Already a joint national aluminium company limited at Damanjodi have started producing alumina past several years, which is polluting the rivers. Hundreds of people suffer from skin diseases due to air and water pollution. Another two alumina companies one at the Langagorh and another at Kashipur of Raygada district are under construction in Orissa tribal populated area, as a string of big dams and four power projects (Machkonda, Kolab, Balimila and Indravati) started generating power and irrigation to benefit MNCS and big land lords. Three million indigenous cultivators are thrown from their lands in undivided Koraput and Kalahandi district without being provided proper rehabilitation.
The village of Pakhjhola
In all of the villages Mali Parbat agriculture is the main economic activity and a source of income. The land produces wide varieties of cereals, fruits and vegetables (including guava, mango, ladyfinger, ridge guard, sugarcane, eggplant, papaya, and maize to name but a few), which are sold on the weekly market in the nearby town of Semiliguda.
One of the twenty-two villages around Mali Parbat is Pakhjhola, a peaceful and fertile oasis of some 550 inhabitants, 70 per cent of which is of indigenous ancestry (Paroja tribe). One of the four perennial streams that source on the hill feeds the land throughout the year, giving the villagers the advantage of making a modest living all year round. The domestic animals, that are crucial for the cultivation of the land, graze on the hill. An abundant presence of wildlife can be found in the forest on the Mali Parbat: snakes, tigers, peacocks, deer and wild boars can be found there among others. But they are hunted during a yearly hunting festival in May. The hill is also the site where the villagers practice their animist religion. The rich deposit of bauxite in the Mali Parbat is a key feature in the fertility of the region. It acts as a sponge for its porous quality makes bauxite ideal for holding the monsoon rain-water over the coming months of the hot season, releasing it slowly through the streams through out the year, enriched with life-giving trace elements of all the minerals, which bauxite is rich in. Certainly, because capping of these mountains that Orissa has started to look like a desert - a process already visible around Panchpat Mali in Koraput district. For when bauxite is mined out, the mud that is left exposed which later hardens. Its previous life-giving properties of storing water, providing grazing ground for the cattle and feeding the land to make agricultural activities possible go into reverse. Pakhjhola will itself suffer from mud flows that will come down during the rainy season because of the mining waste and take away the land that lies in front of the hill.
Benefits are a fraud
What then are the so-called advantages that the proposed mining project will bring? The profit in the short-term is not in doubt. But profit for whom? Clearly not for the uprooted ‘adivasis’. The lack of respect being shown to them now in Lanjigarh and Kashipur is an ill omen for their future. This is why the inhabitants of the Mali Parbat villages have organised themselves in the Mali Parbat Protection Forum (Mali Parbat Surakshya Samiti). The tribals dispossessed by the Indravati, Kolab and NALCO projects, know that promises of a good "resettlement package", "employment opportunities", and other benefits are basically a fraud.
In the undivided Koraput district of Orissa, out of 71,794 persons displaced by various industries, a mere 17,225 (i.e. 3,445 families or 24 per cent) have bee resettled in colonies and around 10,000 others have been given some economic opportunities and limited resettlement. Thus more than two thirds of the displaced people are not resettled at all, giving them no future prospects and forcing them to look for alternative livelihood options in the urban periphery. However in Semiliguda most businessmen are not local but have come from other districts to take advantage of the local poor. In this competitive context it is unlikely that the ‘adivasis’ will manage, because they don’t have a feeling for this kind of business its only for the lack of money that they have agreed to set up such businesses.
The social structure of tribal society is inevitably fractured by displacement, as numerous studies have shown. ‘Adivasis’ know what is at stake is nothing less than their continued existence, as a culture. They live in close-knit communities. Their social values are centred on their relationship with their land and natural environment and in being self-sufficient for most of their needs by their own labour: for food, building their own houses. To call them “poor” is correct only when the system of exploitation imposed on them by trader-moneylenders is already taking away a large part of the food they grow. Where they are still largely self-sufficient and control their own land – as in Pakhjola – they do not see themselves as poor. Corporations know this and try to influence the to be displaced villagers, by violence, bribe, threats or court cases. While I was talking to some villagers of Pakhjola, one such situation had occurred in one of the three villages, where the road for transporting the bauxite is planned. At a moment when some villagers were drunk, people from Hindalco took them to a hotel, served them beef and tried to bribe them with Re 5,000 to get their fingerprint in order to make a road though the village possible.
Hard livelihood conditions
It is because of this lack of training in modern technology, only a negligible harvest is produced every year. Sometimes it is too little to meet their own needs, in such cases they have to buy what is needed in Semiliguda; but with what money? When there is surplus production it is sold but with very low profit. The villagers are unable to get a right price for their produce goods. Businessmen ask Rs five to six per kg of tomatoes, forcing the locals to sell them at Rs two to three per kg, which can hardly be called a fair price. When talking to them, they mentioned that big agricultural farms get subsidised, while small scale cultivators like them are relentlessly forced into the competitive market logic. According to them, the government should do something about this unequal situation.
Extra financial income is generated through daily labour, which is the second biggest economic activity in Pakhjola, followed by gathering the selling of forest products. Next to construction work, the villagers are employed in granite cutting. The leaves – mainly gathered by female workers – are sold for one rupee per bundle. The men collect firewood and carry them on their shoulders all the way to Semiliguda by foot, where they get Rs 80 to 100 for 40 kg. Hundreds of households in the nearby villages around Mali Parbat depend upon this kind of economic activity. Although they face many problems, the Paroja tribe of Pakhjola is destined to stop the proposed mining project on Mali Parbat. Let us wait and see what will happen the fate of these people living in 22 villages.
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