Company builds road to the mine before getting final forest clearances; Battle for Niyamgiri: Vedanta faces tribal ire

Financial Express, March 27, 2010
Dilip Bisoi

Lanjigarh, Orissa: Way before final forest clearances for the bauxite mining project in Orissa’s remote Niyamgiri hills roll in, mining giant Vedanta Resources has completed the construction of the road to the mines. Also being built is the infrastructure for a conveyor belt that will carry the bauxite from the hills to its refinery plant on the foothills—we counted 47 pillars.


Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh had on March 13 said Vedanta was found to have violated norms on its Orissa projects, a statement the Orissa mines minister dismissed as preposterous and biased.

But once we reach Lanjigarh— it takes us 10 hours to travel 480 odd km because the roads are bad and narrow most of the way—we see the construction that has taken place ––the road to the mine, and the pillars. Lanjigarh and the Niyamgiri hills range are home to a near-extinct tribe, the Dongria Kandhs, of whom only 8,000 odd remain. They are not organised, unlike the Posco movement. But with environmentalists and activists taking up the issue Vedanta has been under pressure to stop construction.Why is the bauxite from the Niyamgiri hills important to Vedanta? It needs the raw material for its one-million-tonne alumina project in Lanjigarh. At the moment the bauxite is being sourced from Chhattisgarh and other states.

The road and pillars have come up over a stretch of 74 metres, which the government says is no man’s land. But the chief operating officer of Vedanta Aluminium, Mukesh Kumar, told FE the company has purchased the 74 metres from a private party. He also said the conveyor belt and the mine access road have come up on the company’s own land and there is no violation of MoEF guidelines. Kalahandi collector R Santhangopal, too, says there is no construction now.

But Usha Ramanathan, head of a three-member committee appointed by the Union ministry of environment and forests, says settlement of rights is incomplete so no construction should have started. Her committee “is firm in its view that forest-dwellers’ rights should be settled on a priority basis before granting stage-2 forest clearance to Vedanta”.