Will the leaders of this country learn to ensure that resources that belong to the people do not benefit only a select few?
The most underprivileged sections of Indian society, in particular, indigenous communities, happen to live in areas that contain the most expensive minerals.
Not coincidentally, in these regions are located the country’s best, biologically-diverse forests and water systems. These lands and forests not only provide livelihood to tribal peoples -- their symbiotic bonds with the jal, jangal and jamin around them are as old as humanity itself.
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| Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |
These territories also happen to be tracts where left-wing extremists (including Naxalites and Maoists) – repeatedly described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the nation’s biggest internal security threat -- are actively engaged in conflicts with India’s police and para-military forces. In India’s wealthiest lands reside the country’s worst-off people who have not gained from mining activities or implementation of so-called development projects. On the contrary, it can be argued that mining has resulted in a further deterioration of the conditions in which tribals live and that these projects have robbed them of their means of sustenance.
Three states, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, together account for 70 per cent of India’s total reserves of coal, 80 per cent of the best quality of iron ore available in the country, 60 per cent of its bauxite and virtually all its chromite reserves. The forest cover in these three states is above the national average and all three provinces have population profiles that are dominated by tribals and those belonging to scheduled castes.
It was estimated in a 2008 publication by the Centre for Science and Environment, Rich Lands, Poor People: Is ‘Sustainable’ Mining Possible?, that an estimated 1,64,000 hectares of forest land have been lost to mining over the last six decades. Entire districts have been denuded of their forests, three examples being Jajpur in Orissa, Dhanbad in Jharkhand and Bardhaman in West Bengal. Yet, we continue to traverse this path in the name of ‘development’.
The kind of corruption and venality that has been associated with mining recently made headlines. Former Chief Minister of Jharkhand Madhu Koda started out as a menial laborer in a coal mine, then became an independent member of the legislative assembly and after barely three years in a position of power and authority, allegedly became the owner of unimaginable wealth. He and his cronies reportedly even bought mines in African nations, before tax officials unearthed some of the loot he and his collaborators reportedly stashed away.
Consider the ‘Gali’ Reddy brothers, Janardhan, Karunakar and Somashekhar, whose political influence extends beyond their party (the Bharatiya Janata Party) and their state (Karnataka). Once upon a time in not-too-distant past, mining magnates used to be satisfied funding politicians. Now they are themselves ‘elected representatives of the people’. Janardhan Reddy’s clout extends far beyond the Karnataka tourism department which he heads as minister – he, his relatives and his associates caused a crisis in the B.S. Yediyurappa government in November.
It is often pointed out that the ‘red corridor’ that traverses through Nepal, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, stretches all the way from Pashupati to Tirupati, from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. It is clearly not a matter of chance that inequalities of income and wealth are most apparent in these regions. It is also not surprising that government of India as well as state governments are desperately trying to ‘eradicate’ the ‘menace’ of Maoism and Naxalism from precisely these areas that are being greedily eyed by mining conglomerates of all kinds, public and private, domestic and multinational.
The presence of valuable natural resources have attracted modern-day mercenaries who collude with powerful local elites to grab the gifts of nature, in the process exploiting local populations and exacerbating their poverty. The phrase ‘resource curse’ was first used by Richard M. Auty in Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis (Routledge, 1993). The term has subsequently been used widely in academic texts and popular journalism to describe a common phenomenon wherein the presence of natural resources – especially in developing countries, whose economies depend on minerals or forest wealth -- has contributed to corruption, conflict and absence of democratic governance.
Joseph Stiglitz, in his book Making Globalization Work (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2006) has devoted an entire chapter to the topic entitled ‘Lifting the Resource Curse’. He says the resources are both the object of the conflict and the source of the financial wherewithal that enables the conflict to go on: "Sadly, in the struggle to get as big a share of the pile as possible, the size of the pile itself shrinks as wealth is destroyed in the fighting. Nowhere is this aspect of the resource curse more evident than in parts of Africa, exemplified by the heinous fighting between government and rebels in Sierra Leone during the 1990s that killed 75,000 people and left 20,000 amputees, 2 million displaced people, and large numbers of children psychologically damaged by having been forced into combat, or worse."
Is India going the way of certain African nations? Will the leaders of this country learn from the mistakes committed by others and ensure that resources that belong to the people – from natural gas in the Krishna-Godavari basin (over which the Ambani brothers are squabbling) to bauxite in Niyamgiri, Orissa (where the Vedanta Resources/Sterlite group wants to set up the world’s largest aluminium manufacturing complex) – do not benefit only a select few?
Unless the government ensures that those who lose land are properly rehabilitated and compensated, sustainable mining will never be possible. This is not going to be easy since attitudes have hardened on both sides and local people in mineral-rich districts have completely lost faith in the promises and pronouncements made by politicians and bureaucrats who work under them. From Dantewada in Chhattisgarh to Lalgarh in West Bengal and Gadhchiroli in Maharashtra, the existence of any form of government disappears soon after one leaves whatever road that exists in these parts of the country.
Getting out of this vicious cycle of conflict and confrontation is going to be a long and arduous exercise. Till then, the generosities of Mother Nature will not be a blessing but a curse on the most marginalized people who inhabit her bosom.
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
The author is an educator, an economic analyst and a journalist with over 30 years of experience in various media—print, radio, television, Internet and documentary cinema.
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