INDIA:INDIA'S SUPREME Court has allowed two massive and controversial mining projects to proceed in eastern Orissa state which activists claim will displace thousands of tribal people, deprive them of their sustenance and devastate the environment.
The court on Friday permitted the British-listed mining giant Vedanta to mine bauxite from the Niyamgiri mountains and surrounding forests, which the Dongria Kondh tribe views as sacred, in order to produce aluminium to sustain the global car, chocolate- and food-wrapper industries.
In a separate ruling, South Korean steel firm Posco has been given the go-ahead for a $12 billion plant in the same state, despite continuing protests by environmental activists.
The court, however, has directed Vedanta to invest at least $2.5 million in the area to help the local tribes.
But leaders of the 8,000-strong Dongria Kondh said no amount of money could compensate for the damage to their sacred mountain and the forests that have sustained them for centuries.
They have vowed to "fight to the death rather than leave their sacred home".
"We are deeply connected with the mountain. It is home to our god Niyamraja," tribe member Jitu Jakeskia said.
"We will not allow the company to mine our land, our sacred place. Any compensation they offer is worthless to us," Jakeskia added, referring to the struggle between a powerless group of animists and a British FTSE-100 company.
The Indian and Orissa provincial governments both back the Vedanta plan and the Posco project to industrialise and exploit mineral resources in a region which they say is under-developed.
The Kondhs are members of one of India's most backward and isolated tribes. They believe in witch doctors, animal sacrifice and animism and have long opposed Vedanta's plans to construct the massive $800 million open-cast mine to source bauxite some 150 miles southwest of the provincial capital Bhubaneshwar.
The mountain is also the source of the Bansadhara river and a proposed elephant reserve and vital to ensure drinking water and irrigation to millions of people in surrounding areas. Vedanta rejects the tribal opposition, claiming the project would environmentally upgrade the area, besides bringing the tribes prosperity.
Norway, meanwhile, had already excluded Vedanta from its national pension fund investments, "due to an unacceptable risk of complicity in present and future severe environmental damage and systematic human rights violations".
Survival International, the London-based non-governmental organisation that supports tribal people globally, has urged Vedanta's British shareholders, such as Coutts Bank, Standard Life, Barclays Bank, Abbey National, HSBC and Middlesbrough and Wolverhampton councils, to disinvest unless it abandons its mining project in Orissa.
"The Supreme Court ruling is a devastating blow not just to the Dongria Kondh, but to all of India's tribal peoples," Survival's director Stephen Corry said.
"International and constitutional rights are being trampled for the sole benefit of distant shareholders."