"There will be the falling away in India of much of the material
suffering that has been brought on a troubled people"
Edgar Cayce, Earth Changes Prophecies
Fatal Clash at Mill Site Shows Perils of India's Rise
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
KALINGANAGAR INDUSTRIAL AREA, India, Jan. 13 - On the first Monday
morning of the year, four bulldozers, accompanied by nearly 300 police
officers, arrived on a rocky patch of farmland on the edge of a wooded
village and began leveling the earth. It was meant to be the first step
in the construction of India's third-largest steel mill.
Soon, from the bowels of the wooded village came an army of resistance.
Armed with scythes and swords, stones and sticks - and according to the
police, bows and arrows - the indigenous people who live on these lands
in eastern India advanced toward the police line by the hundreds.
Exactly what happened next is a matter of contention, except that by
the day's end, the land was littered with the gore of more than a dozen
dead and a fury that lingers.
"We will not leave our land," Chakradhar Haibru, a wiry, stern-faced
leader of the indigenous people, vowed in an interview. "They are
trying to turn us into beggars."
Reminiscent of the peasant uprisings in China, the standoff here has
reverberated across the country and snowballed into a closely watched
political storm.
The confrontation is effectively a local territorial dispute, over
whether and how one of India's most prominent industrial conglomerates,
Tata, will build a plant on land that its current occupants, mostly
indigenous villagers, refuse to vacate. But the dispute also raises a
far wider challenge for India: how to balance industrial growth against
the demands of its most marginalized citizens.
Orissa, the mineral-rich state where the clash took place, is one of
India's most stellar examples of the economic boom of recent years,
just as it is among the most left-behind states, and its unprecedented
growth spurt has mirrored the two faces of India's ambitions.
In 2005, Orissa attracted the largest foreign investment ever in India,
with the promise of a $12 billion steel plant by Posco, of South Korea.
The same year, Orissa also held the record for the highest rate of
poverty in India, which included nearly half its population, or 17
million people. How Orissa deals with the current crisis bears broader
lessons for other states. As in much of eastern and central India, the
land here is chockful of iron ore, coal and copper and is also home to
tribal people known here as adivasis.
But today the area's defiant villagers are blocking a major road that
connects iron mines to the state's main port on the Bay of Bengal, and
it is no longer safe for the police to venture into tribal villages.
The Congress Party, which rules the central government but plays
opposition here in Orissa state, has seized on the episode, flying in
its party president, Sonia Gandhi, to console grieving tribal villagers
- an important constituency for the party. Orissa authorities privately
grumble that Maoist guerrillas, resurgent across the tribal belt, had a
hand in the troubles.
Since the Jan. 2 confrontation, Naveen Patnaik, the Orissa chief
minister, has promised to revise the state relief policy for villagers
displaced by new industry. In an interview in his office in the state
capital, Bhubaneshwar, he repeatedly called the incident "tragic," but
declined to comment on how it developed, or how it could be calmed. He
said he would visit the affected area once "normalcy is restored."
"I certainly hope it will not affect industry that wish to come up
here," he said.
Orissa began grooming itself as the country's steel hub in the early
1990's, shortly after the Indian economy opened up. Within a few years,
steel makers began pouring in to what the government demarcated as the
13,000-acre Kalinganagar Industrial Area, drawn by the rich deposits of
iron and chromium in the nearby hills, an abundance of water, a nearby
seaport and a web of railways and roads.
The new investments have already given Orissa a radical makeover. New
buildings have been erected in the capital, potholed highways in the
interior have been repaired and widened, and the smokestacks of steel
and aluminum factories have sprung up across this hardscrabble land.
The blueprint for future development envisions an airstrip and a new
township here in Kalinganagar, along with two new ports on the coast.
Tata's would-be plant at Kalinganagar is slated to produce six million
tons of steel a year. Further east, the proposed Posco mill would
generate double that amount.
A report by Morgan Stanley predicts that the state could draw $30
billion to $40 billion in new investments over the next five years. But
that industrial boom has not yet brought new schools and hospitals to
the subsistence farmers who live here. One village that sits on the
Tata land still has no electricity. Not least, at the heart of the
industrial surge has been a high-pitched contest over rural lands.
On paper, at least, the government has acquired the land that makes up
the Kalinganagar Industrial Area. On paper, too, the government has
awarded varying amounts of compensation to some of the roughly 1,800
families who have been displaced, though the state's industrial
development agency now says an estimated 1,500 families are yet to be
fully compensated. All plants in the industrial area are obliged to
employ one member of each family displaced, but not all those jobs have
yet materialized, the agency adds.
In Tata's case, the company says it paid the government a handsome $16
million for the 2,000-acre property where it wants to build its mill
over a year ago. That land now officially belongs to the company.
The government says compensation was granted to eligible villagers more
than a decade ago. They were allowed to continue to live and work on
the land, while negotiations went on with a number of companies that
expressed interest in setting up in the area, but then backed out.
The villagers acknowledge that some of them got paid. Mr. Haibru, the
village leader in Gobarghati, reaped $26,000 in compensation for his 28
acres, for instance. But those without legal claims to the land - and
there seem to be a great many among the villagers here - got little or
nothing. Some seem unaware that the land now belongs to Tata. Others
are not entirely sure exactly what benefits they are entitled to.
Most here seem convinced of three things, however. First, that whatever
relief they have received is not enough in exchange for abandoning
their land forever. Second, that considering Kalinganagar's ambitions,
their sorry patches of land will soon be worth a great deal more than
what they have been offered. And third, that the factories that have
mushroomed across their lands have delivered few opportunities to their
communities.
But if the people here were once open to negotiation, the Jan. 2
incident has left them seething. "If we die, we die," spat Amba Tiria,
in the village of Champakoila, on the edge of the battlefield. "We will
not leave our land. We're dying anyway."
To anyone following the currents here, what ultimately unfolded here
should not have been unexpected. Industrial projects have faced
increasingly militant protests over the last year. Tata's plans to
build a fence around its property, for instance, encountered furious
villagers last May, and in the confrontation, a local government
administrator's front teeth were knocked out.
In the latest standoff, the residents of Champakoila saw the first
bulldozers on the horizon. Word quickly spread from village to village.
Men, women and children streamed out of their homes and marched toward
the bulldozers. "Shut it down, shut it down," they yelled, and they
advanced toward the police line.
Several villagers, interviewed separately, said they had wanted to lay
down before the bulldozers, to persuade Tata to withdraw its machines.
They said they did not imagine the police would fire, killing 12
people, including a 12-year-old boy and a woman who had gone to the
fields that morning to relieve herself.
More than 30 villagers were injured; some had been shot in the back.
One police officer was hacked to death; 32 others were injured. A few
days later came a macabre coda: it turned out that the hands of six
corpses had been chopped off. The police blamed doctors performing the
autopsy.
The superintendent of police has been suspended, pending a government
inquiry, though the police insist they had been prepared to act with
restraint. Each 30-man platoon was allowed only three rifles.
Protesters were warned to step back. Tear gas, followed by stun
grenades, followed by rubber bullets were fired to disperse the crowd.
The villagers said they had no idea these things were precursors to
gunshots.
The police say they fired in "self-defense" and only after coming under
attack. The villagers dispute this. Some say they were shot as they
turned around and tried to flee.
For now, Tata's Kalinganagar project has been delayed. But neither
Orissa government officials nor Tata seem deterred. Tata's chief of
communication, Sanjay Choudhry, blamed "extremist activity" for the
violence and said the company had no plans to pull out of the project.
He maintained that Tata had aided other communities in which it works
and would seek to do the same here.
"Industrialization is the best way to improve quality of life,
especially of the tribal people," Mr. Choudhry said. "We're not
thinking of backing out. We'll work with the government and tribal
people and see if there's a way out, a proper way of doing this."
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