MINING-INDIA:
Woman Leads Tribals
Against World's Steel Maker
By Gagandeep Johar
NEW DELHI, Sep 12, 2009 (IPS) - The fight against the
world's biggest steel maker, ArcelorMittal, is being waged from a tiny tea
stall in Ranchi, eastern
It is run by Dayamani Barla, a journalist and activist, and
is the office of the Adivasi Moolvaasi Ashthitva Raksha Manch (AMARM), which
loosely translates as a platform for the protection of the rights and identity
of indigenous peoples.
As AMARM'S convenor, Barla, in her forties, is at the
forefront of a campaign to stop an 8.2 billion dollar steel plant project by
transnational ArcelorMittal that will uproot 40 villages and 70,000 indigenous
people in mineral-rich Jharkhand state.
The global steel giant has been allocated vast coal blocks
and iron ore sites. Dense forests and rivers will be obliterated by the mining.
Ancient ways of life practiced by tribals will be lost forever.
"The project will displace not just 70,000 aboriginals
but 70,000 generations of people," says Barla. "Our culture, social
values are linked to our jungles and cannot be replaced."
The project to build one of the world’s biggest steel mills
was launched by stealth in 2005. Unknown to villagers, ArcelorMittal, which
wants 12,000 acres of land, conducted a land survey.
Barla, who has written on tribal and Dalit rights issues
for 10 years in Prabhat Khabar, an influential Hindi-language daily, stumbled
on a map of Jharkhand in a block officer's cabin, where 40 villages, including
her own, were marked. Further investigations revealed the markings constituted
the project area of a proposed steel plant.
For four years, Barla has travelled from village to village
alerting villagers of their impending displacement. "We want development
but not at our cost," she is emphatic. "I have worked against
displacement for a long time now and my research shows displaced people don’t
have proper lives. They loose their sense of belonging."
In the nineties, Barla was involved with the massive
protests against the ambitious Koel-Karo hydropower project in Jharkhand. Faced
with unrelenting opposition, the government was forced to shelve the plan in
2000.
Jharkhand's tribals are well acquainted with the
irreversibility of displacement. A power project in the early sixties - the
state-run Heavy Engineering Corporation in the Hatiya region, set up in
collaboration with Soviet and German help - had uprooted 36 villages belonging
to the Uraanv, Munda and Khadia 'adivasis’ (indigenous people). The villagers
are still rootless. Only 5 percent of people uprooted by so-called development
projects in Jharkhand have ever been resettled, says Barla.
The pressure on tribal and forest lands has multiplied
since the nineties, when India opened its economy and international and Indian
industries flocked to Jharkhand to exploit its mineral wealth,
AMARM has taken an oath that no village will be uprooted by
ArcelorMittal. The next move will be litigation against the transnational
giant, she says, but doesn’t divulge details.
Barla, and her husband Nelson who previously owned a paan
(betel leaves) stall, plot strategy with activist comrades in their tea
stall-cum-office, Jharkhand Hotel on
"Every villager contributes one muthi (fist) of rice
and one rupee, each time a mass agitation is planned," says Barla. When 15,000
people camped in
"The day we take outside funds, the movement will
break," she says.
Barla who has a masters in commerce from
"My family disintegrated because we couldn't fight the
moneylenders. My father had to work as a daily wager; my brother went to
For the first two years in the unfamiliar city, she lived
with her brother in a cattle shed - the only thing they could afford - and
scraped together a living as a domestic worker. She washed dishes and mopped
floors before and after school in several houses, she says. When she completed
grade 10 (in 1984) she began tutoring children at home - stopping only when she
graduated from college.
The rigours of her early life have given her confidence to
pursue her dream, she says.
Barla became a journalist because "Dalit, tribal and
women's issues were not really addressed in the media," she says. She
dedicated her life in the cause of her people who, she says, have suffered
because of lack of education.
"I was clear from the very beginning that I want to
fight for my people. My parents were exploited because they were not educated
and were uninformed. I didn’t want anybody in my community to suffer for not
being educated."
Barla’s entry in her blog on Mar. 19, 2009 says: "We
need food grains, not steel. Jharkhand is ours not a jagir (fiefdom) of any
company. We want development, not industry."
Inevitably AMARM's fight is compared with the Narmada
Bachao Andolan (NBA), the long-running movement to save the Narmada river in
central
"Our movement is different from NBA's in the sense
that there was no protest in the beginning but it happened later over the
height of the dam," she says. "Here we are protesting from the very
beginning that we will not give our land on any condition."
"Ek inch bhi zameen nahi denge (We won't give even an
inch of our land)," she concludes. (END)
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