MINING-INDIA: Woman Leads Tribals Against World's Steel Maker

Posted by admin on September 12, 2009

By Gagandeep Johar
NEW DELHI, Sep 12 (IPS) The fight against the world's biggest
steel maker, ArcelorMittal, is being waged from a tiny tea stall in
Ranchi, eastern India.

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 Ranchi's Club Road. Tea stalls are gathering
places in India.

"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 Ranchi, among Jharkhand's big cities, in March
2008 for weeks, AMARM was able to feed them day after day.

"The day we take outside funds, the movement will break," she
says.

Barla who has a masters in commerce from Ranchi University, is a self-made
woman. Born in Arahara village, Gumla district, she went to Ranchi at the
age of 13. Her father's fields were taken away by moneylenders,
and the family "disintegrated", she recounts.

"My family disintegrated because we couldn't fight the
moneylenders. My father had to work as a daily wager; my brother went to
Ranchi to work as a coolie (labourer). Even I worked for other farmers
before I left for Ranchi," she says.

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 India led by Medha Patkar, the 1992 winner of the Alternative
Nobel Prize.

"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.

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