“Jharkhand”, meaning the land of natural forest, is a state of tribal origin in Eastern India. However, if the lush green forest was a boon for the indigenous Adivasi population for centuries, the mineral reserves beneath the earth, proves to be their destruction today. Industrialization has led to rapid depletion of forest cover, degradation and pollution of environment and massive displacement of around 8 million native forest dwellers from their ancestral land of Adivasis under the garb of various 'development' projects as dams, coal, iron, uranium mining and other industries, during the last 150 years (when coal mining was commenced by the British). Adivasi movement struggles to stop this.

The pure natural water sources are drying up have become polluted, even by radio-active waste, like in Jadugoda, where the uranium mine and its tailing dam are located. There have been several bursts of the pipe-lines which carry the radio-active uranium tailing waste, and the poisonous waste has leaked to Adivasi habitats. (in photo an old Adivasi shows the location of the burst in the pipe). The percentage of health risks in the area are shown to be higher than elsewhere.

World's largest steel corporate Arcelor Mittal aims now to set up in Jarkhand by 9.3 billion $ investment a huge steel plant with 12 million tons annual capacity and with a 2,500-MW power plant. This would lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Adivasis. Under mining the lands give for them much less work and livelihood than what they used to get from the lands earlier. While destroying Adivasis' natural sources of livelihood, the mining industry does not even provide alternative decent employment for Adivasis. Adivasis can only wait when the truck full of their ancestral soil’s unrefined stones of iron ore drives by and small pieces of stones with some iron drop to the roadside. Then they use their hands and a sieve to try whether they can find some particles of iron ore. This is Adivasi share of mining in the soil of their own ancestral lands.

On question of sharing with tribals the profits from their ancestral lands, Mittal said: “it’s ridiculous to share the profit with people who don’t know what to do with it”. As black gases from the factory chimneys pollute the air and everything, Mittal profits also by its 100 million euro carbon fund launched now ”to strategically engage in the carbon market and promote climate friendly solutions... relevant for the steel industry”. So even the air - our natural right to our common life-breath together with the plants, trees and all life - is transferred into a product available only for those who have money to buy.

So tribals oppose such investments to 'tribal development' and even the life of such Adivasis, like Dayamani Barla (photo above), who raise the voice of Adivasis against Mittal, has been threatened. “Neither steel nor iron, we want food grains, not factories but forest” echoes aloud among Adivasis, whose livelihood, identity, dignity, cultural autonomy and justice are built on land, forest and water.

We need to strengthen the rights of land, forest, water, air and of the whole Earth to be lived and treated by such practices and ways to understand and treat Earth’s life, which are adapted indigenously to Earth's own regeneration and renewal of its life. Adivasis should have thus primary user rights in the areas they have traditionally used and sustained - to continue to treat water, sunlight, trees and wind indigenously as our sisters or ancestors, rather than as mere energy and raw-material for industrial constructs. They should have right to use sustainably the Earth according to how it is our mother, to whose life we also belong - rather than as if the Earth would belong to us as a mere chemical composition.