For months, they have been living in fear. The people of Banteji, a small tribal village amid the rolling green mountains deep in India’s Odisha state, have lived here for generations. Yet now most only return home for essentials and spend the night sleeping in the jungle. The police raids and violence, they say, could come again at any time.
Like so many of India’s tribal communities, known as Adivasis, the people here in the district of Rayagada live in extreme poverty, with little access to education and healthcare. The jungle and hills that surround them also sustain them, as they have done for hundreds of years, providing food, livelihoods, medicines, materials to build their homes and places to graze their animals. These mountains are also their gods.
Yet under new plans, this verdant, untouched landscape of the Eastern Ghats will soon become home to a vast opencast mine to extract bauxite, the main material used to make aluminium. While demand for aluminium globally is at an all-time high, mining for bauxite is notoriously destructive to the environment and known for making areas virtually inhospitable: stripping away forests, poisoning and disrupting water supplies and generating huge amounts of dust and debris.
Thousands of Adivasis living in the villages in the foothills of the Sijimali hill range, where the mine is due to be built, have risen up in protest. In response they say they have been hit by a campaign of violence, intimidation, arbitrary arrest, judicial torture and harassment by police and officials working for the company tasked with setting up the mine. One environmental activist was kidnapped minutes before he was due to make a press statement, and held blindfolded in a van for several hours, he alleges by police. More than 20 people from the village are still being held in jail, where they say they are regularly beaten by police.
“They are calling us kidnappers and terrorists but we are just simple Adivasis asking for our rights,” said Bhukar Dhan Naik, 55, one of almost 100 people named in a police case against protesters, charges he alleges are false.
“If we allow mining this time, it will not only end us but also be the end to our future generations. If they displace us from here, where will we go? Why should we sacrifice everything so that a rich company can get richer?”
Rayagada district is no stranger to the threat of mining; for decades, corporations have had their eyes on the rich bauxite reserves, worth tens of billions of dollars, that lie beneath its ancient forests.
In the 1990s, plans were made to begin mining Sijimali, but local people put up such fierce resistance that the company eventually backed off. In nearby Niyamgiri, protests against bauxite mining sparked one of India’s largest lands rights movements, resulting in mining being banned in the area and a ruling by the supreme court in 2013 that no new mine could go ahead anywhere in India without the permission of the local community council, known as the gram sabha, as enshrined in India’s forest rights act.
But activists say the mining project is being pushed through amid an erosion of environmental laws and regulations by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) to the benefit of big corporations. Environmental activists are also being targeted under terrorism laws, and this month more than 60 environmentalists were raided in the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh.
In July, controversial amendments to forest protection laws were passed that enable corporations to bypass community consent to build projects on vast tracts of old forest such as Sijimali. Vedanta, which was granted the Sijimali mine project in February by the state government, run by the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) party, giving the mining company access to 311m tonnes of bauxite, is reported to have donated millions of dollars to the BJP since the party came to power in 2014.
When asked to comment on the protests against the mine, Prafulla Kumar Mallik, the Odisha state minister for steel and mining, who is with the BJD said only he had “no reports regarding this” and ended the call.
Vedanta recruited a local company, Mythri infrastructure and mining, to set up and operate the mine; an agreement, say locals, “to do their dirty work”. It was only the arrival of officials from Mythri in villages such as Banteji that gave local people the first scent that trouble was upon them. They announced to the villagers that mining would begin soon, and if they cooperated, each household would get 1,500 rupees (£15) a month. The mines would bring employment and development, promised Mythri, and would mean new schools and hospitals and roads would be built.
Few in the community were won over. Yet as their resistance strengthened, so too, they say, did the harassment by police and the company. They allege that in July, after some villagers attempted to file a police complaint against Mythri officials, police arrived in the village the next morning and began beating several of the men. Villagers said Mythri officials would also send in their own men to threaten and harass them. Top officials at Mythri did not respond to requests for comment.
In August, hundreds of villagers confronted 20 officials from Mythri who had arrived to visit the mining site. According to accounts of those present, they prevented the officials from boarding their vehicles and made them walk 6 miles back down the mountain.
“This was a peaceful protest,” said Kartik Naik, 33, who was present. “We handed the officials over to police without any violence and no one was harmed.” As the villagers had demanded, the Mythri officials also signed a piece of paper pledging no mining would go ahead without local consent.
Yet overnight a police report was filed alleging a very different version of events. According to this report, the villagers arrived armed with “deadly weapons like axes, lathis and swords … the mob then turned violent and they manhandled us with a deadly weapon. They also swung axes to kill [Mythri officials].” It also accused the villagers of kidnapping the officials and holding them for ransom, and throwing stones. Almost 100 local people were named in the report, including three dead people.
Over the following nights, violent police raids on the villages began. Women said they were beaten before their husbands were dragged away, and men in the village showed bruises where they said they had been hit. A total of 22 were picked up and remain behind bars.
According to family members who have visited them, senior figures from Mythri have visited the jail twice to issue threats to either cooperate with the mine or face indefinite time in prison and harassment of their families. They also allege those detained have endured violence at the hands of the police.
“They have been torturing them in jail,” said Naik, whose brother Umakant Naik, 28, was among those arrested. “They have been tying them by their hands and beating them, then tying them by their feet and hanging them upside down and beating them.”
He added: “The more we fight and protest to protect our forests, the worse they get tortured in jail, so we are powerless. Yet the situation is so bad we have no options but to keep fighting, even if it takes our lives.”
This week hundreds of villagers flocked to a government public hearing to express their opposition to the mine, despite alleged attempts by police to stop many attending.
Repeated efforts to contact the superintendent of Rayagada police, Vivekanand Sharma, were ignored, and his office later blocked the Guardian’s calls.
The wives of those in jail said they had been under constant pressure from company officials, who visit the villages almost every day with promises that bail will be arranged instantly if their husbands agree to stop protesting. Fulmuti Mahji’s husband was among those arrested and was allegedly so badly beaten by police during his arrest he was briefly taken to hospital and has been told he may not walk again. She laid out the untouched sacks of potatoes, chilli, lentils, rice, onions and 1,500 rupees in cash that had been delivered by Mythri officials.
“They told us if we don’t take it, then they won’t release my husband and he will be tortured in jail,” she said. “We are going starving but I will not touch this food. Even if our husbands die in jail, we will still not compromise.” Pointing to the green mountains that cradle the village, she added: “There is our courage.”
A Vedanta Aluminium spokesperson said there was “tremendous support” for the project from local population in the name of development and that its “core purpose is to work in harmony with our host communities guided by the extant norms and regulations of the land”.
Vedanta added that “maintenance of law and order is a state subject, and the state acts solely to uphold the same”.
Environmental activists say that when they have tried to speak out, they too have been silenced. Prafulla Samantara, an award-winning activist from Odisha, was waiting at his hotel room in Rayagada on 29 August, ready to address a press conference about the mine project, when several men barged in, tied his hands behind his back, put a bag over his eyes and dragged him out into a vehicle, where they held him for several hours.
Samantara alleges he was kidnapped by police as the men had identified themselves as officers to the hotel reception, and he says police have done nothing to investigate the incident. The police could not be reached for comment.
“It is part of a campaign of state-sponsored terrorism to crush the tribal communities who rightfully own this land and hand it over to private corporations,” said Samantara, who said they would take the fight against Vedanta up to India’s highest courts.
Nowhere is the reality of bauxite mining’s impact so starkly visible as in the tribal villages adjacent to Baphlimali, another peak in Rayagada district where a mine operated by Utkal Alumina International was opened in 2006. People in Paikakupakhal village say they were wooed with promises of jobs, development, hospitals and roads, but they say barely any have materialised and they are more impoverished than ever.
According to the villagers a few taps were installed but no water flows from them, the nearby river they depend on has become contaminated by mine debris and their crops of rice and millet have been poisoned by the constant blasting. Forests have been cut down, cutting the people off from their traditional sources of food and livelihoods. Children running along the narrow muddy village paths were allegedly often covered in bumpy rashes and many adults suffered breathing difficulties.
Utkal Alumina said in a statement there was “absolutely no merit in the allegations”. A spokesperson said the company was “committed to the ecosystem and society in and around its manufacturing operations” and was “deeply engaged with the community with a view to improving every aspect of their life including health, livelihood and education”.
Yet the villagers who have been protesting for longer than a decade at the lack of jobs and development allege they face almost weekly violence from police. Thousands of police cases and court summons have been filed against them, targeting even a 10-year-old child and the village elders in their 80s.
“This mine has destroyed our lives, we are treated worse than animals and have nothing but broken promises and bruises from police,” said Ghenua Naik, 40, who was recently jailed for taking part in a protest. “A new mine must be fought off at any cost.”
• This article was amended on 12 November 2023. The Odisha state government is run by the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) party, not by the Bharatiya Janata (BJP) party; and Prafulla Kumar Mallik is a member of the former, not the latter.
