RALLY OF ANTI-DISPLACEMENT MOVEMENTS FROM ALL CHHATTISGARH IN RAIPUR ON 6TH OCTOBER.

The unrelenting loot of the abundant mineral resources of Chhattisgarh – iron ore, coal, limestone, bauxite, and even diamond and uranium has meant the total stranglehold of big corporates – foreign and Indian – over the State’s bureaucracy, polity, and even judiciary.

Multinationals Holcim and Lafarge have gobbled up the Indian cement companies and persist in earning super profits from the illegal exploitation of contract labour; Vedanta can get away with, and is in fact ably assisted by the State administration in, the criminal cover up of murder by negligence of nearly a hundred workers in a recent chimney collapse; Jindal and Monnet specialise in managing the pollution control department and so the Raigarh district, labouring under black clouds, drying water sources and disappearing forest cover, sees public hearing after public hearing where the public is never heard and clearances are granted, (Jairam Ramesh honestly called these environmental public hearings “match fixing” by the companies); a rash of sponge iron factories – mushroom in Raipur; Tata and Essar, with a little help from Collector Sahab, manipulate gram sabhas in the scheduled areas in gross violation of the PESA Act and employ every trick in the game to coerce people to accept compensations for land.

And in Bastar, where the huge ground clearing of 644 villages for “development by mining companies” is being resisted by lakhs of displaced adivasis, living in the jungles and therefore declared “outlawed”, who are struggling for their lands and livelihoods, the State is preparing to launch a full scale war ( now there is even talk of air strikes and American assistance) .

For the toiling people of Chhattisgarh, particularly the peasants and adivasis, this integration into the imperial loot machine that is called ‘development’, has meant displacement on an unimaginable scale. The whole of Raigarh district is dotted with heavily pollu