Congress figurehead, Rahul Gandhi, has said tribal protests against Adani’s coal mines in the Hasdeo forests are ‘justified’. Results of his work behind the scenes on the ‘problem’ should be ‘visible in a couple of weeks.’
In Sundergarh district of northern Odisha, over 700 Adivasi families are facing displacement due to construction of a railway line that will facilitate the transport of coal from Dhamra port for use in the Adani group’s under-construction power plant in Godda, Jharkhand.
Civil society member, however, feel this is still too short a period for any meaningful public consultations on wide-ranging structural reforms in the mines and mineral sector. Also, it excludes the affected communities.
In India, a conflict between various state governments and the central Modi government is developing over Modi’s determination to proceed with a controversial auction of 41 coal blocks. In the state of Chhattisgarh, a proposed elephant reserve in the Hasdeo Aranya forest could prove crucial to whether coal mining in these biodiverse forests proceeds. But if the reserve is compromised to enable mining it will worsen human-elephant conflict for the indigenous Adivasis.
