Dharavi, Asia’s largest shantytown, made famous by the movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, and home to nearly a million people, is slated for demolition and redevelopment by the Adani Group. With their homes and jobs at risk, the people are fighting back.
A dispossessed village leader describes the hardships faced by him and his family despite financial ‘compensation’ for land acquired for an Adani coal project. He warns other villagers facing the same fate from the next Adani coal project not to accept company promises but to keep fighting for their rights.
Ramal Kariyam, a village leader in India’s Hasdeo forests, describes how his community is standing up to Adani and the authorities, despite unwarranted detentions and an arson attack.
Sunita Porte, a tribal leader of the struggle to protect the Hasdeo forests from Adani’s coal mines, tells of her narrow escape from police on the day that other village leaders were taken into custody in the dead of night. While village leaders were detained without charge, the forest was felled by the Adani company.
Chaotic scenes as authorities try to strong-arm village approval for Adani coal-mine expansion. The Adivasi tribal residents of the Hasdeo Aranya forest in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh are dealing with a mix of good and bad news. On the one hand, they have reason to celebrate as an interim order by the Chhattisgarh State Scheduled Tribes (ST) Commission has temporarily put a stop to a coal mine being opened in the Parsa coal block, which is adjacent to the PEKB coal deposit.
In the eastern Indian state of Odisha, a struggle by tribal people against displacement by a railway that will carry Adani’s Carmichael coal to its power station at Godda has exposed the violation of rights conferred when India became an independent nation. This story describes how this controversy has its roots in an old Indian fault-line between territories governed by the British Empire, and ‘princely states’ – territories governed in colonial times by native Indian rulers. The violation of indigenous rights enshrined at independence in 1947 has prompted leaders to call for a secession of a former princely state from the state of Odisha.
Chintamani Sahu, 72, is spearheading a legal challenge to the Adani Group’s massive coal-power station at Godda. Having refused to surrender the land on which his ashram stands, he has led a group of refuseniks to file a case at the state’s High Court. They argue that the acquisition of land for the project was illegally carried out. Today, as the power plant’s skeleton hulks over his ashram, and the government stalls the case, Sahu is undeterred.
For over four years, a brave family has refused to hand over their land to Adani’s coal-power project at Godda in north-eastern India. The power plant is the intended destination for Adani’s Carmichael coal. In 2018, Sita Murmu fell at the feet of Adani officials as crops on her land were bulldozed. Last month, she and her family addressed a tribal convention near the construction site, inspiring a struggle to protect indigenous rights in the region. They remain impervious to official threats and enticements to surrender their ancestral lands to the colossal power plant.
Lush orchards in the Indian state of West Bengal have become the latest flashpoint along Adani’s chain of land grabs for exploiting coal from its Carmichael mine. The orchards, locally famous for their mangoes and lychees, are to be bulldozed to make way for a high-voltage transmission line taking electricity from Adani’s Godda power plant to Bangladesh. In early July 2022, a huge force of police and Adani supporters overwhelmed orchardists protesting at the destruction of their fruit trees. Several orchardists were injured. Some claim there is a conspiracy to have them murdered.
