Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel by Felix Padel and Samarendra Das

(Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi 2010)

Reviewed by Madhusree Mukerjee The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains, Gandhi had observed in 1928. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. The locusts have arrived, and they are stripping bare the heartland of India. In Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel, anthropologist Felix Padel and film-maker Samarendra Das describe a plunder of resources in the mineral-rich Indian states of Orissa, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh on a scale so horrific as to recall the worst excesses of colonialism. The forests, mountains and peoples of central India are being devastated so that entrepreneurs can get at the aluminium, iron, coal and other minerals underfootto earn unprecedented profits for themselves, their financial backers, and the ministers and civil servants they suborn. This book fascinates with the exceptional depth of its research and the unforgettable lesson it imparts on the phenomenon of resource extraction in all its globalized complexity and local perversity. And it terrifies by peeling off layer after layer of propaganda to reveal how feeble a control the citizens of even a democracy may have over their own destinies. No longer is the adivasi (or indigenous Indian) free to decide on what mountain slope she will build her hut, what she will plant on her farm, from which forest glen she will gather firewood, from which crystal stream she will collect water, and what she will feed her childrenhow, indeed, she will live. Whether she will be allowed to live at all and on what terms are being decided by bankers in New York, Washington, or London; by CEOs of extractive industries who live anywhere in the world they choose, which is never near the ravaged landscapes where they mine; and by ministers and civil servants in New Delhi or Bhubaneswar or Ranchi or Raipur. These men have decided that the aboriginal way of life has to become extinct, in order to make way for an India that will replicate the United States in its wealth, power, strip-mall homogeneity and social inequityas well as its history of appropriation of indigenous lands.

The aluminum industry depends primarily on bauxite, a porous rock that caps mountains, some of the highest and most pristine of which are in Orissa. Bauxite being porous, it retains water, so that the sides and often the summits of these mountains are densely forested; moreover, the bauxite slowly releases the water in the summer, in clear streams that nourish the fields and bodies of the peoples who live on these mountains, and, further downstream, feed the regions major rivers. Out of more than 20 mountains in Orissa and Andhra, mining is planned or has started on all. Padel and Das relate in gory detail the reality of open-cast aluminum mining as it is being practiced in India today. To strip the old-growth forest off the summits and sides of mountains; to use explosives to blow up the mountaintops themselves; to herd the people who live on the hillswho have cherished and nurtured their unique environment for millenniainto settlements that sometimes resemble concentration camps; to build dams for supplying the enormous quantities of water required to smelt aluminum (almost 1,400 tons of water for every ton of the metal), drowning neighboring valleys and villages; to crush, refine, and smelt, leaving behind toxic smoke that chokes lungs, weakens bones and bleaches crops, as well as caustic, radioactive red sludge that leaches into rivers and kills fish, along with the occasional humanto the eyes of the uninitiated, such activities would seem to be ecocide and (what the authors call) cultural genocide. In Incredible India, it goes by the name of development, economic growth, or even poverty reduction, despite pervasive documentation of a drastic fall in the living standards of the displaced. Salu Majhi of Kucheipadar, whose village is making way to an aluminum refinery, asks in song:

Who will speak for us? They are coming With marching legs and arms They are crying to buy our land Where will we go? Oh are you taking us to paradise?

Some of the last peoples on earth who live sustainably and self-sufficiently are being forcibly deprived of their lifestyles and turned into desperate vagrants. Even leaving aside the cultural costwhich cannot be measured in monetary terms aluminum production is a fundamentally uneconomic activity, as Padel and Das show. In an unusually frank 1951 report, analyst Dewey Anderson observed that, although aluminum is of great strategic importance to modern defense forces and therefore to the U.S. government, the immense social and environmental damage that its production entails are such that the U.S. cannot any longer afford to make aluminum of it can be obtained in large enough quantities and on favorable price terms from other sources. As a result of such considerations, the industry has gradually relocated to the most corrupt and mineral-rich corners of the earth. The rulers of impoverished countries and provinces are being persuaded by corporate heads, and their even more influential political and financial backers, to underwrite aluminum production by providing cheap bauxite, grossly underpriced water and electricity for the refineries and smelters, as well as free roads, railways and brand-new ports for exporting the metal. Often this infrastructure is financed by massive loans, placing the country or province (such as Orissa) deeply and inexorably in debt, and forcing it to continue mining in large quantities in order to service that debt. Bauxite is sold by India at the pitiful royalty rate of Rs.64 per ton, whereas the world average is $30 per ton. The authors calculate that even a payment of $1,000 per ton would only begin to reflect the cost of ecologicalbut not socialdestruction associated with bauxite mining. (Finished aluminium is sold by the companies at about $2,500 a ton.) Indias liberalization policy, originally pushed in the early 1990s by the World Bank as a condition for loans, has progressively made it easier for corporations and the foreign interests that back them to enter India, dig out the mineralsand depart with the lions share of both the metals and the profits. Indias assets lie open to plunder on a scale unimaginable before the 1990s, the authors comment. Although the nation still displays the trappings of a democracy, its citizens appear to have unknowingly ceded control over the countrys economic decisions to outsiders. Some millions may of course be left behind, in the pockets of executives, ministers and senior civil servants, or, even as we speak, are being wired to foreign havens. Every

year, $27 billion of black, or illegal, money is estimated to leave the country; a significant portion of this wealth comes from mining deals. The cash is used to wreck democratic systems of justiceso that the concurrent wrecking of ecology and lives by mineral extraction can continue unimpeded. The rare public servant whom the corporations cannot buy is shunted out of the way or possibly even murdered. (M.C. Mahapatra, Joint Secretary to the Ministry of Mines, died in suspicious circumstances in 1997.) Environmental reports are amended under pressure; the public is forcibly prevented from attending public consultations; and members of groups that oppose the mines are bought, beaten, enmeshed in false police cases, shot, or, in one case, run over. No wonder India has once again become the site of innumerable mutinies, with bows and arrows facing guns in a bizarre return to the nineteenth-century wars between aboriginals and a rapacious state. Thousands of adivasis in Chattisgarh, allegedly displaced so that steel manufacturers can claim the mineral-rich land on which they lived, have fed the ranks of a rather more modern army, that of the Maoists. This time around, several corporations are involved, but their tactics have much in common with those that the British East India Company employed 200 years ago subjugating or co-opting the subcontinents rulers, and then robbing the populace by means of the states own lawmakers, police, armed forces, and, on occasion, judiciary. Out of this Earth reveals how the worlds largest democracy has blundered into a servitude to corporations that chillingly resembles the colonization from which it had escaped a mere six decades ago. Padel and Das have produced not only a treatise on mineral extraction, but also an eye-opening case study of modern-day imperialism.

Madhusree Mukerjee, a former editor at Scientific American magazine, is author of The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders (Houghton Mifflin, Boston and Penguin India, New Delhi, 2003) and the forthcoming Churchills Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (Basic Books, New York and Westlands, New Delhi, August 2008).