कर्णपुरा की कहानी...India's Coal Rush: Interview With Jharkhand Leader Bulu Imam
Peasant's struggle against coal mining projects in Karanpura, Jharkhand
Hridayesh Joshi's NDTV report from Karanpura: कर्णपुरा की कहानी..
Interview With Jharkhand Leader Bulu Imam
Hridayesh Joshi's NDTV report from Karanpura: कर्णपुरा की कहानी..
Interview With Jharkhand Leader Bulu Imam
BY JEFF BIGGERS
In the last month alone, with coal-fired plants powering an estimated 50% of the nation's electricity, Coal India--the world's largest coal producer--flirted with buying up floundering Massey Energy and Peabody Energy mines. Other Indian companies have moved into African and Australian markets. Not that India's own coalfields have been spared. India's Minister for Environment and Forestscontinues to fend off demands by the coal industry for reduced forest protection restrictions. Earlier this year, human rights organizations charged that over 70,000 children were impressed into labor in some of the nation's most dangerous "rathole" mines.
No one understands the impacts of coal mining on India better than Jharkhand activist Bulu Imam, Director of the Sanskriti Research Center in Hazaribagh, and coordinator of the Karanpura Campaign, a nearly 25-year-old campaign against open-cast strip coal mines. Imam also serves as the convener of India's National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. An important exhibition on Jharkhand tribal art, along with photographs by Robert Wallis, will open in London at the Brunei Gallery in the School of Oriental and African Studies in April, 2011.
As the heartland of the coalfields in eastern India, Jharkhand has often been compared to Appalachia for its rich coal deposits--and the devastating repercussions and removal of local tribal or adivasi communities and their native lands by a form of open-cast mining similar to mountaintop removal mining. Photojournalist Robert Wallis made this overview of Jharkhand from his story, "Dark Side of the Boom" last year. Foreign Policy magazine did a photo essay this fall on the region's coal wars and conflicts, which have now embroiled Maoist insurgents.
With his region dealing with 30 massive open-cast mines, I recently did an interview with Imam to learn more about the coal rush in India, with a particular focus on Jharkhand. For Imam, the displacement of tribal populations ranks as "a humanitarian disaster of the first order."
JB: What type of mining is employed in your area?
BI: The type of mines is open-cast coal mining or what you call strip mining very similar to mountain top removal in the Appalachians. Very few local people are employed since the work has been since the beginning planned on a high technology method of mining and out of the 50,000 tribals displaced by Piperwar and the two Ashoka mines not even 300 have gained employment as labourers or been re-settled. The other expert labour for operating the big machines have been brought from outside areas. There are many voluntary organizations working in the area as removers of poverty and targeting the displaced people for education and acculturation. Alien ideologies are being imposed upon vulnerable forest subsistence societies which is in keeping with the government policy of urbanizing village societies. As a result these people are losing their traditional culture and ability to live on the land in a productive manner.
JB: Are you able to estimate how big of an area has been mined in the last decade?
BI: The actual area mined might seem small i.e. 15 sq.km but its impact in ravaging the land which is richly forested and heavily watered with streams cover ten times that area in the very least. If another 30 mines are made it will be multiplied by 15 in square kilometers. Most of this land is forested in a natural ecosystem and richly agricultural since the Karanpura Valley is well watered by over 37 streams and has been known since British documents that mention the Karanpura Coalfields (19th cent.) as the rice bowl of Hazaribagh.
JB: For our international readers, can you please explain who are the adivasi communities, and what rights do they have in protecting their land?
BI: The Adivasis are the indigenous first dwellers whose ancestry is traced to a prehistoric level by rockart of the region which is world famous and by the palaeolithic remains of earlier generations that have made the valley famous throughout the world and drawn international attention to it. You may see the I COMOS World Report and threatened Site:www.international.icomos.org/risk/2001/indi2001.htm or www.international.icomos.org/risk/2002/india2002.htm.
The valley is a rich repository of ancestral tribal art connected with the 14 painted rockart sites dated back to the Mesolithic and more recently Chalcolithic eras. Currently an important exhibition on the art, along with photographs by Robert Wallis, is being organized in London at the Brunei Gallery of the School of Oriental and African Studies for two months from April 2011. I will be in London with two tribal artists for two seminars at the Univ. of London being organized by SOAS to coincide with the opening of the exhibition on 13th April 2011... read more:
