Word: dongria
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...Near the end of the film, the Na'vi fight a long and heroic battle with a corporate militia to save their sacred forest. In real life, a violent conflict is unlikely to end well for the Dongria. The state of Orissa has become an active recruiting ground for an armed Maoist insurgency that, in other states, is growing ever more aggressive. Nationwide, the death toll from the insurgency rose 36% last year to 1,125. Despite rumors and a few unconfirmed media reports, activists who work with the Dongria deny that the Maoists have any presence within the community...
...While India's Ministry of Environment and Forests ponders whether to clear the way for the Niyamgiri bauxite mine, the Dongria's supporters are mounting a campaign to block it. Survival International, a London-based advocacy group, bought the Avatar ad and has produced a short film about the Dongria. Lindsay Duffield, a London-based spokeswoman for the group, says the Indian government should postpone its decision, expected later this year, until India's 2006 Forest Rights Act is fully implemented. The act aims to protect the interests of India's traditional forest dwellers. "The mine should only go ahead...
...London-based mining company called Vedanta Resources that is controlled by billionaire businessman Anil Agarwal. Vedanta's aluminum subsidiary plans to invest $2.5 billion to extract some 78 million tons of bauxite from the Niyamgiri mountain. Its chief operating officer, Mukesh Kumar, insists that the mine will benefit the Dongria - the company will set aside 5% of the mine's pretax profits for a local development agency - and that it has followed all the relevant Indian laws. "Whatever we do, we do in a transparent manner," he says. Yet the Dongria have become a cause...
...compensated and resettled. People living on that land cannot object once the state acquires it, and in Orissa the authorities have approved 54 projects worth $46 billion. That process has already displaced 1.4 million people in the state since 2001, according to India's Rural Development Ministry. The Dongria are challenging this policy in the courts. Says Prafulla Samantara, an activist in Orissa and one of the original petitioners in the case: "How can the state give away land which is not theirs in the first place...
...Dongria don't want to leave their mountain, but that doesn't mean they want to be left in an untouched state of nature. At one point in the film, Avatar's hero, Jake Sully, laments about the Na'vi, "They're not going to make a deal ... There's nothing that we have that they want." But that's not necessarily true for the Dongria or the millions of other so-called tribals who live in India's vast stretches of undeveloped forest. While they are largely self-sufficient, living on what they can grow and hunt, they...