Word: niyamgiri
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Dates: during 2010-2010
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Every year, in late February, the Dongria Kondh tribe of the eastern Indian state of Orissa gathers at the top of Niyamgiri mountain to celebrate the annual festival of Niyam Raja, the king of the mountain. This year's celebration began on Feb. 20 with a three-hour climb to the summit. Women in white silk saris danced and sang, adorned with wooden jewelry, flowers and tiny knives tucked into their hair as a reminder of their daily confrontation with the forest. Hundreds of Dongria then shared a communal feast of rice and lentils in honor of nature and their...
...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...
...following its own Hollywood film script, Survival International fingers a villain: a 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...
...Conflicts like the one in Niyamgiri are becoming increasingly common in India, as the country tries to extract and exploit the mineral wealth in its forests and mountains. India allows state governments to appropriate land for use by private companies provided the people displaced are 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...
...meantime, Vedanta has built an aluminum refinery just north of Niyamgiri mountain. It is using bauxite trucked in from other sites until the Niyamgiri mine is available, and was built on land that was relatively uninhabited. "When you talk of a rehabilitation package, it means only for the plant-affected people - about 100 or so families who have been displaced," says Pramodini Pradhan of the Orissa chapter of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, a group based in New Delhi. Activists say, however, that the refinery has adversely affected nearby land and water. But because people on that land...
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