Last week I travelled to a remote place in India called Lanjigarh, which is located in the state of Orissa. It was a trip I'd been looking forward to for a few months. I am sure you'd have heard/read of how mining, sometimes illegal, is destroying the remaining forest cover in India and displacing tribal communities living in these forests for hundreds of years. This is a story of one such primitive tribe called the Dongria Kondh that lives in Orissa's Niyamgiri Mountains , which are part of India ’s Eastern Ghats range. These tribals have been fighting a nine-year long battle for survival against British mining giant Vedanta Resources, incidentally owned by an NRI (non-resident Indian). The story is simple yet complicated. Vedanta wants to mine the bauxite (raw material for making aluminium) in the Niyamgiri Mountains , which are worshipped as God by 8,000+ tribals that reside here and have never known any other home. These tribals, like any ...
Untold stories of people known and unknown