India's Hidden War Inside the resource conflict you haven't heard about. "..This isn't just an Indian story -- it's a global one. In the wake of Singh's economic reforms, foreign investment in the country has grown to 150 times what it was in 1991. Among other things, India has opened up its vast mineral reserves to private and international players, and now major global companies like Toyota and Coca-Cola rely on mining operations in the heart of the Maoist war zone. Investors in the region claim that the fighting is taking a toll on their businesses, and Bloomberg News recently estimated that some $80 billion worth of projects are stalled at least in part by the guerrilla war, enough to double India's steel output.
But in our visits to the region and dozens of interviews there -- with miners and politicians, refugees and paramilitary leaders, cops and go-betweens for the guerrillas -- we found a far more complex reality. Mining companies have managed to double their production in the two states in the past decade, even as the conflict has escalated; the most unscrupulous among them have used the fog of war as a pretext for land grabs, leveling villages whose residents have fled the fighting. At the same time, the Maoists, for all their communist rhetoric, have become as much a business as anything else, one that will remain profitable as long as the country's mines continue to churn out the riches on which the Indian economy depends. The first sign you see as you leave the airport in Jharkhand's capital city of Ranchi welcomes you to the "Land of Coal," and indeed, mining underlies every aspect of life here. Seams of coal are visible in the earth alongside the rutted roads that connect the jungle hamlets. Travelers learn to anticipate mines not by any road signs, but by the processions of men pushing bicycles heaped with burlap sacks full of coal: day laborers who pay for the opportunity to scrape the stuff out of thousands of off-the-books mines and sell it door to door as heating fuel, for perhaps a few more dollars a day than they would make as farmers trying to eke out a living from Jharkhand's depleted soil. India's coal country was mostly passed over by British colonists until they discovered its mineral wealth in the late 19th century and built the obligatory handful of dusty frontier towns and roads necessary to take advantage of it. Today the region bears the obvious scars of a hundred-odd years of heavy industry. The damage is most visible at road marker 221 of Jharkhand's main north-south highway, about 40 miles outside Ranchi, where a freshly paved patch of asphalt veers sharply west and snakes up a smoky hill through the village of Loha Gate and into an ecological disaster zone. Shimmering waves of heat, thick with carbon monoxide and selenium, waft through jagged cracks in the pavement large enough to swallow a soccer ball. A hundred feet below, a massive subterranean coal fire, started in an abandoned mine, burns so hot that it melts the soles of one's shoes. The only vestiges of plant life are the scattered hulks of desiccated trees. Like the legendary coal fire that destroyed Centralia, Pennsylvania, this blaze could easily smolder for another 200 years before the coal seam is finally burned through.." -- You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole. -AMBEDKAR http://venukm.blogspot.com http://www.shelfari.com/kmvenuannur http://kmvenuannur.livejournal.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB.
