Vedanta Undermines Indian Communities

A tribal temple on Shervaroyan Peak in the hills of Yercaud in Southern
India recently developed several large cracks. Built several centuries
ago, the temple has withstood colonization and independence. But of
late, a new mine threatens to destroy this historic site. Vedanta, a
fast-growing British company, owns a subsidiary - Madras Aluminium
Company Limited (MALCO) - that has been strip mining this and nearby peaks
for bauxite, the ore that yields aluminium used in products from
throwaway soda cans to aircraft bodies.



From where he stands, K. Babu can see the deep red gashes ripped into
the hillside barely 100 metres from the temple. He and other community
activists charge that MALCO is a heavy weight player in the local
economy and politics, and a significant contributor to environmental
degradation. "There's a limit to exploitation. Nothing is sacred any
more," says the president of the local youth federation. "Their only
botheration is to excavate more and more. Maintaining ecology is not at
all an issue."

MALCO's operations in the southern Indian stat e of Tamilnadu span more
than 60 kilometres- from the mist-clad Yercaud and Kolli hills to the
impressive earthen dam and reservoir on the Kaveri River in Mettur. On
the banks of the huge reservoir, MALCO operates a smelter and a
refinery complex where locally mined bauxite is converted into
aluminium. A mountain of toxic red mud - a by-product of aluminum
production - is separated from the reservoir by a flimsy embankment.

MALCO is a small cog in the giant wheel that is Vedanta Resources, a company set up by British billionaire businessman Anil Agarwal.
Born in eastern India, he started out as a scrap metal merchant in
Mumbai, before moving to London 30 years ago. Agarwal's fortunes soared
as the small Indian company he set up in 1988 rode the telecom boom,
supplying copper cables to telecom companies in India.

Today, Vedanta is a vertically- integrated behemoth with an impressive international portfolio comprising copper, bauxite (aluminium), zinc, lead and gold. It has raised almost $1 billion on the London Stock Exchange and has started to snap up mines in Zambia and Australia.

In India, which remains its production base, the company runs a giant copper smelter in the coastal town of Tuticorin in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and aluminium smelters in the central and east Indian states of Chattisgarh and Orissa. According to the company's annual report, it plans to start a massive captive mine in the Niyamagiri hills of Orissa, a smelter in nearby Lanjigarh, and a refinery also in Orissa.

According to activists, the projects threaten densely forested areas that are home to tiger, Indian bison, bear, and elephant. The affected human population includes impoverished tribal communities, some of whom charge that Vedanta's projects are illegal, and that the state and central governments are colluding with the company to circumvent environmental protections.

"Nobody wants to take on Sterlite. They have built entire plants within their copper complex [in Tuticorin] with no permission from any of the authorities and without fear of reprisal," says Fatima Babu, a women's activist and fisher leader from Tuticorin. "The government machinery has not just tolerated Sterlite's violations but facilitated it."

Faced with community opposition, Sterlite has set up a foundation to address local needs and sited seven of its 18 centers in Tuticorin, Sterlite Copper's hometown . "We don't do anything extraordinary," S. Chaamundi, country head of the foundation's child welfare program told India's Financial Express. "But the glow in the eyes of the children when they feel that they have someone to bother about them, the shine in the face of the poor parents when they report their child also say 'sorry' and 'thank you,' like the children in the homes they work as housemaids or coolies, make us feel we are doing something worthwhile."

Telling Tales from Tuticorin

These social welfare programs have done little to blunt a long history
of opposition to Vedanta or to counter evidence that it has polluted
the environment, poisoned locals, and colluded with officials to bypass
environmental protections.



In less than 8 years, 139 people have been injured and 13 killed by
accidents or pollution from the Tuticorin smelter complex, according to
documented reports and testimony from workers. [See box on
"Occupational Injuries and Deaths at Sterlite"]



Complaints about the company began mounting in the mid-1990s, when
protesters in Ratnagiri in the western state of Maharashtra cited
environmental concerns to block Sterlite from building a smelter and to
force the state to revoke the company's license. Shortly after, a Tamil
Nadu government invitation to Sterlite to build a plant in Tuticorin
sparked massive protests by residents -- particularly fisherfolk.



But the Tamil Nadu project had the blessing of Chief Minister J.
Jayalalithaa Jayaram, who laid the foundation stone for the complex.
Less than four months after applying to build the smelter, Tamilnadu
Pollution Control Board (TNPCB) granted conditional licenses to
construct a 140,000 ton-a-year copper smelter and associated plants.



That license stipulated that the unit be at least 25 kilometres from the Gulf
of Mannar Marine National Park in order to protect the region's ecology
- its famed coral islands and exotic species such as dugongs, sea
turtles, and pearl oysters -- from sulphur dioxide, arsenic and lead
emissions.



In 1995, ignoring the TNPCB's instructions, Sterlite erected the
smelter complex- including a mothballed smelter scavenged from the U.S.- 16 kilometres from one of the protected islands. Rather than act on
the violation, the pollution board granted the company an operating
license to manufacture up to 40,000 tons of blister copper.



In 1996, local resistance came to a head when fisherfolk used an armada
of small boats to prevent ships carrying Sterlite's raw material -
copper concentrate - from entering the Tuticorin harbour. But
resistance waned after the government conceded to one of the
protesters' demands: to prohibit disposing the effluents at sea.



Within two years a spate of accidents and gas leaks from the factory
spurred the Madras High Court to commission a report on pollution by
Sterlite. NEERI - a national environmental engineering laboratory -
faulted the company for discharging dangerous levels of pollution into
the environment and recommended the company's closure. Barely three
months later, the same court reversed itself, cleared Sterlite, and
recommended its reopening.

Then, weeks after the facility re-opened, nine employees of a
neighbouring radio station who were hospitalized, blamed a gas leak at
the factory.

By September 2004, when a Monitoring Committee (SCMC) empowered by the
Supreme Court visited Sterlite, the plant was churning out four times
the allowed levels of pollutants, according to the Vedanta's Annual
Report 2004.

In the face of this record, some environmental and human rights
activists are confident that local resistance will gain strength. "The
[anti-Sterlite] campaign is bound to pick up because of [Agarwal's]
arrogant expansionism," says T.S.S. Mani of Human Rights Tamilnadu
Initiative, a Chennai-based voluntary organisation.

Other activists remain sceptical.
"I don't know how we are going to
succeed given the level of [government] collusion," Fatima Babu says.
"Even now, they are going ahead with illegal expansions and business as
usual."

That cynicism is fueled by the fact that all the new construction in
Tuticorin has occured without the environmental clearances legally
required by both the central and state governments,
and that other
illegal construction at the Orissa site continues. At the time of the
Supreme Court monitoring committee's 2004 visit to Tuticorin, Sterlite
had nearly completed construction of a 300,000 ton-per-year copper
smelter, a 127,000 ton copper refinery, a power plant, and several
other units. None had government approval.

Nonetheless, barely a day after the committee's visit, the central
government gave post-facto clearance to the already constructed plants
- despite the fact that Sterlite had never gotten the pollution board's
consent to built them. The board approval came in April 2005 when the
factory was ready for production. According to a July 2005 Supreme
Court Committee report the TNPCB claimed that it consented afterthe
Central Ministry ordering it to do so.

Senior TNPCB officials declined to comment. "I'll get into trouble if I
speak to you. Please don't ask me anything," said R. Ramachandran,
member secretary (acting) of the board. A faxed letter seeking
clarification on the reasons for TNPCB's failure to force compliance,
elicited a cryptic response from Surjeet K. Choudhary, secretary to the
Tamilnadu government and temporary board chairman. "Board is taking
necessary action," he wrote.

Phone calls and emails to Secretary to the Union Environment Ministry
Prodipto Ghosh and to public relations chief Maria Doss went unanswered.

Deforestation and Evictions

The controversies have apparently not affected the company's bottom
line. The man behind Vedanta/Sterlite, Anil Agarwal, reported that
attributable profits for year ending in March 2005 were up 66 percent
to $120 million."This has been an exceptional period for metal prices
driven by strong demand from China," as well as for "increased foreign
investment and the potential [for India] to become a major regional
manufacturing hub," he said in Vedanta's annual report. Agarwal
acknowledged that the company had benefitted from the political
climate. The Congress Party, elected in May 2004, "has maintained a
policy of growth and liberalization" favorable to his company, he
reported.

That growth is in no small part a consequence of Agarwal's ability to
work the system. India's commerce minister P. Chidambaram was on the
Vedanta board until his party assumed power in New Delhi last year. His
replacement, 70-year old Naresh Chandra, is a former cabinet secretary
and senior advisor to the prime minister of India from 1992 to 1995,
and Indian ambassador to the US from 1996 to 2001.

A cartoon in Business India depicts the Vedanta/Sterlite founder
squeezing himself through an hour-glass saying "In India, you must have
patience. Everything will come through." Many concede that the
London-based billionaire's understanding of India's decision-makers is
frighteningly accurate.

Ritwick Dutta, a Supreme Court lawyer who has brought Vedanta's
violations in Orissa to court, says that the company adopts a
time-tested strategy: "They don't go for small violations. They go in
for massive violations, bring it to light and then get post-facto
clearance after payment of an insignificant fine. In Orissa, they
chopped down trees on 58 hectares, and gladly paid the fine of Rs.
30,000 or so ($650). Now, they have gone ahead and clear-felled another
1,000 hectares of forests in Chattisgarh."

On September 21, another Supreme Court monitoring committee, this time
the Central Empowered Committee (CEC) on Forests, recommended revoking
Vedanta Alumina Ltd's environmental clearance for a 1 million ton
aluminium refinery in Lanjigarh, Orissa. The CEC found that Vedanta had
falsified information, destroyed 58 hectares of forest land and begun
construction without the required clearances.

"The refinery's viability is dependent on mining the nearby Niyamagiri
hills which are in a reserve forest. But the company failed to disclose
this while seeking permission for the refinery," says Dutta. "Their
strategy is to quickly invest money and build the refinery and then
plead with the authorities that their investment - nearly Rs. 3500
crores ($780 million) would be rendered unviable if the mine is not
cleared." The Lanjigarh plant is nearing completion, while the mining
proposal has yet to secure approval.

Company head Agarwal brushed aside these concerns in his annual report.
"There have been some public interest submissions to a Supreme Court of
India sub-committee, regarding the environmental clearances for the
bauxite mining and these are currently being addressed.

Some activists suspect that the ways the company is addressing the
problem is not to ameliorate damage, but to work its special
relationship with government officials. According to Dutta and the CEC,
the situation at Orissa throws the integrity of the authorities in
question.

Indeed, the CEC hints at complicity between the company, the Union
Ministry of Environment and the Orissa government. In its report, the
committee writes: "The casual approach, the lackadaisical manner and
the haste with which the entire issue of forests and environmental
clearance for the alumina refinery project has been dealt with smacks
of undue favour/leniency and does not inspire confidence with regard to
the willingness and resolve of both the State Government and the MoEF
to deal with such matters keeping in view the ultimate goal of national
and public interest."

Besides the clear cutting, there is the issue of "demolition of tribal
villages on the land that Sterlite wanted to occupy," says Dutta. In
2004, two tribal villages were razed, and the residents were forcibly
relocated to resettlement camps. Since then, two more villages have
been evicted with help from the state police and company-sponsored
goons, according to tribal rights activist Prafulla Samantara.

As of November 10, armed police stationed around Lanjigarh were
preventing tribals and activists from congregating at the plant gate to
protest the Vedanta project's illegal construction, said Samantara.
Police have detained several tribal leaders and their supporters, he
said, and a cordon around the village was keeping him from protest
site.

The non-profit People's Union of Civil Liberties investigated the human
rights violations reported by Lanjigarh residents and concluded: "It is
hard to believe that [the area] is a part of the same India that the
elite continuously brags about having catapulted into twenty-first
century. ...The people are terrorised, and believe (perhaps rightly)
that their attackers enjoy the support of the police. This apprehension
of the people is reinforced by the fact that the attackers admit in
public that they have attacked the agitating villages."

Nityanand Jayaraman is a Chennai-based journalist investigating and reporting on corporations and their impact on environment and human rights.

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