BackPillai case: The right questions to ask
The Mahan mines would rip apart around 1,200 ha of sal forests, destroying the contiguity of one of central India’s best un-fragmented forest zones
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For weeks now, there has been a debate raging in the media on the issue of Priya Pillai and whether the government was right in stopping the Greenpeace India activist from travelling abroad. What I have missed in these debates is an engagement with the real issue that Pillai was supposed to be campaigning against. This particular piece is not about Greenpeace or their methods of campaigning, which I may agree or disagree with. This is about what’s happening in Mahan, the coalfield in Madhya Pradesh—actually a dense forest—which was on the chopping block for coal which should have been the point of focus for news.
Ironically, as the media debated civil liberties, no one focused on sending reporters to ground zero and getting the pulse of the people there who may be for or against the project. What I would have liked to see is visuals of the forests of Mahan, the views of the people who live there and their voices from the ground. Or perhaps, more about the ecology of the region, the forest that has been slated to be cut to meet the energy needs of a power-hungry nation.
The proposed Mahan mines would rip apart around 1,200 hectares of sal forests, destroying the contiguity of one of central India’s best un-fragmented forest zones spread over 20,000 hectares. Sitting under one of the best sal forests in the country, the Mahan block was allocated to a joint venture between Hindalco Industries Ltd and Essar Power Ltd in 2006. The block was to supply five million tonnes of coal a year for 14 years to a 1,000 megawatts (MW) power plant of Essar and a 650MW project of Hindalco. For this, as many as 500,000 trees would be chopped from a dense forest, considered to be one of India’s finest.
What the government avoided cleverly was another issue: the rights of tribals under the forest rights Act, a law passed by Parliament, which makes it mandatory to take the consent of the people when it comes to their traditional forests. In fact, it is the same law that was invoked by the Supreme Court while upholding the rights of the Dongria Kondh tribals in the Vedanta case—an issue which the media should have raised in its role as a watchdog.
Another issue which received some attention, but wasn’t debated enough was why fake signatures were shown of people, who were dead, to show that approvals of the village councils were taken. These are serious allegations the media should have probed.
Now, to address the issue of nationalism. A fallout of the controversial Intelligence Bureau (IB) report is that anyone questioning our right to clean air or the rights of tribals to their forests is labelled as being anti-national. A Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson proudly defended his government’s decision to debar Pillai from travelling abroad by proclaiming, “I would rather trust the IB of this country than a foreign agency."
What is this foreign hand that seems to be bothering the government, when the fact is that there are many foreign companies operating in the mining sector and, in fact, have been invited by the government to operate in and invest in different sectors?
A third point which the media again failed to highlight is the doublespeak within the environment ministry. While on the one hand the ministry granted stage II forest clearance to Mahan in February 2014, in December it wrote to the coal ministry asking it to take Mahan off the list of coal blocks to be auctioned. If the environment ministry wrote this letter, then why did it not cancel the forest clearance it had given in February last year?
These and many other questions should have been asked even as the media cried itself hoarse on the issue of civil liberties.
So, yes, the Pillai case is about rights and civil liberties. It is about the rights of local people to their land and forest. That’s what we should have been debating in public discourse and media newsrooms.
Bahar Dutt is a conservation biologist and author of the book Green Wars: Dispatches from a Vanishing World.
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