Farmers who grow the well-known Bhalia wheat variety in the southern Ahmedabad district are getting ready to resist plans for a chemical park in their premises — a project they had fended off 13 years ago. A public hearing for the Bhal Industrial Park, slated to house 500 chemical units among a total 712 units, will be held on Friday. Kantri Makwana, a farmer from Pishavada, a village which falls within a...

Both Posco and the Orissa government said there were no tribals on the land for Posco’s 12 mn tonne steel plant. The presence of 21 tribals in the voters list has hit their credibility and probably the plant as well A 4-member environment ministry committee has recommended that the environmental clearances given to Posco be revoked for the violation of existing laws, for serious lapses and suppression of facts. As always,...

Vedanta, Posco and Sindhudurg. The issue is the same — the need for a well-thought-out policy relating to extractive and resource-based industry. The government’s withdrawal of mining permission to Vedanta on the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa’s backward Kalahandi district; the divided verdict by the Gupta Committee on the Posco iron ore project; and the environment ministry’s concern on 49 mining licences issued by the Maharashtra government for bauxite and iron...

As POSCO hits green roadblocks, the mega project seems doomed THE ODISHA government is trying hard not to sound defensive, after the Meena Gupta Committee report pulled it up for violating the local people’s forest rights while giving the nod to POSCO for setting up its proposed $12 billion steel plant. Earlier, a joint committee of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) had reached the same conclusion, and reported several...

Paan kheti [betel vine cultivation] is our lifeline…why does the government want to destroy it and force us into being labourers?” asked Niranjan, a 60-plus-year-old farmer who would lose his betel vines to the Posco steel project in Orissa. This is one of the questions that haunted us,when we, a group of US-based researchers interested in the new economy of globalised India, started looking into the Posco project. We had...