Interview by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, translated into English by Abir Dasgupta

This interview deals with Adani’s coal-mining and iron-ore mining operations in the Hasdeo Aranya forests of India. The Chief Minister of the Indian state of Chhattisgarh is interviewed by investigative journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. They discuss the state government’s responses to claims that local approval for one of the mines had been forged, the secrecy surrounding contracts with Adani and the government’s proposed elephant reserve.

Bhupesh Baghel has been Chief Minister for 18 months. His Congress party government replaced that of the Hindu-nationalist BJP in 2018, having made commitments to stand up to corporations such as the Adani Group. A sub-titled version of the interview is here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GIwlUpI8yDVX_z7gLcqJHd9bB5T4wlON/view

The full interview was first published by NewsClick – see the link below. The section pertaining to Adani and the Hasdeo Arannya forests starts at 17:27.

https://www.newsclick.in/covid-19-will-have-huge-unpredictable-impact-politics-bhupesh-baghel

Translation

17:27 Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (PGT): Before the elections [in December 2019] you had said you are afraid of no one. You once tweeted, “no matter how big someone is, even if it is Adani, rules would no longer be bent.” You have alleged that recent raids by central government authorities on bureaucrats in your government are a “political vendetta” since you have initiated investigations into past decisions. Could you elaborate?

18:14 Bhupesh Baghel (BB): As far as Adani is concerned or anyone else is concerned, all industrialists are welcome, however, no help will be given to them by the government by flouting rules. For example, we found discrepancies in the case of iron ore mines in Dantewada – owned by a joint venture between CMDC (Chhattisgarh Mineral Development Corporation) and NMDC (National Mineral Development Corporation). The Mine Developer and Operator (MDO) is an Adani group company. In that case, the local residents had alleged that their consent by means of the gram sabha (village meeting) had been forged. My government considered the various demands raised by the people and accepted them. We committed that there would be no steps taken towards opening the mine, no cutting of trees and that we would investigate the consent of the local residents obtained through the gram sabha.

The report of the district collector that was prepared after investigation showed that no meeting of the actual gram sabha had taken place, and a falsified report had been prepared, and the “consent” acquired was a forgery. On that basis, we raised a show-cause notice to NMDC. They had requested one month’s time to respond, that we granted. They have requested an extension due to the ongoing lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. Its a matter of natural justice, how can anyone answer during the lockdown? So we have granted the extension. However, NMDC will have to answer, notices sent by two departments of the government.

I bring this up to clarify that the law will prevail, whoever is the industrialist concerned.

Just north of Chennai, a proposed expansion of one of Adani's ports threatens an important area of wetlands, including Pulicat Lake, a vital fishery and buffer against the open ocean.

Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited (APSEZ), an Indian shipping company, is working to expand an existing port in nearby Kattupalli, a dozen kilometers south of Pulicat Lake. APSEZ is proposing to increase the port’s capacity from roughly 25 million tonnes per year to 320 to support the region’s coal-fired power plants, oil refineries, and car factories. Expanding the port would change the coastal landscape drastically and put livelihoods at risk.

Karthikeyan Hemalatha reports for Hakai magazine about the potential impacts on millions of people if the development goes ahead.

‘I feel Mother Ganges has called me to Varanasi,’ said Narendra Modi in 2014 as he launched his campaign to become Prime Minister of India. The holiness of the Ganges River to Hindus was a constant theme in Modi’s successful pitch to the Indian electorate. But he didn’t just speak about the river’s religious significance; he also spoke passionately about the river’s practical significance as a source of water to millions and as a remarkable natural feature facing enormous threats.

On taking office, Modi promised to restore the great river’s cleanliness and flow. In 2015, he pledged over US$3 billion to clean up the Ganges, a river degraded by dams, diversions, industrial pollution, raw sewage and plastic litter. He established the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation. A moribund river authority was replaced by a new institution – the National Ganga Council. An ambitious program of research, monitoring and projects was laid out. People had reason to feel optimistic about the future of the Ganges and its threatened life forms.

Five years later, there is deep disappointment. In October 2018, a prominent advocate for the Ganges died after 111 days of fasting to protest the lack of action to address the river’s many problems. For almost all of its length, the river’s waters are unfit even for bathing. According to international news outlets such as Reuters, many of the promised funds for clean-up programs have not materialised. Less than one third of the promised clean-up projects have commenced. And the Modi Government, under the guise of minimising delays to new industrial projects, has dismantled environmental protections and put in place a speedy process for granting approvals. Numerous waterway developments have been given the green light, despite warnings from experts about resulting impacts on the health of the river. And one of the players contributing to the trashing of Modi’s pledge to save the Ganges River is the Adani Group.

Adani plans to draw millions of cubic metres from the lower Ganges every year. The water will be piped to the company’s massive power plant (currently under construction) at Godda where it will be used to wash coal, to manage industrial wastes, and to generate steam to power the turbines. In 2019, Adani’s plans to deplete India’s holiest of rivers received environmental clearance – despite potential impacts on threatened species, such as the Gangetic dolphin, that depend on the river.

Such concerns echo criticisms of Adani’s water management in Australia, where it is feared that the company’s Carmichael mine (which is planned to supply the coal to the Godda power plant) will have serious impacts on the Doongmabulla Springs and the Great Artesian Basin.

Adani’s apparent disregard for Prime Minister Modi’s pledge to restore flow to the Ganges is ironic. The close relationship between the Adani Group’s founder, Gautam Adani, and the prime minister is well known. They forged close bonds during Modi’s time as Chief Minister of Adani’s home state of Gujarat, while Adani was building his corporate empire. When Modi was running for Prime Minister in 2014, he notoriously used Adani’s personal aircraft while on the campaign trail.

Over the course of a couple of decades, the Adani Group has become a sprawling corporate empire in India, with interests in ports, power generation, edible oils, real estate, airports and defence industries. The group’s founder and chairman, Gautam Adani, is India’s second-richest man and a close associate of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Accusations of corruption and environmental destruction have dogged the company’s rise to power.

One journalist who has followed Adani’s progress is Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. He is lead author of a book on the Adani Group soon to be published in India with the title ‘The Incredible Rise and Rise of Gautam Adani’.

Paranjoy is the doyen of hard-hitting journalism in India. He’s a broadcaster, writer, documentary maker and critic of crony capitalism. Here he speaks to Geoff Law from AdaniWatch, who visited Paranjoy in Delhi in February 2020.

In a remote part of India, a huge and grotesque structure is taking shape against a backdrop of gently undulating pastures, woodlands and crops. This is the Godda power station. It is being rapidly built by Adani to receive coal from the company’s mine in Queensland. The output from Godda will be a massive 1.6 GW, more than the four units comprising the Yallourn power station in Victoria.

Godda is the lynchpin in Adani’s convoluted plan to ship Queensland coal 10,000 km so that power can be generated in India and sold across the border to Bangladesh. Godda is 600 km from the nearest port and hundreds of kilometres from the nearest major city. Despite its importance to the Stop Adani campaign, the situation at Godda has been shrouded in mystery, with few clear indications of Adani’s progress in constructing its power plant. To find out what was going on there, AdaniWatch went to take a look in February 2020. I was accompanied by Abir Dasgupta, a free-lance Indian journalist and contributor to a book on Adani to be published this year, who set up a vigorous schedule of meetings and interviews, organising, recording and translating as we went.

Our first shock occurs when we are still more than 300 km from Godda, in the provincial capital Ranchi. Two knowledgeable people, a local lawyer and a member of the legislature, inform us that Adani’s power plant is 40% complete. This is completely at odds with earlier reports that Adani had managed little more than clear the land and assemble some office buildings. If the plant is already 40% complete, then Adani is clearly well on the way to meeting its schedule to start generating power from Queensland coal in 2022.

Offsetting this news are descriptions of the ways in which local people are defying Adani in the courts, where a flurry of different actions is underway. To speak to them, we travel to the village of Gangta, hoping to get photos of Adani’s construction site while we’re there. We know we have to be careful while in this area. We have been warned that companies such as Adani carry out their own surveillance using security companies from the USA and Israel, as well as employing local goons to ‘protect’ their sites from the intrusive eyes of journalists. Stories abound of foreigners who, while covering contentious issues in India, have been confronted by security personnel and run out of town.

First, we rendezvous with Inam Ahmed, a feisty local lawyer who is representing several of the residents who are refusing to concede their land, on the main street of Godda. With a population of about 100,000, Godda is like other small Indian cities – it’s noisy and polluted. The combination of loud machines, manic tooting of horns, diesel fumes and coal smoke from cooking fires leaves me feeling dazed. We wait in the hot sun for Balesh Pandey and Ramji Paswan. Balesh’s father is among those who have had their land acquired for the power project – he was shown as dead in official papers and thus the requirement to secure his consent waived. He is very much alive. Paswan’s land is also sought to be acquired. He has filed a police complaint accusing Adani of a caste atrocity under an Indian law meant to protect the ‘scheduled’ castes and tribes, communities that are traditionally outside the Hindu caste hierarchy, and still subject to the practice of untouchability and daily violence. Balesh and Ramji will accompany us to the villages adjoining the project. Once they arrive, we leave in a three-wheel autorickshaw, contributing our own noise to the proceedings.

We putt-putt along the main road out of town, past some huge earthworks that Inam says are for Adani’s Godda rail link, and turn onto a side road. Before long, there are signs pointing the way to Adani’s power plant, under the formal name Adani Power (Jharkhand) Ltd. We turn off again, following a newly-erected wall that obscures our view of the construction site. A village appears – a collection of humpies, smoky cooking fires and dinghy stalls selling plastic packets of stuff. Idle men and scrofulous dogs lounge around amongst the rubbish. But this is not Gangta. It’s a shanty town that appeared next to Adani’s wall shortly after construction commenced. Balesh informs us that all these men are ‘outsiders’ - not locals.

We leave the shanties behind, wind amongst fields and trees, and pull up outside a temple. Beneath the spreading foliage of a sakwa tree is a welcoming committee. Further away, along a path framed by a wooden arch and lined by vegetation, are the neatly arranged houses of Gangta and the adjacent village Govindpur. The relative quiet is a blessed contrast to the cacophony of Godda.

We remove our shoes and seat ourselves on mats in the shade. Across the way, a white-haired man washes his thin legs with water pumped up from a well. A woman leads a couple of big white cows past a group of children. The fields are dotted with mango trees, their lower limbs pruned to a straight horizontal line by grazing animals. Another old man – Bhagat – arrives on a bicycle and joins our group. We will soon learn that he is one of the fiercest activists in the movement to prevent confiscation of land for the power project.

For an hour and a half, we sit and discuss the details of the government’s acquisition of these people’s land on behalf of Adani – the type of land, the value of it, the inadequate compensation, the various legal measures being taken to uphold their rights. The conversation occurs in Hindi. I take in the surroundings and observe the group of about 15 people who have spared us their time. They are mostly older people, members of an ‘adivasi’ tribe, an indigenous community whose status is recognised by law. They have been carrying on this battle for several years but their indignation has not dimmed. From time to time, their responses become angrily animated; at other times there is grim laughter. To one side sits a small group of women. They remain silent and I wonder how many times they have heard their story told to journalists who listen, record and then leave.

The land has been in these people’s families for generations. It’s fertile, yielding up to four crops a year. It provides a living for the villagers – direct food and then cash from the sale of the excess. The loss of land undermines their economic security. But it’s not just livelihoods affected. Land ownership allows people to get health services and to get their children married. Loss of land threatens these things.

There are other impacts of Adani’s encroachment, in particular, the degradation of domestic water supplies. We are shown water pumped from a well that runs red; it leaves a dirty residue in cooking pots. This is because Adani’s consumption of water for its construction works has lowered groundwater to the level of iron-rich bedrock.

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Many thanks from AdaniWatch to the cartoonists featured below for generously allowing us to display their work.

Courtesy of First Dog on the Moon / The Guardian

Courtesy Matt Golding

Courtesy of First Dog on the Moon / The Guardian