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Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel

Article · January 2010

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 Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel
by Felix Padel and Samarendra Das (Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi 2010)

Reviewed by Madhusree Mukerjee

“The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today

keeping the world in chains,” Gandhi had observed in 1928. “If an entire nation of 300
million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
The locusts have arrived, and they are stripping bare the heartland of India. In Out of this
Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel, anthropologist Felix Padel and
film-maker Samarendra Das describe a plunder of resources in the mineral-rich Indian
states of Orissa, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh on a scale so horrific as to
recall the worst excesses of colonialism. The forests, mountains and peoples of central
India are being devastated so that entrepreneurs can get at the aluminium, iron, coal and
other minerals underfoot—to earn unprecedented profits for themselves, their financial
backers, and the ministers and civil servants they suborn.
This book fascinates with the exceptional depth of its research and the unforgettable
lesson it imparts on the phenomenon of resource extraction in all its globalized
complexity and local perversity. And it terrifies by peeling off layer after layer of
propaganda to reveal how feeble a control the citizens of even a democracy may have
over their own destinies. No longer is the adivasi (or indigenous Indian) free to decide on
what mountain slope she will build her hut, what she will plant on her farm, from which
forest glen she will gather firewood, from which crystal stream she will collect water, and
what she will feed her children—how, indeed, she will live. Whether she will be allowed
to live at all and on what terms are being decided by bankers in New York, Washington,
or London; by CEOs of extractive industries who live anywhere in the world they choose,
which is never near the ravaged landscapes where they mine; and by ministers and civil
servants in New Delhi or Bhubaneswar or Ranchi or Raipur. These men have decided
that the aboriginal way of life has to become extinct, in order to make way for an India
that will replicate the United States in its wealth, power, strip-mall homogeneity and
social inequity—as well as its history of appropriation of indigenous lands.
 The aluminum industry depends primarily on bauxite, a porous rock that caps
mountains, some of the highest and most pristine of which are in Orissa. Bauxite being
porous, it retains water, so that the sides and often the summits of these mountains are
densely forested; moreover, the bauxite slowly releases the water in the summer, in clear
streams that nourish the fields and bodies of the peoples who live on these mountains,
and, further downstream, feed the region’s major rivers. Out of more than 20 mountains
in Orissa and Andhra, mining is planned or has started on all.
Padel and Das relate in gory detail the reality of open-cast aluminum mining as it is
being practiced in India today. To strip the old-growth forest off the summits and sides of
mountains; to use explosives to blow up the mountaintops themselves; to herd the people
who live on the hills—who have cherished and nurtured their unique environment for
millennia—into settlements that sometimes resemble concentration camps; to build dams
for supplying the enormous quantities of water required to smelt aluminum (almost 1,400
tons of water for every ton of the metal), drowning neighboring valleys and villages; to
crush, refine, and smelt, leaving behind toxic smoke that chokes lungs, weakens bones
and bleaches crops, as well as caustic, radioactive red sludge that leaches into rivers and
kills fish, along with the occasional human—to the eyes of the uninitiated, such activities
would seem to be ecocide and (what the authors call) cultural genocide. In Incredible
India, it goes by the name of development, economic growth, or even poverty reduction,
despite pervasive documentation of a drastic fall in the living standards of the displaced.
Salu Majhi of Kucheipadar, whose village is making way to an aluminum refinery, asks
in song:

Who will speak for us?

They are coming
With marching legs and arms
They are crying to buy our land
Where will we go?
Oh are you taking us to paradise?
 Some of the last peoples on earth who live sustainably and self-sufficiently are being
forcibly deprived of their lifestyles and turned into desperate vagrants.
Even leaving aside the cultural cost—which cannot be measured in monetary terms—
aluminum production is a fundamentally uneconomic activity, as Padel and Das show. In
an unusually frank 1951 report, analyst Dewey Anderson observed that, although
aluminum is of great strategic importance to modern defense forces and therefore to the
U.S. government, the immense social and environmental damage that its production
entails are such that “the U.S. cannot any longer afford to make aluminum of it can be
obtained in large enough quantities and on favorable price terms from other sources.” As
a result of such considerations, the industry has gradually relocated to the most corrupt
and mineral-rich corners of the earth. The rulers of impoverished countries and provinces
are being persuaded by corporate heads, and their even more influential political and
financial backers, to underwrite aluminum production by providing cheap bauxite,
grossly underpriced water and electricity for the refineries and smelters, as well as free
roads, railways and brand-new ports for exporting the metal.
Often this infrastructure is financed by massive loans, placing the country or province
(such as Orissa) deeply and inexorably in debt, and forcing it to continue mining in large
quantities in order to service that debt. Bauxite is sold by India at the pitiful royalty rate
of Rs.64 per ton, whereas the world average is $30 per ton. The authors calculate that
even a payment of $1,000 per ton would only begin to reflect the cost of ecological—but
not social—destruction associated with bauxite mining. (Finished aluminium is sold by
the companies at about $2,500 a ton.) India’s liberalization policy, originally pushed in
the early 1990s by the World Bank as a condition for loans, has progressively made it
easier for corporations and the foreign interests that back them to enter India, dig out the
minerals—and depart with the lion’s share of both the metals and the profits. “India’s
assets lie open to plunder on a scale unimaginable before the 1990s,” the authors
comment. Although the nation still displays the trappings of a democracy, its citizens
appear to have unknowingly ceded control over the country’s economic decisions to
outsiders.
Some millions may of course be left behind, in the pockets of executives, ministers
and senior civil servants, or, even as we speak, are being wired to foreign havens. Every
 year, $27 billion of “black”, or illegal, money is estimated to leave the country; a
significant portion of this wealth comes from mining deals. The cash is used to wreck
democratic systems of justice—so that the concurrent wrecking of ecology and lives by
mineral extraction can continue unimpeded. The rare public servant whom the
corporations cannot buy is shunted out of the way or possibly even murdered. (M.C.
Mahapatra, Joint Secretary to the Ministry of Mines, died in suspicious circumstances in
1997.) Environmental reports are amended under pressure; the public is forcibly
prevented from attending public consultations; and members of groups that oppose the
mines are bought, beaten, enmeshed in false police cases, shot, or, in one case, run over.
No wonder India has once again become the site of innumerable mutinies, with bows and
arrows facing guns in a bizarre return to the nineteenth-century wars between aboriginals
and a rapacious state. Thousands of adivasis in Chattisgarh, allegedly displaced so that
steel manufacturers can claim the mineral-rich land on which they lived, have fed the
ranks of a rather more modern army, that of the Maoists.
This time around, several corporations are involved, but their tactics have much in
common with those that the British East India Company employed 200 years ago—
subjugating or co-opting the subcontinent’s rulers, and then robbing the populace by
means of the state’s own lawmakers, police, armed forces, and, on occasion, judiciary.
Out of this Earth reveals how the world’s largest democracy has blundered into a
servitude to corporations that chillingly resembles the colonization from which it had
escaped a mere six decades ago. Padel and Das have produced not only a treatise on
mineral extraction, but also an eye-opening case study of modern-day imperialism.

Madhusree Mukerjee, a former editor at Scientific American magazine, is author of

The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders (Houghton Mifflin,
Boston and Penguin India, New Delhi, 2003) and the forthcoming Churchill’s Secret
War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (Basic Books,
New York and Westlands, New Delhi, August 2008).

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