The struggle for clean water

Photo: Survival International

Voting on a proposal put forward by Bolivian ambassador Pablo Solon, the United Nations General Assembly voted yesterday to declare that “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights.”

So it was fitting that on the same day in London, police were out in force to prevent protesters gate crashing the AGM of the British-based mining transnational Vedanta. The corporation is accused of fatally polluting the local water supply around its aluminium refinery in Lanjigarch, Orissa state in India.

A petition signed by 30,000 people was handed in to the meeting calling on shareholders to stop Vedanta’s local subsidiary, the Orissa Mining Corporation, opening a bauxite mine to feed the refinery, in the nearby Niyamgiri hills.

The development threatens the very survival of the Dongria Kondh indigenous community who live there. A report from Amnesty quotes a member of the community saying: “The hill is our god and the earth our goddess. Between the two we have the rains and the water. Those wanting to mine here will slowly take over this. Where will we go then?”

An estimated 884 million people don’t have safe drinking water and about 1.5 million children under the age of five die each year from diarrhoea and other water-related causes. Dirty water kills more children than AIDS, malaria and measles together. Three and a half million people die each year as a result of contaminated water.

One of the United Nations-sponsored Millennium Development Goals agreed in 2001, was to halve the number of people who cannot reach or afford safe drinking water and halve the number who do not have basic sanitation. But in reality, the opposite is happening.

As the effect of global warming increases, water is becoming more than ever a scarce and expensive commodity. Some 10 million people in West Africa are facing starvation right now as a result of a long and worsening drought.

New figures show that global temperatures are soaring to their highest-ever level this year. The Met Office Hadley Centre, drawing on the work of more than 100 scientists from more than 20 institutions, has compiled ten indicators of temperature. “They provide, in a one place, a snapshot of our world and spell out a single conclusion that the climate is unequivocally warming,” the Met Office reports.

Clean water must be a right, but like all others it will need to be fought for in the teeth of opposition from the corporations and the rich. Rights can’t be left as words on paper, as all the Development Goals for Africa have been.

It is absolutely right to use any legal recourse to defend rights, including working through the United Nations. Ultimately, however, power rests in the hands of corporations and even governments have to kowtow to them. This week, for example, the government of Uruguay has been forced by Phillip Morris to revisit their strict no-smoking laws because the death-dealing corporation has made a complaint to the World Trade Organisation.

In our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions, we tried to put the concept of rights into a revolutionary context. We propose that human rights must expand beyond the concept of the individual to societal rights – the right to decent housing, health care and so on. This connects with the idea of “Mother Earth Rights”, proposed in the World People’s Declaration on Climate Change: for what is nature but the body of human beings, whose health is our health.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

A sacred peak defies the god of profit

On the website of Vedanta, the mining company claims: “Our focus on sustainability drives our conviction to pursue value creating projects and at the same time achieve positive environmental, social and health and safety outcomes.” Can this be the same corporation that is pushing ahead with plans for an open-cast mine in the Indian state of Orissa against fierce local opposition?

Vedanta plans to extract bauxite from the Niyamgiri Hills, a forested mountain range inhabited for centuries by the Dongaria Kondh tribal people. who regard the mountain peak as sacred. They are receiving widespread support, at home and abroad, for their struggle against Vedanta. Ironically, the name is borrowed from Hindu and means a philosophy that embodies spiritual knowledge and traditional wisdom.

In the first week of March 2009 the Dongaria and other tribes marched through dense forest to create a 17-km human wall along the base of Niyamgiri Hills to blockade the roads and thus to defend their sacred mountain and its biodiversity. Even though they are managing to hinder construction work, the new road has already reached the Dongaria village of Phuldumer, very close to the mine site.

Krushna Wadaka, aged 64, from the village of Katraguma in the Kurli Panchayat in the area, asks: “How can we survive if our lands are taken away from us?” He finds it difficult to understand how the source of their life can be mined for profit. He continues: “We won’t leave our land, come what may, and we will continue to resist any attempt to evict us,” he says in an interview in Seedling, published by sustainable farming group GRAIN.

Vedanta – owned by London-based Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal – signed an agreement with the Orissa government in 2003 to set up a 1-million-tonne aluminium refinery, along with a 100-MW coal-fired power plant. The company plans to dig the bauxite mine to feed another refinery in the area.

The Dongaria get almost everything they need from the forest and the “swiddens” (small patches of forest that they slash and burn in order to grow crops). The forest also plays a dominant role in their culture, domestic well-being and spirituality, as they believe it to be the home of many of their deities. Before they fell a large tree, for instance, the Dongaria Kondh entreat the gods for permission to do so.


In early November 2007, the world’s second-largest sovereign pension fund, operated by the Norwegian government, sold all its shares in Vedanta, saying that investing in the company presented “an unacceptable risk of contributing to grossly unethical activities”. Later in the same month, to the delight of the Dongarias, India’s supreme court banned Vedanta from mining the mountain. But it proved only a temporary reprieve: in August 2008 Sterlite, Vedanta’s Indian subsidiary, came back with a modified proposal and was given the green light.

But the Dongaria are still fighting back. If mining goes ahead, two of India’s strongest constitutional guarantees will be overturned: the right of a “primitive tribal group” to their territorial integrity and to decide on their own path of development; and the right to religious practices and beliefs, since the summit of this mountain is a sacred place of worship to the Dongaria Kondh’s supreme deity, Niyam Raja.

According to Salpu Jakesika, aged 34, a Dongaria from Mundabali village, “The Vedanta company will try to use force once again after the general election is over [in May 2009], but we will continue to resist.” Niyamgiri, he said, cannot be handed over to Vedanta. “The hills belong to the Dongarias and we are not going to let go.” But for Vedanta such a philosophy holds no meaning. The living earth is for them a resource to be exploited for profit.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor