expected buoyancy of inward remittances
The large the top decile of income-earners, would
by emigrants. A set of complex, inter-
related factors must account for this, but
no up to date, state-of-the-art analysis of
this has appeared. Presumably the Plan-
ning Commission and the concerned
ministries are seized of the problem. One
critical question which must arise is
whether the projected 6 per cent growth
in the Eighth Plan w i l l not be thwarted
by exports failing to deliver the imports
needed for this rate of growth. A n d if this
is at all likely, what contingency plans can
be devised which can be expeditiously put
into operation? It may not be prudent to
bank on a growing stream of non-resident
deposits to meet a portion of the current
account deficits. On this point the Annual
Report of the Central Board of the R B I
recognises how "the sustained and sizable
inflow of funds" under the different
accounts of non-resident deposits has
facilitated the financing o f the b o p
deficit (p 62), On p 71 it is stated, w i t h
some satisfaction, that these deficits have
been financed from different sources on
"reasonable" terms. While the cost of bor-
rowing from the international institutions
may not be large and bilateral aid may be,
at. least nominally, low-cost (not so in
reality if allowance is made for the par-
ticularly inflated prices at which imports
under suppliers' credits, are acquired),
would the rates of interest on these non-
resident deposits qualify as being reason-
able? Already perhaps the aggregate of
these deposits, including accumulated i n -
terest, exceeds the total foreign exchange
resources of India. The R B I Report places
the country's debt service obligations at
as high a level as 24 per cent of exports
and gross invisible receipts in 1987-88.
Tbday it is perhaps even more. But this
excludes the outflows of profits earned by
private foreign capital in India and
royalties, technical fees, etc, and the grow-
ing but unseen accumulation of interest
on non-resident deposits. We hope the
authorities w i l l correct us if we are
mistaken.
There is a sensitive issue involved in any
discussion of exports, imports and other
flows of funds across national frontiers.
This relates to the exchange rate. Are the
authorities convinced that the existing
regime of exchange management is giving
the economy o p t i m u m results? Is an open
discussion of this question, together w i t h
an objective evaluation of the alternatives,
altogether taboo, even when it is a critical
issue, governing the terms on which we
trade in goods and services, contract loans
and enter into long-term commitments,
and when in a highly complex manner it
affects the f u l l repatriation of export
proceeds and seems to put a premium on
manipulating trade values to illegally
Economic and Political Weekly March 11, 1989
retain foreign exchange abroad?
and continuous budget deficits are a
highly potent factor here, as they under-
mine confidence in the rupee.
Import requirements of the Eighth Plan
would be determined, among other things,
by the structure of investments being pro-
jected (and, of course, by the existing i n -
vestments which have to be maintained
and gradually modernised) and, therefore,
by the composition of the flow of goods
and services they would yield. A more
pronounced t i l t towards meeting the basic
needs of the common man, rather than
Not for the Love of Tribals...
Xavier Dias
The forest department or Bihar Forest Corporation, the mines and
industries, the contractors or the timber merchants should not be
allowed to fell a single tree for ten years. After all, nature must be
given "time to heal the wounds these criminals have inflicted on
it". This was the demand of the Manki of Kotgarh at a recent
government-organised seminar at Chaibasa, in Singhbhum
of Bihar.
ON September 8, 1980, over 5,000
Jharkhandi forest dwellers of villages sur-
rounding HSCO's iron ore mining town
of Gua in Singhbhum, Bihar assembled
at the company's air-strip to march to the
Gua Bazar to organise a public meeting.
The Bihar Police and the Bihar M i l i t a r y
Police ( B M P ) were present in large
numbers. They prevented the people from
having their meeting. They arrested the
leader and as the people were protesting
the police opened fire on the peaceful
crowd. Many Jharkhandis were injured.
The Jharkhandis stringed their bows and
fired back w i t h their arrows. Four police
men were injured and later they succumb-
ed to their injuries. The people carried
their wounded and took their to the
IISCO hospital a km away. While they
were in the hospital premises awaiting
medical attention, a group of B M P
suddenly turned up and started butchering
the Jharkhandis in the hospital itself.
Eleven tribals were killed, according to the
government version. According to eye-
witnesses many more. It must be remem-
bered that not even in war is a hospital
attacked.
The previous day, September 7, 1980,
the villagers had assembled at the
TISCO's N o a m u n d i air-strip in Kutingta
village about 20 km from Gua, to present
a memorandum to Russi M o d i , the then
vice-chairman of TISCO. While they
waited for his plane to arrive, the people
wanted to present a copy of the same
memorandum to the divisional manager.
The T I S C O security personnel prevented
make a difference, subject of course to the
overriding need to invest in export i n -
dustries and any others where productivity
gains may have a beneficial cascading
effect. On this question of productivity,
the Economic Survey has stated that
despite stagnation in gross domestic
savings in the eighties, relatively high
growth rates have been achieved because
of "improvements in capacity utilisation
and productivity". A few illustrations of
the latter would have been reassuring and
heartening.
district
them from doing so and beat them up.
That night the police raided Kutingta and
its surrounding villages, beat up the
villagers and arrested the men folk. False
criminal cases were instituted against
them. The cases continue in the Chaibasa
district court till today.
PROBLEMS OF THE PEOPLE
Why had these people assembled in
Gua and Kutingta? What were their
grievances? These people and their
ancestors were living peacefully in the
forest eighty years ago. The mining com-
panies came, cut down the forest, built
their colonies and townships, brought in
outsiders. The people soon found it dif-
ficult to exist as they used to do. The forest
on which they fully depended was fast
depleting, its produce that they were living
on was becoming scarce, produce like
oilseeds, mahua flower, edible roots,
fruits, mushrooms, leaves, medicinal
herbs, meat and fish from streams and
rivers. The wild-life too was endangered.
The animals had lesser areas to graze on,
and the carnivorous ones had lesser food.
The continuous blasting frightened them
and the animals in turn attacked the
villagers and their cultivation. The mining
and industries brought in pollution, all
kinds of dangerous chemicals were
dumped into the rivers, forcing the people
to drink them. W i t h the coming of the
mines and industries, new diseases too
were introduced, diseases for which the
forest dwellers had no previous knowledge
497
of in order to find some herbal cure.
Apart from a l l this Jharkhandi women
were continually the target of the contrac-
tors, officers and mine-workers especially,
the outsiders. Rape and molestation
became part of a daily routine. The mines
and industries introduced mechanisation
to multiply their profits. This mechanisa-
tion resulted in more and more Jharkhan-
dis losing the chance of employment.
REPRESSION LET LOOSE
These were the problems of the people.
These were the issues they wanted to raise
at the meeting at Gua on September 8,
1980, and in Kutingta near Noamundi on
September 7, 1980, They were democra-
tically calling the attention of the govern-
ment and the mining companies to their
problems. H o w did the government res-
pond? After the incident of September 8,
1980, the government, in the words of a
senior I A S officer, decided to 'teach the
tribals a lesson'. Thousands of Jharkhan-
dis were arrested under false criminal
cases, the entire south Singhbhum was
terrorised by the administration. For this
j o b of terrorising the Jharkhandis, they
brought in a very efficient I A S officer,
Vijay Kapoor, and made him the SDO. He
personally supervised the arrests and
harassment of tribals. Over 280 houses
498
were burnt and destroyed by the police.
Trains on the H o w rah-Bom bay main line
were stopped and any one looking like a
tribal was attested. The manner in which
Vijay Kapoor acted would leave one to
think that he had his training with the
white racist South African government.
The mining companies, forest contractors
and other business communities were
overjoyed to have an officer like this.
During the years after 1980 the govern-
ment continued to use the same policy—to
treat the just demands of the people as
a Maw and order' issue, they continued to
frighten the Jharkhandis into submission
with raids on villages, arbitrary arrests,
false criminal cases, bullets and butchery.
It was a policy of genocide. But the
Jharkhandis d i d not give i n . They fought
back, each day, in isolated incidents, by
organising demonstrations, public meet-
ings, strikes in mines and industries. The
government tried another trick, an old
one. They bought up the Jharkhandi
leadership, thinking they could 'solve the
problem'. But the Jharkhandis soon realis-
ed this. "You can buy up our leaders...
but you cannot buy up our burning desire
to defend our culture, our self-respect and
our forest!". This response had its echo
in Lohardaga, Ranchi, and in Illigara,
Palamau where Gangaram Kalundia was
Economic and Political Weekly
butchered by the police, in Bhanjhi, Santa!
Parganas, where 14 Santals were slaugh-
tered. In spite of bullets and slaughter the
people fought back. The leadership may
be purchasable but n o t o u r heritage!
STRUGGLE AGAINST PLUNDER
While all this happened the mining
companies continued to plunder the
mineral wealth of this area and destroy the
forests, the forest contractors and officers
became lakhpaties overnight. While the
money earmarked for the development of
this area was pocketed by corrupt officials,
and block development officers (BDOs)
became truely officers who block develop-
ment, the tribals were left w i t h no alter-
native but to claim their traditional rights
to the forest. They started clearing forest
to convert it into cultivable land. It is true
that while doing so, the forests were
destroyed. This is a threat to the very
culture of the tribals. This act has some
similarities with Gandhi's resort to hunger
strikes to obtain concessions from the
British. Gandhi too threatened his'very life
to gain concessions from the British. The
Jharkhandis are threatening their very
existence as a tribal community to an-
nounce to the world that they better be
listened to and understood from their
March 11, 1989
point of view. The Jharkhandis are doing
today naturally, what Gandhi did rational-
ly. But very soon, this act was capitalised
by the forest contractors and timber
merchants. They began paying Jharkhan-
dis to fell trees, lb the criminal act of these
contractors the people became wage
labourers.
Today there is much talk about the
country's depleting forest area. In 1952,
40 per cent of the country's land area was
covered by forest. Now that 40 per eent
has been reduced to just 10 per cent. This
means that in the next decade the entire
forest area in India could be wiped out.
OFFICIAL'S VIEWS OF THE PROBLEM
It is this alarming situation that has
made the government wake up. The dis-
trict administration of Singhbhum called
a seminar at the Tata College, Chaibasa,
on 'Peoples Development and Forest Pro-
tection'. The dates of the seminar?...
September 7 and 8, 1988. Exactly eight
full years after the Gua firing! The
administration was unaware of this coin-
cidence. But the Jharkhandis who were
the main participants among the 400 and
odd crowd could not forget i t . The
seminar was a first attempt at a dialogue
between the government officials and the
people. But can it be said that the govern-
ment has shifted its policy from repression
to dialogue? Let us go ahead and see.
The deputy commissioner of Singh-
bhum, Sashikant Sharma, while inaugura-
ting the seminar stressed the close links
between the tribals and the forest. His
conclusion was that "certain unemployed
youths are inciting tribals to destroy
forest". Not once did he mention the
criminal role of the mining companies, in-
dustries, forest officials and contractors
in the destruction of the forest.
In the keynote address, D N Champia,
the Bihar's minister of state for human
resources, a tribal, briefly gave the history
of how this destruction of forests started.
"The forests" he said "were originally
owned and looked after by the tribals
themselves, then came the British who
started taking over the forest from the
tribals, the Indian government continued
this process. Because of the rich mineral
and forest wealth in this area it attracted
mining and industries. For the mines and
industries, townships and colonies came
up!' According to Champia it was with the
advent of these mines and industries that
the destruction of forest started. They
only looked at the forest commercially,
whereas the tribals never had such designs.
Continuing on the same line Champia
said that today big dams are being con-
structed to supply electricity for the mines
and industries. This, he said, is causing
Economic and Political Weekly March 11, 1989
lakhs of tribals to lose their lands and will
destroy more and more forest. He con-
cluded his speech by saying that "The
present forest policy is to protect the forest
from the people and not from the in-
dustries and thus tribals are being sacrific-
ed in the name of national development!'
Most of the government bureaucrats
who spoke towed the line of the deputy
commissioner—that the tribals are des-
troying forest. D K Srivastav, a DFO, too
claimed that frustrated yourig people were
destroying forests. The tribal welfare com-
missioner, Chintu Naik, while giving the
same line, said that if people were given
jobs the felling would stop. From all this
it became apparent that one of the main
reasons for this seminar was to legitimise
the government's charge that tribals are
cutting forests. H a d it not been for the
presence of the Mundas and Mankis
(traditional t r i b a l village chiefs) in large
numbers and other interested citizens, the
government would have got away with this
claim. One by one dozens of Jharkhandis
spoke out about the forest officials, the
police and the contractors, the mining
companies and the industries. They
challenged the government's accusation
that tribals were destroying forest. On the
contrary they spoke about the effort they
have put to save the forest by forming
village committees to protect the kunkati
forest (village common lands), they spoke
how they protested when timber was being
illegally transported, how they prevented
this and later, the police framed false
criminal cases against them.
Right through the two days of the
seminar, it was only the non-government
people who were giving a realistic view of
the problem. If the government is sincerely
interested in the protection of the forest,
it better have a correct analysis of the
situation. Government's policy and its
officers are fully to blame for the acute
problem of the destruction of the forest.
It has got to see itself a cause of the pro-
blem before looking for a solution.
Making the tribals scapegoats is not going
to solve the problem. It is only when the
.government admits this that one can say
that it is prepared for a dialogue w i t h the
people.
There was a lot of talk of the govern-
ment's aforestation' programme. The Tkta
Steel Rural Development Society (TSRDS)
too claimed that they were engaged in
aforestation programmes. A woman who
spoke on their behalf mentioned that 3
lakh saplings have been plahted around
the city of Jamshedpur this monsoon
season. She d i d not mention how many
of these saplings were of the eucalyptus
variety, that environmentalists today con-
sider a dangerous plant. It would have
been good if TSRDS could make a study
of who is responsible for the massive
deforestation that has taken place during
these last eighty years around the city of
Jamshedpur, since the coming of the steel
company. Jamshedpur city was built on
a hundred villages around the village
Kalimati; these were all villages surround-
ed by forest, green and beautiful.
Indrajit Dey of the Society for Rural
Industries (SRI), who is an expert on soil
and water management, criticised these
aforestation programmes as "unnatural
and a waste of money". He said that
nature, if left alone, is capable of creating
its own forest, for this the land should be
left alone and free from grazers for a
couple of years.
TOWARDS HEALING THE WOUNDS
The seminar did create a very hopeful
atmosphere among the people who
attended i t . The people felt that for the
first time they are being listened to. This
atmosphere was possible because of the
role of the convenor of the seminar, t h e '
deputy development commissioner,
Amarjit Sinha, whose attitude towards the
people and the problem was different
from the rest of the bureauc jats. He con-
tinually emphasised "we want to learn
from you", "we want to know your pro-
blems" and finally confirmed that " i f any
effort to protect the forest has been made
it is the Mundas and the Mankis who have
done so and not the Forest Department".
Very welcoming words, after all these
years of repression unleashed on the
Jharkhandis. But, are they the words of
just one officer? For the people to accept
the hand of the government for a dialogue
they need some more assurance, in prac-
tical terms. They need to see, that the
government takes action against officers,
contractors, mining companies, that no
tribal village can be raided, that all
arbitrary arrests be stopped, that their
women can walk and roam the forest
safely, that a l l false cases on Jharkhandis
under the Forest Act be withdrawn.
This assurance is badly needed, before
full trust and confidence can be establish-
ed. Or else it may prove that the real policy
is just another trick to impress the people
before the coming elections, or ti dampen
the spirit of the Jharkhand Movement
and thereby split i t . In the last but most
important suggestion that came from
Nirojan Bobonga, the M a n k i of Kotgarh,
he demanded that if the government is
really interested then it should issue a
moratorium on all timber felling for the
next ten years. The forest department or
Bihar Forest Corporation, the mines or
the industries, the contractors or the
timber merchants will not be allowed to
fell a single tree for ten years, giving
"nature time to heal the wounds these
criminals have inflicted on it".
499