Tribals boycott public hearing on Bauxite mining

By SNV Sudhir

Chintapalli (Vizag Agency), Oct 3: Tribals gave an unexpected jolt to the State by boycotting the public hearing held on Bauxite mining here on Friday. It was also shock to the police who laid a seize to the entire agency area and banned the vehicle movement days in advance, riding the Maoist threat.
The confused officials had to go ahead with their programme without a single person to hear them. The Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board (APPCB) intended to hold the public hearing on the environmental aspects of the proposed bauxite mining by the State owned Andhra Pradesh Mineral Development Corporation (APMDC) in four blocks of Jerella reserve forest area, coming under GK Veedhi Agency mandal. The bauxite mined by the APMDC would be supplied to Anrak aluminum, a UAE based firm which would setup its alumina refinery at Makavarapalem in Narsipatnam division. The state government earlier entered into a MoU with the Anrak in this regard.
In a highly guarded affair, the officials of APMDC and APPCB started the hearing process amidst slogans from the tribals drawn from the surrounding villages. However tribals from the actual mining effected villages, which are 40kms away from the hearing site, didn’t attend as the police suspended passenger bus services to those villages. It is learnt that the villagers who were feared of heavy deployment of armed police preferred to stay indoors. And some of them who came all the way on foot from those villages boycotted the hearing and aired slogans against the mining.
The hearing process started half an hour late due to the protests and slogans raised by the tribals asking the authorities to withdraw their decision to mine bauxite in Agency areas, which would render thousands of them shelter less and other environmental related problems. Officials were not given any chance to begin the hearing. Later after half an hour the APPCB environmental engineer Satyanrayana Murthy began the procedure. The APMDC MD, Rajagopal tried to explain the advantages of the mining. But there were no audience to listen to him except few scribes. All the tribals who entered the premises left without showing any interest in the MD’s speech. Interestingly the APMDC and APPCB officials went on explaining about mining addressing an empty ground. Tribals said that they were not interested in taking part in the public hearing, as none of them wanted it. Terming the mining as demon, tribals said that they were also ready to face death to stop the mining process. APPCB EE, Murthy said that they have received around 1,571 written representations of which 1,500 belonged to various tribal associations, MLAs, political parties, NGOs. He said they would send the representations, minutes of the public hearing, series of incidents occurred to the ministry of environment and forests for the permission to mine bauxite.
“We would send the minutes and actual incidents happened here to the MoEF,” said the district joint collector, M Veerabrahmaiah who chaired the meeting. Bhadhrachalam MP, Midiam Babu Rao, CPI and CPM district secretaries, JV Satyanrayana Murthy, Ch Narasinga Rao, TD rural unit president and its MLA, Bandaru Satyanrayan Murthy, Chengala Venkat Rao and G Srinivas of Samata led the tribals.