The wanton and violent annihilation of ancient ecosystems and communities in east-central India for mining projects, catering to short-term greed rather than meaningful development, is not widely recognised. At the centre of this story is Vedanta, a company that abuses an ancient name to mask its iniquities and pursuit of bauxite, across Odisha’s mountains. Defeated in 2013 over its plans to mine bauxite from Niyamgiri, through Supreme Court-mandated gram sabhas that voted unanimously against it, Vedanta has had to buy bauxite from elsewhere to supply its Lanjigarh refinery: from Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Australia and since 2018, from another mountain, Kodingamali. Bauxite is carried from here in cargo trucks, spreading dust and danger through villages along the route. Tijmali (known as Sijimali in the Kond Adivasi language) is one of the great bauxite-capped mountains of south Odisha, spanning the border of Rayagada and Kalahandi districts. In February 2023, Vedanta acquired mining rights to its bauxite deposit – estimated at 311 million tonnes (mt) to be mined at 9mt per year for 30 years. Villagers for miles around oppose this decision. They have already witnessed the devastation caused by existing mines nearby and know the history of three other movements aimed at preventing bauxite mining in Gandhamardan, Baplamali (Baphlimali) and Niyamgiri. The Gandhamardan movement of the 1980s succeeded; the Kashipur movement on Baplamali mining was eventually defeated after ten years of police repression and Niyamgiri, as mentioned above, was won but remains under pressure.Resistance movement and the state responseThe Tijmali movement follows this tradition and is characterised by remarkable solidarity between Adivasi and Dalit communities. In 2023, they jointly founded the Maa Mati Mali Surakhya Manch (Mother Earth-Mountain Protection Platform) to protect Tijmali, Majingmali (earmarked for Vedanta) and Kutrumali (over which Adani obtained rights). Women’s participation has been integral from the beginning, with key leaders such as Medha Patkar risking arrest to show their support. Women have also been central in establishing tent blockades to prevent the construction of access roads in mountains. Since May 2025, a community has prevented the Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation of Odisha (IDCO) from constructing a three kms access road up Tijmali. Residents of Talampadar village standing together on the morning after the 21 overnight arrests, Photo: Malika Singh.Meanwhile, the state’s response has been increasingly violent. On April 3, 2026, the Rayagada sub-collector imposed a curfew to break a blockade, but around 300 women and men from a dozen villages refused to budge, manning it in relay. On April 6, police staged a night-time attack on Kantamal, one of the ‘resistance’ villages. Over 100 policemen and masked ‘goondas’ arrived around 3 am, firing tear gas bombs that set fire to thatched homes. Over 70 people were severely injured, a cow was killed and cash and gold jewellery stolen. This followed a similarly violent pre-dawn raid on Talampadar village on March 11, in which 21 people were forcibly arrested, including a pregnant woman and elderly women. Permanent police surveillance of hamlets has since become the norm, compounding the blatant fabrication of ‘consent’ at coerced public hearings in 2023 and the systematic trampling of pro-tribal and environmental legislation. A Bharatiya Janata Party MP Malvika Devi, along with other political leaders, have demanded an inquiry into the April attack and called for the principle of Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) to be upheld.Extractivism in IndiaIndia’s first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru, who laid down the ‘Panchsheel Principles’, promoted a ‘hands-off’ tribal policy, asserting Adivasis’ right to develop ‘according to their own genius.’ Yet his government simultaneously initiated a new degree of industrialisation in tribal areas, including mega-dams, mines and metal factories, displacing tens of thousands of people in Odisha alone. The Hirakud dam project (1948-1957), the Indal aluminium smelter it supplied and the Rengali dam built for Rourkela steel plant, displaced thousands and led to considerable violence. These and other mega-projects initiated a form of human sacrifice: Adivasi citizens’ well-being was sacrificed at the altar of economic development, which is yet to yield the benefits promised.After India’s new economic and mining policies in 1991-93, mining and metal factories escalated sharply. Several ‘developed’ countries have closed their steel and aluminium factories due to high environmental, labour and material costs, outsourcing metal manufacture to the so-called ‘developing’ countries, where land, labour rights and environmental safeguards carry less force. India has accelerated production to the point where it is now the world’s second largest producer of coal, steel and aluminium after China – at an enormous cost to water sources and biodiverse forests and farmlands that are increasingly transformed into desiccated wastelands. Calculations by the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy show that producing one tonne of steel consumes over 40 tonnes of water, while manufacturing one tonne of aluminium consumes over 1,300 tonnes. The big dams form part of this commodity chain, supplying metal factories with hydropower and water, in effect extracting water from the public domain, though each factory also depends on captive coal mines and power stations. Equally important is the fact that bauxite mountain capping, estimated to be 40 million years old, hold monsoon rainwater in suspension and release it through dozens of perennial streams. When bauxite is mined, the mountains die as sources of water and fertility. The scale of present extraction portends havoc for Odisha’s future. It is not well-known that Vietnam holds larger bauxite deposits than India – the second or third largest in the world, while India has the seventh largest. Nor is it known that Vietnam has conserved these deposits with far greater care. The country’s top military strategist, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who played a key role in defeating French and American occupying forces, strongly advised against excessive extraction from the 1980s up to 2009, when the government started promoting it and suppressed unprecedented opposition. Nevertheless, Giáp’s foresight spared his country’s highlander tribal communities from the scale of ecocide and cultural destruction currently faced by Odisha’s Adivasis. In 2023, India mined an estimated 22mt of bauxite, against Vietnam’s 4mt. What this means is that, for the sake of short-term profit and rapid expansion of its arms industry, India is burning through its bauxite reserves exceedingly fast, with incalculable ecological and social consequences. The concepts of ‘extractivism’ and ‘rights of nature’ evolved in Latin America. Ecuador was the first country to embed rights of nature into its constitution in 2008, alongside ‘plurinationalism’ and ‘interculturality.’ The principle was upheld in overwhelming referendum votes in August 2023 against oil extraction in the Amazonian Yasuni national park and gold mining at the Andean Choco Andino. These initiatives originated in Ecuador largely due to the influence of CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Ecuador), which has consistently opposed mining and oil extraction. Rights of nature has since been taken up by environmentalists and multicultural institutions globally, but often without recognising it as an inherently political initiative rooted in indigenous life-worlds. Ecuador’s indigenous plurinationalism goes beyond seeking rights for indigenous people by recognising the inter-relatedness of human and beyond-human consciousness and offering a broad political imagination for every sector of society. ‘Rights of nature,’ therefore, emerges from indigenous ontologies that are mindful of class divisions and claim a stake in national politics. When taken up by environmentalists, this grounding is often forgotten and the concept is used simplistically; especially in India, where Adivasis are increasingly excluded from the country’s 600 national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, imposing a human-nonhuman divide. Conservationists and tribal rights activists are too often on opposing sides, reflecting the division of India’s ‘wild lands’ into wildlife sanctuaries on the one hand and ‘sacrifice zones’ open to industrial devastation on the other. Adivasis are aware that both categories exclude them, placing far less value on their lives than on wildlife or minerals. Their key role in conserving the world’s biodiversity hotspots is only beginning to be understood.CONAIE questions fundamentally an economy in which corporations, in collusion with the state, fund nation’s ‘development’ by extracting wealth from indigenous territories. Similarly, Māori in New Zealand have used rights of nature legislation to defend sacred mountains and rivers and a 2022 ruling by the Madras high court upheld the same principle. All this resonates with how Odisha Adivasi and Dalit communities articulate their movement to protect the mountains. Konds conceive the mountains they inhabit as spiritual entities who give them life. Geologist T.L. Walker, who discovered Odisha’s bauxite, recognised this connection in 1902 when he named the base rock of these mountains ‘khondalite’, “in honour of those fine hillmen, the Khonds.” Another colonial-era geologist, Cyril Fox, formulated in 1932 the very plan for bauxite mines, dams, factories, railways and exported aluminium that is being realised in Odisha today. A 1941 census official confided to Gopinath Mohanty that when asked about their religion, Konds replied with a single word: ‘Dongar’ (mountains).Among thousands of Adivasi and Dalit women who attended a public hearing for Sijimali on October 16, 2023, Namita Majhi, 19, said: “Sijimali forest land is worshipped as a god. The police have been coming to our village in the middle of the night and scaring us. Are we in a ‘ganatantra’ (republic) or ‘gun-tantra’ (gun-rule)?”On November 4, 2023, the Odisha Mining Corporation, supported by ten bus-loads of police, brought JCBs up Majingmali, neighbouring Sijimali. They were stopped by at least 150 women who lay down in front of the vehicles. One of them said, “Like all the Malis which are our neighbours, we people are also kith and kin of different Malis. We shall die instead of letting these Malis be destroyed.”The stand these people are making to protect their mountains is a stand for the future well-being of all Odisha’s inhabitants. Mined for 40 years by Nalco, Panchpatmali’s perennial streams have dried up, its forests are gone and villages throughout the surrounding areas live in dire poverty. Officially, Adivasi and other farmers displaced by dams and mines are termed ‘Project Affected Persons’ (PAPs) and the process is described as ‘development-induced displacement.’ But seeing how communities’ own paths to development are cut off and their truly sustainable livelihoods undermined, ‘investment-forced dispossession’ seems a more accurate description, the factor motivating large-scale police repression being the financial investment at stake. Lavish promises of project benefits are invariably betrayed and the rapid decline in quality of life in mined or industrialised areas begins with the divvying up of communities and the destruction of ecosystems. Adivasi ontologies versus a military-industrial complexAdivasi knowledge systems are far deeper than most outsiders realise and far more holistic, in line with indigenous understandings of sacred mountains worldwide. Adivasis do not need science to explain that their mountains’ bauxite capping conserve water like clay; they understand that the exceptional fertility of central Odisha depends on the rivers that rise in these mountains. They grasp what mainstream economists, engineers and politicians usually do not. As Bhagavan Majhi of the Kashipur movement, articulated:What sense does it make to destroy ancient, life-giving mountain ranges, for 30 years of output, profiting only a few, to manufacture aluminium into warplanes? India’s bauxite mines are now an intrinsic part of India’s military-industrial complex, and represent a ‘double death’ – a militarised annihilation of livelihoods, natural formations at the point of extraction and death-dealing missiles and planes at the point of end use.India’s former President Abdul Kalam was a weapons scientist, a ‘missile man’ who promoted the aluminium industry to make India more self-reliant in weaponry. Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. factory near Nalco in Koraput displaced thousands of Adivasis and has joint ventures with Israeli weapons firms, while Adani manufactures drones in a joint venture with Elbit near Hyderabad, that are also supplied to Israel. Complementing this two-way arms trade, Israeli ‘counterinsurgency’ training programmes for Indian police, including aggressive use of Israeli spyware, are now commonplace, with drone surveillance and bombing of Adivasi citizens alongside Maoists in Chhattisgarh. Drones have reportedly also been used to intimidate the Tijmali protest movement. The mining and arms companies involved are driven by a ‘grammar of greed’ that discounts subsistence agriculture as ‘primitive.’ ‘Adivasi Economics’ involves systems of exchange, including communal labour on each other’s land, that never profited at the other’s expense. The Kothari Education Commission, established under Nehru, aimed to transform tribal economies from subsistence into an industrial labour force through a proliferation of training schemes, boarding schools and hostels – an ‘ashramisation of tribal education’ that the Virginius Xaxa Report (2014) characterises as assimilation in all but name. India has many more boarding schools for children of Adivasi or indigenous families than the United States and Canada ever had. As in those notorious ‘stolen generation schools,’ sexual abuse appears to be rife. These schools are often funded by the very mining companies displacing Adivasi communities and propagate an extractivist ideology completely at odds with Adivasi ontology – the knowledge and value systems that have evolved in symbiosis with the mountains, forests and rivers that Adivasis have always called home. As Santoshi Markam articulates, school education often alienates Adivasi children from their land, languages and cultures to a degree bordering on linguistic genocide of India’s several hundred tribal languages. Is it not time to reverse the learning and re-attune education to practices that reconnect mind with land? Should not economics be based in sound knowledge of the ecosystems that sustain us? Indigenous communities in Ecuador, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere have set up inspiring models that empower indigenous children and revive their languages. Adharshila and Muskaan are two learning centres in Madhya Pradesh that have transformed Adivasi children’s lives, among a growing number of such initiatives in India that are starting to return Adivasis to meaningful control over their children’s education.The blockade made out of stones and branches to prevent company personnel from approaching the Tijmali plateau, Photo: Malika Singh.The blockades preventing mining vehicles from reaching Tijmali and other plateaus are protecting sacred mountains whose life-giving fertility is vital for future generations across India, not only for livelihoods. India’s Human Development Index ranked it 130th out of 193 countries in 2023 and in 2025 it was counted as the sixth most polluted among 143 countries. In international law, Adivasi people lack several major legal safeguards. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was passed in 2007. Although India endorsed it, its applicability has been denied. Similarly, the International Labour Organisation Indigenous and Tribal Convention No. 169 (1989) has been ratified by Nepal but not India. Nevertheless, Sijimali and Odisha’s other sacred mountains fall within the schedule five areas, where tribal land rights are meant to be protected.Instead of arrests and criminal cases against protestors, should it not be the police officers who face criminal proceedings for acts of unprovoked violence against Adivasi and other villagers? The impunity of senior police officers known to have used torture and orchestrated killings is a stain on the country’s reputation. At least the Supreme Court recently overturned, as casteist and discriminatory, the bail conditions issued by Rayagada police for released Adivasi activists from the Tijmali movement ordering them to clean police stations!As Lado Sikaka stated at the Belambar public hearing for expansion of Vedanta’s Lanjigarh refinery in April 2009: People say there are millions of rupees to be made by mining Niyamgiri, but it isn’t money up there, it’s our Maa-Baap and we must protect the mountain from corporations whose demonic behaviour replicates the demons of ancient mythology. As another Dongria woman put it: “We need the mountains and the mountains need us.”Felix Padel is an anthropologist who has worked extensively on Adivasi rights.Malvika Gupata is a doctoral candidate at Oxford department of international development, working on Adivasi and Indigenous rights in India and Ecuador.