At the time Saranda fleeted in and out of conversations in the corridors of power in Delhi, in August 2011, few would have known much about it. Forest, Maoists and mines were the inadequate terms which were liberally used, mostly in news reports, to help imagine Saranda from great geographical and political distances. But with the announcement of the Saranda Action Plan (since renamed the Saranda Development Plan) and rural development minister Jairam Ramesh’s monologues on it (in the aftermath of his trips to the region), the nation is being compelled to reckon with this once-grand forest. The trouble is that imagination of Saranda remains as distant as before.

So, our series on Saranda must inevitably begin with a telling of what it was, what it is, and what it stands to become for the better or for the worse.
This 850 sq km forest of sal, mahua, arjun and other trees, with numerous perennial streams feeding many rivers, covering large swathes of Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district, sits on one of the largest iron ore deposits of the world – around 2,000 million tonnes. The relief is one of small, contiguous hills of red soft rock and top soil, known locally as ‘murum’ and grey hard rock. The sal cover, though depleted to a large extent, remains to this day the largest in Asia. The jungles of Saranda are home to the Hos, a tribal people, and also the few Birhors (an ancient tribe) who remain today.

The Hos are largely an agrarian tribe, cultivating rice, a few pulses, vegetables and greens on fields created by cutting down trees and burning stumps. Their homesteads with huts of wood, mud and red clay tiles stand on the clearings by the side of the newly-tarred road from Sedal Gate, near Badajamda, to Manoharpur, the block from which vast tracts of Saranda are administered. (But these are not all. They also have settlements/villages deep inside the forest.) Some of these villages are revenue villages while the others are ‘forest’ (settled by the forest department before Independence) and some others are the ‘Jharkhandi’ ones (encroachments made by the residents without the forest department’s sanction).

The tribals are greatly dependent on the forest produce, collecting and selling them in local markets. The jungle is also their source of water for all usage and of game animals. However, the tribal people’s association with Saranda doesn’t just end with its water, land and forests as mere utilities (jal, jangal, jameen – has been an undying rallying cry in all their movements for their rights). The hills, the trees, the streams are all deities in their religion, which the Hos call ‘Sarana’. In fact, most of their worship is directed at the many universal and local elements of nature.

The local tribesmen were also the first users of the iron ore of the region. Loose nuggets extracted from shallow digging were melted in rudimentary furnaces and shaped into arrowheads, axes and plough-heads. Iron strips were also bent to hold the ‘nagra’, a large drum used in public announcements. Mining interests in the region grew in the early years of the last century with Bengal Timber Trading Company, a British firm, reporting the presence of high-grade iron ore. Soon after, Martin-Burn, a British mining concern, set up Saranda’s first modern mine at Gua. A few years later, the company’s second mine came up at Chiria.

The mines served the colonisers’ needs right up to World War II. However, by the early 1940s, the mines had already changed hands and had been acquired by the industrialist, Sir Biren Mukherjee, who founded the Indian Iron and Steel Company (Iisco). Iisco was later nationalised, and in 2006, finally merged with the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL). SAIL itself was no stranger to the region, running large mines at Kiriburu and Meghatuburu, both near Karampada, a fringe of Saranda. Further, a few private mining concerns like Usha-Martin, Mishrilal Jain and others got permits and leases in the forest and on its fringes. Over the years, small stone and clay quarries, legal and illegal, started operating in the area.

Since the early 1980s, all these mining activities have altered the political and physical landscape of the region. India’s growth needed Saranda’s iron and rock at unprecedented volumes to make steel and roads. The ecology of the area began to change, getting damaged irreparably in patches. “If you look at Saranda now and had seen it three or four decades ago, you would understand the nature of this change and its implications for the people of the area,” says Abhijit Ganguly, a local adventurer-entrepreneur who was born in Gua.

Many perennial streams dried and the soil lost its fertility in the villages by the mines. The mining concerns had settled their employees in townships which had running water, electricity, functioning schools and green spaces. Meanwhile, the flawed government policies and their shoddy implementation hindered the natural rights of the tribal people to the forest. With the touted benefits of ‘trickle down’ economics failing them and the access to the forest threatened, discontent grew.

This discontent, over the intervening years from then till now, has had various articulations – it found resonance in the ‘jungle kato’ movement of the 1980s, and relevance in the ‘Jharkhand Bachao Andolan’ of the recent years. However, troublingly, for the past decade, it has also been held hostage by the Maoist Communist Centre (the Communist Party of India – Maoist, after merger with the People’s War Group). The banned left-wing extremist party has expanded its toehold in the region, despite a strong opposition from the locals, taking up the issue of forest rights of the tribals and the impact of the mining on them.

“The traditional governance of the Hos has been under the Manki-Munda system (a government of tribal chieftains of the villages). In the continued absence of the state in the region and the ensuing political vacuum, the only resistance to the Maoists was from the traditional governance. But without governance support from the state, even this has given way,” says Sushil Barla, the district general secretary of the Congress and a member of the Jharkhand Human Rights Movement.

The near-absence of the state that Barla is talking about can be traced back to the political struggles of the 1980s and the 90s for the creation of a larger Jharkhand consisting of tribal areas of undivided Bihar, the southern western part of West Bengal and the northern reaches of Odisha as well as the tribal rights movement of the time. With the creation of the state of Jharkhand in 2000, these struggles achieved a partial but disabling and abrupt culmination, throwing their political leadership in a flux from which the most secure exit was the race to assume the governance reins of the new state. The brighter side, the people had hoped, was that the coming of a government led by tribal leaders would guarantee the upholding of their rights.

However, these leaders colluded with the corporate sector they had opposed in the course of these struggles, thus distancing themselves from the causes that had got them the mass support in Saranda and the rest of the state. Many PSUs invested heavily in the state, invited there by the different governments that came and sank in the last decade. The ‘mainstreaming’ of these “peoples’ parties” also led to their losing the support from the ground in Saranda. With the region left on its own, governance delivery through functionaries waned while the essential services came to be disbursed through the mining interests in the region through the never-obligatory corporate social responsibility. Doles by successive governments and the occasional, incongruent CSR work became the apologies of both the state and the corporate sector and, intermittently, kept dissent down.

As an illustration of this deficit, consider this: SAIL regularly throws up the hand pumps it has set up in the Saranda villages (most reel under acute scarcity of drinking water round the year) or the wings it has added to government schools as evidence of its being a responsible corporate citizen. However, when Governance Now visited some of the villages, most of the hand pumps had been non-functional for months, even years, while the teachers in some of the schools came only once every month. This neglect by both the state and corporate has created anger among the villagers which, in the recent years, has given the Maoists their chance.

In the context of Saranda’s riches and its discontents, let us go back to the opening paragraph of this piece. Why did, after so many years, Saranda enter the conversation in distant Delhi? One has to search and reflect on the workings of neo-liberal politics for an answer. The Jharkhand government, in the past few years, has signed a number of MoUs with mining giants, Arcelor Mittal, Tata Steel, Jindal Steel Works, to name a few, for extraction of ore in the region. Nineteen new mining and prospecting licences have been granted by the government at the centre.

So, in July-August last year, the central and state police and paramilitary forces launched a combing operation – Operation Anaconda – in the jungles of Saranda to ‘sanitise’ the area. By October 2011, the government had declared the region ‘cleared’ of Maoists and had announced the Rs 263 crore Saranda Action Plan. Villagers of six – Digha, Lailour, Chiria, Makranda, Gangda and Chottanagra – of the 15 panchayats in Manoharpur block were to be beneficiaries of the plan.

The plan itself broadly envisaged the rigorous implementation of welfare schemes of the central government ranging from MGNREGS to Indira Awaas Yojana. Formalisation of forest rights also found mention in the plan as did education for the tribals. Among others things provided in the plan is a road network, 130 km long, that is to connect these six panchayats to an arterial road running from Karampada to Bhalulata. This arterial road has been proposed to be built as a metre-thick concrete road. The cost of building this road was earlier estimated at Rs104 crore. After six months, a revised estimate stands at Rs 130 crore – nearly half of the entire package being given for the development of the tribal people. The fact that the road is to link areas where the mining licences have been granted immediately stoked concerns that the plan had been leeched on to the plight of the Hos and the Birhors while it was aimed at creating infrastructure for the mining companies.

“There is an obvious mining interest behind the plan. Otherwise, the costs for the road network seem absurd given that the tribals will get cycles under the plan,” says Clement Kujur, who is associated with Johar, an NGO based in the district headquarters of Chaibasa. At the same time, the implementation of the schemes dovetailed into the plan, so far, has been appalling. In the later articles in this series, there will be detailed reportage of what is happening with the plan on the field.

On one hand are the Hos and the other tribes of Saranda tied to its wood, sal seeds and leaves, mahua flowers, tendu trees, game animals, streams, and its hills which they revere. On the other are the corporations inching their way into the forest to blast the iron out of its bowels.

As a consequence of the struggle for access to these riches, Saranda has been the stage, the prop and the theme of many peoples’ movements and state and non-state action of various hues of the political spectrum in the past and it promises to do so in the future. This is the first in our series of reports from the ground which will explore and comment upon the changing face of Saranda.