Sebastiao Salgado, the world-renowned Brazilian photographer, describes himself as a 'militant journalist', seeking to transcend the mere documentary nature of his art. In 1994, he started a global project on migration. Here, "the last apostle o
Amidst vast mineral resources and fertile soil, there is dehumanising poverty, leading historians to comment on Bihar's "poverty among plenty", with nearly half its population living below subsistence level. With the lowest per capita income in India, the gun has become the arbiter of existence for the starving throng. As a historian has written, "In Bihar, capitalism is stunted and deformed ...there is cruel mockery of the concept of 'civil society' and two thousand years after blood sports were banned by Emperor Ashoka, terror stalks the land."
Bihar can be divided into three zones, the mineral-rich Chottanagpur plateau, the relatively prosperous South Gangetic plain and the densely populated and poor districts north of the Ganga. The mineral wealth has created a mining boom but has led to poor peasants being driven off their land--or sucked into the mining machinery as petty labourforce and wretched scavengers of slag. On the Netherhat plateau, for example, 48 open bauxite mines are destroying fertile farmland. The coal mines of Dhanbad, Hazaribagh and others in the Ranchi region have transformed the local proletariat into an exploited sub-proletariat.
The Orwellian expansion of industry and mines have torn away the forest cover, created a Dante's Inferno where millions scratch a living from open cast iron, manganese and limestone mines. The indigenous communities are trying to fight back, to stop the decimation of their homelands. The construction of the Suvarnatekha-Chandil dam was stopped because of tribal agitations.
Yet the mining and manufacturing sector, instead of freeing the people from feudalism, has created conditions of utter deprivation where armed mafias carry out gohar (massacres) on the vulnerable and skinny mineworkers sleep amidst iron ore clad in their only worldly possessions. Expectedly, the mining boom has brought in its wake all kinds of industries--iron and steelworks, cement, automobiles. These sectors are electricity-intensive, so dams have been built and more are under construction, destroying more of tribal land. Many locals had to abandon their land and migrate--between 1981 and 1991 the urban population in the state of Bihar rose by over 30 per cent. Others have stayed back, only to be turned into petty footsoldiers in the yawning industrial structure.