India’s coal war heats up - The Ecologist
▻http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2988234/indias_coal_war_heats_up.html
On October 1, police bullets killed 5 villagers and injured 40 others in a village in central India. Their crime: protecting their fertile lands. The National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) goes over dead bodies to get at the coal lying under the highly productive soil.
This is only one of 48 mapped struggles in India against the fossil fuel industry and one of 231 environmental justice frontlines from which we know enough details to feature in the Atlas of Environmental Justice. That’s the tip of the iceberg. Pushing people off their lands accompanies 80% of these conflicts. The land dispossession has accelerated since 1991, when India decided to adopt the ‘Western way’ of GDP growth at all costs. Saskia Sassen, and Ashish Kothari and Aseem Srivastava describe the speeding up of expulsions in relation to the arrival of neoliberal policymaking in their books (Expulsions and Churning the Earth: The making of Global India). It turns out that as the world’s Cold War ended, a coal war was just getting started in India.