the facets: The Soldiers of the Sacred Mountain

One of India's most remote tribes, the mountain they revere as a God and a multinational mining company with their site set on a mountains scared stone. The stage is set for the bitter struggle against the backdrop of eastern India's dramatic landscapes as the bull dozers draw closer. What will one tribe do to save their forest, their mountains and their GOD.
There is a place where the rich forests shrouds the hill sides, where the summer’s monsoon rains turn the streams into rivers. These are India's Niyamgiri hills, home to one of sub continents most remote tribes, the Dongriya Kondh.
Niyamgiri Hills, named after the Niyamraja, the main deity of the Dongriya Kondhs, are one of the last untouched wildernesses of Orissa. Rising to a height of more than 4000 feet, it is the source of

Bansadhara and Nagabali rivers. It has some of the most pristine forests in Orissa. It has approximately 50 species of important medicinal plants, about 20 species of wild ornamental plants, and more than 10 species of wild relatives of crop plants such as sugarcane. Niyamgiri hills are home to a number of vulnerable wildlife species including tiger, leopards, elephant, sloth bear, pangolin, palm civet, giant squirrel, mouse deer and sambhar, etc, most of which are in the IUCN red list of endangered species. It is also a part of migration corridor of elephants between forests of Kondhmals and of Kalahandi/Koraput. Niyamgiri hills are also home for rare birds like Hill Myna and Hornbill. Recently, the Golden Gecko has been discovered for the first time in Orissa from the Niyamgiri hill which happens to be the only known habitat in the state. This gecko is one of the rarest lizards of India, endemic to Eastern Ghats and is found in only one another site in Andhra Pradesh. Due to its extremely rare status, this lizard is classified in the Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act. The ecological diversity in the Niyamgiri hills is linked to the hundreds of perennial streams flowing from these hills, even though Kalahandi is one of the most perennially drought prone areas in the country.
The Niyamgiri Hill is sacred to the Dongriya Kondhs, a unique primitive tribal group found only in the Niyamgiri Hills. This tribe too is endangered and on the brink of extinction, since the 2001 census reveals a total population of around 7,500 only. They consider the mountain top of the Niyamgiri as inviolate and protect the forests on the top as “Kaman” forests, where their god Niyamraja Penu resides.
This is not what is interesting and attracting the outsiders. The mountains are rich in Bauxite. The raw material for Aluminum and it is this, that has brought the London based mining company Vedanta

Resources here. It plans a vast open cast mine on the top of Niyamgiri, the Dongriya Kondhs most sacred site. The company hopes that blasting the top of the mountain area will reveal 70 million tones of Bauxite. Through the trees of Niyamgiri, one can see Vedanta's aluminum refinery in the neighboring Lanjigarh. These white plains far below Niyamgiri are home to other tribes. Their fate is seen as warning already. Life has become hard and the old women and children are dying. They are treated and living there like dogs. They have lost their land and homes for ever. Vedanta's refinery dominates the plains around Lanjigarh. Its toxic waste is dumped into enormous

pools and it seeps underground. One can even hear its hum from high in the Dongriya Kondh's forests. But Lanjigarh was not always like this. The tribe used to eat and drink well, and thrive on the fruits and vegetables from the forests and the farming was good as well. But nowadays, everything has got Vedanta written on it. The company came and asked the tribes in Lanjigarh to leave their land in exchange of money. When they resisted, they were forced and along with the police they were harassed. When they still did not budge, the bull dozers were used at night to demolish their homes. The site where the refinery is standing now, was a huge resource of water. But now the Bauxite dust is mixing into the wells and the streams causing great trouble and inconvenience.
Alongside the rising pollution, there is something remarkable about the

Dongriya Kondhs. The resistance. The tribal people have become extremely agitated and are ready to lay down their lives to protect Niyamgiri. In Niyamgiri, the pressure is mounting. The roads are being bull dozed deep into the hills. But the Dongriyas are determined not to allow them at any cost. And so they have blocked the road to the sacred hills and they have decided not to allow their fate to be decided in the corporate boardroom. They are ready to even have their throats slit and their heads beheaded to reserve their exclusive right of the Niyamgiri hills.

If the mining is not stopped, the Dongriya Kondh will lose their livelihood, their identity and the sanctity of their most religious site. They will also lose their present good health, their self-sufficiency and go down un-noticed in the books of history.
For the Kondhs it is as if their GOD has been sold for Bauxite. How much, they ask, would the God go for, if he was Ram, Allah, or Christ?