 It's about what I call the crisis of the culture of concealment, the mining industry in India. It's based on a book that we have written, which we call Ecology and Economy, quest for a socially concerned, socially informed connection. And it is about the mining industry, the extractive industries in India and how they affect certain tribal communities in a particular central part of India. And I have a couple of co-authors, and one of my co-authors is Felix Spadel, who is basically an ecologist, anthropologist, so this entire book is written in that style. And it's not the usual number crunching exercises, which me as a labor economist generally does. But we got a very good macro pictures from the earlier two or three presentations that we saw, and we very clearly know that India is not an export dependent country on extractive industries. It's nowhere in the first list of 15. It's probably not there in the next list of 15 and so on. So to give it a kind of a flourish, Amitav Ghosh, he's one of my favorite authors, has written a book, a new non-fiction book called The Great Derangement in 2016, and he questions why and how the current culture of the art and literature generally, which responds to current events such as war and other kind of crisis, is not talking in terms of climate change. It is the most important question confronting us today, and why is it that climate change is not showing up in the current arts and literature? He calls this a crisis of the culture of concealment. When later generations look into arts and literature of our time and do not find that it depicting the crisis of climate change, how would they react to this culture of concealment? Now what does this got to do with my story about the extractive industry? Basically the story of the extractive industries can also be considered a crisis of culture, a crisis of concealment. Felix Bedel has written other than this particular book that we have, Economy and Ecology, another book called Out of this Earth, which came out in 2010. And here he exposes in both these books together, we basically expose this crisis of concealment in the extractive industries, specifically of the mining industry, in particular states in the central belt of India, in the states of Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Northern Andhra Pradesh and so on. This crisis of concealment described in great detail in our books is about how financial capital, the metal exchange systems of the UK and the US collide to take away the cultivable lands of these tribal communities in these states for profits for the mining companies in these foreign lands. In this talk I will describe this crisis of concealment, that is how the long arm of the mining company is able to impact these former, these former, there is a tribal communities. Who would believe that the mining companies in distant UK or USA would have an eye on and can actually create havoc in the lives of these communities. A rationalization of mining of land that were cultivable and belonging to the tribal communities whose livelihoods depend on that is this modern culture of excessive consumption and the dominance of the culture of the rich over that of the poor. India, on the other hand, has also enacted a number of extremely progressive laws, which is meant to protect the environment and to protect these indigenous tribal communities. And I describe these and how the mining industry and how the financial capital surmounts them with huge cost to the environment, to the ecology of that region and to these tribal communities. This can be called really what has been called in a lot of literature called the resource curse. Now, bauxite is an is part of is an aluminum ore and it is a main source of aluminum. You saw that bauxite is not the main India is not the main depository of bauxite, but it does have one of the most good quality bauxite in this particular region of the eastern guards of eastern and central guards of India. And here this is basically inhabited by this tribal community called the corns and that hills where they live, that is called the corn hills, which is has this particular basic metal called called corn delight, which gives the name from this tribe, actually. So largest proportion of India's mineral resources are in these three poor states of India, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, also northern are the predation small bits of that. And besides bauxite, 80% of the country's hematite, that is iron ore of exceptionally good quality meant for the steel industry, also exists in this region. And there are also coal deposits in this region. And this is the cause of the conflict between industry, mining companies, the finance, the capital, the government against the tribal communities of this region. And this we call this crisis, this crisis of concealment. It is a classic case of a resource curse. A resource curse spills into resource wars and countries and economically dependent on this for this export of primary products are at a higher risk of political instability and armed conflict. Does not necessarily refer to India, but to some of these other 15 countries that he was talking about. So in our book, The Ecology and Economy, we review projects on water, mining, coal, power and aluminum. And it is clear that the methods of assessing the relative value of the environment, social and economic factors need refining. Some of what actually Alan Roe was pointing out, every project witnessed a conflict of interest and raised questions about the legal status of this human action. Our review has shown how closely entwined are the water resources with the mineral and electricity generation for the cultivation of these industries. Basically, it is the aluminum industry, the oil industry, the steel industry and the coal industry. The aluminum industry and the oil industry work as a cartel, a non-formal organization that has an excess with the governments at various levels of officialdom and involves collaboration between these competing firms to fix favorable prices. For mining companies, their starting point of value creation is getting ore at the cheapest price. They come together as a cartel along with financial institutions and powerful but hidden government interest in order to impose the cheapest possible prices for ore. What is driving the takeover of these community lands and resources and posing such a threat to the ecosystems in the process is the foreign investment itself, whether it comes as loans or as debt or not. Debt works in the same way at a macro and micro level, just the way in which the money lender works towards the village to acquire the village lands. So does this, so do these international mining companies and the financial capital. Since 2000, and I really understood from Alan Rose's presentation why 2000, loans to extractive industry projects arranged in the London and US have multiplied by about 10 times. And the IPO sales for these kind of companies by about 100 times. Speculation in metals trading though through reputable mainstream banks as well as through hedge funds and private equity funds registered in tax havens have mostly run from the world's top capitals and play a key role. Obviously it is the price of metals which have been going up maybe due to the consumption needs which are coming up. Aluminum industry is the most essential commodity for building all your cars, planes and whatever. Mining and metal production has been progressively outsourced to other countries. And as resources get scarcer, a frenzy of investment pours into India and to other developing countries with precise aim of developing their resources in quotes, meaning a free for all battle ensures between the companies and the individuals, Indian and foreign based to obtain rights to the country's precious metal deposits and the land, water and coal necessary to process them. The banking logic of creating new money with every new loan is done with a slate of the hand that dispossesses and impoverishes the poorer populations of the poorer countries. We have actually looked at two, three industries, the aluminum industry, the steel industry, the oil and coal industry in our book. And then we document this whole process for each of them. I can't, I don't have time to go through, I can't do all that right now. And neither did I want to make a PowerPoint presentation of something which is not a very statistically, you know, hitting kind of thing. It's more of an anthropological kind of work. Now, on the other hand, this is what is happening as an onslaught from the mining companies. On the other hand, India has enacted a number of very progressive laws. India has some of the world's best legislations for protecting the environment and the rights of the people and the indigenous communities. However, the implementation is far from satisfactory and rival legislations in the form of company law which facilitates the interests of joint stock private companies and the financials might seem to overcome and override to take precedence over the more progressive laws meant to protect the tribal communities and their land rights in India. The role of the judiciary has also become very crucial because at the end, most of these end up in court and who decides how the laws should be implemented and how the conflict between different laws can be resolved. The pro-people laws in India are what are called PESA and come to that, the Forest Rights Act and also the NREGA, which is a public employment program. The pro-corporate laws are the Land Acquisition Act that is still being fought very strongly in parliament. It has still not been implemented or not been enacted. And then the Special Economic Zone Act of 2005 and then there is the Mining and Mineral Development Regulation Act. So you have both the progressive set of acts which protect this economy, this environment, the ecology and the tribal communities. And on the other hand, you have these laws which they can take recourse to the mining companies or any company to enter these areas. PESA is known as a provision for the extension of Panchayati Raj. India is a very interesting local governance system which we call Panchayati Raj. It's a three-structure. So you have the state governments but then you have the district level governments and then you have the local government government which is the village level governments and also the urban bodies. It came under the 73rd and 74th amendments of the Constitution in the early 90s. So this was not extended to this tribal areas because some of these areas are protected areas and they are not run by the states in which these they are located. They're actually run by the central government and that's called Schedule 5. So there are a set of areas, Schedule 5, which have these tribal communities which happen to have these mineral resources which are not under the control of the state governments but are under the control of the central government but this act allowed for the provisions of this local governance to enter these Schedule 5 areas. That is what PESA is about. So PESA basically attempts to bring and on the other hand, these tribal areas, these communities, these indigenous communities had their own laws, their own customary laws, their own ways of sharing the land and using the forest land. In fact, they're the better conservators of the forest than the forest department. So what PESA was trying to do was to bring together the two different worlds of into a single framework, the informal systems of governance of tribal communities and the formal systems that are governed by law. Another among the PESA, among the other things, PESA recognizes the tribal community's dependence on the village commons and the forest for their survival and livelihoods and traditional ownership was collective and regulated by customary law. This act transfers power and control over resources of land, water, minor forest products and minor minerals to the people who live in these Schedule 5 areas. And due to long-term neglect of development in these areas, these have also been affected by left-wing extremism. So we have a huge Maoist problem in this particular belt. The state governments are reluctant to enact these laws, but then it is required that the state government has to enact the kind of for this thing law, the same law has to be enacted by each state. Now the state does not want to enact those laws. They don't want to draft them, draft the rules. And when they do, they kind of work towards sort of diluting them. And without rules, the operation of the PESA on the ground becomes null and void. And then we have a forest rights act which was enacted in 2006. It is also intended to protect the forest lands. And that again has been undermined several times when infrastructure projects have been allowed to go into these forest areas, which again are inhabited by these tribal communities within this particular belt. So you have situations where it is necessary to hold a village, it is mandatory in this law to hold a Gram Sabha meeting, that is a village-level meeting and take and have a resolution passed by the tribal communities that they allow the mining companies to come into this area. That is a kind of huge method of participation of the local community which the very progressive laws have thought about. But it has happened, it has so happened that some of these mining companies have been able to forge the resolutions which have been made by the villagers, forge them and been able to acquire the land. A similar situation is also there among the, in a particular area in Odisha which is a particular hill called the Niyamgiri Hills which holds the best iron ore. And that has become a symbol of resistance of the tribal communities where they have resisted the takeover of that land and there's a whole history of documented of that including in our book. So there was a 2013 Supreme Court order in which 12 Gram Sabhas under the FRA villagers including the cons of this area articulated the ecological, spiritual and food security grounds on why the Niyamgiri Hills should not be mined for the bauxite and this iron ore that existed there. But over two years on the Odisha government has involved the court has evoked the court to annul the Gram Sabha resolutions. So now what does one do about this? So we just give two quick solutions. One is basically what I think on a global scale your project is trying to do to have a kind of a holistic approach to looking at the cost and benefit analysis. Generally the cost benefit analysis is done of each and every one of the projects whether it's a hydro prop project or whatever but you invariably have only engineers and economists who have no sense of anything social or ecological or the costs that come with that which cannot be measured. Anything that cannot be measured is not included in a cost benefit analysis or in an economist engineering point of view. The mainstream models of economic growth come from a very materialistic point of view and expert engineers and economists who design them do have no understanding of the sociology or the ecology and its destructive impact. A holistic approach would require that the costs and benefits are drawn on a balance sheet for every project which would include the environmental and social costs including the issues with regard to labor displacement displacement of these communities and their livelihoods and give a proper weight to the environment and social costs involved in this. A conventional cost benefit analysis will focus only on the economic costs and tries to fix a financial value for the assets that you have a net present value which is given to that but a holistic approach would require that for each benefit you also look at the social and environmental ecological costs. So just to give a very quick example when you're looking at foreign direct investment which is a benefit of the money coming into your country, fantastic but then you're also buying up people's lands and resources. If you have company profits it's also displacing communities on the cost side and what the community is called flooding us out with money and violence. Government revenue, taxes and royalty it's not a big thing in India but still it's coming in from these things but on the other hand you're giving huge subsidies of electricity and water and basically taking away these resources of electricity and water which could have gone into other industries it could have gone to agriculture but instead it comes into these aluminum and steel industries and so on and these extractive industries. You are stimulating growth but on the other hand you have the environment water regimes damages you have pollution you have greenhouse gas emissions and so on. You say that you're reforesting and plantation are the benefits which are coming but then you have actually lost the primary forest. You have lost that biodiversity that biodiversity can never be replaced. That biodiversity came into being there over 200 years and they just simply cannot be replaced by reforestation and then you have corporate social responsibility which is doing much for the community there but what have you done on the other side you have actually divided the local communities. You have they have lost control over their land they have lost control over their labor and they have lost control of the environment and the ecology has been destroyed. This is the culture of concealment that we talk about in our book and none of this is happening. There is a major reality gap. The holistic approach gives us a non-economic costs and benefits borne out by this community and in this book on out of this earth we look at this for each of the of these industries how it is possible to arrive at a holistic cost estimate cost and benefit estimate say for the aluminum industry for the steel industry and so on. And similarly the implementation of the second method of doing it is of course to implement the fantastic laws that we have put forth in India. The Forest Rights Act if it is implemented in spirit it will take the forest dwellers into consideration when it talks about these mining. Is there any way to mine in a rational fashion instead of acquiring all the lands and destroying all of it at the same time? This would also mean that you are admitting the knowledge base of the local communities that interact most intimately with the forest and value their decision making. In a 2013 Supreme Court order observed we have realized that the forest have the best chance to survive if the communities participate in their conservation and in their regeneration. Further if nurturing seriously at an institution of local governance the Forest Rights Act mandated gram sabers can be a vital mechanism to outline the full costs and gains of mining and more crucially how these can get distributed. People's participation is the model of the story. If there is people's participation in the decision making with regard to their lives and livelihoods and resources in what has been aimed at by India's progressive laws including the 73rd amendment, the PISA laws and so on democratic decentralization is what is intended by the Panchayati Raj system. Gram sabers are mandated village meetings to discuss these issues and voice their concerns. If this PISA which is extended to the tribal regions mainly in the central Indian belt, FDI in mining and the government complicity in it is making a mockery of these progressive laws meant to protect the rights of the poor people. So I just present what is a slightly offbeat view of this and of course the question posed by Alan is do you allow these things to remain below the ground? Well, maybe to some extent. Thank you.