Freedom Road/El Camino para la Libertad is pleased to be able to offer this first-hand look at a key struggle in Orissa State in India. The battle in Kashipur is one of literally hundreds of life-and-death mass struggles raging every day in India, though hidden behind media proclamations about the new economic giant India is becoming. The author, M, is an Indian who spent a good part of the last decade organizing low-income workers into trade unions in the US and is now based back in India. In this report M raises important questions about how folks from the Marxist tradition should understand and deal with the lives and societies of indigenous, ecosystem-dependent peoples, especially in light of the tradition's historical productivist biases. A complementary look at the Kashipur struggle can be found in an article by Debarpita Manjit in a recent issue of the Indian journal, Revolutionary Democracy.
--Editors

The Indian state of Orissa first hit international news in January of this year when police opened fire and killed twelve tribal villagers at a protest. The villagers were objecting to the construction of a boundary wall for a proposed steel plant at the Kalinganagar complex. This 12,000 acre complex had been set up by the Industrial Development Corporation of Orissa (IDCO) with provisions for compensation of (confiscated) deed land and set-asides of some small household plots for landless persons. This arrangement left out the majority of local people who have been cultivating mostly untitled land, since the last recorded land survey had been actually completed in 1926. In addition, IDCO had acquired land for the complex in the early 1990s at a cost of some 37,000 rupees per acre but later resold the very same plots to private companies for 350,000 rupees per acre, nearly nine times the original price.