By Matters India Reporter
New Delhi: An Indian activist, who rallied tribals to scuttle a mining conglomerate’s mega project in Odisha, has won an international award for environmentalists.
Prafulla Samantra, convener of the National Alliance of People’s Movements in Bhubaneswar, is among six winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize that was announced on April 24 in San Francisco.
The 65-year-old activist is the sixth Indian to win the award set up in 1989. The prize is also called the Green Nobel.
The citation said the prize recognized Samantra’s “historic 12-year legal battle that affirmed the indigenous Dongria Kondh’s land rights and protected the Niyamgiri Hills from a massive, open-pit aluminum ore mine.”
Samantra and other activists not only rallied the tribal people living in Odisha’s Niyamgiri region but used law to thwart Vedanta’s plans to mine bauxite.
Father Ajay Kumar Singh, another Odisha activist who has worked with Samantra in opposing mining and displacement in the eastern India state, welcomed the award. “We are thrilled over Prafulla’s award,” he told Matters India soon after Indian media reported the award.
Samantra is a lawyer, who began his activism during the “Total Revolution,” a movement Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan launched-in mid 1970s. He is currently in the United States to receive the award.
The activist says he would continue to strive to ensure that politics play more than lip service in ensuring sustainable development. “We must have a national mining policy to rationally decide how much of our natural resources can be used for mining,” he told The Hindu in an interview prior to the award announcement.
The annual prize honors grassroots environmentalists, who risk their lives, to protect the environment and empower those threatened by industrial projects.
The award website describes Samantara as “an iconic leader of social justice movements in India.” He grew up in a farmer’s family and took to fighting for tribals after reading a newspaper report on the Vedanta project in 2003. He filed a petition against the project before a Supreme Court panel on mining, thereby becoming the first citizen to use the law to halt Vedanta in its tracks.
The Supreme Court’s historic decision on April 18, 2013, empowered local communities to have the final say in mining projects on their land. It gave village councils from the Niyamgiri Hills the right to vote on the Vedanta mine. By August 2013, all 12 tribal village councils had unanimously voted against the mine.
In August 2015, after years of partial operation and stoppages, Vedanta had announced the closure of an aluminum refinery it had built in anticipation of the mine’s opening.
The Goldman Environmental Prize is given every year to environmental activists, chosen from the world’s six geographic regions — Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America. Each winner gets US$175,000 as prize money.
The earlier Indian winners are Medha Patkar, M.C. Mehta, Rasheeda Bi, Champaran Shukla and Ramesh Agrawal.
Other winners this year are Mark Lopez, United States; Uroš Macerl, Slovenia; Rodrigo Tot, Guatemala; Rodrigue Katembo, Democratic Republic of Congo; and Wendy Bowman, Australia.
Until 2013, the organizers have given a total of US$15.9 million to 157 honorees from more than 79 countries.
The Goldman Environmental Prize was set up civic leaders and philanthropists Richard N. Goldman and his wife, Rhoda H. Goldman. Richard Goldman died at age 90 in 2010 and was predeceased by his wife. Richard Goldman founded Goldman Insurance Services in San Francisco. Rhoda Goldman was a great-grand-niece of Levi Strauss, founder of the worldwide clothing company.
The prize winners are selected by an international jury who receive confidential nominations submitted by a worldwide network of environmental organizations and individuals. Prize winners participate in a 10-day tour of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., for an awards ceremony and presentation, news conferences, media briefings and meetings with political, public policy, financial and environmental leaders.