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Published: October 20, 2011 00:00 IST | Updated: October 20, 2011 04:21 IST
United forum of Koraput raises demand for separate State
In protest mode: Members of Koraputia Jana Surakhya Sangh staging a demonstration in front of the district Collector's office at Koraput on Wednesday.
Koraputia Jana Surakhya Sangh, a united forum of Koraput district indigenous societies, raised a demand for a separate state or a union territory comprising all the tribal dominated districts of the region on Wednesday . In a memorandum to the President of India with copies to the Governor and Chief Minister, the forum alleged that the State government had betrayed the indigenous people living peacefully in the region by giving false promises for a better life over the last many years. While people who were displaced for construction of water reservoirs and companies suffered for the inadequate compensation many of them were struggling for existence in the deep forests in the neighbouring states where they had to take shelter on the face of poverty, Dambarudhar Khilo, president of the combined forum alleged .
Further taking advantage of the innocence, illiteracy and poverty of the residents, some industrialists were pressurizing the government to allow them to grab mineral resources by acquiring the landed properties of tribal people in the name of national development, he added. The government, apart from implementing the PESA Act in its true spirit, land that was un-utilised out of the land which was acquired for the factories and projects in the district be returned back to the previous land owner and lands grabbed by the outsiders with vested interest be distributed among the indigenous people of the land , the forum demanded .
While there were good number of water reservoirs and dams on rivers like Kolab, Duduma and Indravati , producing electricity in the region, most of the villages still remained in the dark for the lack of accessibility to electricity supply. Water in these dams was used more for the interest of industries than for the farmers in the region, the forum alleged. Demanding priority in filling vacancies in the Central University of Orissa, HAL, Nalco and other establishments by maintaining a minimum level of reservation for the permanent residents of the region, the members of the forum had placed demands for proper utilization of funds under corporate social responsibility of all the companies in its peripheral area .
Prafulla Samantray, leading environmentalist from Bhubaneswar, said that while the people were staging a peaceful rally to press their demands, thousands of people were forced to stop at Damanjodi, Semiliguda, Laxmipur and several other places by the police, preventing them from entering the district headquarters.
