It wasn’t quite a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past, but it may have made the chairman of British mining giant Vedanta Resources, Anil Agarwal, sit up and pay attention.
On 19th December, angered by an ‘Indian Entrepreneur of the Year’ award given to Agarwal by UK consultants Ernst and Young, Survival International paid him a visit at his Mayfair home to deliver a gift-wrapped copy of an offi cial complaint made against his company to the Organisation for Economic Organisation and Development (OECD).
Vedanta is planning to turn the sacred homeland of India’s Dongria Kondh tribe into an open cast bauxite mine, destroying untouched forest and polluting watercoursesin the process. Numerous appeals by the tribespeople to the company have fallen on deaf ears.
In November 2007, the Norwegian government withdrew its investment from Vedanta because of increasing concern over the company’s human rights record.