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Chapter 6: The PESA Betrayal --- Constitutional Promises, Administrative Silence, and the Systematic Dispossession of Tribal Odisha

On January 26, 2020, while the rest of India was celebrating Republic Day --- the anniversary of the Constitution coming into force --- five gram sabhas in Sundargarh district were convened to decide whether their land should be handed to Dalmia Cement Bharat Limited for a mining expansion. The sub-collector of Sundargarh had issued letters to the sarpanches of Kukuda and Katang gram panchayats, directing them to hold the assemblies on that date. Republic Day. The day the Constitution is read aloud in school assemblies, when the President takes the salute, when the document that promises to “secure to all its citizens” justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity is ritually celebrated.

All five gram sabhas voted unanimously against the land acquisition. The Kukuda Gram Panchayat resolution was unambiguous: “all the villagers present in the meeting unanimously resolved not to give an inch of land to OCL.” Over four hundred people signed. The rejection was categorical, documented, and constitutionally protected under both the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition (RFCTLARR) Act of 2013 and the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) of 1996.

Eighteen months later, in July and December 2021, the Odisha authorities issued preliminary notifications to acquire the land anyway.

This is not a story about one gram sabha in one district being overruled by one collector. It is a story about 136 documented violations. About a constitutional protection that was passed by Parliament in 1996 and, in Odisha, has never been given the administrative machinery to function. About a central government that legislated tribal self-governance as a grand promise and then watched, decade after decade, as that promise was systematically hollowed out. About the gap between Delhi’s constitutional text and Odisha’s administrative ground.

PESA: What Was Promised

The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act was passed by Parliament on December 24, 1996. It was supposed to be revolutionary --- the word is not too strong.

The context was specific. The 73rd Constitutional Amendment of 1992 had established panchayati raj --- local self-governance --- across India. But the amendment explicitly excluded Scheduled Areas under the Fifth Schedule from its provisions, recognising that tribal areas required a different governance framework. The Bhuria Committee, constituted to recommend what that framework should look like, proposed something radical: that in tribal areas, the gram sabha --- the village assembly of all adult residents, not the elected panchayat body --- should have sovereign authority over land, forests, minor minerals, and natural resources.

PESA, when it was passed, embodied much of this vision. The Act mandated that state governments would amend their panchayat laws to give gram sabhas in Scheduled Areas specific powers:

Prior consent for land acquisition for development projects.
Mandatory consultation before granting mining leases for minor minerals.
Ownership and management of minor forest produce.
Regulation of money lending to prevent debt bondage.
Control over plans and resources for tribal sub-plans.
Prevention of land alienation and restoration of unlawfully alienated tribal land.

The Act required each of the ten states with Fifth Schedule areas to frame state-level rules within one year. One year. That was the timeline Parliament set in 1996.

Here is the fact that tells you everything you need to know about the distance between constitutional promise and administrative reality: Odisha has not finalised its PESA rules. It is now 2026. Twenty-nine years and counting.

The Thirty-Year Non-Implementation: A Timeline

Tracking which states have framed PESA rules and when tells a story of deliberate, sustained inaction.

Andhra Pradesh published its rules in 2011 --- fifteen years late, but it published them. Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Telangana followed. Maharashtra framed its rules in 2014. Gujarat in 2017. Madhya Pradesh completed the process. Chhattisgarh finalised its rules in 2022 --- twenty-six years after the Act, but done. Jharkhand finally notified its PESA rules in January 2026, after public consultations beginning in July 2023, workshops across the state in 2024, and Cabinet approval in December 2025. The rules apply fully in 13 of Jharkhand’s 24 districts, with partial implementation in three more.

Odisha has not completed this process.

In November 2023 --- twenty-seven years after PESA was passed --- the Government of Odisha published a draft notification for the “Odisha Grama Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Rules, 2023” in the Odisha Gazette, inviting objections and suggestions. The state conducted hearings with people and organisations who submitted responses. And then the process stalled. The draft was discussed in a Tribal Advisory Council meeting, where it was decided that “further discussions are needed.” A state-level workshop was proposed, involving tribal representatives, MLAs, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members.

The rules remain in draft. No finalisation date has been announced.

Twenty-nine years. A draft notification. Further discussions needed. The constitutional protection that Parliament intended to be implemented within one year of 1996 remains, in Odisha, a proposal under review.

Why the Rules Were Never Made

The reason is not mysterious, and stating it plainly is important.

Odisha’s mineral revenues --- iron ore, bauxite, chromite, manganese, coal --- contribute approximately 84 percent of the state’s non-tax revenue and around 41 percent of total revenue receipts. Mining revenue grew tenfold from roughly Rs 4,900 crore in FY17 to approximately Rs 50,000 crore in FY22. The value of minerals produced in the state reached Rs 87,086 crore in 2021-22. Odisha’s share in India’s total mineral production value rose from 32.8 percent in 2017-18 to 44.7 percent in 2023-24.

PESA, if implemented with teeth, would give gram sabhas in Scheduled Areas the power to withhold consent for land acquisition --- including land acquisition for mining projects. It would give tribal village assemblies the ability to say no. And Scheduled Areas cover 44.70 percent of Odisha’s geography --- 69,614 square kilometres, encompassing seven fully covered districts (undivided Koraput, Mayurbhanj, Sundargarh) and parts of six more (Keonjhar, Kandhamal, Ganjam, Kalahandi, Sambalpur, Balasore). These are precisely the districts where the minerals lie.

Giving gram sabhas effective veto power over mining decisions would mean giving the poorest communities in the state the ability to block the largest source of state revenue. No government --- BJD for twenty-four years, BJP since 2024 --- has been willing to accept that trade-off. The BJD did not frame the rules in over two decades of uninterrupted power. The BJP government, which came to power in June 2024 on the strength of the tribal vote and installed Odisha’s first tribal Chief Minister, has not finalised them either.

This is the structural insight worth sitting with: the Indian Constitution provides tribal communities with legal instruments of self-governance. The Indian state has systematically declined to activate those instruments in the one context where they matter most --- resource extraction from tribal land.

But to treat this solely as a state-level failure is to miss the central government’s role. Delhi passed PESA. Delhi set a one-year deadline for state compliance. And then Delhi watched for twenty-nine years as Odisha ignored that deadline, without consequence. No central government --- Congress, BJP, or coalition --- has ever made PESA compliance a condition for mining clearances. No central ministry has ever withheld environmental or forest clearance from a project in Odisha on the grounds that the state had not implemented PESA. No Prime Minister has ever publicly pressured Odisha to frame its PESA rules.

The Ministry of Panchayati Raj maintains a section on its website dedicated to “PESA Rules framed by PESA States.” It lists the states that have complied. Odisha’s absence from the list is a matter of public record. The central government knows. It has always known. It has chosen not to act.

In software terms, this is a system with a critical permission check --- gram sabha consent --- that was written into the specification but never compiled into the running code. The specification exists. The documentation exists. The feature was announced. But the actual enforcement logic was never deployed. And every stakeholder who benefits from the missing check --- the mining companies, the state revenue department, the central clearance agencies --- has an interest in keeping it that way.

The CAG Audit: 136 Violations in Black and White

In September 2024, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India --- the constitutional auditor, the one institution whose reports carry the weight of official investigation --- published a devastating audit of land acquisition in Odisha’s Scheduled Areas. The audit covered the period from 2017 to 2022. It examined land acquisition processes across four districts: Kalahandi, Koraput, Mayurbhanj, and Sundargarh.

The findings: 136 cases where state authorities illegally bypassed both the RFCTLARR Act and PESA to push through land acquisition for projects in tribal areas.

The violations were not subtle. They were not edge cases or technical disputes about procedural interpretation. They were straightforward, documented instances of the state ignoring its own laws:

73 cases across four districts, involving 297.5 acres, where gram sabha meetings were never conducted at all. The law requires prior gram sabha consent for land acquisition in Scheduled Areas. In these 73 cases, no meetings were held. No consent was sought. No assemblies were convened. The state simply issued acquisition notifications and proceeded. Projects affected included the Telengiri Major Irrigation Project, the Talcher-Bimlagarh Rail Link Project, and the Ret Irrigation Project.

24 cases where gram sabha meetings were conducted without the required quorum. The law mandates a minimum attendance of 50 percent of members, including one-third women. In several cases along the Jeypore-Nabarangpur Rail Link route, the CAG found attendance rates between 0.30 percent and 8.80 percent of eligible members. Zero-point-three percent. In a village of, say, a thousand eligible members, three people showed up and their “consent” was recorded as the will of the gram sabha.

29 cases in Sundargarh alone, involving 1,165 acres, where preliminary notifications were issued despite explicit gram sabha rejection. This is the Kukuda pattern writ large. The gram sabhas were convened, the members voted against the acquisition, and the state proceeded anyway. The CAG documented that the Sundargarh district collector issued preliminary notifications for 64 cases of land acquisition covering 1,528.91 acres between March 2018 and December 2021. Of these 64 cases, only 3 --- covering a mere 8.12 acres --- had documented gram sabha consent. In 32 cases, no traceable records existed at all. The remaining cases showed either rejection, quorum deficiency, or procedural irregularities.

Systematic documentation failures. In over 100 cases, the CAG found records “not readily traceable.” Project names were omitted from gram sabha proceedings. Meetings were conducted for one project’s land but the consent was applied to a different project. In one set of cases involving the Telengiri Major Irrigation Project, gram sabha meetings for 37.36 acres were conducted one to nine years prior to the preliminary notification --- and the meetings were originally held for a different piece of land entirely.

The Dalmia Cement case in Kukuda is the most thoroughly documented instance, but it is not an outlier. It is the pattern. Dalmia Cement proposed expanding its Rajgangpur plant from 4.2 MTPA to 9.5 MTPA capacity, requiring additional land in the Kukuda and Katang gram panchayat areas. The gram sabhas rejected the expansion unanimously. The state issued acquisition notifications anyway. The CAG flagged it. As of this writing, the dispute continues.

What the CAG audit reveals is not a few bad actors or isolated procedural lapses. It reveals a systematic pattern of the state treating gram sabha consent as an administrative inconvenience to be bypassed rather than a constitutional right to be honoured. The law says the gram sabha must consent. The practice says the gram sabha is a formality. If it consents, good. If it does not consent, the acquisition proceeds regardless.

The central government’s response to these findings has been silence. No central ministry has issued directives demanding corrective action. No environmental or forest clearances have been revisited in light of the CAG’s findings that the underlying land acquisition violated both RFCTLARR and PESA. The 136 violations are a matter of public record. The consequences are zero.

The Fifth Schedule: A Paper Tiger

The PESA non-implementation does not exist in isolation. It sits within a broader failure of the Fifth Schedule protections that the Constitution provides for tribal areas.

The Fifth Schedule of the Constitution covers Scheduled Areas in ten states, including Odisha. In the state, the Scheduled Area extends to 69,614 square kilometres --- 44.70 percent of Odisha’s total geographic area. Seven districts are fully covered, six partially. The tribal population in these areas is substantial --- an estimated 68 percent of Odisha’s tribal population resides within Fifth Schedule territory.

The Fifth Schedule establishes three key protections:

A Tribes Advisory Council (TAC) in each state, chaired by the Chief Minister, to advise the Governor on matters of tribal welfare. In practice, the TAC in Odisha has met infrequently and functioned as a rubber stamp. Its advisory role has never translated into a binding constraint on state action. The one significant recent TAC intervention --- its reported rejection of the BJD government’s 2023 proposal to amend tribal land transfer rules --- was notable precisely because it was exceptional. The TAC acting as a genuine check on government policy was news because it almost never happens.

The Governor’s special powers to direct that particular laws do not apply in Scheduled Areas, or apply with modifications. This is an extraordinary constitutional authority. In theory, the Governor of Odisha can block legislation or executive action that harms tribal interests in Scheduled Areas. In practice, this power has never been exercised to block a mining project, an industrial development, or a land acquisition in Odisha’s tribal districts. The Governor is appointed by the central government and acts, in practice, on the advice of the state government. The constitutional design envisioned the Governor as an independent guardian of tribal interests. The political reality has made the Governor an agent of the same government that benefits from overriding those interests.

Restrictions on land transfer from tribal to non-tribal ownership in Scheduled Areas. The Odisha Scheduled Areas Transfer of Immovable Property (by STs) Regulation, 1956, and a 2002 amendment banning all transfers of tribal land to non-tribals in Scheduled Areas, were supposed to prevent land alienation. The reality: more than 50 percent of tribal land in Odisha has been lost to non-tribals over 25 to 30 years, through indebtedness, mortgage, and forcible possession. An estimated 56 percent of tribal land loss resulted from informal debt mortgaging, where land is cultivated by lenders until debts are repaid --- debts that, in practice, are never repaid, making the “temporary” mortgage a permanent transfer.

The constitutional protections exist. The legal framework is in place. The enforcement is absent. And when the enforcement is absent for twenty-nine years --- not twenty-nine days, not twenty-nine months, but twenty-nine years --- you are no longer looking at a failure of implementation. You are looking at a system that was designed to appear protective while functioning permissively. The Constitution gives with the right hand. The administrative apparatus takes with the left. And the central government, which has the authority to intervene, watches with both hands in its pockets.

POSCO: Delhi Pushes, Odisha Pays

The POSCO project is covered in the existing political landscape series from the perspective of state-level politics and community resistance. But from the perspective of Delhi’s role --- what the central government did and did not do --- the story looks different and more damaging.

POSCO signed its $12 billion MoU with the Odisha government in June 2005. The MoU committed the state to “use its best efforts to procure the grant of all environmental approvals and forest clearances from the central government of India within the minimum possible time.” Read that clause carefully. The state government was not merely facilitating a private project. It was contractually committing to lobby the central government for clearances on behalf of a foreign corporation.

The central government’s role was critical at every stage.

The initial environmental clearance was granted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in 2007, based on an environmental impact assessment (EIA) that, as subsequent inquiries would establish, was fundamentally flawed. The EIA failed to account for the betel vine economy that sustained approximately 20,000 people in the project area --- an informal economy invisible to standard assessment methodologies because it was unregistered, decentralised, and embedded in local ecological knowledge.

The Meena Gupta Committee was constituted by the MoEF in 2010 to investigate complaints that environmental and forest clearances had been granted illegally. Three of the four committee members produced a majority report documenting grave violations: of the Forest Rights Act, the Coastal Regulation Zone rules, and the EIA guidelines. They found collusion and fabrication by the state government in securing clearances. They recommended revocation of existing environmental and forest clearances. Meena Gupta herself dissented, supporting the clearances but recommending additional study.

On January 31, 2011, the Environment Ministry overruled both reports. The Ministry, under Minister Jairam Ramesh, upheld the environmental and forest clearances while prescribing “additional conditions.” This is the central government’s fingerprint on the POSCO story. An expert committee, constituted by the government itself, found grave illegalities. The government dismissed the findings. The National Green Tribunal would later observe, with respect to Meena Gupta’s dissenting position, that her findings were “definitely hit by personal/official/departmental bias” and that “the entire process of review is vitiated under law.” But the Ministry’s January 2011 order had already given POSCO the green light.

The consequences played out over twelve years. POSCO spent a decade in Odisha and produced zero tonnes of steel. What it produced was displacement, ecological destruction (betel vines destroyed, cashew trees felled, mangroves cleared), police action against civilians, and a deep erosion of trust between communities and the state. The village of Nuagaon, which cooperated with the land acquisition, is today a picture of despair: residents exhausted their compensation and now work as daily-wage labourers in the betel vine plantations of neighbouring Dhinkia, which resisted and survived. The village that trusted the state is poorer than the village that fought it. That fact alone tells you everything about how the system works.

After POSCO withdrew in March 2017, the Odisha government transferred the same land to JSW Utkal Steel Limited. The same communities. The same conflict. A different corporate logo. The cycle continues.

Delhi’s role in POSCO was not passive. The central government actively pushed clearances despite documented violations. It overruled its own expert committee. It provided the regulatory cover that allowed a project to proceed for twelve years despite never achieving viability. And when the project collapsed, leaving behind felled trees and broken livelihoods, no central ministry accepted any responsibility, offered any compensation to the affected communities, or reviewed the clearance process that had enabled the damage.

Vedanta and Niyamgiri: The Flip-Flop

The Niyamgiri case is rightly celebrated as a victory for tribal rights. Twelve gram sabhas voted unanimously against Vedanta’s bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri Hills between July and August 2013, and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change rejected the project in January 2014. But the decade-long timeline of the case reveals a central government that flip-flopped repeatedly, aiding the mining company before reversing course only when the Supreme Court forced its hand.

2003: Vedanta Resources applied for mining clearance. The alumina refinery at Lanjigarh was already under construction before the mining lease was secured --- a sequence indicating corporate confidence that government approval was a formality.

2008: The MoEF granted Stage-I forest clearance for diversion of 660 hectares of Niyamgiri forest land. This was the central government saying yes. The clearance was challenged by environmentalists and tribal rights groups.

2009: Following protests, letters from MPs, and Parliamentary Standing Committee reports, the MoEF issued a circular requiring that all forest diversion proposals be accompanied by certificates from affected gram sabhas confirming implementation of the Forest Rights Act and their informed consent. This was the central government adding a safeguard --- under pressure.

2010: A four-member committee, along with the separate N.C. Saxena Committee, recommended rejection of Stage-2 clearance on grounds of FRA violations and other illegalities. In August 2010, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh suspended the clearance. The Dongria Kondh celebrated what they thought was a victory.

2011: The MoEF revoked its mining license for Niyam Dongar. But the refinery at Lanjigarh continued operating, importing bauxite from elsewhere. The company’s infrastructure remained in place.

April 2013: The Supreme Court ordered that gram sabhas of affected Dongria Kondh and Kutia Kondh communities must be consulted before any mining could proceed --- “independently and completely uninfluenced, either by the project proponents or the state or central governments.”

July-August 2013: All twelve gram sabhas voted unanimously against mining.

January 2014: The MoEFCC rejected the project, citing the gram sabha decisions and the Supreme Court order.

November 2014: The MoEFCC announced plans to amend the Forest Rights Act to diminish the authority of gram sabhas. This was the central government, having been forced to respect tribal consent in one case, moving to ensure it would never be forced to do so again.

The pattern is clear. The central government initially enabled Vedanta’s entry --- granting forest clearance in 2008, overruling concerns, facilitating the construction of a refinery before the mining question was settled. When public pressure mounted, it appointed committees. When the committees returned damning findings, it partially retreated. When the Supreme Court mandated gram sabha consent, it complied. When the gram sabhas rejected mining, it accepted the outcome. And then it moved to weaken the legal mechanism that had produced the unwanted result.

This is not a government that protected tribal rights. It is a government that was dragged, reluctantly and incompletely, toward respecting them --- by the Supreme Court, by civil society, by international advocacy organisations. Left to its own institutional incentives, the MoEFCC facilitated corporate mining on tribal land. It required external force to do otherwise.

I should state a confidence level here. I believe with roughly 80 percent confidence that the pattern I have described --- central government enabling, then reluctantly retreating under external pressure --- reflects the institutional dynamics accurately. I would be wrong if internal MoEFCC deliberations revealed genuine factional conflicts within the ministry, with some officials consistently advocating for tribal rights and being overruled by superiors acting under political pressure. Such evidence would suggest a more nuanced picture than institutional complicity. But the observable pattern of decisions --- clearance, committee, reversal under pressure, attempted weakening of the mechanism --- is consistent and documented.

Kalinganagar: The Central Clearance Behind the Killing

On January 2, 2006, police opened fire on tribal villagers protesting the construction of a boundary wall for Tata Steel’s proposed plant in Kalinganagar, Jajpur district. Fourteen people died --- thirteen tribals and one policeman. The tribals had come with bows and arrows. The police had come with guns.

The political landscape series covers Kalinganagar from the perspective of state-level politics and the Mohanty Commission’s controversial finding that the firing was “justified.” From Delhi’s perspective, the relevant question is different: how did the central clearance machinery enable the conditions for the killing?

Tata Steel’s Kalinganagar project required multiple central clearances: environmental clearance from the MoEF, forest clearance for diversion of forest land, and mining clearances for the captive mineral sources that would feed the plant. These clearances were granted through the standard process --- an EIA, public hearings, expert committee reviews, and ministerial approval. The process treated the land as a site for industrial development. It did not treat the people living on the land as stakeholders with the power to withhold consent.

The land acquisition itself was carried out under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 --- a colonial-era law that gave the state sweeping powers to acquire land for “public purpose” with minimal consultation and compensation. The tribals of Kalinganagar rejected the compensation as inadequate. Settlement surveys required under the Odisha Survey and Settlement Act had not been implemented. The state proceeded with acquisition regardless. The central clearances had been obtained. The project had been approved. The villagers were an obstruction.

The National Green Tribunal would later issue a notice to Tata Steel and the Odisha government regarding illegal construction of boundary walls and cutting of trees. Approximately 5,000 tribals were ultimately displaced for the plant’s construction. The Birabhumi --- the martyrs’ tower --- stands where the firing happened. Every January 2, the families of the dead gather there.

What the central government’s clearance process does not account for --- and has never been reformed to account for --- is the human cost of industrial projects on tribal land. The EIA process evaluates environmental impact. It does not evaluate the impact on livelihood systems, on cultural practices, on the relationship between a community and its land. The forest clearance process evaluates the ecological value of trees. It does not evaluate the value of the forest to the people who live in it. The result is a clearance machinery that can approve a project, enable the acquisition of tribal land, and facilitate the conditions for a massacre --- and then wash its hands when the bullets fly, because the clearances were “properly issued.”

The 2023 Land Rule Amendment: Testing the Limits

In November 2023, the then-BJD government attempted to amend the Odisha Scheduled Areas Transfer of Immovable Property (by STs) Regulation, 1956 --- the law that prohibits transfer of tribal land to non-tribals in Scheduled Areas.

The proposed amendment would have allowed Scheduled Tribe members to sell their land to non-tribals with written permission from the sub-collector. It would have permitted mortgaging tribal land to public financial institutions --- including non-agricultural lenders --- for purposes including agriculture, construction, higher education, self-employment, business, and small-scale industry. The safeguard was thin: if the sub-collector denied permission, the tribal person could appeal to the district collector, whose decision would be “final.”

The proposal drew immediate backlash. Tribal rights organisations, academics, and civil society groups argued that relaxing land transfer restrictions in Scheduled Areas would accelerate alienation --- that the “voluntary” sale of tribal land to non-tribals was rarely voluntary in any meaningful sense when the seller was indebted, economically desperate, and culturally unfamiliar with land market dynamics. The fifty percent figure --- more than half of tribal land in Odisha already lost to non-tribals through indebtedness, mortgage, and forcible possession over 25 to 30 years --- was cited as evidence of what happens when protections are weak. Weakening them further would accelerate a process already approaching the point of no return.

The Tribal Advisory Council reportedly rejected the proposal. The state government rescinded its decision and sent the matter back for further review. The amendment was not implemented.

But the attempt itself is revealing. A state government --- one that governed with substantial tribal electoral support --- attempted to weaken the one legal barrier between tribal communities and the market forces that have already dispossessed more than half of them. The stated justification was economic empowerment: allowing tribals to mortgage land would give them access to credit, which would enable them to invest in education, housing, and enterprise. The structural reality is that in an economy where information asymmetry, debt cycles, and power imbalances systematically disadvantage tribal borrowers, the ability to mortgage land is the ability to lose it.

The central government did not intervene to prevent the amendment attempt. It did not invoke the Fifth Schedule’s provisions to protect tribal land. It did not direct the Governor to exercise special powers. The amendment was defeated by internal political pressure, not by central constitutional guardianship.

The Pattern: Legislate, Don’t Implement, Don’t Enforce

Step back from the individual cases and the pattern is structural.

Delhi legislates. The Fifth Schedule is written into the Constitution. PESA is passed by Parliament. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 recognises forest-dwelling tribal communities’ rights. The RFCTLARR Act of 2013 mandates gram sabha consent for land acquisition in Scheduled Areas. The legal architecture for tribal protection is comprehensive, arguably world-class.

The state does not implement. Odisha does not frame PESA rules. The Governor does not exercise Fifth Schedule powers. The TAC rubber-stamps government proposals. Land acquisition proceeds without gram sabha consent. The 136 violations documented by the CAG happen in plain administrative daylight.

Delhi does not enforce. No central government has conditioned mining clearances on PESA compliance. No environmental clearance has been withdrawn for failure to obtain gram sabha consent. No central ministry has penalised Odisha for twenty-nine years of PESA non-implementation. The POSCO clearance was upheld despite expert committee findings of grave illegalities. The Vedanta clearance was granted despite Forest Rights Act violations.

This three-step pattern --- legislate, don’t implement, don’t enforce --- is not accidental. It serves a specific function. The legislation provides the appearance of protection. It allows the central government to claim, accurately, that it has passed laws protecting tribal rights. It allows India to present itself internationally as a country with robust constitutional safeguards for indigenous communities. The non-implementation ensures that the protections do not interfere with the extraction of resources from tribal land. And the non-enforcement ensures that non-implementation carries no consequences.

In investing terms, this is the difference between a company’s stated risk management policy and its actual risk behaviour. The stated policy --- PESA, the Fifth Schedule, the Forest Rights Act --- looks robust on paper. The annual report quotes the policy. The compliance department references it. But the actual risk behaviour --- 136 violations, zero consequences, twenty-nine years without rules --- tells you that the policy is decorative. The risk management exists to reassure observers, not to manage risk.

What Has Been Lost

The numbers quantify the loss, but the numbers do not capture it.

More than fifty percent of tribal land in Odisha alienated to non-tribals over 25 to 30 years. This is not a statistic. It is the destruction of an economic base. Tribal communities in Odisha are not subsistence farmers clinging to marginal land. Many of them occupied productive landscapes --- forests that provided minor forest produce, agricultural plots that sustained families, common lands that supported grazing, water bodies that supported fishing. When this land is alienated, it does not simply change ownership. It changes the entire economic possibility set for the community. A family that owned three acres of agricultural land and had access to communal forest is not in the same situation as a family with a Rs 2 lakh compensation cheque and no land. The compensation evaporates. The land was a permanent asset. Its loss is permanent.

An estimated 56 percent of tribal land loss through informal debt mortgaging. The mechanism is elegant in its cruelty. A tribal family borrows money --- for a medical emergency, a wedding, a crop failure. The lender takes the land as mortgage. The lender cultivates the land until the debt is repaid. The debt, thanks to compound interest and the family’s marginal income, is never repaid. The “temporary” mortgage becomes a permanent transfer. The transaction is technically legal --- a willing borrower, a willing lender, a documented agreement. It is structurally coercive, because the borrower has no access to formal credit (banks will not lend against tribal land in Scheduled Areas without the regulatory changes that the 2023 amendment attempted) and the only available credit comes from lenders who know exactly how the transaction will end.

2,155,317 tribal people displaced by development projects between 1951 and 1995. This figure, from government records, covers dams, industrial plants, and mines. It does not include displacement after 1995. It does not include the informal displacement that happens when a mining project poisons the water, deforests the hillside, or makes agricultural land unproductive. It does not include the displacement of livelihoods that remain technically in place but are no longer viable. The actual number of tribals whose lives have been fundamentally altered by development projects in Odisha is unquantifiable, but it is certainly multiples of the official displacement figure.

The Paradox of the Tribal Chief Minister

In June 2024, Mohan Charan Majhi --- a Santal from Keonjhar, a mining-heavy tribal district --- was sworn in as Odisha’s first tribal Chief Minister. His party, the BJP, had won approximately 18 of 33 ST-reserved assembly seats, flipping the tribal belt that had been a BJD stronghold for two decades.

The symbolism is powerful. A tribal man leading the state. The community that was shot at in Kalinganagar now occupying the Chief Minister’s office. But symbolism and structural change are different things. The questions that matter are not about who sits in the chair but about what happens to PESA rules, to the 136 violations, to the fifty percent land alienation, to the clearance machinery that enables projects on tribal land without meaningful consent.

The BJP government has not finalised PESA rules. The draft remains in consultation. The Tribal Advisory Council is discussing further discussions. The mining auctions continue. The clearance machinery operates. The structural position of tribal communities vis-a-vis the extraction economy has not changed.

This is the paradox --- or perhaps the design --- of Indian democracy’s relationship with tribal politics. A tribal Chief Minister’s presence in the chair is compatible with the continuation of every structural mechanism that dispossesses tribal communities. The representation is real. The power is constrained. The system that produces the dispossession does not depend on who sits in the Chief Minister’s office. It depends on who sets royalty rates (Delhi), who frames devolution formulas (the Finance Commission), who grants environmental clearances (the MoEFCC), and who decides whether PESA rules are ever finalised (whoever benefits from the status quo).

Conclusion: The Betrayal That Continues

The word “betrayal” in this chapter’s title is deliberate. PESA was not a vague aspiration or a policy goal. It was a specific, enacted law with a specific, enacted mandate: frame the rules within one year. The central government passed the law. The state government ignored the mandate. The central government did not enforce it. Twenty-nine years later, the rules do not exist.

In the interim, 136 documented land acquisition violations. Fifty percent land alienation. A $12 billion project approved despite expert findings of illegality, producing zero steel and destroying thousands of livelihoods. A mining company granted clearance on a sacred mountain, reversed only when the Supreme Court intervened. Fourteen tribals shot dead for standing on their own land.

The constitutional protections for tribal communities in India are, on paper, among the most comprehensive in the world. The Fifth Schedule, PESA, the Forest Rights Act, the RFCTLARR Act --- together, they construct an architecture of rights that should make dispossession of tribal land virtually impossible without the community’s informed consent.

That this dispossession happens continuously, systematically, and without meaningful consequence tells you what the architecture actually is. It is not a shield. It is a stage set. It looks like protection from the audience. From backstage, you can see it is made of plywood.

The central government built the set. The state government performs on it. And the tribal communities of Odisha live behind it, where the audience cannot see what is actually happening.

Sources

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