Transcript
Anuradha Munshi: Just seeing the skyline. We cannot see the skyline anymore in Delhi. There is always haze in the air. There is so much pollution. I'm asthmatic, and I can feel that difference over the years.
My name is Anuradha Munshi. I work with an organization called Center for Financial Accountability. It’s based in India.
I don't think even people in Delhi know about the existence of the city called Singrauli, let alone know what is happening to them on-ground.
We reached Singrauli at a very late hour. It's almost like a day and a half journey. And I remember this vividly. We reached around 10, 10:30 In the night. So we couldn't actually see anything at that hour. But one thing that kind of struck us immediately was the smell in the air. We could actually smell coal, we could smell the sulfur. Some of us thought that we could like maybe vomit right now because the smell was so intense. Actually we blew our nose, it was like a black mucus coming out. But what we saw the next day was such a devastating tale.
The first thing when we went out, we just realized that the plants, the trees, everything was black in color. They were coated with coal dust. Another devastating situation we were seeing was of the Adivasi community. They are basically forest-dwelling people who are dependent for their livelihood on the forest produce, which they collect, which they sell. Their lives are entwined with the forest ecosystem. They had been literally plucked up from the periphery of the forest where the coal mines for this particular Sasan project had to come, and shifted to a rehabilitation colony so far away from the forest. And now these people had no access to any livelihood source. Entire families were supposed to live in one room. There was no access to water. And there were people who were telling us how they had to actually sit for begging in the market every day just to make ends meet. So you pick up a community, which is self-sufficient, lives with the forest ecosystem, pluck them from their environment, put them in a barren land, literally make them beg for their livelihood. And there is no accountability.
We thought it was important to look at who are the financials and how we can hold these financials accountable for what they are funding and how they are impacting people on ground. We realized it was U.S. Ex-Im Bank, and China's Ex-Im Bank.
And now in 2020, April 10, I think, we get to see the news and videos, horrible videos of ash dyke break:
NDTV news clip: “News from Madhya Pradesh, and two people are dead and four people are missing after a fly ash dyke gave way at a coal fired power plant, this is in the Singrauli district … this is the third such incident in the district in a year’s time…”
When a dike breaks, it’s like .. it's like opening the gates of a dam. Like massive ferocious rivers of ash water, like, flowing everywhere, in the fields. The entire crop was ruined. There were six deaths, of which three were children.
The immediate thing that we did was we reached out to the U.S. Ex-Im Bank, because we really wanted to call them out. Because they kept on ignoring what we had been trying to communicate for so long to them, that today we are in this situation.
These institutions work with so much impunity. You cannot operate with no conscience, especially when you claim that your aims are alignment with the Paris Agreement, your, your aims are to talk about climate justice. And at the end of the day, you are not bothered about what exactly your investments are doing to communities on ground, just because they happen to be in some other part of the world.
We know finance motivates half of the things. It decides what is important, what will get revenue, what will get profits. The kind of profits we expect cannot be made without exploitation of resources, of people, of environment. And I think the worst impacted have been the marginalized communities. It's the life and livelihood of people that is threatened. It's the very existence of people that is threatened.
Music: Banaras Baba & Kolkata Kid Court of Akbar (Epidemic Sound)