Tribal communities in Chhattisgarh are weaponising constitutional laws to halt an 8.7-square-kilometre underground mine they say will destroy their water and escalate fatal elephant attacks.
RAIGARH, April 24 — Ten tribal villages in Chhattisgarh have drawn a hard line in the forest dirt against the Adani Group. They’ve invoked sweeping constitutional powers to block a massive underground coal mine in the Dharamjaigarh block. The Purunga underground coal block covers 8.7 square kilometres of the Mand-Raigarh coalfield. It holds an estimated 260 million tonnes of coal beneath the soil. But the people living above it won’t let Ambuja Cements Limited, an Adani subsidiary, dig it out.
The block was allocated to the cement giant during the commercial coal mine auctions in March 2023. Since then, the region has transformed into a pressure cooker of indigenous resistance. The standoff isn’t just about corporate expansion. It’s a fight for survival in a district where mining threatens the ecologically fragile Kokdar reserve forest. Residents of Purunga, Sawarsingha, and Kokodar villages haven’t waited for bureaucratic saviours. They’ve weaponised the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, known widely as PESA, to defend their borders.
Through special Gram Sabhas, these communities have passed unanimous resolutions entirely rejecting the mining project. They didn’t stop at paperwork. Villagers marched on the district collector’s office, laying siege to the administrative compound. They delivered a memorandum demanding the immediate cancellation of an environmental public hearing. The district administration had scheduled that hearing for November 11, 2025, a move that only threw petrol on the fire. For the locals, scheduling clearance hearings without prior consent isn’t just insulting; it’s an illegal overreach.
And their anger is rooted in very tangible fears about the land they stand on. The villagers have two primary concerns that drive their relentless opposition. First, they fear that underground mining will fracture the region’s hydrology. Extracting coal from deep seams routinely disrupts subterranean aquifers. If the local water table collapses, the surface water sources that these ten villages rely on for agriculture and daily survival won’t survive the year. They’ve made it clear they can’t drink coal.
The second concern is measured in blood. The Kokdar forest is a known, highly volatile flashpoint for human-elephant conflict. Heavy industrial activity, blasting, and machinery noise will inevitably agitate the elephant herds living in the reserve. It doesn’t take much to trigger a crisis when habitats are compressed. When elephants lose their territory or face extreme stress, they push further into human settlements.
Local statistics cited by community leaders paint a grim, violent picture of this reality. Since 2001, elephant attacks have killed 167 villagers across the region. In that same violent crossfire, 69 elephants have died. The villagers argue that keeping the forest intact isn’t an environmental luxury. It’s a matter of absolute physical safety for their families. Destroying the buffer zone guarantees more fatal encounters, and they won’t accept that risk.
So, how did the company address these life-and-death concerns? They haven’t. According to the villagers, not a single representative from Ambuja Cements has come to the villages to speak with them directly. The corporate silence is deafening. Instead, the company and the state have relied on local administrators to run interference.
The Sub-Divisional Magistrate and other officials have tried to manage the fallout through secondary channels. They’ve passed messages to the tribal leaders claiming that underground mining technology will minimise physical displacement on the surface. They’ve also promised that no extraction work will commence until all formal forest clearances are secured. The villagers aren’t buying a word of it. They’ve rejected these assurances as entirely inadequate, noting that their explicit consent is required before any clearance process even begins.
The law appears to firmly back the villagers’ defiance. Legal experts observing the Raigarh standoff point out that bypassing the Gram Sabha violates both the 1996 PESA Act and the 2006 Forest Rights Act. Raigarh district falls strictly under the Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which grants immense statutory power to local tribal councils to govern their own lands. Section 4(i) of PESA is utterly unambiguous. It doesn’t leave room for bureaucratic interpretation, making consultation with the Gram Sabha mandatory before any land acquisition can occur in Scheduled Areas.
Experts are directly comparing this resistance to the Supreme Court’s landmark Niyamgiri judgment in Odisha. That historic ruling cemented the legal principle that Gram Sabhas hold both the power and the sacred duty to protect their cultural and natural heritage from destructive industrial practices. The tribal councils in Dharamjaigarh know this precedent inside out. They’re using it to build an impenetrable administrative fortress around their homes.
They aren’t fighting this battle in isolation. Local Member of Legislative Assembly Laljit Singh Rathiya has thrown his political weight behind the tribal resistance. Environmental activist Rajesh Tripathi has also joined the fray, amplifying the villagers’ demands on a wider stage. Tripathi hasn’t minced words about the state administration’s tactics in Raigarh. He accuses officials of systematically bypassing established legal procedures purely to serve corporate interests. He argues that the industrial machinery is trying to steamroll indigenous rights in the name of economic progress.
The battle lines aren’t just drawn; they’re entrenched.
On one side stands a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate hungry for 260 million tonnes of fuel, backed by a state apparatus eager to facilitate extraction. On the other side stand ten villages armed with constitutional guarantees, a history of survival, and an absolute refusal to back down. They’ve decided their water, their forests, and their lives aren’t up for commercial auction. The tribal communities of Raigarh have drawn their line in the dirt, and they dare the state to cross it.
