Place · Dongria Kondh sacred mountain · India
Niyamgiri Hills
The Niyamgiri range in Kalahandi and Rayagada districts is the ancestral mountain of the Dongria Kondh, an Adivasi people of about eight thousand who worship its highest peak Niyamraja — the law-giving god — and live on turmeric, pineapple and shifting millet cultivation on its slopes. The hills hold one of the richest bauxite deposits in the subcontinent, and the resistance of twelve Dongria gram sabhas between 2008 and 2013 against the Vedanta Resources mining lease produced a Supreme Court judgment of 18 April 2013 that recognised the hill itself as a religious site and gave the villages a veto. The verdict is the strongest Indian precedent on Adivasi community forest rights.
- Function
- Cosmology & sacred geography
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.670, 83.330
Connections (1)
- Related traditionDongria Kondh resistance
The Niyamgiri Hills are the ancestral mountain of the Dongria Kondh and the subject of their 2003-2013 community-forest-rights resistance against the Vedanta Resources bauxite mining lease. The movement is simply inseparable from the place: the Supreme Court's 18 April 2013 judgment ordered the twelve gram sabhas of the Niyamgiri range to vote on whether the hill's religious and cultural significance to the Dongria could be overridden by the mining lease, and the gram sabhas unanimously voted no over 18-19 July 2013. The verdict reshaped Indian environmental and Fifth Schedule law.
Sources
Standard reference.
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