For years, tribals agitated to get a state that they can call their home. Now they live in the fear of being uprooted from their home, in the name of development.

Manu Pingua, who has taken voluntary retirement from the Jharkhand government services just a couple of years ago, is spending his days in constant fear these days. His village falls in the area that has been earmarked by the state government for an ambitious steel plant, to be set up by JSW Steel. Pingua is apprehensive, that one fine day, he might just receive a sealed envelope from the state revenue department, asking him to vacate his land to facilitate the "prestigious" steel plant.

This isn't Pingua's fear alone. Many tribals in and around Ranchi, who have inhabited this region from time immemorial, have this constant fear to cope with. It is surely the most burning political issue. But what makes it more glooomy for the tribals here is that they think they have nowhere to go. "Neither the UPA nor the previous NDA government has done enough to allay the fears of dislocation," says a disillusioned Pingua.

The day Arcelor Mittal signed up an MoU with the Jharkhand government in 2006, there were screaming headlines all over. Politicians belonging to the ruling NDA went to town with claims that the project will wipe out poverty from the state forever. Possibly, it could have. The project could have provided direct employment to about 10,000 educated youth in the area. Then why the resistance? What went wrong? "Perhaps the selection of land," says Dayamini Barla, tribal rights activist. "The state has thousands of acres of barren land that cannot be cultivated. The government should have cautiously earmarked only unfertile barren land for such projects. If you try to take away three crop land, which is situated at a stone's throw from the state capital, it is bound to attract resistance."

Barla is spearheading a mass movement of tribals in and around Torpa in Jharkhand, against the Arcelor Mittal proposed facility.

After having lauched a peaceful agitation for several decades to press their demand for a separate state, the local population is again having to go back to the old ways. Their main grouse, demand a separate state, had been against the domination of the locals by outsiders, or 'dikus'. Now, their own elected government is threatening to uproot them in the name of development.

The local population believes that the state government is discriminating against them. There are some apparent flaws in the state government's resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) policy as well, which is why, the government policy has not been able to muster support at the grassroots.

The R&R policy permits only one member from each family selling land for a particular project to get employment in the project. The government can attract substantial support by a minor tweak in this policy. All it needs to do is make provisions for employment of more than one member, where family size is large.

Both the mainstream political parties know that this is an issue they can't afford to take lightly. Says Ram Tahal Chaudhary, BJP candidate from Ranchi, "We will ask companies to do smaller projects. When companies come with such big projects, it leads to many people getting uprooted. This is a very painful process as far as tribals are concerned, and addressing this is prime on my agenda."

According to Subodh Kant Sahay, Congress candidate and union minister in the outgoing UPA government, "The state government should have simply adopted the national rehabilitation policy. With this, a lot of issues could have been addressed. This is a very serious matter. Political parties across the board need to come together and work a way out, so that development can take place without uprooting tribals."