And today they are stronger, more numerous and more ambitious than ever. “Because without our land we will die anyway.”She wore a green salwar kameez (traditional dress) and a red headband – the uniform of the Maoist guerrillas, who are now a big factor in the struggle over how India should develop.Called “Naxalites” after the town of Naxalbari in West Bengal where their insurgency first broke out in 1967, the Maoists have had their ups and downs, but they have never gone away. At a demonstration held at Kalinganagar after the New Year massacre, a woman on the platform put the adivasi case very simply “We are ready to give our lives but not our land,” she said. Thin young men riding bicycles with carts attached to the back struggle to move their loads, which protrude far behind the cart, of steel reinforcing rods for cement.

Money is being made here, a chaotically affluent city is being thrown together.But then, two days into 2006, the bloody end to the protest at Kalinganagar south of the Jharkhand border threw the whole jamboree into question. Rising above the crowds of sugar-cane wallahs and beggars are huge advertisements for iron bars, nails and wire – but also for business suits. Rickshaws fight for space on roads clogged with lorries and vans, the air is full of choking smoke, Main Road is dominated by the aluminium-clad tower of the city’s first swanky hotel, Capitol Hill. We were in Malaysia recently on holiday, and we said, God, India could be like this. Of course it may not be good for every individual adivasi …”Five years ago Ranchi, the state capital, was a sedate, rather genteel country town with many Christian mission schools, where bicycle rickshaw was the favoured way to get around Today it feels like some raw place on the frontier.

It’s happening already thanks to the firms that have already moved here: for the first time shopkeepers here are learning what it means to have money. With a steel mill, the taxes the firm will pay will have a ripple effect all over the state. “It will have a massive knock-on effect – on taxis, hotels, every other business. Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh have signed tentative agreements with more than 100 companies to build plants. If all came good, the total investment would be more than $20bn.”If even one steel mill came into the state it would make a huge difference,” said a man in the drinks trade in the Ranchi Club, the former hangout of the British in Jharkhand’s capital, taken over and expanded by the local elite. In what direction are things likely to go? To the advantage of the poor and hapless, or to their detriment?Last October Jharkhand made business news headlines when Laxmi Mittal, the world’s number one steel-maker and third richest man, Indian-born but now based in Europe, announced that he was making his first investment in his native land: setting up a 12-million-tonne steel plant somewhere in the state, at a cost of US$9bn.

And now the ground rules have changed; now big business is in the driving seat. If there are rules to be followed – and, according to the Indian Constitution, land f held by tribal people in tribal areas subject to the Constitution’s Fifth Schedule cannot by any means be transferred to non-tribals – it is a sound bet that they will be ignored.That’s the way things worked under the lumbering, supposedly benign and paternalistic socialist system that ruled independent India for its first 50-odd years. Women became infertile and their husbands abandoned them, and they began to be persecuted as witches, the true aim being to steal their land. The Uranium Corporation of India Ltd maintained that none of the village’s health problems were connected to their activities.Jaduguda illustrates the way that India moves into the future: this is the style of its progress When the state wants to do something it just does it Land is requisitioned, the earthmovers arrive. A child was born with only one eye and one ear, mentally handicapped as well, unable to walk, and he grew bigger but no heavier. A uranium mine was, it seemed, the sort of mine you could live with.Then the first deformed children began to be born in the village. People of the village and the cattle they had washed regularly in the water of the pond began dying prematurely of cancer.