A newly-proposed mining project in Gadchiroli district in Maharashtra has courted controversy due to the potential diversion of forest land to facilitate iron ore mining and processing. The project involves diversion of around 9.37 sq km of forest land, an area about half the size of New Delhi airport. Accordingly to news reports, this has raised questions about the project’s location within the Tadoba-Indravati tiger corridor, a key wildlife linkage connecting forests in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh.
Decades of Maoist ideology-led insurgency in Gadchiroli meant that the forests in the district had largely remained insulated from rapid industrialisation that the rest of Maharashtra had been witnessing. That is likely changing with the recent announcements by Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis regarding future development plans for the district. Furthermore, the controversy surrounding forest clearance granted to the proposed iron ore mining and processing project by Lloyds Metals & Energy has drawn attention to the ecological significance of Gadchiroli, arguably one of Maharashtra’s most forested districts.
The debate intensified after media reports revealed that maps submitted as part of the project proposal showed substantial overlap with the corridor identified in the National Tiger Conservation Authority-approved Tiger Conservation Plan for Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve. Despite this, the project was exempted from wildlife clearance requirements after state authorities concluded that the site did not fall within a recognised tiger corridor.
Mandar Pingle, the assistant director of the Satpuda Foundation, a non-profit focused on wildlife and landscape conservation in central India informs Mongabay-India that the proposed mining site falls on an active elephant corridor. “Many megafauna use these corridors for movement across forests,” he says.
The controversy has highlighted broader concerns about the ecological value of Gadchiroli’s forests, which remain less studied than many other biodiversity-rich landscapes in India. Pingle shares that decades of restricted access due to insurgency meant that there is very little understanding of what the district stands to lose in terms of biodiversity if development plans are made on forest lands.
The Lloyds project comes amid a wider push to industrialise Gadchiroli through mining, steel production and infrastructure development. State authorities view such investments as important for economic growth and employment in a district that has historically lagged behind other regions in development indicators.
As development projects expand across Gadchiroli, the district is increasingly emerging as a focal point in the broader debate over balancing economic growth with the conservation of one of central India’s largest remaining forested landscapes.
Banner image: An iron ore mine in Chhattisgarh. Representative image by India Water Portal via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
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