Raghunath Khara keeps a shop in Balda, a village in Odisha’s Koraput district. When he signs his name, he signs it in English. That small habit is now evidence. A sheet of paper says he agreed to a government proposal to mine bauxite on his village’s forest land, and next to his name is a thumb impression. “I always sign in English,” he told Mahmodul Hassan of Al Jazeera. “It was someone else’s thumb.”

He says he never went to the meeting. On that day, 9 October 2025, he was about 100 metres away, protesting with his wife and his sister. Both of them are on the list too.

The hill

Balda Hill has a flat top, and at least 10 tribal villages around it hold its forests, grasslands and caves sacred. Kalinga Alumina Limited, a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises, wants to open a $24m bauxite mine there to feed an alumina refinery. The lease runs 50 years and covers 157 hectares of forest. Adani Enterprises belongs to Gautam Adani, whom Al Jazeera describes as India’s second-richest businessman and close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The law put one small obstacle in front of this ambition. Forest land cannot be handed over without the consent of the gram sabha, the village council, and that consent is valid only if half the adults agree in writing. So the paper had to be produced. In places like this, the paper often outweighs the people.

Three people overlook a lush river valley where an enormous sheet bearing three fingerprints drapes over a forested plateau, rendered in a vintage woodcut style.

The official record says the councils of Balda and Bannur, two villages 5km apart, met on 9 October 2025 and agreed: 360 adults in Balda and 227 in Bannur, which is every adult in both villages. The elected heads of both villages say no signatures were collected and call the meetings invalid. Photographs taken by villagers show about 40 people at the Balda meeting and 68 at Bannur. The notices are dated 22 and 23 September, but villagers say they went up only on 8 October, the day before the meetings. The guidelines require two weeks’ notice. The villagers asked at once for new meetings. Instead, the resolutions went into the official file on 15 October and appeared on the environment ministry’s website on 11 February this year.

The list

Read slowly, the list is a record of people who were not there. Rama Hantal, 60, has been paralysed and unable to speak for years, yet an Odia signature stands beside his name. “There is no chance he could have attended the meeting or even signed,” said his daughter-in-law, Chandrama Hantal. Her own name carries a thumbprint, and she says she was not there either.

The name Gurubari Khara appears three times. One woman of that name lives 3km away and denies attending. Another cannot be traced. The third died in February 2025, aged about 75. “How can they forge her presence and signature eight months later?” asked her son, Sahdev. Her paralysed husband and her nephew are on the list as well, and both deny attending. Nakul Alang, 35, found an Odia signature in his name from a day he was working in Visakhapatnam, about 170km away. His mother, Sanai Alang, serial number 108, “died four years ago,” he said.

An empty wooden chair stands in a sunlit courtyard, casting a shadow shaped like a seated person with an outstretched arm.

Al Jazeera interviewed more than 20 people and could not trace at least 67 of the listed signatories. In Bannur, at least three dead people are represented by thumbprints. More than 50 people have filed affidavits saying their signatures were forged, and there have also been petitions and police complaints.

Then there is the question of whose hand wrote the names. Sunadhar Muduli, a 50-year-old farmer, recognised his own handwriting on page 10 of the 16-page Bannur document: 13 names, each with a thumbprint. He says a contract revenue worker, Ramnath Pungi, came to him in December, supposedly to register land rights, and had him sign on behalf of others. Pungi confirmed it. He said he was paid 3,000 rupees and “did not know they would use it for this”. He added that he, too, opposes the mine.

One could put it this way: whoever holds the pen does not need the people. Their names are enough.

The speed of approval

The rest of the file moved at a speed the poor rarely see. Adani Enterprises was named preferred bidder in February 2023, and protests followed. Most villagers objected at a public hearing on 6 March 2025, and environmental clearance came months later anyway. That year the villages claimed forest rights over 2,500 hectares, most of it overlapping the lease. In January the claims were declared “settled” without the councils being told. Less than a fifth of the claimed area was recognised, the mining area was left out entirely, and two appeals committees upheld the decision within three days. In March all 10 villages rejected the resolutions. In May, Ajaya Muduli, one of three people the villages authorised to act for them, went to court and called the process “abnormally rushed”. On 7 May every approval was granted and the land handed over. No compensation has been promised, and work has not yet started.

Three wax-sealed envelopes lie on a red dirt road passing through a giant rubber stamp, surrounded by wooden fences, dense forest, and distant mountains.

In June, Odisha TV, citing The Hindu, reported that residents accused the company, panchayat representatives and district officials of colluding to divert 157.2 hectares in the Nageswari forest reserve. It also reported that no FIR had been registered despite a detailed complaint filed in February. The Congress party took up the protests as a political cause.

The other side has said nothing. Al Jazeera emailed the Adani group and its communications chief on 18 August and again on 25 September, with no reply. The district magistrate, Manoj Satyawan Mahajan, and the Koraput police superintendent, Rohit Varma, did not respond either.

A pattern

Balda is not alone. About 180km away at Sijimali, villagers alleged similar forgery in 2023 over a 708-hectare bauxite mine for Vedanta Resources. At least eight villages deny giving consent, and clashes there in April injured 70 people. Land Conflict Watch has counted at least 28 conflicts over consent since 2003. A 2024 report by the CAG, India’s government auditor, found 136 consent violations: in 73 cases no gram sabha was held at all, and in 29 the councils’ views were disregarded. Arpitha Kodiveri of Vassar College calls it “an administrative approach to bypassing the consent provision” and “a deeply troubling trend”. Shomona Khanna, a Supreme Court lawyer, says a forest clearance granted without gram sabha consent “has to be quashed. They are making a mockery of the law.”

The villagers fear losing their streams, their paddy fields, the produce they gather from the forest and their shrines. Raghunath Hanthal, 70, a priest, is serial number 171 on the list. “I did not even go to the meeting. We were here, protesting that day,” he said. “The forest is everything for us… Our maa [goddess] is here.”

Rajendra Khara, another Balda resident, said: “Whatever happens, we are never going to give it to Adani. This is our ancestral land.”