Shankergarh area of Bara tehsil of Allahabad district is extremely backward. Rich in mineral wealth, the terrain is largely mountainous. Government policies have made people of the area suffer extreme poverty, deprivation, illiteracy, lack of potable water and health facilities, etc.

Tens of thousand families of the area are engaged in mining of silica sand, sand stones, gravel, boulders etc. Valuable silica used in manufacture of glass is supplied from Shankergarh area to the entire country. Gravel is also broken in adjacent Koraon tehsil of Allahabad, in Chitrakoot district and in Rewa dist. of MP.

The area has several washing plants where silica is washed. One can see adivasi women, men and other poor people with taslas (containers) on their head, spades, pickaxes and water pipes in hand, carrying and washing sand. The owners of these plants are feudals and contractors of the area. They have armed goons, like Mafia, to force people to work on low wages. In collusion with them the officials of the state, police and forest departments have accumulated enormous amount of illegal wealth. All labourers working in these plants are under burden of loans taken from the contractors. They are their bonded labourers. This issue has been in focus in the activities of NGOs and 'left' organizations active in the area.

Sand is supplied by trucks and rail wagons. Barring short period during rains, mining of sand, gravel and boulders continues throughout in every village of Shankergarh. The gravel and stones are used in highways, houses, walls of wells etc.

Mine labourers bring up their innocent children and care for their old in straw huts or under plastic sheets. Very soon, at a very tender age they will have hammer and spades in their hand in order help the parents to earn their bread. In this manner they cater to obtaining salt and chapatis in order to 'build' up their bodies so as to help their owners to earn wealth.

Every crossing and village of Shankergarh area has well built houses, but workers living here for several years still do not possess a house site. Entire bastis live deprived of clean drinking water. Normally the hand pumps do not work and workers depend on water from the canal or ditches. This leads to spikes in illnesses during summer and rains. On the other hand due to the govt. policies, the 30 bedded government hospital in the block is counting its last breath. The workers thus either depend on outdated practices and quacks or on private nursing homes. For this they mortgage the work they will do in future to the contractors and become bonded for life.

Forty six villages of the area are on mining lease for 99 years to Raja Shankergarh (Mahendra Pratap Singh, SP assembly candidate in last election) and this has played its role in workers' deprivation. If workers mine gravel/ sand in these villages themselves, the royalty is collected by the raja's contractors. Normally in these villages the contractors get the mining done. This further exposes the fraud of land distribution under Zamindari Abolition law.

These apart, mining lease is issued by the mines office and this is full of legal hurdles. Workers can do mining on their own or patta lands also only if they have a lease. Obtaining a lease involves big bribes. Lease holders get transport permits for which one has to keep running to the office all year round. Without this permit gravel cannot be sold and transported and the permit will have to be purchased in black from other contractors. Lease requires police verification, treasury permits, maps, which becomes impossible and too expensive for the poor to arrange. Corruption apart, the anti-worker nature of this rule is self evident.

In other villages contractors operate on legal leases or illegally in connivance with the police. Many of these are run by persons not belonging to the village. Here they establish the workers on their leased plots and these adivasi labourers, under burden of loans taken from them and in order to continue living on that lease land, work as bonded labour at very low rates. Most of this labour has migrated in from neigbouring Rewa district, where living conditions are worse than this. Most workers normally earn Rs. 50 per day and this is their only source of their income.

It is significant that during several years of such operations, some old workers who had pattas have mined the stone from their land and converted it into fertile lands, reaping reasonable harvests.

A number of NGOs like Sankalp, Mahila Samakhya, Mitra Mandal, etc. have been active in Shankergarh area for a long time. They got about 12 mining leases made for the workers in villages Ghogh, Sonbarsa, Janwa, Pandit pura, Juhi, Garhwa, Authagi, Bargarhi etc. Each lease cost the workers' cooperative committees (Samooh) about Rs 30 to 55 thousand. This fund was accumulated in the process of forming the cooperatives through regular collections for six months and later on the banks gave a loan for the remainder amount.  Where ever the lease has been made, they could not run regularly as there was no regular route for trucks to ply. Many of these cooperatives could not sell their gravel. If the leaders managed to get trucks to their leased land, feudal goondas began threatening the drivers and extracting goonda tax from them. The cooperatives went into crises, the process of getting transit permits from the mines department stopped, the loan burden piled on and some cooperative leaders took to financial corruption. Forced into starvation, the workers started selling their gravel through the contractors at throw away prices. Slowly they again got entangled into the mesh of feudals, stone contractors and moneylenders and recovery certificates were issued against their cooperatives.

In this area another NGO, Sahyog has started another anti worker program of bio deisel (Jatropa) farming in the name of increasing income of farmers. Under this program the village common lands which should ideally be given to the landless labour for their house sites, for mining, farming and economic well being, is being turned into Jatropa farms. The administration is going all out to help. The village pradhans, along with the middlemen are giving 60 years lease of these lands in the name of a few poor persons for doing Jatropa farming. The lease is being given under supervision of Sahyog, which is providing Jatropa plants free of cost and is appointing one poor person of the village on payment as a chowkidar. It is being claimed that the diesel produced will be available after 3 years. Some big oil company will buy it and the profit will supposedly go to the poor. This income, if at all it accrues, will go to the person who owns the lease and not to the entire poor as would have happened if the land had been distributed to the poor for economic use. The normal course is that commercially useful crops sell at very low rates dictated by companies and having no other buyer, farmers are forced to make distress sale. Some big landlords in the area are planting fruit and Anwla trees in their land with help from horticulture department in order to save it from ceiling.

In this manner the land which should have been put to use of the poor workers is being engaged to grow a crop which are of use to big oil companies. By involving few individuals amongst the poor there is a plan afoot to displace the rest of the poor. And all this is in the name of augmenting the income of the poor. If the concern was genuinely to help the poor the land would have been allotted in the name of all the poor people, they would be given possession of the land and the organization would have provided them seeds, fertilizer free of cost or at very low rates to help them sustain their agriculture.

The government has another plan also to displace the poor people. This is in the name of securing the forests and water level. In the name of digging ponds, houses built for several years on land marked earlier for ponds are being removed or agricultural pattas issued on such land are being cancelled. In this work also NGOs are active. They are making the workers do 'shramdan' or free labour to propagate the values of raising water table. Neither these NGOs nor the administration is concerned about the several ponds which are under illegal custody of the big landlords of the area. Nor are they concerned about the dozens of silica washing plants which are dumping the waste from the washing into the ponds and are lowering the pond capacity.

The forest department has intensified its campaign for afforestation. The gram sabha lands are being transferred officially to it for this purpose. The tree plantation will provide income to the pradhans also. These lands are being surrounded by pillars. The landlords and forest officials are together ensuring that dwellings of the workers are surrounded in this process at many places. There is an attempt to displace people living in the 72 bighas (45 acres) plot marked as Tandon Van near Shankergarh block.

The basic questions before the people of the area are of house sites, land for cultivation and ownership of allotted pattas. The main mineral stone and sand are minor minerals, which as per law are reserved for the employment security of the poor. The government has declared these minerals to be its property and in order to earn royalty from it they give mining leases to contractors. Practically this means control of big contractors and Mafia. For safeguarding the rights of workers it is necessary that the right to mine sand and stone should be made free from all incumberances and entire system of mining contracts should be stopped. The government is free to earn its royalty and cost of transit permits through barriers on the roads and rail routes. Only then can the rights of workers be ensured. Otherwise in the name of workers, the contractors will enjoy all rights.

The NGOs working in the area claim to be working to secure rights of workers and for this they get funds from our governments and foreign agencies. They organize protest meetings in order to rally the workers. Apart from getting the mining leases issued which were destined to fail and then retreating from the follow-up tasks, they have taken up issues of malfunctioning of govt. hospitals, for mid day meal programmes in schools and putting a stop to child labour etc. But they have not developed any systematic movement on these issues. They have also remained quiet on basic issues of livelihood. In this background, taking up the issue of child labour tantamounts to cheating the people.

Where ever in the area any movement of the people starts taking place, these NGOs drop anchor. They distribute small gifts to the children of the poor to draw their sympathy, offer small payment jobs to the activists, give money to organize programmes, prevent the poor people from targeting the local landlords and from embarrassing the local government and in this manner prevent them from building their struggles basing on their own strength. For this they get a lot of funds from foreign institutions and governments. For this purpose only the District Magistrate, Commissioner and SSP make rounds of the area in their programmes. With an idea of helping the poor many intellectuals also end up supporting them.

Shankergarh is an area of big landlords who have their own land and have occupied the pattas of the poor as well as gram sabha lands. In many disputes they have obtained stays from the courts and 'legalized' their hold. It is necessary to concentrate on these struggles.

Of the organizations working in the name of communists, CPI was active earlier but has been considerably weakened. Later CPI(ML) Liberation took up many issues in the area. It is important that where ever the questions raised by them came into clash with the system, i.e. the local toughs and the government, they began stalling the movement. For example the struggle against the forest department's occupation of peoples' land in which the slogan of people liberating forest department's occupation was raised, but the programme was postponed. On Ganne hill this organization recently organized a meeting with the help of a big contractor of the area which exposed its true class character.

In this area one of the main political issues is tribal status for Kol adivasis. Till date this status has eluded them in UP while the same has been granted in neighbouring MP. Along with this issue, other issues need to be fought.