If the key stakeholders in this thesis were the people in the State government and the industrial group proposing the project on the one hand, and those immediately affected on the other, fieldwork research was difficult since the former was largely inaccessible for interviews and the latter had very little information to provide other than what various activists and opposition parties had told them (though they did of course have a lot to say about their own livelihoods).
Instead the key informants interviewed were mainly among those opposing bauxite mining or people who had already left active government work (a list of people interviewed is provided in the annex). For confidentiality reasons names and other potential identification markers like profession or location have been withheld.
To at all get heard by busy bureaucrats, party leaders and industrialists the tactic of using introductions was employed. This was done to increase the trust in the researcher to allow people to talk on a controversial subject. It was possible to snowball among retired IAS officers in
Hyderabad and elsewhere due to the existence of a few initial key contacts. Once higher up point of contacts had been established this did lead to a few leads into the bureaucracy as well. At other times contacts would come from unexpected places; an academic with an interest in providing help for field research would have contacts among political parties or in the bureaucracy based on personal contacts. These contacts would sometimes turn out not to lead anywhere and chasing the people who could possibly provide an introduction was as difficult as finding the actual interview target. But at other times these introductions were invaluable and allowed access to people and resources which could never have been found otherwise.
As mentioned above, key informants were vital in providing assistance in the interpretation of various documents obtained as well as filling in gaps in what was not available or left unmentioned in documents. Key informants among retired bureaucrats were able to read between the lines of the documents and provide information on things not discussed. Open-ended questions were provided to guide the interviews and allow the respondents to discuss matters freely. It was not possible to provide a strict interview model due to the many cross-cutting issues and the partial knowledge of each informant (as well as the researcher). Interviews of this ongoing issue allowed capturing some of the many uncertainties and the lack of information which faced many people engaged with the issue often in sharp contrast with the extreme certainty and complete absence of contention depicted in bureaucratic documents.
Interviews usually lasted for at least one hour and were recorded where possible to improve accuracy. On most occasions, such as in the bureaucrat offices, it was thought that the use of a recording device would either make the interview impossible or at the very least diminish the usefulness of responses. In these cases notes were taken during the interview and written up as soon as possible afterwards. A greater challenge was to gather any viable material during the usually brief and frequently interrupted attempts at interviews in busy bureaucrat offices when phones kept ringing and files which had to be signed kept arriving.
A brief livelihood analysis, consisting of approximately two weeks in total at each site, was made to get a basic understanding of the circumstances people were living under in the areas now allocated by the government for industrial uses. An understanding of local livelihoods and environments was gained partly from surveys carried out at both project sites, but mainly via interviews and group discussions conducted with villagers, especially elected traditional ‘elders’, and elected members of Panchayats, activists, journalists and other key respondents. Government interactions remained mainly related to the collection of population and agricultural statistics.
Observations of the physical settings on repeat visits served as another form of information gathering.
A brief 3-page questionnaire was prepared with the aim of gathering some of the basic livelihood characteristics for select villages such as family members, educational and other skills and type of livelihood activities (See Annexure C: Livelihoods Questionnaire on page 258). Being very homogenous tribal villages, significant differences were hard to find within the villages. One of the main differences between refinery and mine areas was that people in the proposed refinery area had land titles in their own names and had made investments in farm equipment like irrigation facilities, while in the proposed mining area they would have land but not formally acknowledged and without any supporting infrastructure.
While the plan was to carry out the questionnaire in two villages at the refinery site and two villages at one of the bauxite mountains, various difficulties restricted the questionnaire to one village in each location. Reasons for this included initially the difficulty of finding research assistants which restricted visits to short weekend visits. Later I was becoming a little too well-known in the refinery area and thought it best to move away from there when police questions were being asked. In the mining area the selection of a village on top of one of the bauxite hills without road access seemed like a good choice of a village sure to be affected by mining until repeat visits had to be made by climbing up to it taking a fair bit of time. The idea was to compare this hill top village to one at the base of the hill right on the main road to Visakhapatnam. When the said village by the road was visited it turned out that it had been split over the issue of mining. Internal strife had undermined the authority of the traditional village leader and when he on a direct question asked us not to approach people there, it was decided that this village was not conducive to further studies. For the refinery, material from the survey made by Reddy et al. (2010a) provided very valuable additional data.
At many times what was meant to be personal interviews during village fieldwork became group discussions since people would routinely gather around outside visitors to listen and sometimes add their opinions. This was not necessarily a negative thing (although the occasional drunk did spoil interactions) since it strengthened the possibilities for recollection of events. It also gave valuable insights into village dynamics. People being slightly better educated and more integrated with the rest of the State in the refinery area opened up for freer discussions while in the Agency
all discussions centred around the village leaders, usually the slightly better off and better educated men.
Interviews at the sites were conducted via translators which made the process a slow one. Here recordings allowed for a better capture of the richness of responses which a quick translation could not afford. The translated interviews were transcribed and added to NVivo along with descriptive passages to help remember the conditions under which the interview took place.
One serious shortcoming was the inability to interact with most women who would only rarely join these group discussions and were not possible to approach as the researcher as well as the research assistants were male. A number of locally influential women were however interviewed during visits to the proposed sites.
Walking tours around the villages helped get a better picture of where land holdings existed and provided a basic understanding of the borders where the proposed refinery and mine might come up. Plans were clearer at the refinery since land acquisition notices specifying survey numbers had been made. The problem was that the acquisition plans kept changing which at least created the impression of uncertainty. During visits to the mining areas no information was available to any of the informants making the exercise of understanding future impact very uncertain beyond the well-known locations of the hills where the bauxite ore exists and some geo-technical information about the ore deposits. But even with Environmental Impact Assessments and other planning documents the situation was not that much clearer. Despite site visits and the collection of almost every plan, document and map known to exist, no exact clarity has been possible to achieve on project borders and therefore the detailed impact on farmers. Given more time a mapping exercise together with villagers would have been very useful. But the mine and refinery borders would have remained vague.