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Kutamal (Rayagada district, Odisha)/Jaipur (Rajasthan): On the afternoon of April 3, Rayagada Police in Odisha imposed a month-long curfew under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) across Sunger Panchayat in Kashipur Block of Rayagada District.

Kutamal village, one of the 35 hamlets in the Panchayat, was the site of this declaration. While the village is largely being referred to as Kantamal in the media, that is the Odia version of its name. In Kui, the Adivasi language of the region, it is Kutamal.

It was clarified by authorities that the curfew is to prohibit the collective movement of villagers in and around Kutamal, as the Industrial Development Corporation of Odisha was to commence the construction of a three-km road from point X to point Y.

Point X is the junction between Sagabari and Bichapinda mouza (revenue circle), roughly seven km away from Kutamal where a 12-hectare eucalyptus plantation sits and families from both villages farm. Point Y is the flat-top of Tijmali, a pre-civilisational, indigenous hill that is home to sacred groves, fields and life-sustaining forests of the several Adivasi and mool-nivasi people from the state-categorised Kondh, Paraja and other Kui-speaking tribes as well as other forest dwelling communities like Dom, Dalit and pastoral Goud communities.

Fifteen hundred hectares of the Tijmali plateau has been leased to Vedanta Resources Limited for mining bauxite since February 2023, permitted by the Odisha state government to mine nine million tonnes of bauxite per annum for the next 30 years.

Since then, Vedanta’s alleged operational illegalities, financial and regulatory non-compliance, the people’s resistance, subsequent militarisation and surveillance, and overall ignorance towards the inevitable loss of civilisational lands, has been documented here, here, here, here, and here.

Consent has previously been manufactured via fabricated gram sabhas, and arbitrary arrests are emerging as a norm for the people of Sunger Panchayat.

On April 4, over 300 villagers from five villages of Kerpai Panchayat, six villages of Sunger Panchayat and Talampadar village of Talampadar Panchayat stationed themselves in the Bichapinda mouza where the approach-road construction was to begin. The project is led by the Odisha Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (IDCO), the state’s nodal agency for liaising with private companies to establish industrial projects across Odisha.

Currently under legal challenge with an interlocutory application being heard at the National Green Tribunal, Kolkata Bench, the three km road construction is sub-judice.

The Rayagada administration responded to the people’s mobilisation around Bichapinda with battalions of police occupying the adjacent stretch of road.

When The Wire’s reporter approached the police personnel on site to inquire about their presence, he was rebuffed. An email inquiring about the legitimacy of the road construction, therefore, has been sent to the collector’s office, and this article will be updated upon receiving a response.

The protest rendezvous is only 500 metres away from the Sagabari camp, a tent set up three km away from Tijmali plateau. It has been independently built out of bamboo and tarpaulin sheet by the residents of all the above-mentioned villages, to protect Tijmali each night, in rotation, since June 7, 2025.

In late May 2025, company field officers of Mythri Infrastructure had begun........

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