Tag: Goa

English Results & Vedanta AGM – 2012

English Results & Vedanta AGM: On Tuesday 28th August 2012 I photographed a protest by London teachers over Michael Gove’s interference with GCSE English grading before going on to Lincoln Inn Fields for a lively protests outside the AGM of London-based mining company Vedanta.

Regrade GCSE English

Dept of Education, Westminster

London teachers protested outside the Education Ministry against Michael Gove’s intervention in the grading of GCSE English results, which had moved the mark boundary between Grad C and Grade D, meaning that many students who previously would have achieved a C grade were now graded at D.

GCSE had been introduced as a system to grade students with no particular significance to the C/D boundary, but over the years has been altered by governments to make C a pass and D a fail, both for the students and also for the schools.

Students who fail to get a C or above in English (and Maths) may be prevented from goning on to further study even in unrelated subjects, and schools which fail to get passes for the required 40% pass benchmark are at risk. Some teachers may also lose pay as a result – even though their students have actually performed at the same level.

The change in the grade boundaries is seen as part of Gove’s agenda to blame schools and teachers for ‘failing’ students and provide a rationale for closing down schools run by democratically elected local councils and replacing extending the privatisation of education by their replacement by ‘academies.’

The altered grading disproportionately affects students from working class backgrounds, whose aims to better themselves through education have already been hit by this government with the removal of EMA, the educational maintenance allowance for 16-18 year olds, and by the hike in University fees.

Then NUT Deputy General Secretary Kevin Courtney speaking

The grade shift was estimated to result in an increase of around 10,000 in the number of young people not in education, employment, or training, “NEET“s. and on the same day as this protest Employment Minister Chris Grayling announced that young unemployed Londoners would be forced to do three months of unpaid full-time work or have their benefits cut.

More on My London Dairy: Regrade GCSE English

Vedanta AGM Protest

Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Mining company Vedanta, owned by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal and backed by the UK government was opposed by groups in India, Goa, Liberia, Namibia, South Africa, Ireland, Zambia and Sri Lanka because of the environmental damage, pollution and human rights abuses caused by its mining of bauxite and other minerals.

Protesters from Goa ask ‘Where have all the trees gone!’?

Vedanta’s activities had been condemned by Amnesty International and many organisations had withdrawn their investments including the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, Martin Currie Investments, the Church of England, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Dutch Pension Fund PGGM.

But the company was still supported by over 30 major banks and financial agencies including HSBC, RBS, Deutsche Bank, Axa, Royal Bank of Canada, Credit Suisse, J P Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Lloyds Banking Group, Nordea Bank, ICICI, Citigroup, National Bank of Kuwait, ANZ and Merrill Lynch.

Samarendra Das of Foil Vedanta speaks, John McDonnell MP listens

In Odisha, India, the smelting of bauxite had left over 10,000 displaced people landless, contaminated drinking water and devastated vast areas of formerly fertile land, with famines every year since 2007. Only widespread and determined resistance by the indigenous Advasi people over seven years has so far prevented the devastation of their sacred Niyamgiri hills.

There had been many huge protests in Tamil Nadu where their subsidiary “has flouted laws without remorse, operating and expanding without consent, violating environmental conditions, and illegally dumping toxic effluents and waste” and had overturned court decisions against them by “large scale corruption and bribery.”

The lively protest was organised by Foil Vedanta. At one point well-dressed protester who walked up to the gate leading to the AGM and threw fake blood on the pavement before rushing away.

Shareholders attending the meeting then had to step carefully over the pool of blood to go in to the meeting until some minutes later a cleaner was sent out to clear the mess.

Four of the protesters, icnluding Bianca Jagger, dressed as usual in white, had to step over it as they went in, having become shareholders to they could attend the AGM and raise questions about the company’s actions.

More at Vedanta AGM Protest

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

Vedanta Foiled

Vedanta Foiled: Vedanta Resources Limited is a mining company with headquarters in London though founded in India in 1976 and is largely owned by the family of its founder Anil Agarwal. Mining is essentially a dirty business, but Vedanta has earned a reputation for being one of the very worst in terms of environmental damage, unsafe operations, human rights and dodgy tax practices.

Vedanta Foiled

I first became aware of the company in 2010 when human rights and activist groups, including Survival International, Amnesty International organised a protest in London outside its AGM against its plans to destroy a mountain sacred to the Dongria Kondh people in the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha, India for its deposits of the aluminium ore bauxite. Even the UK government criticised the company, which refused to cooperate with an OECD investigation.

Vedanta Foiled

Their refinery in Odissa has also been found to produce high levels of air and water pollution, as have other factories owned by Vedanta subsidiaries elsewhere, including in Zambia.

Vedanta Foiled

In 2018 Vedanta announced it was de-listing from the London Stock Exchange after pressure from politicians and activists following the Thoothukudi massacre in Tamil Nadu in May in which 13 protesters were killed and dozens injured, and the success of grassroots activism which has shut down Vedanta’s operations in Goa, Tuticorin and Niyamgiri.

Vedanta Foiled

Much of that pressure came from the activities of Foil Vedanta whose annual protests outside the Vedanta AGM I photographed for some years. As well as noisy protests outside the meeting some of these campaigners had bought shares so they had a right to attend the AGMs and ask questions about the companies activities. While their questions were seldom addressed seriously they did greatly embarrass the company and caused som independent shareholders to disinvest.

But Foil Vedanta also did more, and a few days before the final AGM had released a comprehensive report ‘Vedanta’s Billions: Regulatory failure, environment and human rights’ detailing the company’s crimes in all of its operations, and of the City of London’s total failure to regulate Vedanta, or any other criminal mining company and revealing the vast scale of tax evasion and money laundering.

Four years earlier Foil Vedanta had issued another report on the company’s subsidiary mining copper in Zambia, exposing how it had evaded taxes there as well as pollution and environmental problems that other investigations had already reported.

They also supported Zambian communities consistently polluted by Konkola Copper Mines in bringing a case against the company to court in the UK. Vedanta appealed to the Supreme Court against the case being heard in the UK arguing it did not have a duty of care towards persons affected by the operations of a subsidiary company.

Surendra Das of Foil Vedanta commented “Vedanta’s remorseless pollution of the River Kafue since 2005 continues the colonial legacy of environmental racism which made the Zambian Copperbelt a global pollution hotspot. While the financial and material gains from copper have been allowed to flow seamlessly out of the country, justice risks being restricted by economic and institutional barriers of territoriality. We very much hope that the court will enable the fight for justice to continue.“

The Supreme court’s lengthy judgement confirmed that at a duty of care can exist between a parent company and third parties affected by the operations of its subsidiaries.

After the de-listing Vedanta is now a private company so this was the last Vedanta AGM, but protests by Foil Vedanta and the London Mining Network have continued in London against the company which still receives important backing from the City of London, as do other mining companies which are still plundering the world – if not as openly and crookedly as Vedanta.

More at Vedanta’s Final AGM.