Doing the Needful

Essar’s industry of influence

The Ruia family controls the vast Essar corporation: from left, Anshuman Ruia, Ravi Ruia, Shashi Ruia and Prashant Ruia. MADHU KAPPARATH AND SANJAY PANDYA / INDIA TODAY IMAGES
01 August, 2015

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THE TRACK AT THE MAHALAKSHMI RACE COURSE, in Mumbai, runs around a large field that almost touches the Arabian Sea. As horses gallop to the finish line, they pass the course’s colonial-era grandstand, just behind which stands the high column of Essar House. On the twentieth floor of this building, the billionaire brothers Ess and Ar—Shashi and Ravi Ruia—sit in two corners of a shared office, a room nearly 30 feet long.

The chrome and glass exterior of Essar House usually mirrors the green sward of the race course, but not on the afternoon of 22 January 2014. A little after 1pm on that day, six people dangling off the facade, ostensibly hired to clean it, dropped a large white banner. On the sheet, 72 feet long and 36 feet wide, was a message: “We Kill Forests: Essar.”

The banner bore Essar’s logo, and pictures of Manmohan Singh and Veerappa Moily—respectively, the prime minister and environment minister of the United Progressive Alliance government. In less than an hour, about 50 protestors, holding up placards, joined the crowd congregating under the building. About 30 of them were volunteers with Greenpeace India, the local wing of the global environmental non-profit. The rest were from villages near Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh, close to the Mahan forest, where the government had allotted Essar a coal block for captive mining in 2006. The villagers were part of the Mahan Sangharsh Samiti, an organisation protesting Essar’s planned mining.