Photos

Villagers from the Mahuva area of Bhavnagar district in Gujarat have been holding a long-drawn protest against proposals to set-up a cement plant in the vicinity, claiming a water-body they built would be destroyed and their livelihoods ruined. This is a picture taken at one of the first rallies to Ahmedabad in 2010, where at least a thousand men, women and children came in buses and trucks and whatever else they could climb on. These villagers stood silently with their placards along the Sarkhej-Gandhinagar highway that passes through Ahmedabad. They undertook two maore rallies in the city later on, the latest was called a padyatra, where some 10,000 marched from Mahuva to Gandhinagar on foot for about two weeks, and submitted a memorandum to the state government. The issue is currently being fought in the Supreme Court