The people of Pentakota, at the small town of Puri in Orissa, are a stable community of some ten thousand souls. They live in thatched cottages on the sandy coast on the Bay of Bengal of Eastern India and gain their living by fishing.

Their ancestors have done the same for perhaps ten thousand years. Their boats are modest and do not fish the oceans dry in the cause of profits or paying bank interest, so the occupation builds no financial empires for anyone, but - the catch and the way of life is enough for them and the local population, which is what life is about, or should be, and it will be enough for as long again - or longer - if they are left alone -

But they are not to be left alone. The plan is to move this fishing community, lock, stock and barrel - all ten thousand of them and unwilling though they be, to make way for a modern holiday resort complex so that a certain few people, for whom 'enough' is never enough, can make ever more money. These 'investors' perhaps will never visit the place, and any newcomers who do come and even stay awhile will not be happier or better, and they and the people they introduce will not be permanent - Neither hotel staff nor their visitors are noted for their permanence, and modern hotel complexes inspire little fervour of loyalty or patriotism.

And this present population? - Oh, they don't matter; like it or not they will be shifted two hundred miles away from this their home - for better prospects? - Oh no, simply away from here - Any question of better prospects is really immaterial; that is not the criterion, you see. These people, much like ourselves - look at these superb photographs and you might well recognise yourself in them - are being moved - or that is the plan - simply because they are in the way of a few making more money - As has been done, and is still being done, in all the cruel 'Acts of Enclosure' - or more properly 'acts of appropriation' - of what really is not their world or our world, but - if anyone's - God's - wherever such 'acts' are being 'politically' bought and enabled and enacted, and imposed and enforced and maintained, all over the world, from Brazil and Australia, America and Mexico, England and Scotland - to here in Pentakota -

You know, we really cannot ignore the question any longer, can we, and it brooks no evasion. - Just exactly for whom or for what is this world? - Is it just for cash? - Is it just for those who can pay bribes enough for influence? - for those suborned then to exercise such influence in their favour? Because if some continue to think and act as though it were so, then the rest of us, who don't, can exercise some pretty fair clout of our own, too, by finding those responsible and those implicated, whoever they are, wherever they are all over the world and whatever they are doing, and cutting them up for bait -

In fact, while not advocating anything specific as yet except that the said 'investors' desist and stop making pests of themselves to the rest of us and to the planet, these same investors - and certainly we - could not blame these present inhabitants and the intended dispossessed everywhere if, in reacting in defence of their homes and their families' livelihood, they explore in a very practical sense the possibilities of this rich new source of bait.

There are members here who might even raise a discreet cheer if they do just that -

- Justice International - Geneva