The French-owned Lafarge Cement, the largest cement manufacturing company in the world, and its clone subsidiaries are destroying large tracts of land, forest and water, polluting the environment, emitting poisonous at an unprecedented level, and taking away lands from Indigenous Peoples and marginalized communities thus destroying their livelihood, tradition, customs, culture and environment in the militarized northeast region of India. Lafarge’s destructive activity is being assisted by several multilateral and bilateral institutions including the International Finance Corporation.

One of the resistance sites against this company is in a small confederacy of villages in the east khasi district of Meghalaya state in North East India. The Lafarge Surma Cement (LSC), a joint venture between the Lafarge Group of France and Cementos Molins of Spain, is the first project under the South Asia Sub-regional Economic Cooperation (SASEC) as program promoted by ADB. It involves Bangladesh and North East India. A cement plant was established in Chhatak in Sunamgonj district of Bangladesh while the raw materials for this plant are sourced from the Indigenous Khasi people area of Meghalaya state in North East India.