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Sadhna Uikey is an Adivasi activist from Madhya Pradesh. She has been campaigning alongside thousands of Adivasis against the union government’s Ken–Betwa Link Project, which will channel water from the Ken River in Madhya Pradesh, through a network of waterworks, to the Betwa River in Uttar Pradesh. The project is estimated to cost ₹44,605 crore, and is being publicised as a boon to the water-scarce Bundelkhand region, but will displace the primarily Adivasi residents of 22 villages in the Chhatarpur and Panna districts of Madhya Pradesh.
Uikey entered electoral politics in 2022, contesting in the Bhopal municipal election with support from the Gondwana Gantantra Party. In 2024, with support from the Bharat Adivasi party, Uikey contested the by-election in the state’s Budhni assembly seat, which the former chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had represented for eighteen years. Earlier this year, she founded the National Birsa Missile Force, an activist group primarily focussed on Adivasi rights.
Ryan Thomas, the product manager at The Caravan, interviewed Uikey in Bhopal, where she is currently based.
You contested the 2023 by-election from Budhni on a ticket from the Bharat Adivasi Party. How was that experience?
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