A resettled Dongria village - Sakata - on the edge of the forest would appear to support that gloomy prediction. A few years back, the people were given 'pukka' concrete houses and land to grow crops but have since done nothing with the government's gift. Almost all the men of the village are dead from taking too much of the potent local liquor, which is far stronger than the sago-wine of their tradition. 'With the connection to the forest gone,' a local social worker says, 'the men of the village simply earned enough as day labourers to drink themselves to death.'

For Dr Padel the mining of the Niyamgiri Hills is as economically exploitative as anything done by the East India Company. The mine, he says, will impoverish the already poor, extracting vast wealth for the convenience of the developed world and enriching mostly Vedanta's shareholders - the company's share price has quintupled from £4 to £20 since 2003 - and a cabal of local politicians. For the Dongria, he says, it will bring disaster. Much of the aluminium extracted from the hills will go for export, to make everything from missiles (the arms industry is one of the major users of aluminium) to Coca-Cola cans and cars - essential items in a world in which the Dongria have no stake and little understanding.

And the view that this is ethically and morally insupportable is apparently not confined to anti-globalisation activists and left-wing academics. Last November the government of Norway withdrew all investments in Vedanta after its Ethical Council concluded the company 'has caused serious damage to people and to the environment as a result of its economic activities'.

For its part, Vedanta and its Indian subsidiary Sterlite Industries has pledged to give five per cent of the mine's profits for welfare schemes to help the locals. It sounds impressive, but the history of such pledges, activists say, shows that most of the money will be dissipated through corrupt local bureaucracy, bringing scant benefit to the displaced. Anyway, the Dongria want their hills, not money.

Doitary Kadraka, a Dongria elder, has seen many changes in his 55 years, but says he is not prepared to give up his people and hills just yet. 'The deep forest is already mostly lost; there used to be different types of animals - big bears and tigers - but they are no longer seen. Big snakes are also gone, but the people are still there,' he says. But aren't those people living in poverty? If the mining consortium were to offer them proper houses, electricity, schools, health centres and running water - even motorbikes or cars - would that not be a fair exchange for their sacred mountain?

The old man laughs sadly at the implied logic behind the question. 'Vedanta can give us a helicopter each and we won't give up our hills,' he says. 'We can't go. The hills are who we are.' And when the bulldozers and the mining engineers move in with their blasting caps, what then? Kadraka doesn't hesitate. 'We'll fight,' he says. 'What choice do we have? If we give up the hills we'll die anyway.'

It is time for us to leave. Dodi points to some grooves in the soft bauxite rock, the same rock that the British geologist Cyril Fox identified for its aluminium potential in the 1920s. This was the place, Dodi says, where his ancestors once sat and sharpened their arrows. In those days there was enough game to go round. Now the Dongria hunters use guns, but the superior technology has left their forest increasingly bare of animals. When Dodi was a boy 25 years ago the village hunts never returned empty-handed, but today he trudges back down the hill without any game. The only 'prey' is several handfuls of creamy-skinned oyster mushrooms plucked from the trunk of a tree by Dodi's men, who scale the branches using the thick vines that descend from the jungle canopy.

Back in the village Dodi accepts a few rupees for part of his mushroom haul, a parting exchange of gifts before we walk the five hours back to 'civilisation'. The fungus is deliciously nutty, fried with coriander and garlic at the offices of a Dongria support group run by a local social worker, Bijaya Kumar Baboo, who has worked with the tribes of Orissa since the rice famines in the 1980s.

He is pessimistic about the fight to come, gloomily accepting the inevitability that the Supreme Court will eventually rule in favour of big business and big government. 'The Dongria cannot survive this mine. Their language, their living is different from the people down on the plains,' he says. 'They will just disappear, die out. This is not development. It is destruction, like a kite which swoops down on the village, steals the chickens and then is gone.'

To Bijaya's eyes the decision to mine the Niyamgiris is both unjust and short-sighted. There are, he insists, alternatives. 'Orissa is an astonishingly productive area for fruits and rare medicinal herbs. We could supply the world's entire need for Ayurvedic medicines. If industry switched its focus to this area, how many people could benefit?' But after 25 years in the field, Bijaya is realistic enough to know the quick money on offer from mining is too great a temptation for the politicians to ignore.

'This mine will last for 25 years and it will destroy a world which has been around for many, many centuries. I cannot see the sense in that. The Dongria people have lived on so little for so long without destroying their world. And yet we are destroying our world at an unsustainable rate. Before the Dongria cease to exist, shouldn't we be asking if we have anything to learn from them?'

Telegraph UK, 19 Apr 2008