Requiem for the Western Ghats

5 Aug, 2009, Herald, Panjim

HARTMAN DE SOUZA documents how mining – ‘legal’ as well is ‘illegal’ – is decimating the Western Ghats in Goa

One feels sad for the kingfishers that choose to follow the Kushawati as she comes down from Sulcorna. These birds, intent on finding an eddy or pool where a fish may seek respite from turbulent monsoon currents, thoughtlessly go with the river as she bends north towards Colomb and Rivona.

Barely a kilometre ahead where the first open-cast iron ore mine starts, the Kushawati, thanks to the waste churned up, has turned sluggish, changing in colour from the tea-brown water associated with the monsoon flow to the dirty, muddied, disembowelled red associated with mining. If there were fish there, they have long since disappeared.

Even worse is the devastation on either side of the Kushawati and the road to Colomb and Rivona that runs parallel: hundreds of acres laid bare as far as the eyes can see, one huge dune of fist-sized stones leading to another, roads created in between by bulldozers, and huge chasms of muddy stagnant water that, come September, will be pumped out into the Kushawati so that the company can dig even deeper. The destruction will be absolute and the mining will systematically destroy a majestic river that brings water from the Western Ghats.

The destruction of forests, using highly sophisticated machinery, is nothing short of ‘scientific’ – barring fifty metres either side of the road that show evidence of the trees that originally made up these Quepem forests, and which, ironically, hide the mining on both sides of the river and road, from public view. This is part of an elaborate farce enacted by mining companies making new forays in Quepem, rubber-stamped by the ever compliant pro-mining panel embedded in the MoEF, New Delhi.

The mining companies maintain a pitiful green cover in front of their mines, as they say in their applications for ‘environment clearance’, to reduce the ‘visual impact’ of their mining operations! The euphemisms are on a template: the dirty, muddied, dead bodies of water, steep sides well below the water table, are referred to as ‘reservoirs’; companies promise to cut only those trees necessary to begin mining, with no mention of how many hectares of government-demarcated forest will disappear. Reforestation amounts to planting a row of acacia, hybrid bohenia, Singapore cherry, and shrubs of milky-green durantha at the entrance to the mine, perhaps even some bright-coloured hibiscus around the security cabin, to reduce ‘visual impact’.

Mining is a bonanza for a privileged few, from the large mining companies to the politician or politician’s kin turned ‘super contractors’ doing their bidding, to the affluent in Goa with investments in mining shares, or trucking operations, or barges.

In a mining operation that will net a few thousand crore rupees at least, Rs40-50 lakh is set aside for reforestation projects; Rs10 lakh reluctantly spent to hire water tankers to spray the roads to keep dust levels down, or provide drinking water to villages that once had water in abundance! It is this easy to get official ‘environmental clearances’.

It is difficult to explain this to birds looking for fish or worms, or to wildlife losing their natural abode and coping with the plight and indeed, fright, of fleeing; or to villagers in Colomb who point out the cracks in their mud and mortar homes brought on by the mining company blasting explosives; or old men wondering why centuries-old forests need to uprooted, or why the mud in their fields is stained with the blood of mining; or women and children who watch, baffled, as the water sources slowly and surely dry up and choking red dust settles on and around their dwellings.

Or, for that matter, to villagers in Maina, Pirla, Colomb and Rivona who wonder what system of governance prevails in this country, when, in spite of violent opposition to new mining operations in Quepem, the permissions to mine are still be given, old leases being renewed well after they have lapsed.

Or to explain to farmers in Quepem that when one of these old colonially legislated leases is sold for a few crore to a mining company or ‘super contractor’, they are left with ‘superficial rights’ under the law, and the mining concession, in spite of being drafted at a time when Quepem did not have such human settlement, given precedence.

Given the scale of mining in Quepem thus far, when it is obvious that only a massive deforestation beckons, one begins to wonder what exactly is ‘legal’ in mining iron ore in our Western Ghats? Villagers there are not to know that in Goa, democracy is defined as a government ‘off’ the people, ‘buy’ the people and very ‘far’ from the people indeed! The tragedy surrounding the rape of Goa’s forests begins with laws that give the mining industry precedence over agriculture and kept this way by successive pro-mining governments in Panjim. Add to this an archaic principle that accepts that those who pollute will pay for their sins.

This is how the mining companies got away with murder in the early 70s when they made their first forays in North Goa, with officialdom advising farmers they were not strong enough to take on the mining behemoths and should therefore sell and move out. This was their strategy in Sanguem, where they have already been successful in taking away an entire generation of young able-bodied men from earning a successful living off the land. They turned them into truck drivers to haul the ore. This is their strategy in Rivona and Colomb, as also in the recent leases renewed in the villages of Pirla, Maina and Kawrem, all surrounded by forest lands the government has been steadfastly refusing to notify. Why should they, when ministers own mining companies, or barges, or businesses in earth-moving machinery…

In the Regional Plan, Quepem has been demarcated as a place in need of quality educational institutions. But even as this is being written, two meetings have been held at a government school in Maina, chaired by truck drivers and mining managers, the deal being that mining will now come even closer to the school and cross over to the other side of the road, destroying large sugarcane fields and going all the way towards the Paikdev Temple and the Curca river.

The school has already been given a bus by the mining company, the children have got exercise books and pencils, umbrellas for the rains, and now promises have been made that the students will shift into a new school building built by the miners. Does anyone in government even know about this, or is this proof of complicity afoot? How can we have ‘laws’ that allow unscrupulous politicians and industrialists to destroy what remains of the Western Ghats?

In Ambaulim, where villagers have been protesting about the quantum of mining trucks passing through, more able-bodied men have been lured into owning trucks and making the money the company offers them, and now the mining company wants to build a community hall for the local church!

These are sops, because if the mining companies have their way they will wreck hundreds, if not thousands, of hectares of forest land in the cusp between Rivona, Collomb, Kawrem, Maina and the outskirts of Ambaulim. The farce is incomplete without mention of the fact that ‘environment clearances’ have been procured in Maina for land that is not even owned by the politician in question! A local sugarcane farmer, brokering nefarious deals, is wealthy beyond his wildest imagination, cheating his own sister-in-law of her late husband’s land. He owns a Sumo, has a tipper truck parked in his compound, and has built a two-storeyed mansion without any official permissions.

The polluter cannot be allowed to pollute. But for that to be realised, our priorities need to be re-aligned and the foundation of ‘industrial development’ shaken at its core, made subservient to the Western Ghats. If that were done, the ongoing destruction of Quepem’s forests would cease.

As it is, though, the procedures to enact this wanton rape are ridiculously simple.