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Minerals, Myths & Mafias |
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Place: Backyard of an iron ore mine in Sundargarh, a tiny district somewhere in Eastern India. Time:12 noon…the hot mid-day sun right on the top of their heads. Aditi: I have come to see these mines. I want to do a project for my school on them. Arvind: What’s a project? Aditi: Can you help me? I am kind of lost here…Which is the way to the bus stop? Arvind: Bus stop? Where do you want to go? Aditi: To Madhupur. Arvind: Hmmm…you are moving in the wrong direction. But you can take a short cut from here. Come I will show you.
Aditi: So you stay around here? Arvind: Yes, right there..(points to a cluster of huts in the outskirts of the mine)..Where are you from, and what are you doing here? Aditi: I stay in Kolkata. I have come to see these mines. I want to do a project for my school on them. Arvind: (scratches his head): What’s a project? Aditi: I am going to write about how iron ore is explored and extracted here. It is so thrilling to see the source of this mineral, don’t you think? Arvind: (looking puzzled) Thrilling? But why? Aditi: (waving her hand around excitedly) Well you know…It is used for making practically everything that we use in our daily lives. For building our houses, our cars, our trains, our roads, for making steel. It is used as raw material for almost all the core industries. And to think that it all begins here... But you must know this better than me, You stay here. Arvind: Well, I haven’t really thought about it. They started digging here when I was a little boy, may be seven years old. Now I must be about 16. Aditi: Oh my god…so you have grown up with the mines around you. This will be such an interesting story for my project! Come let us sit here for five minutes, and you tell me how these mines changed your life. Arvind: (sits with Aditi, but still looks puzzled): You want to write about me? Aditi: Yes, yes. Tell me all about it. What did this place look like before they began digging? Arvind: (Sits quietly, thinking, for a couple of minutes): I remember lush green forests and tiny hillocks. Our little village was tucked in a corner just outside the forests. My sisters and I knew every alleyway, and had a name for every tree around us. Everyday, we took our goats into the forests and as they grazed, we played hide and seek. My mother was with us sometimes, picking fruits, roots and leaves. She made wonderful medicines at home from those leaves, you know. All our cuts and burns used to heal within a week. But she was there every morning, too, gathering twigs and pieces of wood that she carried home, to light the chulha. My father joined us, too. He collected bagfuls of mahua and tendu leaves. But those were not to be used at home. He stored them in our backyard and went to the market in Madhupur, where you will go now…to sell. My elder sisters went to school then, because he earned enough. Sometimes he came back with clothes for all of us, and bangles for my mother. (Wistfully) You know, I miss those forests now. Aditi: (a little impatiently) Yes, but when did the digging begin? Arvind: One day, a group of people from the towns came in driving a jeep. They were carrying all kinds of strange looking tools, and began measuring our forests and our hills. It went on for many days, while all of us in the village watched them curiously, wondering what they were up to. Then we got to know. Two very important-looking gentlemen arrived one day, and asked for our headman. All the men in the village clustered around them listening intently. Later our father told us that these babus were from the forest department. They have discovered rich minerals under the land we lived on. We needed to vacate our village and move somewhere else, so that the company, which had been given the permission to dig there, could begin work. ‘But we don’t want to go,’cried my mother, ‘We have lived here all our lives, this is our land’. My father said the babus were saying the land actually belonged to the government, not to us. But there was good news, too, he tried to cheer up my mother who was howling with anger by now. ‘We are going to be given jobs by the company here. So we shall be earning a lot of money,” he said. Aditi: (more subdued now): What did you do?
Arvind: I only remember my mother crying as we packed little bundles, preparing to leave. We were given patches of land to build our huts again. I did not like my new house, it was much more cramped than our old home with the backyard. But the saddest thing was that we were told to stay out of the forests. It belonged to the company now. If we tried to get in, we could be punished for trespassing! It was terrible. Our goats died because we could not feed them, and my sisters had to stop going to school. Aditi: But why? Didn’t your father get a job in the mines? Arvind: He did work as a labourer at the site for some time. But then huge, gigantic machines to drill the hills were brought in. Then he, along with many other village men, were told one day that their services were no longer required. The machines were more efficient. Aditi: Did he find any other job then? Arvind: No. He was too sick by then. Aditi: What happened to him? Arvind: The drilling was on full scale, and we could constantly hear blasts, as the boulders and rocks were loosened and broken by explosives. All we could see was red dust. Everywhere. The soil, the leaves of the remaining trees, had thick layers of dust on them. And some of us, like my father and my little sister, developed racking coughs. The village doctor said their lungs were full of red grains! He could barely eat, and lay moaning in our hut. Aditi: (near to tears now) : But, but, the rest of you? Arvind: My mother was taking care of the family. But she had loads to do. After drilling began, the first showers came. And all the dust that was flying around in the air, now settled on the stream that wound around our village. It turned red! My mother had to go farther and farther away from home to find a water hole, which still had clean water. Even now, she spends most of her day fetching water for drinking and cooking. Now I help her... We wish it did’nt too. But the fact is, India's richest mineral-bearing regions are those which hold its lushest forests, along with its poorest people. Any efforts to extract minerals from these lands, therefore, results in a complete upheaval in the lives of millions of Arvind Tuppos…
India mining Amongst the non-metallic minerals, more than 90 per cent of the aggregate value is shared by limestone, magnesite, dolomite, barytes, kaolin, gypsum, apatite and phosphorite, steatite and fluorite. There are 2970 reporting mines (excluding atomic minerals, petroleum (crude), natural gas (utilised) and minor minerals) as of 2005-06. India is the world’s largest producer of mica blocks and mica splitting. It ranks third in production of coal and lignite, barytes and chromite, fourth in iron ore, sixth in bauxite and manganese ore, tenth in aluminium and eleventh in crude steel in the world.
India is literally a mine of treasure! Losing ground Currently, the total land (including forests) leased out for mining (for coal, metallic and non-metallic minerals) in the country stands at 7,54,861.23hectares. So, not only forest tracts, (like Arvind Tuppo’s homeground), but agricultural lands, too, are converted for mining.
Left landless The cement industry is developing at a rapid pace in states like Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. This has forced the agricultural communities to move away from their traditional lifestyles. Thousands of rice farmers have now become contract labourers in these cement plants. The rehabilitation packages offered to them can hardly make up for the trauma of a total disruption of livelihood.
Ecological catastrope Each stage of the mining cycle — from exploration to mine closure — has an impact on ecosystems. DESTRUCTION LADDER 1. Exploration This does not only act as a gateway to the mineral rich land, but it also increases the access of future mining projects to ecologically sensitive areas. 2. Excavation This step involves removal of earth, rocks and soil, and the standing vegetation along with the biomass and nutrients it contains. This disrupts the ecological balance of the area, and leaves the land vulnerable to the forces of nature to act upon it. Soil erosion caused by wind and water is just one face of it. 3. Extraction There are two processes of mining — open cast and underground. Open cast mining is the removal of the topsoil, earth, rock, and other materials (called overburden)- -to gain access to the ore seam, which is drilled or blasted for mineral extraction. This destroys vegetation, soil and habitat completely. And in underground mining tunnels, are dug directly to reach the mineral ore. This makes the land void. And when the rock overburden can no longer be supported, deep cracks open up. Eventually the surface collapses, which causes extensive damage to agricultural land, buildings and transport networks. 4. Closure This happens after all the digging has been done. Internationally, experience with mine closure has been poor and mining companies have left behind ‘ugly footprints’ — ghost towns, gigantic craters and waste-choked waterways — for governments and local communities to deal with. Mines that are to be closed should be filled with sand (sand flushing) and grouted with cement to stabilise the underground voids. But this does not happen. For instance, on paper, Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), in Jharkhand, has filled mines with some 50 million tonnes (MT) of sand. But insiders say that less than one-fourth of this amount may have actually reached the pits. The outcome is major accidents like the one that occurred on September 10, 1995, when the walls of a mine collapsed after being weakened by fires. More than 60 miners lost their lives in the mishap. The result is obvious: environment degradation and waste generation. Yes, apart from directly wrecking the environment, mining creates a mammoth problem — waste. Water Mining adversely affects the hydrological regimes of the area being mined. Soil erosion caused by deforestation leads to siltation and sedimentation in the nearby waterbodies. Other run-offs from the mines pollute the water and make it extremely unsafe for use. eg: The Damodar River has become one of the most polluted rivers in India, thanks to the mining operations on the mineral-rich banks of the river.
Mining Menace Wastes are generated during extraction and processing of minerals. The bigger the scale of mining, the greater is the amount of waste generated. And as this waste is of no use to the industry, it is just stored within the mine lease area, or on public land. On one hand, extraction (involving blasting) creates large volumes of soil, debris and other material. On the other, processing of ores to extract mineral generates immense quantities of waste, as the amount of recoverable metal in ores is generally just a small fraction of their total mass. For example, only 0.00001 per cent (100,000th of 1 per cent) of gold ore is actually refined into gold. Everything else is waste! And the lower the grades of reserve, the greater are the wastes generated. The various types of wastes include waste rock, tailing waste, various salts (discharged during the chemical treatment of the ore) and other wastes, like radioactive wastes, and marble slurry. Though most of these wastes are inert solid materials, there are many toxic wastes as well. Some toxins are inherently present in the ore (heavy metals such as mercury, arsenic, lead, zinc, and cadmium), and some are added intentionally during extraction and processing, such as adding cyanide to extract gold. These wastes and heavy metals can leach out of stored waste piles with wind and rainwater, and contaminate the local environment. For example, Uranium mining generates large volumes of wastes that contain a number of radioactive materials, which are extremely harmful to human beings and animals. These include Thorium-230, Radium-226, Radon-222 and Pulonium-210. If left on the surface, this radioactive sand can blow in the wind and get deposited on vegetation miles away, entering the food chain. It can also wash into lakes and rivers and contaminate them. The outcome: deaths, fatal diseases, and longterm health problems. Gauge the danger: In 2005-06, around 1,861 MT of overburden and wastes were generated to excavate only 750 MT of minerals!
Aditi’s appeal The challenge also lies in ensuring that mining does not destroy the critical ecosystems. Like the forests by the side of which Arvind once lived. After all, minerals are essential, but they are not critical for human survival; ecological areas and functions are. Aditi’s appeal on behalf of her new friend is: Leave the playground of the Arvinds across the country alone… |
