Eat Dust: Mining and Greed in Goa is an account of the former journalist and theatre personality Hartman de Souza’s travels around Goa, documenting mining operations in the state. De Souza, who hails from Goa, conceived of the idea for the book when he saw a hill that he had once struggled to climb almost disappear due to mining. For several decades, mining in Goa has been a controversial issue. In March 2012, a judicial commission headed by Justice MB Shah, submitted a reported on mining operations in the state. The commission said in its report that companies in Goa were operating through “all modes of illegal mining,” by means such as mining without licenses and requisite approvals, forging permits, tampering with land records, and in direct contravention of the applicable state and central laws. The report also noted that mining activities had caused unchecked environmental damage, such as air and water pollution, and ruin of ecological systems in the area. In September 2012, based on a petition filed by the lawyer Prashant Bhushan after the Shah-commission report, the Goa government banned all mining activities in the state—an act the Supreme Court echoed the following month. However, in April 2014, the apex court revoked its earlier order, and lifted the ban.
In the book, De Souza writes about various aspects of the mining trade: the generations of mining families that have enabled companies to come in and secure land; the politicians who have cultivated relationships with these families and with bureaucrats; the local residents and activists that are resisting the operations; and his personal memories of the beauty and ecological diversity of the state, now transformed due to the flourishing trades of tourism and mining. In the following excerpt, he recounts how politicians such as Vishwajit Pratapsingh Rane, the minister of health in the state from 2007 to 2012, and local businessmen such as Joaquim Alemao, lobbied with the central government, bureaucrats and local residents in Goa to ensure that mining continued in the state through what he calls the “Age of Greed”—the years 2005–2012.
On 3 March 2010, the same day that a few thousand grossly overloaded trucks hauled out ore to Sanvordem and left Quepem and Sanguem talukas in ruins, Vishwajit held a press briefing. Goa’s minister of health was obviously rankled by a letter from the Ministry of Environment and Forests, New Delhi, putting a moratorium on all new mining clearances. The decision had been taken after Jairam Ramesh, union minister of state, environment and forests, inaugurated a conference aimed at saving the Western Ghats from mining operations as well as ecologically damaging industries.
This was what Vishwajit said: “Legal mining is something the chief minister wants to allow in the state, and in my constituency, there are certain villages where we want mining to happen. If the people in those areas want mining to happen, then it should be allowed ...”
As if the message was not clear enough, he stressed: “Mining activities with legal permissions, valid licences and clearance documents from the authorities should be allowed. I think the union minister has unilaterally put everything on hold: the chief minister’s letter had categorically stated that the mining policy was in progress, and it’s a question of another fifteen days, so let the legal process move on.”
Like Joaquim, Vishwajit also told everyone that people had a constitutional right to do business, and if anyone wanted to mine or extract sand (a big business in his neck of the woods), they had the “right” to do so. To quote him: “No one can cancel or keep it on hold ... mining will continue in Goa because it contributes to the state’s economy to a large extent, but at the same time, with the mining policy, illegal mining will come under control.”
Driving through the mining country, an arc right through the Western Ghats as they come into Goa, we find evidence enough to know the travails that dust can bring to everyday life, drastically changing it from the sublime to the ridiculous. Study after study has painfully documented this sorry fact. When the Goan health minister was asked how concerned he was about accidents, congested roads and dust, he replied: “That is why I was asking the chief minister to sit with the mining community in mining areas and discuss the matter with them.”
When one perused the papers in Goa in the Age of Greed and actually read what its elected representatives had to say, he did not look for coherence, articulation or even provocation. The magical word was actually “elasticity”—the ability to adjust or even sugar-coat something as grossly reprehensible as mining to make it look like the panacea to all ills, and act as if the piles of money made out of it were just another side-effect.
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As the Age of Greed built up, the people’s movement against mining—constituting many who were on the same side but not necessarily on the same page—caused the mining barons a whole lot of discomfort.
There was little the government could hide. Digambar Kamat bleated to the media in 2009 that no new mining operations would be allowed in the Western Ghats. Less than a year down the line, Jairam Ramesh stood at Kotagiri in the Nilgiri Range and declared a total moratorium on mining in Goa. The audience applauded, thinking that they had won.
Alas, all of this was akin to building a brand new stable a good six years after the horses had been killed. Digambar Kamat had forgotten to tell the media that none of the five mines between Maina and Cawrem had waited for their clearances before they began upending the earth.
This may have been made easier for Kamat thanks to two men appointed to head the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF): TR Baalu, who led it from October 1999 to December 2003 during the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government, and the man who succeeded him, Andimuthu Raja (of the telephony scam fame), in charge from May 2004 to May 2007. During their terms, the MoEF gave itself the self-certification option—exempting project expansion and modernisation proposals from seeking environment clearances—through an amendment to the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006. The power these men wielded was such that the ministry chose to maintain no database showing compliance to norms with regard to projects cleared by it.
Activist groups used to joke that Andimuthu Raja’s appointment was akin to the MoEF being issued a death certificate, and it wasn’t even funny. In 2009, a report by the feisty environmental group Kalpraviksh —Calling the Bluff: Revealing the state of Monitoring and Compliance of Environmental Clearance Conditions—showed that ever since the new Environment Impact Assessment notification came into force in September 2006, every industrial project for which approval was sought had been cleared (until September 2008). As many as 952 industrial projects were cleared and not a single one rejected. Besides this, 134 thermal power plants, a nuclear plant, 1,073 construction sites and 577 non-coal mining requests had been given the go-ahead.
Actively assisting A Raja in doling out environmental clearances by the dozen was RK Chandolia, then director of planning and coordination in the ministry, and Niira Radia, the now infamous “publicist” whose phone calls were tapped and later leaked, and is now known to have “facilitated” deals.
Raja gave “environmental clearances” to 169 mines in Goa—clearing 120 mines in 2007 alone—giving us the annual figure of more than 50 million tonnes of iron ore being exported. Between 2007 and 2008, after Raja was given another ministry and his portfolio taken over by the prime minister, as many as seventeen “clearances” were given to mines within the Netravali Wildlife Sanctuary in Sanguem Taluka—despite a 2000 Supreme Court order denying mining companies permission to operate inside wildlife sanctuaries.
When the authorities were approached about matters pertaining to mining, we found that they had been tutored to be polite. Security guards searched us for guns we only wished we had, and gave us entry slips that were stamped at two different points. We were led into silent, air-conditioned corridors and rooms where everybody from the minister to the bureaucrat dutifully took down our complaints and told us with great sincerity that they would look into the matter.
They are still doing that—looking into the matter. This was not apathy, as some may like to think. This was proactive collusion, the outsourcing of greed.
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Why would you not then have the royal entry of Vedanta and Posco into Odisha and governments across ideological spectrums, willing, ready and able to bend the rules? Or various parasitic hydro-electric power projects and nuclear power plants to give the cities even more power; fast-tracked industries needing land but not the people dwelling there; the absurdities of a Formula 1 racetrack, or malls after malls, with retail outlets tested to see what can be sold to India’s gullible upwardly mobile middle class and nouveau riche so that they can spend all the money they earn and ask for even more electricity for the cities; to more prominent instances of someone like Jharkhand’s chief minister Madhu Koda who was caught with his fingers in the till with mining loot; and the best known of all, the Mining Kingdom of Bellary ruled by the Reddy brothers, BJP ministers in government.
The Shah Commission rained on everybody’s parade when it declared in its report that “iron ore worth Rs 35,000 crores was plundered by the mining companies, committing theft of Government property.”
As in other parts of the country, perhaps, the law in Goa was used to spit in our faces and get away with it. Bear in mind that between 2004 and 2010, every truck, barge and railway carriage carrying ore within Goa, into Goa and out of Goa, was loaded to the brim. Trucks, in fact, in contravention of prevailing law, even added depth with additional boards welded to the sides and back. A study by the Central Pollution Control Board in 2007 pointed out that on just a single six-kilometre stretch of road near a large mine in northern Goa, overloaded and speeding ore trucks generated as much as 2,770 tonnes of ore spillage per year, largely in the form of dust.
While everyone in government was quick to admit that such overloading was illegal, the time taken to travel between Margao and Panjim to file charges and the subsequent bureaucratic delays ensured that the offence remained unchecked for the longest time. And if an honest government official did try to throw a spanner in the works, he would be transferred before any damage is done, buying the mining lobby a few more months. They did this for more than six years.
It was also during this period that the expert appraisal committees set up by the Ministry of Environment and Forests capitulated to industry yet again. The expert committees are supposed to give environmental clearances to sectors like mining, thermal power, river valley projects and industries. They have a critical role to play under the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification of 2006. These committees, meant to be transparent and honest, were only required to give reasons for their decisions when rejecting a project. ML Majumdar, chairperson of the expert appraisal committee that oversaw mining, was also the director of four mining companies, namely, Uranium Corporation of India Limited, RBG Minerals Industries Limited, Hindustan Dorr-Oliver Limited and Adhunik Metaliks Limited.
He was anything but impartial. Ritwick Dutta, the noted Supreme Court lawyer who argues cases for the environment, told us that Majumdar held the dismal record of clearing about 150 mining projects related to Goa in an hour and a half flat, spending ten minutes or even less on each of the 200-page proposals that sought the so-called “environmental clearances.”
When Jairam Ramesh came in later to whitewash what his predecessor A Raja had done, he sacked Majumdar for failing to disclose that he was on the board of a few mining companies. However, they did not revoke the clearances that he handed out.
The fact is that, for the mines between Maina and Cawrem to operate and function, both the state’s collector and the Goa State Pollution Control Board had been acting as willing couriers. They forwarded what public opinion in Goa overwhelmingly believed to be illegal and fake documents to the MoEF, where environmental clearances were granted a good year—if not more—after someone like Joaquim Alemao had already eaten his way into Jollerancho Dongor.
Meanwhile, both the government and Goa’s mining families claimed every chance they got that what was actually destroying the hills and forests in Goa was illegal mining—with which they held no truck. They claimed that their operations were “legal,” and referred to their method of pillaging the land as “sustainable mining.” Each mining family maintained at least one model mine to show visitors, but criminally ignored thousands of other hectares they had been destroying systematically from the late fifties.
However, what exactly constitutes illegal mining has never been specified for obvious reasons. The school of thought that holds that the ban on mining be imposed in perpetuity, the loot recovered down to every last paisa, and those who committed the offence jailed and fined, say that when push comes to shove and the documents are strictly scrutinised, not a single mining operation in Goa would be found legal. Our activist friend at Bicholim, Ramesh Gauns, said this to several newspapers, every opportunity he got. If one goes by the law strictly applied, that is.
But the sheer brazenness with which the mining was carried on in 2008, following not even the most paltry guideline set by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, made us wonder whether we were the ones who were—in fact—misguided into thinking that the mines were illegal.
Does “illegal” refer to the contractors and politicians who act at the behest of a mining family, freely disbursing large amounts of money for what Joaquim memorably said was his “constitutional right” to mine? We often wondered why it was not the constitutional right of villagers near these forest lands to continue with their way of life.
As wags at the bar used to say: we know there are forty thieves elected to the legislative assembly, but who is Ali Baba?
This is an excerpt from Eat Dust: Mining and Greed in India by Hartman de Souza, published by Harper Litmus, HarperCollins Publishers India.