Iron Ore Mining/ Up in Arms

See
http://www.mid-day.com/news/2011/may/240511-goa-protests-iron-ore-mining-cavern.htm

Up in Arms
May 2011/Mid-day/Mumbai
From a distance, they seem like an innocuous bunch of women waiting by
the hillside shade for a bus. Across the narrow road, a group of men
cluster. Only the laden iron ore orange tipper truck parked on the
road is any indication that this village in Cavrem, Quepem in South
Goa is the site of a small uprising, that has shaken Goa’s iron ore
mining industry. It is day 27 of the villagers’ blockade of the road,
that has brought all movement of iron ore from five mines in the area
to a grinding halt.

While sporadic protests have broken out countless times across Goa’s
mining heartland, it is the first time villagers have pledged an
indefinite blockade.

On April 13, 2011 over a hundred villagers from this adivasi village
converged on the main road and blocked all ore transportation. A week
later police whisked off the protesters in two vans.That was the only
day that ore moved on the road, under police protection. Since then,
ore exporters and the state government are biding their time, even as
villagers take turns to keep a 24 hour vigil on the road.

“Trucks hurtled down this very road at the rate of two a minute. Both
sides of the road are usually choc-a-block full. Now look at the
quiet. We’ve got our peace back and it feels good, just like before”
says Parvati Velip (40). Shailavati Phonu(42), Visranti Velip, Swatni
Velip (40), Laxavati Velip (55), Anandi Velip, Kamal Velip, Manda
Velip and Naulavati Velip (32), are seated around her, taking their
turn this morning. Up in Velip wada, another group of women chop
vegetables in preparation for a wedding feast that day. Nevertheless
they are still tuned in to the struggle on the road below.
The lone truck driver attempts to negotiate with villagers, pleading
he had stolen this particular consignment and could not possibly
“return” it. The women are firm, the truck reverses and heads back
like hundreds of others who were sent back to the mines to offload,
ever since villagers swore before their temple gods and began their
agitation.

So why have the villagers of Cavrem decided to indefinitely blockade
the road and bring on this fight? “This time we’ve decided that enough
is enough. If we sit on this road and die or die in our houses from
eating all the iron ore dust thrown up by the passing trucks, it’s one
and the same”, says Parvati Velip in Konkani, pointing to the
coating of red dust on every tree in sight. Since five mines opened up
in the village three years back, life has never been the same.

Cavrem went through the same process that other mining villages did.
Adopting its time tested footwork, mine operators used the usual
incorporation and bribe methodology. Some fifteen influential people
in the village were given initial loans to buy tipper trucks, to buy
their silence. Sarpanchas and panchas were paid off. Twenty men were
employed in the companies. The village temple was given a Rs one crore
donation and mine companies began construction of a spanking new
temple just above the old one. “The new temple will never get complete
I’m telling you. In the meantime they will have finished our village”
says Surendra Velip (34) who joins in the conversation.

It wasn’t long before all the enticements became meaningless as
reality set in. Fifteen truckers from the village make money, but so
do 750 more from outside the village, he says.”We don’t have wells in
the village, just five springs, which were more than enough for us
before. Now they are down to a trickle, we’ve got to stand in lines”
Visranti Velip pipes in. People hardly ever fell sick, now deaths
have increased. Children can’t cross the village road, without risking
their lives from the 800 trucks that thunder past 24 X 7 carrying ore,
speeding recklessly to maximise trips and earnings. The last straw
came this year, when production of the village’s prized and famed
chilly crop, came down by more than half, the fields affected by iron
dust. Cashew plantations fared worse.

“The big landlords, the Dessai’s here, have sold their land to mine
operators and have settled in flats in the towns. But we don’t want
the money, just our land and our village. If we sell and spend all our
money, what will our children be left with?” asks Laxavati Velip.

One thing is certain. They don’t want to end up like Usgao and
Dharbandora — small towns at the centre of ore movement — that have
cratered roads, miles and miles of banked up trucks, stretching three
lanes on a two lane road, diesel fumes and mining dust swirling in the
toxic air. Life is hell for inhabitants that have not yet fled.
Entire villages are under siege, their roads unmotorable, getting to
work ,school, hospital, or anywhere, a nightmare. Many protests and
dharnas later, people managed to wrest a concession, ensuring that at
least on a Sunday, mining movement would cease. It’s
the only day of the week, one can access the state’s zoo, or the wild
life sanctuaries further down the route. Accidents are routine and the
district collector has cautioned the government that public patience
had worn thin. An olive branch of a dedicated 40 km mining bypass
corridor road has been proffered by the Goa cabinet, but until this is
built, an estimated 12,000 often overloaded trucks use village roads
to get to riverside barge loading points that ply ore to the Panaji
and Mormugao ports for shipment.

Eighty percent of Goa’s iron ore is dispatched to China, mainly by the
top five ore exporters — Sesa Goa, Sociedade de Fomento, V M
Salgaocar & Bro, Chowgule & Co and Salgaocar Mining Ltd. In 2009, the
industry made Rs 8700 cr.

Four decades of mining have devastated the interior taluks of Bicholim
and Sanguem, leaving irreversible damage in the form of mammoth
craters and abandoned mine pits. Strangely it was the needs of the
Beijing Olympics and China’s insatiable demand for steel that is
morphing the face of Goa.

Up until 2005, India’s only privately owned and 100 per cent export
oriented industry, sent out what now seems like modest amounts of 15
million tonnes annually to Japan’s steel mills, that demanded ore of
56 % ferrous content. Lower grade “rejected” ore was piled up in
stacks the size of hills on every mining site, along with the
overburden soil. For decades stacks of “rejects” presented a major
environmental hazard, slipping into adjoining fertile fields and
rivers, resulting in silting and flooding, while the government paid
crores in compensation, says environmentalist Claude Alvares.
Alvares’ Goa Foundation has filed the maximum number of cases against
the industry.

“In the past seven years there’s been a huge jump” says S Sridhar,
executive director of trade body, the Goa Mineral Ore Exporters’
Association.

China’s willingness to import even low grade ore (even 48 % Fe
content) at prices ranging upto US $ 60 a tonne, came as a windfall.
Overnight earlier rejects were shipped out,and production stepped up,
taking exports from 15 million tonnes annually to the region of 55
million tonnes annually, a three fold increase. On the ground this has
translated into a frenzied madness to mine, strip bare hills,
dig,transport and export. There’s no time or need to
process anything, the earth is simply dug up, all of it is loaded onto
trucks and exported, Sridhar admits.

The Portuguese granted some 700 mining concessions in the last decades
of colonial rule. In 1987, these were cancelled and 336 leases
(covering over 30,000 ha or 8 % of Goa’s land mass) were
renegotiated, and require renewal under Indian law. Of these an
estimated 105 leases are being currently operated. With the China
boom, hitherto closed or unused leases are being re exploited, often
by operators/contractors who don’t actually own the original leases.

The industry is now turning to newer, greener, even forested areas to
mine, in the process turning Cavrem’s blood red chilly fields to dust.
Quepem taluka is the mining industry’s newest target. its emerald
hills on the mining map, One of Goa’s more scenic and fertile regions,
fed by the Khushavati
river and an ancient Portuguese water canal, one passes terraced
fields swaying with the green and gold of paddy crops even in May.
But the landscape of rolling green hills is broken by jagged red
mining sites, and serrated pits where excavators have gnawed deep.
and intend going further still, sucking out all the water from
aquifers in the hill.

But Quepem is resistant. In the heyday of the Goa Bachao Andolan, the
villagers of Colamb in Quepem had a major rasta roko in 2007, the
first in a long series of battles to keep mining out of Colamb. Farmer
Rama Velip, cannot even begin to recall the number of times he’s been
harassed by police for organising his village against mining. Goa’s
original tribals — Gawdas, Kunbis, Velips and Dhangars — are
slowly waking up to the fact that their land and villages are now
being exploited for mining, and have set up a GAKUVED coalition to
counter the trend.

In the village of Maina, neighbouring Cavrem, Cheryl D’Souza is
unwilling to sell her farm to miners, though she’s been offered a
king’s ransom. “We’ve been brought up to fight. If the farm is sold
and mined, what happens to the water in the area? How does one look at
one’s face in the mirror if one does that?” asks theatre director and
teacher Hartman D’Souza (60), who has joined his sister’s campaign to
save the farm. Cheryl, her elderly mother Dora and daughter Aki, ran
several campaigns, chaining themselves to the road at one point, to
draw attention to mining in Maina. But while the administration found
it easy to arrest and dismiss Cheryl, it’s less easy to dismiss
hundreds of blockading villagers in Cavrem.

Mining companies and government went into a huddle last week, in a
meeting called by chief secretary Sanjay Srivastava to “resolve” the
Cavrem impasse. The meet decided to finally implement a hitherto
ignored High Court order to regulate ore transport to day hours until
4.30 and keep trucks at 600 a day — a “solution” Cavrem has outright
rejected. Meanwhile with the monsoon off season approaching, miners
in the area are showing signs of desperation. A journalist was roughed
up at the Fomento mine site in Cavrem. Nilesh Gaonkar one of the
leaders of the Cavrem Adivasi Bachao Samiti was assaulted with iron
rods last week just outside his workplace.

Gaonkar’s assault has got the administration and industry worried it
could turn into a rallying point. GMOEA president Shivanand Salgaocar
quickly condemned the attack. Executive director Sridhar says the
GMOEA is worried by fly-by-night operators that have entered the
arena looking for quick riches and a quicker bailout, consequently
giving the industry a bad name.”There are illegal operators,
transporters and traders who have turned exporters overnight”, he
says.

While ire has been directed at “illegal mining”, sans permissions and
escaping royalty due to the public exchequer — villagers facing the
onslaught dismiss the difference. “Mining is destroying our lives and
fields and health. To us, whether we perish by legal mines or illegal
mining, it makes no difference”, says Cavrem farmer Tulsidas Velip.

The opposition BJP however has been systematically pointing to
transgressions by its political rivals in the Congress and NCP, who
have entered the mining fray. Last week, the BJP insisted crime
branch register a case of cheating against NCP leader Jitendra
Deshprabhu. for illegal mining at his property in Pernem.

Claude Alvares however points out that both the Congress and BJP were
shown as official recipients of Rs 25 lakhs each in the annual report
of Sesa Goa, under a previous management. “No government have ever
shown any will whatsoever to bring the mining industry to check. They
are a rogue industry, a law unto themselves. Every politician, either
directly or through their network of supporters is benefiting”, says
Alvares.

He’s pressing for a complete shutdown of the industry, arguing it has
defied all attempts to be regulated and monitored, corrupting every
government agency in charge of its regulation. “There is no chance
that Goa can survive mining”, he says, pointing to the further 480
applications the government has received for prospecting and the fifty
million tonnes annual target that leading exporter, the Vedanta
subsidiary, Sesa Goa has set for itself in Goa.

Alvares can be dismissed as the impassioned plea of the
environmentalist. But in the Goa assembly’s budget session in March
this year, Speaker Pratapsing Rane expressed his shock at what he
called the “rape” of Goa by mining interests. “Flying over Goa, one
can see huge red gashes in the western ghat tree cover”, he told the
house. It’s hardly surprising. There are 63 leases granted in the
Netravali wildlife sanctuary itself, which though illegal, does not
prevent leaseholders from attempting to push permissions through
forest officials. The takings would be enough to corrupt a saint.

Forest minister Felipe Neri Rodrigues told the house 58,940 trees had
been cut for mining purposes in the last four years, while 1314 ha of
forest land had been diverted since 2008 to non-forest purposes,
mainly mining.

These numbers in itself lend some credence to the pleas of Alvares and
the people of Cavrem.(ends)
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