Carbon Fix

Coal has made a select few in Meghalaya very rich. It is also creating a mess that nobody wants to own up to.

Discounting its unusual name, V-Two could pass off for any highway bar in Northeast India. Men of various ages huddle around tables in a smoke-filled, dimly lit room, gulping down their tipple with an assortment of Chinese and Indian dishes. Till you look carefully and notice that the men are clad in branded clothes, flash watches like Rolex and Tag Heuer, wear top-end sneakers, have expensive SUVs parked outside, and are ordering only Scotch, be it Ballantine’s, Black Dog, J&B or Vat 69. There are many other such bars along this stretch of National Highway 44 that connects Meghalaya’s capital Shillong to Tripura; mostly nondescript ones but for the array of fine Scotch and single malt labels that customers keep placing orders for. This stretch is also mostly clogged, pot-holed, dusty or slushy (depending on the weather), but ironically has the highest concentration of individual wealth in the entire Northeast perhaps. The stretch is the one between Wapung and Khliehriat in Meghalaya’s Jaintia Hills. It’s uniqueness shows. It is home to India’s only private coal mine owners.

The land that this highway slices through could also compete to be one of the ugliest and most-polluted spots in the world. A haze of smoke, dust and fine coal powder envelop the area. Its streams and rivers have turned a poisonous red and brown with sulphur discharged from the mines. Its rolling hills are bare. Hundreds of wildlife species have vanished. And humans suffer from a variety of disorders. Ironically, this area contributes a huge chunk to the state’s coffers. In fact, coal—from this belt as well as the West Khasi Hills and the three districts in Garo Hills—accounts for 23 per cent of Meghalaya’s gross domestic product and more than 10 per cent of the state’s annual revenues.

Coal, in fact, is the biggest revenue earner for the state, which is estimated to have reserves of about 600 million tonnes of this ‘black gold’. This year, Meghalaya will earn more than Rs 600 crore by way of levies and taxes from coal. This includes nearly Rs 100 crore in precious foreign exchange, which would enrich Meghalaya through coal export to Bangladesh.

But virtually none of that money will be ploughed back for pollution control, reclamation and other urgently needed conservation measures; or for healthcare, education and social welfare in the mining belts. And coal, incidentally, has benefited only a small section of the original inhabitants of the land. Owners of coal mines, with their flamboyant wealth, stand out in sharp contrast to the hundreds of thousands of poor.

The environment, or the shocking damage to it, is the biggest concern in this coal belt. The reason that all mines are privately owned is that ownership of all land in the state, including most forests, is vested in individuals and tribal communities. Large-scale coal extraction started about three decades ago in the Wapung area of Jaintia Hills. “I remember as a kid that people in and around my village would dig around for coal to meet their individual domestic needs. It became a big-time activity when people realised that there was a big market for coal in the late 1970s. That was when ‘rat hole mining’ started. It has continued because that is the only method of coal extraction we know of,” says Herlington Shadap, one of the bigger mine owners.

Rat hole mining involves clearing a patch of land and then digging a square or rectangular pit varying from 5 to 200 metres deep, until seams of coal are found. The seams, varying from 30 to 225 cm in thickness, are embedded in sedimentary rocks, sandstones and shale. Small holes are dug horizontally into the seams for labourers to crawl in and extract the coal. These burrowed tunnels are so small that miners have to crouch and crawl into them, chipping away the coal as they inch forward. It is a backbreaking and hazardous job; all miners suffer from respiratory disorders and many die when the tunnels, burrowed amateurishly, collapse. Most of these accidents and deaths go unreported since the miners are unorganised, poor and illiterate migrants from Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam, while a sizeable section are illegal border hoppers from Bangladesh.

According to James Diengdoh, secretary, Meghalaya Human Rights Protection Society, more than 100 people die in accidents in the mines every year. “Very often, the mine owners make no attempt to even retrieve the bodies of these workers. Since the workers are unorganised, illiterate and often single—most are single young men and even the married ones come without their families—no one protests,” Diengdoh tells Open. Very often, he adds, children as young as 10 or 12-years-old are employed. This is done because such young children are easier to squeeze down the rat holes.

Despite these stark work conditions, the coal belts of Meghalaya attract millions of migrants. The reason: they’re paid very handsomely. “Each miner is allotted a rectangular box that holds 1.2 tonnes of coal and is paid Rs 1,500 to fill it up with the coal he extracts. It generally takes a little less than three days to fill up such a box,” explains Zoinal Ali, who works in a mine in the Daitphu area of Wapung. Zoinal Ali claims he’s from Barpeta in Assam, but cannot name the major towns of his district; he’s more likely to be one of the countless illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Back there, or even in Assam, an unlettered young man like Zoinal Ali would be more than lucky to earn even a small fraction of the Rs 15,000 per month he makes as a coalminer. However, all he has for a ‘home’ here is a ramshackle plastic shack (he shares it with five fellow migrants) in an untidy cluster of similar shacks that make for the miners’ colony. There’s no healthcare, water supply, drainage, toilets, sanitation, electricity or other basic facilities at this ‘colony’ that has come up on a plot of land owned by the mine owner he works for.

While mining, large amounts of shale are brought to the surface as mine spoils. Iron pyrites in the shale decompose when exposed to air and water, producing sulphuric acid and ferrous hydroxide. These flow into surface and underground water, contaminating them. A recent study done by the Centre for Environmental Studies of North-Eastern Hill University (Nehu) found that all rivers and streams in the mining belts were highly polluted—which crushes the survival chances of any aquatic life. A report by the Centre for Science & Environment (CSE) last year also highlighted similar concerns.

These rivers and streams are the only water sources for hundreds of thousands of residents of these coal belts. “Water drawn from these contaminated water bodies for irrigating farmlands has turned them arid. Farm productivity has fallen sharply in the Jaintia Hills, thus affecting lakhs of locals who depend on farming, and not mining, for their livelihood,” says DG Dympep of the Meghalaya People’s Human Rights Council.

Since the vast majority of local tribals—Khasis, Jaintias and Garos—don’t work in the coal mines, they’ve not made any commercial gains from the frenetic extraction of coal. “At best, the locals who don’t own mines run small business establishments that benefit indirectly from mining, but the number of such people is small. A majority of local tribals have not benefited, but have been harmed by mining activities. Pollution and degradation of the environment has adversely affected everyone,” says AL Warjri, a social worker in Jowai, Jaintia Hills district’s headquarters.

Brian Kharpran, general secretary, Meghalaya Adventurers’ Association, who’s been fighting for the preservation of the vast unexplored cave systems in the coal belt, and against the ecological damage caused by mining, says there’s not a single “living river” left in the Jaintia Hills. “Unscientific and unsupervised mining has made only a few hundred families rich, but destroyed the environment,” Kharpran tells Open. The Supreme Court is currently in the process of hearing his petition against such mining.

The sudden accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few has also led to an erosion of traditional values, spurring all manner of anti-social and illegal activities. “The mine owners and even the workers have lots of liquid cash. Alcoholism, gambling, prostitution and other vices have increased,” observes Warjri.

Abandoned mines pose yet another threat to the already degraded environment. “After all the coal, or as much as possible using primitive methods, has been extracted, mine owners simply abandon the mines. No effort is made to close these mines scientifically,” says a senior officer of the state’s mining and geology department.

Given the enormous scale of mining that goes on in the state’s coal belts, it is surprising that no pollution control measures have ever been undertaken (Meghalaya Governor RS Mooshahary stated his own bewilderment over this while releasing the CSE report last year).

But painting mine owners as villains would be unfair too. The state government, which earns a lot from mining, has never bothered in three decades to get mine owners on board to initiate pollution-control measures. “We’re now being told that the water we flush out from the mines ought to be treated with lime before being released. We’ve never been informed of scientific mining methods. Not a single workshop has been held in this regard in these 30 years… As for welfare measures for workers, isn’t it the responsibility of the government to set up healthcare, education and other facilities?” asks Herlington Shadap, visibly upset with the state’s neglect.

Another big mine owner, Samilton Mukhim, states: “We also reside here, and pollution affects us also. So why would we harm our own lands wilfully?” The mine owners are right: the state government so far has viewed coal mining only as a means to earn revenue. It should have been the state’s responsibility to educate mine owners about modern methods of extraction and about measures to control pollution and environmental degradation. “The government has failed to cater to the basic needs of people—roads, housing, electricity, sanitation, healthcare and education—who belong even to the local tribal populace, leave aside workers,” admits social worker Warjri, adding that the state should have set up a fund with a portion of the revenue earned from coal deployed to fund pollution control and restoration projects in the coal belts.

The state government’s knee-jerk response to the barrage of criticism it has had to face for turning a blind eye to the environmental disaster has come in the form of a draft mining policy. The policy—notified in September this year—aims at imposing strict regulations on mining; putting in place a regime to replace rat hole mining with modern, scientific and less harmful mining technology; regulate and monitor mining leases; work out an optimal depletion rate for minerals; enforce effective conservation and ‘beneficiation measures’; force mine owners to put in place safety and welfare measures for workers; and facilitate joint ventures with central and state PSUs as well as private sector operators in mineral exploration, exploitation and marketing.

The policy puts the onus of implementing pollution control measures, proper closure of depleted mines and restoration of degraded areas on mine owners and lessees. That the government wants to absolve itself of all responsibility in controlling pollution, ecological restoration and looking after the welfare of people in the mining belts is evident from the silence of the draft mining policy on this.

Mine owners have, expectedly, rejected the draft policy, and not least because the government offered a grossly unreasonable fortnights’ time for suggestions and reactions.

L Deibormi Rymbai, president, Coal Miners’ & Owners’ Association, wants the government to appoint a committee comprising mine owners to examine the draft policy. “Land in Meghalaya belongs to tribals, and this policy may be a ploy by the government to wrest control of our lands illegally. Also, small mine owners—and there are many of them—cannot afford the huge costs of pollution control and reclamation. The policy should have offered a cost-sharing model for this. After all, the state has earned thousands of crore rupees from coal mining and has a moral responsibility in this regard,” says Rymbai, bluntly. Sadly, moral responsibility is exactly what the state government wants to shirk.

About The Author

Jaideep Mazumdar