The East Jaintia Hills (EJH) District of the state has become the first place in the state where coal will be “scientifically” mined. The people in EJH are in no way strangers to mining. Their land is already pockmarked with the ubiquitous box-cut pits hundreds of feet deep with off-shoots of rat-hole tunnels spreading out in webs deep underground. People have been mining for decades and the impact of coal mining on the land has been recorded and documented by scientists and scholars, leaving no doubt as to its impact on the land, forests and water. While these documents are hardly given much importance, it seems, nor read by common people, nor used by the government organs or social activists in making awareness campaigns about the ill effects of mining, the exact fall-out is felt by ordinary people of the district in the form of drying water sources, acid coal drainage destroyed fertile lands, disappearing agricultural lands on which their ancestors grew food, poisoning of rivers and loss of aquatic resources and rising heat due to release of greenhouse gases.
Added to the rat-hole mining ravaging their land, there are numerous limestone mines functioning like captive mines to serve about 10 industrial scale cement plants in the area. All these activities are going on within the 2,040 sq km area of the small district.
If scientific studies are to be believed that coal mining or for that matter mining per se, directly degrades the natural surroundings and desertification begins, the people of EJH are yet to see this connection. They see the coal buried in their land as their saviour and provider of wealth and livelihoods and therefore needs to be dug out by any means. Without mining coal they feel they have no means of survival. Over the years the common people have been told this story over and over again by their leaders and elites, who see this as an opportunity to make money.
Indeed, money has been made in the lakhs and the crores. Billions of rupees have been made by the generations of landlords and mine owners since coal was mined in the Jaintia Hills. The most common sight of this prosperity is seen in the coloured mansions of the rich and their up-market transport which they flaunt. Yet, the common people fail to realise that generations of them did not have a share in that kind of prosperity, but we’re reduced to buying water as the local spring or stream had dried out and started to depend on the PDS system for food because their agricultural lands disappeared under the pressure of the force of the mining lobby.
This lobby is rejoicing again because now coal can legally be mined “scientifically”. All that this means is that the mine by the Saryngkham will be open cast in 148 hectares of land. The layers of the soil will be stripped one by one to get at the coal seams lying below. The end result will be a fearsome pit which is 60 meters deep. The mine is supposed to be filled and forested again. But this remains in the future. The destruction that is about to be wrought on the land is fearsome. For the sensitive, its impact is already a looming threat to the future generations of this land. In times of war military strategists apply the “scorched earth policy” meaning leave nothing for the enemy to use. This same concept is applicable to mining as a means to achieve wealth and that dream of a 10 billion dollar economy. To achieve that we may raze the ground and scorch the earth. The future generations be damned.
