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 are clustered in small groups. Only the iron ore laden orange tipper truck parked on the road is any indication that this village called Cavrem, in South Goa's Quepem taluka, 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 in Goa, it is the first time that people have come together and pledged an indefinite blockade against iron ore mining in their area. On April 13, 2011 over a hundred villagers in Cavrem converged on the main road and blocked all ore transportation. A week later police whisked off the protesters in two vans. 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 chock-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. These women work in shifts to keep full time vigil on the road.
Another group of women chop vegetables in preparation for a wedding feast. Nevertheless they are still tuned in to the struggle to protect their village. 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.
Survival
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 ago, 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. Silence too was bought for a princely sum. Twenty men were employed in the mining companies. The village temple was given a donation of Rs 1 crore 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.
Reality
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, says Surendra. "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 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.
Land
"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. 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, diesel fumes and mining dust swirling in the toxic air. Life is hell for inhabitants that have not fled yet. Entire villages are under siege, their roads unmotorable, getting to work ,school, hospital, or anywhere, is a nightmare. 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.
Exploitation
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. Infact Quepem taluka is the mining industry's newest target. Its emerald hills on the mining map and one of Goa's more scenic and fertile regions. 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.
Resistance
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 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 difficult to dismiss hundreds of blockading villagers in Cavrem.
Desperation
Mining companies and government went into a huddle a few days ago, in a meeting called by Goa's 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 from 8 am to 4.30 pm 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. Goa Mineral Ore Exporters Association (GMOEA) president Shivanand Salgaocar quickly condemned the attack. S. Sridhar, executive director of GMOEA says that the trade body is worried about 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 min es or illegal mining, it makes no difference", says Cavrem farmer Tulsidas Velip.
Government
Environmentalist Claude Alvares laments the apathy of the government, "No government has 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." 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 50 million tonnes annual target that leading exporter, the Vedanta subsidiary, Sesa Goa has set for itself in Goa.
Numbers
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. Forest minister Felipe Neri Rodrigues told the house 58,940 trees had been cut for mining purposes in the last four years, while 1314 hectares 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.
Commerce
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 crore. 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 per cent 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 GMOEA.
China's willingness to import even low grade ore (even 48 per cent 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.
History
The Portuguese granted some 700 mining concessions in the last decades of colonial rule. In 1987, these were cancelled and 336 leases 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 exploited by people who don't own the original leases.
Source: Mid Day
Another group of women chop vegetables in preparation for a wedding feast. Nevertheless they are still tuned in to the struggle to protect their village. 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.
Survival
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 ago, 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. Silence too was bought for a princely sum. Twenty men were employed in the mining companies. The village temple was given a donation of Rs 1 crore 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.
Reality
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, says Surendra. "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 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.
Land
"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. 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, diesel fumes and mining dust swirling in the toxic air. Life is hell for inhabitants that have not fled yet. Entire villages are under siege, their roads unmotorable, getting to work ,school, hospital, or anywhere, is a nightmare. 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.
Exploitation
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. Infact Quepem taluka is the mining industry's newest target. Its emerald hills on the mining map and one of Goa's more scenic and fertile regions. 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.
Resistance
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 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 difficult to dismiss hundreds of blockading villagers in Cavrem.
Desperation
Mining companies and government went into a huddle a few days ago, in a meeting called by Goa's 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 from 8 am to 4.30 pm 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. Goa Mineral Ore Exporters Association (GMOEA) president Shivanand Salgaocar quickly condemned the attack. S. Sridhar, executive director of GMOEA says that the trade body is worried about 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 min es or illegal mining, it makes no difference", says Cavrem farmer Tulsidas Velip.
Government
Environmentalist Claude Alvares laments the apathy of the government, "No government has 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." 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 50 million tonnes annual target that leading exporter, the Vedanta subsidiary, Sesa Goa has set for itself in Goa.
Numbers
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. Forest minister Felipe Neri Rodrigues told the house 58,940 trees had been cut for mining purposes in the last four years, while 1314 hectares 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.
Commerce
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 crore. 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 per cent 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 GMOEA.
China's willingness to import even low grade ore (even 48 per cent 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.
History
The Portuguese granted some 700 mining concessions in the last decades of colonial rule. In 1987, these were cancelled and 336 leases 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 exploited by people who don't own the original leases.
Source: Mid Day
