Coal miners and traders in the Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya, are banking on the BJP to end the three-year-long impasse. Arunabh Saikia explores the implications for Congress in the first of this two part article.

It may have been almost four years ago but most people in Meghalaya’s Jaintia Hills remember the exact date the National Green Tribunal banned rat-hole mining of coal in the state: April 17, 2014. The rat-hole technique entails digging small vertical pits to reach the mineral and carving narrow sideways tunnels to move it underground. It was widely practised in the coal-rich region, until the tribunal, which deals with matters relating to the conservation of the environment and natural resources, deemed the technique unscientific and illegal.

“I felt like I had met with an accident, it happened so suddenly,” a coal miner in Khliehriat town in East Jaintia Hills district recalled his reaction to the announcement of the ban. He claimed his business has fallen by 80% since then.

Across Jaintia Hills, several people associated with the coal trade and the many ancillary businesses that have sprung up around it expressed the same sense of shock. “Everything changed in one jhatka,” said a miner in neighbouring Lad Rymbai. “It was like notebandi [demonetisation]. They did not give us any time.”

The range of people affected by the ban is diverse: coal miners and traders, truck owners, motor parts shop owners, garages, small cha and ja (tea and rice) establishments. Almost all of them share a common sentiment – of being let down by the Congress government and Chief Minister Mukul Sangma.

As they get ready to vote in the assembly elections scheduled on February 27, they say they will punish the Congress government for making no effort to fight the ban. They have pinned their hopes on the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has promised a solution within eight months if voted to power.

Graphic source: Anand Katakam.

Mining on a myth

It is a common belief among Meghalaya’s tribal people that they alone have rights over its abundant coal reserves and the Indian state’s coal mining rules do not apply to them. This belief is drawn from Meghalaya’s status as a Sixth Schedule state – a provision under the Constitution to protect tribal rights over land in the North East.

But the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, 1973, which vests ownership and control of the mineral with the Indian state, expressly lists Meghalaya’s coal mines as being under its purview. Besides, the Sixth Schedule also confers the right over underground minerals to the Indian state. It explicitly mentions the need for “licences or leases for the purpose of prospecting for, or extraction of, minerals”.

According to the Constitution, there is only one way a Sixth Schedule state can be exempted from the coal nationalisation law – by a presidential notification to that effect.

Official records suggest that while the state government did express apprehension in the wake of the nationalisation of coal, it never applied for an exemption.

In 1987, the Union energy minister Vasant Sathe wrote to Meghalaya’s chief minister Williamson A Sangma, assuring him that “as regards other traditional mining which has been done by the tribals all these years, we have no desire with their customary rights and practices”. But this letter is deemed a “demi official” communication and counts as little more than personal correspondence between the two politicians.

“Someone messed up,” said a Shillong-based lawyer. “The letter was meant to be followed up on. If they had, the story today would have been very different.”

The state did not formulate a mining policy until 2012. It said: “Small and traditional system of mining by local people in their own land shall not be unnecessarily disturbed.” The annual output from such mining, however, was close to 6 million metric tonnes when the ban was announced in 2014. The previous year, the state government had earned around Rs 600 crores in revenue from coal.

Dangerous and toxic

By local accounts, commercial mining of coal in the Jaintia Hills started in the early 1980s. Anyone who owned land could dig for coal, or lease the land to someone else on a mutually agreeable arrangement. If one struck coal, she could sell it to whoever she wished. Back then, the coal usually ended up in Guwahati in neighbouring Assam.

Old-timers look back at the simplicity of the whole affair with wistfulness. “I still remember the first time we found coal in our land,” reminisced a miner-turned-politician in Khliehriat “It was 1982, I was in Class 8. Some Nepali boys dug and went down and got the coal. I put the coal in a gunny bag, flagged down an empty lorry coming from Agartala and going to Guwahati. I struck a deal with the driver who agreed to ferry me and the coal. I sold the coal in Guwahati and returned home in a bus.”

As is evident from this account, there were few regulations and the state had little role to play in the entire process. As the scale of mining grew over the next few decades, the state inevitably got involved. But its role was still minimal, restricted to levying a transportation tax – challan in local parlance – that it shared with the district council.

The impact of the indiscriminate mining was severe on the area’s ecology: large tracts tracts of land were rendered uncultivable, the water acidic, and the air toxic. The unregulated nature of the exercise also meant child labour flourished and few safety measures were followed. Workers ventured into mines with little more than their tools and a head-torch. The consequences were often dire. Although, officials statistics are tough to come by, people associated with the business admit that cases of people dying in the underground mines were rather common. “There’s no point lying – it’s true that workers often got trapped and died,” said a coal trader.

A miner slowly carries a heavy load of wet coal on a basket hundreds of feet up on wooden slats that brace the sides of a deep coal mine shaft near Rimbay village in Meghalaya. Photo credit: AFP/ Roberto Schmidt.

Miners admit in private that the damage to the environment was rampant and perhaps irreversible. “Once upon a time, rice grew here,” said a miner pointing towards a plot of open space that was used to dump coal. “Now nothing will ever grow here. It hurts to see our land like this. Our rivers have also turned poisonous, the government needs to come up with a policy so that we can do scientific mining.”

Said the coal trader: “There needs to be a shift to scientific mining but it’s also true that mechanised mining is not economically feasible in Meghalaya. Most miners can’t afford all that.”

The petition that ultimately led to the ban was filed by a students’ group from the Dima Hasao district in neighbouring Assam who claimed that the rivers flowing downstream from Jaintia Hills into Dima Hasao had turned acidic because of mining. Subsequently, the petition was clubbed with another plea filed by a Shillong-based non-profit Impulse NGO Network against the employment of child labour in the mines.

Read the second part of Saikia’s analysis tomorrow on South Asia @ LSE.

This article was republished with permission from Scroll.in and can be accessed here. 

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About the Author

Arunabh Saikia is a reporter on India’s Northeast region for Scroll.in. He previously worked at Livemint and newslaundry. He tweets @psychia90.