In “People-friendly growth” (June 12), B G Verghese quotes the expression, “natural resources are national assets”, from a recent Supreme Court order to deny the constitutional safeguards in Fifth Schedule areas. He does this without even looking back at the historic Samata judgment of 1997, which declared that “all lands leased to private mining companies in the scheduled areas are null and void”. The Samata judgment was the result of a prolonged legal battle to protect a Fifth Schedule area in Andhra Pradesh that was proposed to be mined. The judgment didn’t completely rule out mining but it laid down that only a cooperative formed by local tribals could undertake the same; not even state-owned corporations.
The article casually throws in some notional statements here, and some statistics there, without bothering to mention the source. So, according to the author, large dams and mines are said to “regenerate” forests, since they “create” far more green cover than they destroy. One would like to know how the author makes the extraordinary assertion that “for the Sardar Sarovar, the ratio is something like 500:1”. Has he bothered to go through the data on survival rates at compensatory afforestation sites? One is asking that question because today there are two comprehensive performance audit reports on forestland diverted for non-forest purposes and compensatory afforestation in lieu of that by CAG, for the states of Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. In MP, the audit has revealed several significant cases of violation and absence of compensatory afforestation measures. The report can be viewed at http://www.indiatogether.org/2008/apr/gov-afforest.htm.
The author, of course, is free to sympathise with those who disagree with the Ministry of Environment and Forests’ circular on no-go mining areas; and has the liberty to imagine all the leased area “returning to regenerated forests” at the end of the mining cycle, but ecologically speaking, a plantation is nothing but a plantation, not a forest. Perhaps, the article would not peddle the green dream of life after open cast mining if the author had checked the staggering figure of mines that are labelled as “orphaned” or “abandoned” before.
The article also states that mining in Gandhmardhan and Niyamgiri will actually “replenish groundwater regime” by removing the top layer of impervious laterite. This could have been credible if the article cared to substantiate this claim by citing a few examples where streams have appeared due to mining.
Himanshu Upadhyaya, Delhi
