FORAY | Sunday, November 22, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Loot of the land
Chandan Mitra
Revered sage Ramakrishna Paramhans, made even more famous by his principal disciple Swami Vivekanand who founded the Ramakrishna Mission, held material cravings in disdain. Once, offered a vast some of money by a devotee, the sage is believed to have remarked: “Taka ki? Taka maati, maati taka (What is money? Money is as useless as clay and clay is as useless as money).” This popular saying has often been used by Bengali intellectuals to justify their nonchalant attitude towards wealth accumulation and contempt for those who pursue money-making. However, Ramakrishna’s dictum has now been turned on its head as more and more entrepreneurs discover that soil is worth its weight in gold. For a growing band of mine sharks spread across Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, maati has indeed become taka. You need only to scrape the surface of the land, load the soil on trucks and drive to the nearest port for export (mainly to China). Then you laugh all the way to the bank.
The scale of this theft of Indian soil is truly gargantuan. In progress for the last decade or so, it is only now that the media and judiciary have woken up to this rampant loot of the country’s natural resources. Unfortunately, none has mounted the kind of feisty campaign required to bring this scandal to light and enforce accountability. However, the size of the Madhu Koda scam, (which coincided with Karnataka’s Reddy brothers’ audacious bid to dislodge the State’s popular Chief Minister and install a puppet or their own kin in the chair) finally alerted opinion makers to the need for rectification. I doubt if investigations in either case will yield the desired results, given the clout of the personalities involved, proverbial malleability of the CBI and the excruciatingly slow pace of judicial action.
Meanwhile in Odisha, an equally big mining scam was finally unearthed almost accidentally. The Supreme Court has acted swiftly in response to a PIL and banned operations in 157 mines besides ordering the offices of more than 50 accused mining companies to be sealed. Unfortunately, these steps are akin to closing the stable doors after the horses bolted, because mine-owners have already amassed huge amounts through illegal mining and exported vast quantities of iron ore especially during the boom period in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics of 2008.
Few independent investigations have been mounted into these scams. The bulk of media reports in this connection are based on second or third hand sources. The Pioneer last week ran an investigative report identifying the beneficiaries of Madhu Koda’s largesse, detailing companies that applied for large iron-ore rich blocks to be allotted to them in the name of setting up integrated steel plants. Many of these outfits are recent entrants to the mining arena, have no proven record of successfully running steel factories, and are clearly fronts for bigger players. As in the case of the Rs 60,000 crore telecom scam presided over by Minister A Raja, allottees of mines in Jharkhand obviously intended to grab the land and then sell the allotment to bigger sharks, making a killing in the process. While many rumours about the alleged recipients of huge kickbacks have been doing the rounds of the media and political circles, few have bothered to find out who the alleged bribe givers could be. Juicy gossip and mud-slinging on members of the political class are undoubtedly interesting, but cannot be a substitute for a hard-nosed probe into the role of those who were required to cough up hundreds of crores in exchange for allotment of mining leases.
The dangers inherent in the emergence of a new class of parvenu entrepreneurs, no better than carpetbaggers, have been explicitly revealed by the machinations of the Reddy brothers of Bellary. Arguably, the Andhra Pradesh Government has suddenly gone ballistic and demanded a probe into the scandals that involve not only the Reddy brothers but also a clutch of players promoted by the coterie around the State’s deceased Chief Minister YS Rajshekhar Reddy. But the reason for incumbent Chief Minister K Rosaiah’s hyperactivity lies in his eagerness to expose his principal challenger Jaganmohan Reddy who is apparently being sponsored by the mining lobby. Even if Rosaiah is driven by the self-preservation motive, at least he has taken a bold initiative.
The State that has escaped limelight so far despite being one of India’s most mineral rich is Odisha, probably because its Chief Minister appears to have been born with a Teflon-coated reputation — nothing usually sticks to him. In the absence of ‘smoking gun’ evidence, it may be difficult to directly charge him with complicity in the systematic loot of the poverty-ridden State’s mineral resources, but recent reports clearly indict him with acts of omission if not commission.
A fortnight back I accompanied a team of BJP leaders, including three MPs, to the epicentre of the scam — Barbil in Odisha’s impoverished Keonjhar district. Regular readers may recall my article United Killing Co in these columns last May in which I had written about this sleepy town where I spent much of my childhood.
I lamented Barbil’s loss of innocence over the last two decades but admitted that it was a price one probably had to pay for development as it has come to mean. Returning to Barbil after six months, this time in an investigator’s role, I was shocked to discover the modus operandi of the mining mafia, which regrettably features the Who’s Who of the country’s industry barons.
We visited six mines during the day I spent there and discovered contractors merrily digging away on land outside the leased area, continuing operations in mines whose lease had long expired, flouting laws that prohibit encroachment on forest land and, in one case, digging under a reserved forest to escape attention. I learnt that each truck that headed its way out of the myriad iron ore and manganese mines around Barbil would fetch Rs 6,000 at the peak of demand last year.
The price has come down since, but that in turn has spurred more illegal mining because it comes absolutely free except labour cost, which in this part of the country is appallingly low. There are no checks or records, forest guards, municipal and revenue officers are all believed to be on the take, and at least 5,000 fully loaded trucks make the long journey to Paradip every night.
I am not against mining as such, but believe that the people of India have a right to know why our national wealth is being pilfered in this manner. By bribing politicians and bureaucrats, the mining mafia has mounted massive loot whose benefits have completely bypassed the tribals and other inhabitants of these areas.
This is a national scandal and we must demand its immediate cessation as well as action against the looters. Anybody robbing private property is arraigned before the law and sent to prison, but what about those who brazenly seize the collective property of 1.1 billion Indians? Shouldn’t they be punished too?
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