THE SCARRING OF GOA
Goa: Sweet Land of Mine by Claude Alvares with Reboni Saha;
Goa Foundation, Mapusa; Pp 92; price not stated
BOOK REVIEW BY MANOHAR SHETTY
Far from the picture-perfect image of Goa, lies another Goa
virtually quarantined away from the milling hordes of
tourists and other beach and surf struck visitors. This is a
Goa of the interiors, denuded and devastated beyond repair by
the mining industry.
Once considered a blessing, Goa's rich deposits of iron,
manganese and bauxite have turned enormous tracts of
pristine, forested areas into huge dust bowls and surreal
ravines with their over-exploitation through crude methods of
mining.
Goa: Sweet Land of Mine is a passionate yet cogent
denouncement of the evisceration of Goa's interior landscape
by mining barons, their political cohorts, feeble
environmental officials at both the Centre and the State, and
a mix of trucker thugs and village level bullies.
Brought out and authored by Claude Alvares of the
Goa Foundation with Reboni Saha and a team of
committed contributors, this book is a compelling
pictorial and textual exhortation to save Goa from
further degradation by a rapacious industry,
apparently oblivious to the future of this
beautiful but vulnerable State.
The book opens with an apt quotation from the distinguished
naturalist, Joseph Wood Crutch: "When we destroy something
man-made and replaceable, we are called vandals. When we
destroy something irreplaceable and made by God, we are
called developers".
These 'developers', now diversified into more respectable
fields such as hotels, pharmaceuticals, construction,
professional football teams, breweries, and newspapers
(however feeble), with the odd face-saving hagiography thrown
in, have reaped the fruits of the earth but have left swathes
of the once fecund land barren and sterile.
In page after page, this eloquent, saddening book, exposes
the wounds on the Western Ghats and even in government
designated wildlife sanctuaries inflicted by callous open
cast mining, the consequent depletion of the water table, the
irreversible contamination of water bodies, the pollution of
fields, all affecting thousands of villagers in interior Goa.
The judiciary has not been indifferent to this wanton
destruction. In a landmark Supreme Court judgement in 2004,
the highest court ordered the closure of all mines in the
country that did not possess environmental clearances.
However, the order also left a rider that would be
mercilessly exploited by the mining industry.
The court directed that the stay order would not operate if
the mining agencies were able to acquire environmental
clearances. Instead of seizing the opportunity to enforce the
closure of illegal mines, the Ministry of Environment and
Forests, the apex body for the protection of the environment,
set about distributing more than 70 environmental clearances,
even to those who had destroyed large tracts of green cover
and to some in the vicinity of wildlife sanctuaries.
This was made possible by the setting up of 'expert
committees' who promptly used their 'experts' to dole out
scores of 'recommendations'. As the book says, "what could
not be achieved in 40 years, was achieved in two".
When the colonial government of Portugal carelessly
handed out over 700 mining concessions, beginning
from about 70 years ago, to various individuals it
could scarcely have imagined the scale of the
destruction that would be unleashed in the years to
come. To rephrase a passage from the book: "Called
the 'backbone' of the Goan economy, the primitive
nature of the mining operations will more easily
break the ecological backbone of the state."
>From Sunday Deccan Herald, Bangalore, dated 14 Dec. 2008
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