World Environment Day 2021 | In Meghalaya's green hills, stone miners send environmentalists into a brown study

Stone mining in Meghalaya isn't restricted to Jaintia hills; it occurs in the Garo and Khasi hills, too.

Drive down the green and windy pathways of Meghalaya’s mountains - all the way from the border of Shillong’s central district, up to Dawki river near the Bangladesh border - and the roads may seem deserted during the lockdown. That is, with the exception of large sites strewn with cranes and trucks throwing up a whirl of dust from the stone that is being mined out from this mountain range. These you will encounter every few kilometers.

Now, new roadways and divergences emerge at every corner as the forest cover fast vanishes into the yet pristine landscape of Meghalaya’s water bodies, falls, rivers, and its yet rather relatively heavy rainfall during the monsoons. Most of the mining activity appears to take place in Jaintia Hills, but a huge amount of stone is also sourced through deforestation from the Garo and Khasi hills areas.

When you open out the mountains (through mining), you are creating heat islands there. So, the surface keeps getting warmer and warmer.

- Stalin Dayanand, director, Vanashakti.

The Rs 600-crore stone boulder economy had hit a roadblock when Bangladesh raised import duty in 2019. It went into a downward spiral again during the lockdown last year. But things seem to be back on track now. In August 2020, Bhutan said it was opening up a 60-acre plot to facilitate cross border trade - many Indians depend on it for their livelihood.

Environmentalists say that the excessive mining work has impacted the entire area adversely over the last few years, and has contributed to the detrimental health effects around us. They have been calling for greater regulation in trade and export.

“Health conditions in Meghalaya have deteriorated,” says Agnes Kharshiing, president of Civil Society Women Organisation (CSWO) in Meghalaya, who works on land rights for women as well as other minorities and communities. “Trucks are being overloaded, and one can see that there is a lot more stone being stacked into one vehicle than it is possible (allowed) to do,” she adds.

Kharshiing says such excessive stone mining “has de-stabilised the area considerably, and is perhaps the cause for a lot of the landslides and earthquakes”. “Often, one truck carries at least 56 tonnes of coal,” says Kharshiing. “This is an overloading of the truck, and the roads have turned horrendous, full of dust and pollution,” she says.

Mumbai-based NGO Vanashakti has been undertaking research on the adverse effects of excessive stone mining around Meghalaya too. Conservationist Stalin Dayanand, director of Vanashakti, says that the greatest casualty is the ensuing pollution and erosion of water bodies.

“Stone mining creates a lot of damage. There is a loss of forest, and a depletion of water. Ground water levels go down, and there is pollution of that ground water that takes place. With mining, the entire area has dust floating around it, and in the case of limestone, a lot of calcium oxide spreads and goes around in the atmosphere,” Dayanand says. “That acidifies the water,” he adds.

Agnes Kharshiing, president, Civil Society Women Organisation (CSWO) in Meghalaya.

At North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, O.P. Singh and R. Eugene Lamare have published a paper on how “scientific studies have revealed that loss of forest cover, pollution of water, soil and air, depletion of natural flora and fauna, reduction in biodiversity, erosion of soil, instability of soil and rock masses, changes in landscape and degradation of agriculture land are some of the conspicuous environmental implications of limestone mining.”

Their paper looked geographic information system and remote sensing data, to analyse the spatio-temporal changes within land use and land cover. Besides a drop in air quality, the authors reported a rise in noise pollution, polluting of water resources, and degradation and destabilisation of soil; destruction of orange orchards in East Jaintia Hills was also seen through the study, and it was found that this led to a discontinuation of orange cultivation by farmers due to the poor quality and unhealthy reaping that followed.

“A lot of habitats have been destroyed,” says Dayanand. “In terms of climate change, when you remove forests, you are releasing more carbon into the atmosphere,” he says. “When you open out the mountains (through mining), you are creating heat islands there. So, the surface keeps getting warmer and warmer, and you are contributing to global warming too,” he says. “What was a thick forested mountainous area with birds and biodiversity has turned into a barren land, like a desert.”

“Once you extract the stone, the entire region and the soil quality is affected. To reforest it and to get back the biodiversity, it requires a huge amount of investment and patience,” Dayanand says.

Kharshiing, who works on human and land rights around Meghalaya through CSWO, says that there is a huge political nexus around the buying of land and coal in the Northeast. “Many labourers are still missing in East Jaintia Hills, in a coal mine rat hole, for instance. There have been a lot of deaths due to negligence, deteriorating health conditions, as well as the pandemic,” she says. “Most of it is negligence,” she says.

“This is not an issue only in India; it is so all over the world,” says Dayanand further. “Bangladesh is smart. They know that if they have to provide clean water to their people, they need to have their mountains intact,” Dayanand says. “Meghalaya and the Northeast, which are regions that have the best and the purest water quality that we can imagine, we don’t value this resource of ours and are more interested in converting it into cash or economic profits rather than in preservation,” he says.

“Export of our resources needs to be regulated properly,” says Dayanand. “We cannot allow our forests to be depleted... extraction should be restricted and utilised first for only our own consumption. And that too, in a proper manner. It cannot be an unregulated activity,” he says.