Sreelatha Menon: The ground beneath her feet

EAR TO THE GROUND

The mountains in Sikkim are being drilled with explosives to make long tunnels to dam rivers for hydel power projects, despite warnings of geological damage.

Old Suleiman Rai's house, made of wood and standing on wooden pillars, shakes as the skies boom with deafening sounds of a hundred thunderbolts. The mountain on which his house stands at Kajur village in Singhik in North Sikkim is being burrowed for a 9-km tunnel for a hydel project on the Teesta.

The blasting has just begun. It is somewhere in the middle of the mountain and is rather inaccessible from the road except for some tough grasses one can hold on to as one descends.

The mountain is moist and noisy with streams of water flowing everywhere, one of them filling a vessel kept by his wife Martha. Will these continue to flow once the ground underneath is blasted for a tunnel?

There are 60 houses in all and are not included among the project affected families.

This is just the beginning of the work on the tunnel which will divert the Teesta before it is dammed for production of 1,200 Mw hydel power for Teesta Urja Limited.

In a neighbouring mountain, already a 22-km tunnel has been successfully drilled to reach West Sikkim for another hydel plant.

More mountains are in queue to be blasted by 26 different companies for tunnels varying in length from 9 km to 22 km.

The people at risk are a population of 500,000, besides rare wild animals and birds living in forests that form 90 per cent of the area in a state which is in seismic zone 4, the second highest quake prone zone in the country. At least two very low intensity tremors occur in Sikkim every week, which is considered normal. Landslides are frequent and one can hear slopes collapsing even as one moves around in the mountains, whether it is in West or North Sikkim.

Of course, there were warnings from the state's own Mines, Minerals and Geology Department about the implications of such rampant blasting of mountains prior to one of the projects, which the government of Sikkim chose to ignore. The project has been now completed.

The report says: "Numerous slopes and fissures had developed all along the slope ...further formation of voids all along the slope is suspected, which facilitate easy access of water and thereby diminish the overall stability of the area."

The report confirms fears that the blasting of mountains leads to drying of perennial water sources. In one of the project areas, a spring that used to flow dried up after the tunneling. Says the report: "The drying of perennial water source originating below the Sivalaya Mandir was brought to notice during the visits and found to be genuine."

The indifference of the dam-builders is also criticised: "More emphasis is on engineering details, cost and progress of project personnel rather than on geological details of the area and the behaviour of the fragile geo-environmental conditions of the overlying slope at the time of excavation."

These are not the only warnings of death for the mountains. There is more. In the case of the 300 Mw Panan hydroelectric project in North Sikkim, the department talks of evidence of damage caused by surface and sub-surface blasting. It says that impact of the use of explosives may not show up immediately after such explosions, but at a later stage.

It criticises the negligence in disposing of huge amount of muck generated during the blasts. Panan project envisages dumping 24.42 lakh cubic meters of muck in one lakh square metres. It says such a huge load would lead to "disasters and accelerate erosion and change in overall geo-environmental setting of downstream areas."

The Sikkim government, with sight set on 12 per cent free power and equity share in a target production of 50,000 Mw, can only be deaf to these whispers from its own files.