Study Questions Cil'S Environmental Commitment

The Minewatch study assumes significance as the $500 million World Bank of India Coal Sector Rehabilitation Project has the deadline for its mandatory decisions scheduled for December 1996.

The international NGO has submitted, through its most recent study of the Indian coal mining industry, that the huge rehabilitation involved be complete before the project is approved for financing.

According to Richard Harkinson, the concerned Minewatch researcher who spoke to Business Standard in London recently, World Bank project officials are recommending the $63 million IDA credit for the Coal India Environmental and Social Mitigation Project so that the PSU can build up its `environmental capacity and deal with its `backlog of environmental concerns'.

 

Minewatch has examined the environmental permitting system under which Coal India wants to expand its production from opencast mines in five states. Although the system was improved in 1994 with the introduction of a limited environmental impact assessment system, support for the system is untenable without the potential for public participation early enough to influence the development process, says Harkinson.

Coal India's environmental management plan, to be funded by IDA credits, is for the 25 opencast mines. Minewatch has found the reclamation plans lax, inappropriate and unlikely to support reclamation, has criticised water quality monitoring for its irrationality and inappropriateness and has questioned Coal India's commitment to reforestation.

Minewatch has recommended that the Bihar project-affected population NGOs' demand for land-for land is the only just and rational route for Coal India to justify the acquisition of their lands and that resettlement should take place before displacement; the present conditionality requiring Coal India to merely indicate planned changes to the environment permitting system is not satisfactory without public participation in the EIA process.

The research group has backed the common demands for rehabilitation and resettlement from the Indian National Trust for Art & Culture Heritage (Intach), the Chotanagpur Adivasi Seva Samiti, the Jharkhand Janandhikar Manch and the Prerna Resource Centre in the project-affected area, and been supported abroad by the Bank Information Centre, Berne Declaration and Mineral Policy Centre.

Minewatch and NGOs in the Bihar and Chotanagpur region have not had access to the revised master environmental management plans for Pinarwar and North Karanpura and for Ib valley in Orissa, nor have these been made public, according to Harkinson and Intach.

There are other mines planned, and being developed, adjacent to the three mines in Bihar for which Coal India is seeking funding.

These are expected to seriously impact on the people that will be displaced. Intach had asked the India Coal Sector project team for help to see the environment impact assessment plans for the Jordag, Pachindar and Ashoka mines, but the reply reportedly was that the mines are not part of the overall project.

While mine developers have to submit an EIA to the Ministry of Environment and Forests, mining consultants and academics at central mine-related institutes have privately called the Coal India-MOEF interface mere rubber-stamping where two MOFF officials see the EIA and comment on it, incorporate Coal India's comments and provide requested additional information, and get the approval of relevant MOEF committees.

The Minewatch investigation has raised several crucial issues that are apparently neglected by coal India's resettlement/environment impact management:

There is no provision that Coal India should restore the approximate existing contour, as in other opencast coal mining regulatory systems such as SMCRA in the US. Minewatch says the recommended maximum slops on overburden sites is much too severe to allow satisfactory reclamation. Coal India will not commit themselves to substantial backfilling, to minimise destruction caused by opencast mining, says the study.

As of last year, less than 25 per cent of the 3.2 million people displaced by mining from 1951-90 were resettled , according to the Indian Social Institute. Also severely criticised has been the discrimination in comparative land compensation rates for Coal India expansion, while tribals were paid Rs 6,500 per hectare, higher caste farmers received Rs 66,000.

There is no assessment of impacts on water systems. The London-based group says that the necessity of damming the Damodar has been noted, but there is no calculation of water needs - both Coal India's and other users' - excavation and the effect on water tables.

The experience of the East Parej mine has left NGO's from the area and Minewatch deeply sceptical of Coal India's EIA implementation. This opencast mine has been operating for just over four years and is apparently described even by the Central Mine Planning and Design Institute as a disaster. Villagers offered resettlement site discovered that it lay in an active quarry, groundwater and streamwater resources are being lost and overburden from the mind is reportedly being dumped indiscriminately. Mining should be stopped immediately here, is the Minewatch demand.

There also appears to be a contradiction between the recent central decision to make coals washeries compulsory-Damodar area must be remodelled in the EIAs and EMPs - and the ban on coal washeries discharging their fines (1-2 mm coal particles) into the Damodar and its 19 tributaries.