Let’s take it out as fast as we can: How the mining corporations plundered Goa and its people

Only when the last tree has been cut; only when the last fish has been eaten; only when the last river has been poisoned; only then will they know you cannot eat money…

– A saying of the Native American Cree people

It is difficult to understand how the respectable Timblo family business systematically took away an entire hill and its forest over a period of twelve years. If the grim sequence of events were to be reconstructed now, we can see that they first began to dig and hack behind the hill – a place where nobody could see what they were up to for quite a few years because of the height and girth of the natural formation.

That was way back, before the new century came along. The mining companies in the area weren’t yet sending out ore-filled trucks in those days, just preparing the ground while they worked out their deals with iron-hungry China. The low-grade hematite ores found in Goa can only be used when blended with high-grade magnetite concentrate found plentifully in China, and in 2007, backed by that country’s appetite, the price for Goa’s ore – low-grade as it was – jumped from around 65 dollars a tonne to 170 in just a year. The miners were not going to ignore that.

They got rid of the trees first, taking away the topsoil and dumping it outside their lease area. Then they separated the low-grade ore that had been dug out and stockpiled it in huge mounds. Later, as if those mounds were under their lease, the miners went back to where they had dumped the topsoil and started digging there too. China wanted our low-grade ore, and there was a lot of that in these dumps.

In the 1990s, the front of the hill that you saw then was like the set for a Cecil de Mille movie – a prop. Behind it, Fomento Resources had left a burnt orange-red wasteland in their wake. If you drove your bike into this area behind the hill at night to see just what they were up to, it could get pretty scary. You would inevitably lose your bearings between the dunes of low-grade ore and the maze of dusty truck-tyre marked roads. Your high beam would eventually meet your own narrow bike tracks, and then you would stop, switch off the lights and look up at the stars for help.

In 2007, the mine was about 500 metres from the school. Today, it is less than a hundred metres away.

By 2010, there were 15,000 mining trucks in Goa and many more on the way. It got so bad that the superintendent of traffic wrote a letter to the chief of police in April 2011, saying that the number of trucks driving through the mining zone should be reduced by fifty per cent. The letter was ignored because the trucks had created prosperity almost overnight, for the locals who owned them as well as the state, which earned Rs 1,000 crore as royalty in 2010.

However, through 2008–11, at the height of Goa’s Age of Greed, it was better if you didn’t have to look that way as you drove past. Everyone knew, and the mining barons themselves admitted it, that the mining would last barely fifteen years at the rate at which it was going.

This translated into: ”Let’s take it out as fast as we can.”

In the mining season of 2008-09, it was as if the mining barons, always a close consortium of rogues, had received inside information about a Central inquiry (later to be better known the Shah Commission) to probe illegalities in their trade.

Before such an inquiry was actually instituted and then tabled, the mine owners had already set about preparing for its arrival – and any strictures it may put into place.

They seemed to have calculated that they had about two years and a bit to loot the place. Almost overnight, they brought in even bigger machinery, doled out even more loans for trucks and worked in relentless shifts.

At night, three of the mines here were still working. With powerful generators and bright arc lamps lighting up the pit, huge shovels piled mud into trucks manned by a skeleton staff through the night. A little after dawn, the truck drivers would come in on their motorcycles and park them between the trees before getting onto the overloaded trucks and setting off for Sanvordem, where the barges waited, at a reckless speed.

Two simultaneous operations were taken up even as the day shift gave way to the night. On the one hand, the trucks went out with even more loads and even more trips were made. On the other, the digging continued unabated, with one pile of ore going into the trucks for immediate export while another – unable to be transported immediately because even over a thousand trucks were not sufficient – was covered with a bright blue plastic sheet for protection from the rains. The mine owners planned to uncover the piles and export the ore once the storm of the investigation had passed.

The rapaciousness of what the mining companies did appears to be directly proportionate to their growth rate. Goa’s second- largest mining company, the Fomento group, for instance, had exported only around 1 to 2 million tonnes of ore in 2005, and far less in the years before. Newspaper reports say this figure doubled in 2007–08. According to the data on the company website, their production went up from over 6 to 16 million tonnes of ore in just a year.

These were the only figures that were “officially” recorded. Only god and the mining companies in Goa know how much was actually sent out “unofficially”, and how much of the brunt was borne by the state exchequer.

The monstrous scale of mining in Goa during this period can be understood from the figures released by the Controller General of the Indian Bureau of Mines, who admitted in 2013 that Goa had iron ore stockpiles of about 700 million tonnes. Given that Goa’s ore has always been low grade, this quantity may actually have been much higher.

They began piling the ore from the 1960s, when there was neither an export nor domestic market for it. Even if one followed the minimalist guidelines laid down by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, mining companies were supposed to plant trees in these low-grade ore dumps, which also contained mud and clay, as they had faithfully promised to do so when they sought so-called “environment” clearances. They did not.

This may have been just the tip of the illegally mined stockpiled ore because, in September 2011, an RTI request filed with Goa’s department of mines found that the department had only fifteen plots registered to stock ore. What it did not reveal as activist Ramesh Gauns found out and later told the press, was that mining companies had taken up plots at some distance from the mines in Bicholim, Sanquelim, Navelim and Usgao in north Goa.

In the worst case, they had encroached on about 20 kilometres of the banks of the river Mandovi, and even installed illegal crushers to turn lumps of ore into fines. It took the Goa State Pollution Control Board until April 2012 to actually rap the mining companies on their knuckles.

Even as they killed more hills and forests to further widen and deepen their mining pit, the Timblo family gifted the children of the Government High School, Maina, with exercise books and pencils and umbrellas for the rains. Later, they added plastic shoes, money for new uniforms and made promises of providing educational stipends to parents – depending on how much land they held.

Several meetings were held between mining officials and local leaders at the school itself. Many of us knew that as soon as they wangled the necessary permissions to extend the scope of their mining, the Timblos would shift the school into a new building elsewhere, all the better to extend the mine without fear of criticism over endangering the lives of children. In north Goa’s mining corridor, at least two schools were completely surrounded by the mining operations.

Two visits in 2011 by the Justice MB Shah Commission – the Centrally appointed body to look into illegal mining and exports in Goa, Karnataka, Orissa, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh – made the mine owners hot behind their collars. Before both the visits, Fomento launched a corporate social responsibility programme, brought in another clinic, tried to appease the youth of Cawrem by giving them jobs at the mine, opened a ramshackle centre with a few computers in the village, refurbished temples and shrines, and threw promises and coins all over the place.

By the time the Shah Commission team came visiting, mining companies in the area had done everything short of getting signed affidavits from the people of Maina and Cawrem testifying to their contributions to the two villages.

By 2010–11, the company’s prospecting drill had come a stone’s throw from the edge of the school’s football ground, barely fifty metres from the road we drive on. Just before the Shah Commission’s visits, Fomento laid down concrete stakes painted in red – complete with numbers, letters and symbols that bordered on gibberish – to supposedly demarcate the mining territory.

Not too far away stood four or five security guards in black uniforms, each armed with mobile phones that they would whip out whenever anybody unfamiliar approached the pit. They would photograph the visitors before calling in the managers.

“Goa is now the official residence of highly qualified and experienced professionals from various parts of the country who have moved here to connect with their more creative side. And that’s the irony. If you have the means – and too many younger Goans don’t – then Goa is a great place to live in. Even now.

Have those who have bought into Goa integrated themselves into the Goan villages where they now live? A very small minority do, but those tend to be past the age of forty and living in Goa for some fifteen to twenty years. Those younger and well-heeled – artists, designers, writers, dancers, scholars – are here for the ride. Make the bucks slaving elsewhere, then come to Goa to chill out, do yoga, walk the beach, play with and care for the stray dogs, turn organic, reconnect with one’s inner self.

Maybe they are just quintessential tourists: when the going gets tough in Goa, they’ll move to Gokarna or points further south and leave their footprints there instead.”

I still remember a scene from 2009, where a solitary tree – far more gigantic than the ones that had fallen around it – stood at the edge of the pit with its head unbowed and its bark still fresh.

The tree, now leafless, had once stood at the base of a hill that was eventually razed to the ground by miners. On the slopes of this gigantic pit, with its sheer walls and torpid water, it was strangely heartening to see the tree continue to stand its ground in a last-ditch act of defiance against the bulldozers.

Not for long. It fell a few months later. I wonder if the miners bulldozed it or blasted it into oblivion. The pit continued to get bigger – in width as well as depth – because they were working round the clock.

Excerpted with permission from Eat Dust: Mining And Greed In Goa, Hartman De Souza, HarperCollins India.

Hartman de Souza has a background in theatre, education and journalism. He has been associated with several theatre groups in the country and was, till September 2015, the artistic director of the Space Theatre Ensemble, Goa.