How Sagayam battled granite mafia

U. Sagayam, the court-appointed legal commissioner, during his nine-month probe into the multi-crore granite scam he unearthed during his tenure as Madurai collector in 2012, has been probing into alleged human sacrifice, diversion of Manimuthuar river in Malampatti because of granite quarrying, complaints of missing irrigation tanks, irrigation channels that reportedly disappeared, large scale encroachment of poromboke and panchami land.

As collector of Madurai district, Sagayam had submitted a report to the government in 2012 stating that the exchequer had incurred a loss of over Rs 16,000 crore because of illegal granite quarrying. Though his successor Anshul Mishra tried to take probe further, the high court last year decided to appoint Sagayam to further probe the scam in detail. He and his team had looked into various aspects of the scam, its impact on rural life and related crimes committed by the quarry owners.

It may be noted that mining of granite had resulted in many huge hills and hillocks in Melur and Madurai north taluk disappearing in the last two decades. Sagayam during his probe in the last nine months received over 600 petitions from people on the impact of illegal mining on agriculture, cattle rearing, environmental degradation, vandalising structures of high archaeological importance and destruction of water bodies and supply channels.

Among the criminal complaints were threat to and assault on villagers by employees of quarry operators. In the last leg of the investigation, the commission focused on complaints of human sacrifice. Nine bodies were exhumed from two sites and their forensic analysis is under way.

The entire empire was run like this by either terrorising people or bribing government officials. The granite quarries had containers that were converted into rooms and rest rooms for the convenience of customers and proprietors. As soon as the owner stepped out of a rest room, there would be a person standing with a towel and bottle of mineral water for him to wash his hands.

Foreign buyers were driven inside the quarry in Mitsubishi’s four-wheel drive SUVs with an escort in the front and rear. And once they returned after checking the stones, there would be a man standing with shoe cleaning machines so that the buyers could clean their footwear.

At that time, I had very little knowledge about the company except that they are leaders in the granite business in the State. I would usually go there from Chennai by flight or train, select the slabs and return. On one such occasion, after the business meeting I was dropped at Madurai airport in a company vehicle. As soon as I entered the airport, a staff of a private airlines came running to me, collected my baggage and escorted me to the counter and helped me to complete the travel formalities. I never knew why he was doing it for me and it was making me uncomfortable. When I asked him, he said he knew the vehicle in which I was dropped and he guessed that I was a guest of the company.