To Ban or Not to Ban – That Is the Issue

CHENNAI: While quarry operators and truck owners have moved the Madras High Court to quash the order banning inter-state transport of minerals for three months, environmentalists, farmers and social activists are calling for a permanent ban, saying other states should use their own resources for infrastructure development.

The new government’s battle against indiscriminate and non-stop quarrying, leading to severe environmental degradation, is welcomed by the people who wonder why such action was not taken by the previous governments.

The order issued on July 27 came hours after Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay conducted a review meeting with natural resources department minister T.K. Prabhu and other officials.

District collectors and superintendents of police in the border districts were instructed to maintain strict vigil and coordinate with the department officials in enforcing the order strictly.

The ban covers the inter-state transportation of rough stones, including khandas, boulders, size-reduced materials like broken or crushed stones, M-sand, metal jelly, ballast, millstones, hand chakkis, building stones and road construction stones.

The ban came into force immediately on the same day, and any violation of the ban drew action under the Tamil Nadu Prevention of Illegal Mining, Transportation and the Storage of Minerals and Minerals Dealers Rules, 2011.

The order noted that the economically exploitable rough stone deposits in Tamil Nadu were available only in a limited number of districts like Kanyakumari, Tenkasi, Theni, Coimbatore, Tiruppur and Krishnagiri located in the ecologically sensitive zones of the Western Ghats region.

The government also noted that production from quarries within Tamil Nadu was insufficient to meet the increasing domestic demand for infrastructure development; the large-scale transportation of construction materials to other states had placed constraints on the availability of the materials within Tamil Nadu, forcing an artificial supply-demand imbalance and raising the prices.

The price rise was affecting public and private infrastructure, the government said, and noted that rough stone was not a scarce mineral in the neighbouring states of Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

The widening gap between supply and demand has led to unscientific and illegal quarrying, besides the transportation of stone and aggregates, resulting in mining beyond permitted depths and posing a serious threat to Tamil Nadu’s environment and ecology, the government stated.

It also said the continuous movement of heavily loaded trucks, including multi-axle vehicles, had severely damaged local roads leading to inter-state check-posts. The government pointed out that many of the roads were narrow and not designed to handle heavy trucks, which led to bottlenecks for local commuters and an increase in accidents.

However, Kerala Chief Minister V.D. Satheesan wrote a letter to Vijay on the very next day of the ban, to ease the restrictions on the inter-state transport of stone aggregates, complaining that the curbs could delay several national highways and other strategically important projects in Kerala. He said the new restrictions had significantly disrupted the movement of stone aggregates from Tirunelveli, Tenkasi and Kanyakumari districts, which have traditionally supplied a major share of the materials required for Kerala’s infrastructure projects.

Pointing out that Kerala has limited natural availability of suitable stone aggregates for large-scale construction, Satheesan said the state has long depended on neighbouring districts in Tamil Nadu to meet the requirements of ongoing national highway (NH) projects.

The Tamil Nadu Quarry, Crusher and Lorry Owners’ Association has also moved the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court, contending that they were facing huge losses due to the three-month ban. They also said they could not honour the existing contracts and the workers, too, are without jobs. Officials have stated that once the domestic shortage is resolved and local demands are stabilised, the temporary ban will be revoked.

But farmers, environmentalists, local bodies and social activists want the ban to be made permanent, saying that Tamil Nadu’s natural wealth was being over-exploited for the infrastructure development of other states. In a letter to the Chief Ministers, the Southern Districts Farmers Association said that massive and indiscriminate quarrying is happening every day to satisfy the construction demands of other states. They said the huge profit of quarry owners and the politicians who back them has depleted groundwater tables and severely hit local agriculture in southern districts like Tirunelveli, Tenkasi and Kanyakumari.

The local body representatives from the southern districts also complain that empty trucks returning from the neighbouring states return with bio-medical waste, plastic, and meat waste from other states to dump in Tamil Nadu, polluting the land and water bodies. The ban has stopped the dumping of waste in their villages, they happily noted. The people in south Tamil Nadu breathe clean and fresh air after the movement of minerals, and the dumping of waste was stopped.

The quarry owners have sufficient markets to sell their goods in Tamil Nadu itself, where construction and infrastructure activities are going on at a rapid pace. However, they want to transport the minerals and sand to other states for higher profit, and this has a Domino effect on the local price of construction materials.

Since the rocks are moved to other states, the cost of M-sand and rough stones goes up, leading to a financial burden on the people of Tamil Nadu. Despite having all the mineral resources in their own land, people are forced to face higher prices for construction, while the state government must spend more funds for infrastructure development.

Illegal and rampant stone quarrying leads to the depletion of hillocks, described as the land of kurinji in classical Tamil literature. The mountains, hills, and the surroundings are named as the land of kurinji in the Sangam literature, and this is the setting where scenes depicting the meeting of lovers should be narrated. This rule was followed in all the poems of classical literature 2,000 years ago.

The black floating clouds, the waterfalls, sandalwood and bamboo trees, the pouring rain, the humming bees, the kandhal, vengai and kuvalai flowers form the perfect setting for the meeting of the hero and heroine. The Nature described in classical literature will be confined to the poems alone if the rampant quarrying of hillocks is allowed without restrictions.