Anakallumpara & EIA2020
What is the most exciting academic endeavor you’ve ever undertaken ? I would have not had an answer to that if it was posed to me a year and a half or so ago, or at best would’ve strained my memory to come up with something that was fun in the moment or held nostalgic value of some sort (academic != exciting, in short). Aanakallumpara is my current answer to that, which is also my answer to why #WithdrawEIA2020 is something I back wholeheartedly.
We rode through the rocky road at Koodaranji on this run down Pulsar thanks to our Professor of Environmental Management forcing an iron hand on doing something worthwhile for the course, and partly because some of the earlier groups had put in a lot of effort and the ones in mine were thinking about its implications on relative grading. Notwithstanding our intentions, we decided to put up a report on the quarrying there, something that had been a contentious issue in the area(months before the devastating floods and landslides that happen all over Northern Kerala, but after the general deluge in 2018) and therefore weren’t met with a lot of excitement at the gates, to put it lightly.
Phone calls, the liberal use of our ‘IIM tag’ and much reassurance to the owner that we were students of business and the primary aim of our visit was to try and help find a way that the business can be run profitably within environmental constraints opened the gates, or a door rather — to a roaring Tata truck that took us up steep dusty inclines to the site.
We hadn’t anticipated what lay inside, a huge mountain face carved out beyond recognition many stories high, it hits different from when you look at a photo of it to when you actually stand in it, clouds of dust swirling adding to the effect. To think that this was a legal quarry (to the best of our knowledge), with its proposal document for environmental clearance available publicly online didn’t help, we were shook from our urbane lives of being blissfully unaware of how the natural landscape around us was changing. What exactly is happening in the unauthorized quarries then, which can often be risky to get in to, is anybody’s guess.
Carrying on with our plan, we interviewed the manager, locals and the village officer. The latter having carefully collected newspaper clippings and related documents, presented to us a laundry list of issues such as loss of mountain creeks, crop failure due to dust settlement and lowering ground water levels that can be traced back to quarrying; while at the same time stating his cognizance of the fact that over 20 people were gainfully employed at the site. The manager for his part detailed all the precautions and guidelines that were being followed and the social initiatives they engage in to create goodwill among the locals. The locals surprisingly, were the most apathetic, holding their tongue about most things except for expressing dissatisfaction that all except one of the jobs generated went to people from outside the locality.
In what might remind one of the reaction to the draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) 2020 notification till the eleventh hour, mainstream political leadership of the area across party lines were said to have sided with the quarry owners with none of their members representing themselves in the action committees or agitations.
Compiling all this information and more, we had completed the report with seemingly run of the mill suggestions such as companies adopting a triple bottom-line, scrutinizing socio-ecological impact and assigning it a greater weight during the permit granting process. It was only a matter of time before these would catch up and we simply would have to create better business models to survive in that environmentally sensitive environment is what we had surmised. As of today, the opposite of our prediction (like much else in 2020) is looming large on us and that is the single biggest thing that has egged me on to support #WithdrawEIA2020.
[Use this link to send an email to the authorities raising concerns environmentnetworkindia.github.io]
The other acronym in the news recently (No! Covid is word now, right ?) NEP or the New Education Policy, for all its faults, has a stated aim to focus on environmental education. Ensuring that students are exposed to the down and dirty of ecological destruction might go a long way in ensuring a more empathetic response when they get to making decisions or putting their weight behind a cause. Especially the ones that live detached from nature and might form ideas on the state of affairs based on vacations to nature retreats.
[Sadly, we are living in the middle of a pandemic and to go out to take account of scarred nature is just wishful thinking at the moment. Visit cseindia.org/understanding-eia-383 if you want to self-educate right now]
