The craters formed because of mining pose big threat to human lives in Kerala. Though rules stipulate that the craters should be filled up with the soil and debris cleared from atop the boulders, hardly a few quarry operators abide by the directive.
The rules require the quarry owners to keep their work area as intact as possible and give special care to soil conservation. But no one, including the authorities, will insist them to stick to the rules.
The craters are definite death traps. They turn into deep lakes after a good rain. Some of them store water up to 70 feet level and unsuspecting revellers often drown in them.
They take more lives when the huge quantity of water overflows and takes the rocks and boulders along with them in devastating landslips.
This is the reason that the rules prohibit quarries in mountain sloping at an angle of 45 degrees. Yet many of the quarries are situated in slopes of 70 degrees to 80 degrees.
Ask the Kerala mining and geology department authorities about their work to make abandoned quarries safer and they would just tell you that they have given directives to ensure safety.
They think their responsibility ends there. The government has a legal responsibility to tap the royalties it receive from quarry operators to make abandoned quarries safer.
This money is parked under the name of the district collector concerned as the quarry safety fund. Few of the officers use this money. Even questions under the Right to Information Act have not yielded any convincing explanations.
In landslide-prone areas, even slight disturbances on the land could lead to deadly disasters. During bouts of heavy rain, the layers of rocks and soil come under pressure.
In times like these the blasting in the quarries could create termors in the underground rocky layers and even create fissures. The result would be a landslide that is more catastrophic than the rainwater-induced slides.
When rocks are blasted in quarries, the debris could be flown off to 500 metres and underground tremors could be felt up to 300 metres.
Quarries in Kerala are operated without any concern for ecosystems or the safety of the people living around them. The authorities who facilitate the illegal activities for a quick buck often forget that they are not immune to nature's fury.
All blast and no use
Though Kerala's countryside and forest are fast depleted of the rocks vital to the conservation of the soil, the state is facing a severe shortage of granite for construction. Even the state government laments that the state's construction sector is short of granites and M Sand.
This perceived shortage is held as a pretext for allowing quarry licences to anyone who applies for it. Yet the mined granite loads often find their way to other states and even outside the country, going by official records.
The quarries in Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam and Pathanamthitta supply markets in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
They also export their loot, particularly granite dimension stones, via the Thoothukkudi port. Frequent destinations include Dubai, Taiwan, South Korea, Maldives and China.
The traffic outside Kerala is supposed to be regulated by the mining and geology department but the traders often smuggle out loads of stones with one single pass. Officially, 1,400 loads of granite and 25,000 M Sand were transported out of Kerala last year but the actual figures are manifold.
In the name of development
The governments have a way of subverting rules in the name of development. When the Kerala government gave a licence for mining to a Neyyattinkara quarry, it cited the demand for boulders to build the Vizhinjam International Port. Though industries minister A K Moideen objected to the sanctioning of the licence his department eventually relented and issued an order granting the licence.
The quarry had run its course in 2017 and required special sanction from the state government to restart operations. The mining and geology department recommended the government to grant the licence. Moideen wrote in the file that the licence should be granted only after figuring out the quantity of granite available in the quarry but the mining and geology department said that they could not do so. Even the minister's objection was overturned thanks to the quarry lobby's powerful friends.
The government gets only Rs 24 per ton as royalty in this deal. The port developer who told the government in the agreement that it would buy granite for Rs 1,463 per ton has managed to work out a cheaper deal. Meanwhile, the quarry has started blasting away under the cover of the deal, the special branch police have found out.
Stealing mountains
The mining and geology department added to its power in 215, when a law amendment bestowed on it the authority to grant licences for sand mining. The sand mining mafia has a typical modus operandi. They buy hillocks and obtain permits to build houses there. Those permits would be used to apply for passes for mining from the mining and geology department.
Once they have the department's pass, they raze the hills and fill up paddy fields and wetlands which are supposed to hold water during the monsoon. Such areas experience heavy flooding after the slightest of rains because the water has no place to drain out. The hills that have been tampered with become fragile and prone to landslips.
(Reporting by G Vinod, K Jayaprakash Babu, S V Rajesh, A S Ullas, K P Safeena, Jithin Jose and S P Sarath; compiled by Nidheesh Chandran)
Editor's note: This is the fourth and final part of a series on illegal mining in Kerala, which originally appeared in Malayala Manorama.
Part 1: Kerala government's answer to landslides: Get more quarries
Part 2: In Kerala, an illegal quarry is an object of desire everyone is vying for
Part 3: Eager officials & meagre fines: How quarries tunnel away public resources and revenue
