Black clouds roil in the west. Then the first few drops patter on the soggy earth. Frogs croak.
Osman Gani spits on the ground. "Damn it. It's coming again," he mutters.
Monsoon rains are no new thing for the Bolorampur villagers. But it is different now. The village is sinking; slowly but surely. Their village is going under like many other villages in this remote place called Barapukuria. And when you are sinking, rains can only add misery.
Here around Barapukuria coal mine, what once was prime farmland is now sloshing silvery water. And in that water, 77-year-old Gani goes with a fishing net in hand. His sun-baked face, criss-crossed with aging lines, his slightly stooped back signs of his long days in the field, sowing and reaping crops. Today, he goes to the same field but for fishing.
"Son, this is my fate," drawls the old man, his eyes yellow with age. "My land is right under the water and I have to fish. This mine. This mine has robbed me of my last bit."
In the distant, the chimneys of the power plant of Barapukuria coal mine belch a slow stream of black fume.
When the rich reserve of coal was first located here, excitement sparked through the villages around. This backwater will now prosper, they thought. Money will flow in. Our boys will find jobs.
Money came but not to the farmers. It went right into digging up the earth to bore shafts, to bring out coals. One million tonnes a year, to be exact, which is worth 100 million dollars.
For the farmers came a different thing. This water. The villagers discovered that their land is subsiding. One day the rain came. The land that was their main crop giver suddenly became useless as water stagnated. Then it was just a sea. Trees died, one by one.
Some thought at least fish would come. They did not. Because the mine started pumping out black coal-mixed water and throwing it onto the fields. Very few fish can survive at such ph level. So even if they drag their nets through out the day, only some irrelevant fish would come out.
First the villagers were puzzled. Then they got together and started agitating for compensation. Strangely, the mine project authorities did not foresee this land subsidence that was going to affect at least over four square kilometres of prime land, although this is the common thing that happens wherever shaft mining is done. And so they did not keep provision for compensation.
"So, we formed our own group, Jibon O Sampad Rakkha Committee (committee to save life and property)," says Ibrahim Khalil, the convener. "We started agitating. We held meetings. We said: 'down with mining'."
It was all spontaneous. They found a small shop in the local market where they could meet. They collected some chairs. Put up a banner. And soon people started coming to it. Losing their livelihoods, they had plenty of time to spend away.
Finally the mining authorities saw the logic of the movement and arranged to make up for the crop loss.
"I got thirty five thousand taka for the first crop. And then twenty five thousand taka for the second crop. After that the compensation stopped," says Abdul Gani.
Abdul lost 2 acres of land in the subsidence. From that land he could get 120 maunds of aman paddy and 80 maunds of boro. Multiply them with Tk 800, the price of one maund of paddy, and there you get how much he lost even after the compensation.
As the money stopped, the people got desperate. Their lifestyles slipped. And they scrambled for every possible way to meet their needs.
Abu Musa of Baddyanathpur village found himself in a tough struggle as his one acre of land went under water. That meant he lost one third of his income.
"I desperately needed money to repair my house. I had some bills to settle with the seed stores. So I mortgaged my remaining two acres and borrowed thirty thousand taka from Krishi Bank," says Musa. "And I spent most of it to meet these needs, not for agriculture."
He is now unsure how he will repay the loans.
When the land is gone, so are gone other options of livelihood. Future plans go haywire. And dreams are shattered.
Ibrahim Khalil, the convener of the movement committee, had a plan to set up a brick kiln. He even applied for a loan of Tk 50 lakh with the local Sonali Bank.
"I made all the plans. Where I would build the structure. Where to stack bricks. How to sell. Everything," says Khalil. "But then the letter came. The bank wanted me to get a certificate from the local administration that my land is not inside the coal mine area."
Unfortunately, Khalil's land is. But it has not yet been flooded. The bank thought otherwise. It did not want to take a risk. And so Khalil's dream was shattered.
Like Khalil many others are stuck in one way or another. They cannot sell their lands even if those are not flooded.
"I want to move out of this cursed land," says Rizwanul Haque who already lost 12 acres to the cruel water. "But nobody offers any price for the land which is still dry. I am stuck. Stuck forever."
After all the agitation and commotion, the government finally woke up to the distress of the people and allocated Tk 190 crore as compensation for the land lost -- about 464 acres which the government will acquire. But this has created another kind of tension and flurry of activities.
When the government acquires land, these people will have to move out to other places. And so land prices are going through the ceiling.
"We don't know how much land we can buy with the compensation money. Land prices are going up rapidly," says Abdul Gani who is now left with one and a half acres of land after his six bigha was inundated.
In the village market square, sale notices of land are posted all around. People from Fultali and other nearby places are coming here and posting adverts.
And all this trouble for what? This Barapukuria mine has a reserve of 390 million tonnes. But because of shaft mining, which means boring holes in the ground and then making tunnels around to cut the coal away, only 30 million tonnes of the reserve will be extracted over 30 years. A huge 360 million will remain unused, buried under the earth when the mine will be abandoned. Meanwhile, the country's coal requirement is around 4 million tonnes a year.
Not only that. The mine poses high risks as the slicing of the first layer of coal will end within the next four months and then slicing of the second layer will begin. This second layer will be sliced from under the coal block. This is a risky operation that poses the threat of mine collapse. In China, the country which is doing the Barapukuria mining, about 5,000 miners officially and 20,000 unofficially perish every year due to such accidents.
"This makes no economic sense," says Mainul Haq, local consultant for hydrocarbon unit. "If we opted for open pit mining, all the coal could have been extracted. There are some people who argue that open pit mining is bad because of environment problem. But shaft mining is even worse as Barapukuria and other similar coal mines around the world prove."
If Barapukuria was mined through open pit method which means opening up the mine area in patches, extracting coal, filling it up to restore land and then moving on to another patch a very small area would have been turned into a permanent lake instead of villages after villages as the situation is now.
And as the government mulls mining another coal area in Fulbari, the Barapukuria case is a pointer. The plights of Osman Gani and Ibrahim Khalil and thousand others count when deciding which option we go for.
Source : The Daily Star
