People power: Spility Langrin Lyngdoh, 81, sits in
her home at Domiasiat, north-east India. The government wants her land
to mine for uranium but she is refusing to sell. Photo: Ben Doherty
As India's demand for power grows daily, and a population
braces itself for another long, hot summer of power shortages, the
nation is finding its nuclear ambitions assailed on every front.
New power plants are being fiercely resisted by violent
protest, existing ones are stricken by radiation leaks, and uranium
exploration sites are plagued by reports of thievery and smuggling.
And high on a hill in a tiny corner of the country, one woman
is holding out against the might of her government's will.
Eighty-one-year-old Spility Langrin Lyngdoh has been here, in the
village of Domiasiat in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, longer than modern
India.
Her father bought this land decades ago – his grave is a few
hundred metres from the home where she now sits – and Spility has spent
almost her entire life here. She wants it to remain for her children and
grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
But beneath the hills her father bought lies uranium: more
than 9500 tonnes, the Indian government estimates, the "largest,
richest, near-surface and low-cost sandstone-type uranium deposit
discovered in India so far".
The state-run Uranium Corporation of India Limited is anxious
to begin commercial mining as soon as possible. It plans two open-cut
mines over 10 square kilometres. The ore is between eight and 47 metres
from the surface. "Site activities are expected to start soon," the
corporation says.
An exploratory mine site in the 1990s sat next to Spility's land. A working mine would consume it.
During the exploratory phase, the UCIL set up a camp on her
land, and proposed building a road through her village to the mine. It
came with a contract to sell the land.
"They asked me to sign their piece of paper," Spility says,
"but I refused. This is the land of my family. I should not sell it; it
is for my children and my grandchildren to stay here." Spility bargains
from a position of unusual strength. She is a member of Meghalaya's
Khasi tribe, from whom these hills get their name.
As a "scheduled tribe", her people are recognised under
India's constitution, and are empowered with land rights no government
of the day can override.
But Spility bargains alone. There were once more people in
Domiasiat. The village had a school and half a dozen families.
Gradually, however, they left, seeking work and education in distant
cities. The school closed a few years ago, and the building has almost
collapsed.
Spility's family are the only ones left. Her daughters,
children, and grandchildren live in a hardscrabble collection of huts
overlooking the valleys of the land they own.
Their village remains beyond roads and running water and
mobile phone coverage. The government promised electricity, and, three
years ago, brought poles, but no wires.
Spility sees an irony in her land being wanted to power
India's mammoth nuclear generators, while she has lived eight decades
without a light switch.
But as India's need for power grows, its desire for the ore
beneath her feet escalates with it, and she says she feels the pressure.
"But what is money? What use do I have for it? This is the
land of our people. I want the government to leave this place and never
mine."
Spility says even the exploratory mining – of a few hundred
tonnes compared with an operational level of 1500 tonnes a day – was
dangerous. Her two adult daughters died while exploratory mining was
occurring. While there is no definitive evidence to link their deaths to
the mining, "I believed that it killed them", she says.
"A lot of people fell sick, a lot of people died here during
that time. They got rashes over their bodies and died quickly. In the
river, all the fish were found floating, dead, too."
The UCIL says reports of ill health and environmental damage
caused by mining are wrong. It says there is "absolutely no health
hazard". And it says that development – electricity, roads, water – in
villages like Domiasiat will come with the mine being built.
The UCIL says that only a few families would be displaced by
the mine and that the community would benefit from jobs and improved
services and infrastructure. Eighty-five per cent of the mine's jobs
have been earmarked for locals.
India's future will be nuclear. Driven by the country's
almost insatiable need for more energy, the government has ambitious
plans for an already burgeoning industry.
Almost every sector of India craves power: villages want it
connected, industry requires more of it, and the country's rising
middle class demands it around the clock.
There is not enough of it today – even in the country's major
cities, massive blackouts are a daily occurrence as demand outstrips
supply – and the shortfall is only growing. Four hundred million
Indians still live with no electricity, and the government faces
pressure to electrify the 100,000-odd Indian villages, like Domiasiat,
still off the grid.
India has 20 nuclear reactors operating in six plants, which
provide about 3 per cent of the country's energy. But 44 more reactors
are either slated for construction or are already being built and, by
2050, India wants a quarter of its energy to be nuclear.
But government plans for new reactors and mines are regularly frustrated by bureaucratic delays and fierce public protests.
Plants under construction are vehemently opposed by those who
live nearby. At Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, rolling protests have slowed
construction by years. When finished, the proposed plant at Jaitapur in
Maharashtra will be the third-largest nuclear plant in the world, but it
is being violently resisted, with scores of arrests in protests, dozens
injured and one man shot dead by police.
Plants already in operation face problems, too. In two
separate incidents within five weeks last year, 40 workers at the
Rajasthan Atomic Power Station in Rawatbhata were exposed to radiation
leaks.
The year before, four labourers were exposed to radiation at
the Kaprakar Atomic Power Station in Gujarat, and in 2009, workers at a
nuclear plant in Karnataka state fell ill after radioactive water
contaminated their drinking supply.
India's Comptroller and Auditor-General has said the body
that oversees nuclear safety in India, the Atomic Energy Regulatory
Board, is ineffective, mired in bureaucracy, and negligent in monitoring
safety. More than 60 per cent of inspections of operating or
under-construction nuclear power plants were either delayed – up to five
months late – or never undertaken at all, the auditor found.
But despite regulatory delays and operational setbacks – and a
growing public uneasiness since Fukushima – the government is anxious
to secure its energy future.
The country's uranium supplies are too small to supply its
burgeoning industry on their own, so it is looking overseas. Australia,
with 40 per cent of the world's mineable high-grade uranium deposits,
is set to become India's newest, and potentially one of its most
significant, nuclear partners.
The Labor government's decision to allow uranium sales to
India, after a decades-long ban, has delighted Indian authorities, and
bureaucrats from both sides are thrashing out the details of a
safeguards agreement. Negotiation is expected to take up to two years.
From Spility's seat by the window of her sun-baked hut,
diplomatic negotiations over uranium sales could not be of less
interest, despite their possible consequence.
She says she does not begrudge India seeking more secure
energy, even if she does not believe she will benefit from it. But, she
says, the country's development should not come at the expense of its
poorest.
"We are not powerful people. Leave our land alone. This land is all we have."
source: smh.com.au
