THE
DUTCH DISEASE
Ajit
Chaudhuri – June 2022
Safety
is not a metric, it is a value!
Joining a large, old, well-established and highly
successful organization, as I did this March, is not easy – especially when it
is towards the fag end of one’s career. The bureaucracy is mind-boggling in its
complexity, and simple tasks require oodles of patience and perseverance, a
very thick skin, and a sense of humor. There is little separation of work from
personal life in a town in which one is recognized as an officer of the
organization wherever one goes, and therefore little scope for, forget about
cocaine-inspired episodes with underage prostitutes or drunken bar fights with
the local peasantry, even stuff like running a traffic light or making a reference
to the virtue of someone’s female relatives in conversation. And as for the
observation of hierarchies in every act and conversation, including referring
to others in terms indicating either knighthood or ownership of a brothel, depending
upon gender, the less said the better.
And yet, I feel like a fish in water!
A reason for this is the opportunity to roam around in
small and remote mining locations scattered across the Eastern Ghats, and to
meet the communities that reside alongside and are affected by its operations.
This note is about one such location – the iron ore mines at Noamundi and
Katamati on the Jharkhand – Odisha border.
Noamundi is a beautiful 130 km drive from Jamshedpur,
with an excellent road that meanders its way through forests, meadows, rice
fields, the occasional village haat
with fresh vegetables and locally brewed hooch on prominent display, and small towns
such as Chaibasa and Jagannathpur. Much of it is a company township, with residential
areas, a club, offices, a shopping area, workshops and all, and then there is the
mine itself – a high grade iron ore mine that feeds steel plants in India and
abroad.
The area was verdant forest until, about a century ago, the soil was found to contain iron ore in abundant quantities. And then, the laws of Mammon took over. The tribal communities that occupied the land were shunted out, the forest was cut down, and open cast mining began. Mining involves – taking over a large tract of land; ridding it of its occupants and stripping it of its forest cover; drilling into the land; blasting the soil; organizing the soil pile and loading it onto a dumper; transporting the soil/ore to a plant where it is sorted and cleaned; and then transporting to a loading station where it is put onto railway wagons or trucks that move it to a port or to a steel plant. It’s not pretty – it involves displacing communities, cutting trees, raping the earth, running trucks day and night to move material (and dealing with the offshoots of this, including increased liquor consumption, more accidents, noise pollution, a rise in prostitution), et al.
And yet, what are the alternatives? Economic growth is
recognized as the best way out of poverty – 10% growth in gross domestic
product per capita every year results in average income doubling in 7 years,
and 14% in 5, and average income doubling for a large country is huge even if the
likes of Adani and Ambani disproportionately benefit. Such a pace of growth
requires abundant quantities of raw materials, minerals and metals, energy, and
so on, without the option of colonialism to obtain them that was available to
countries that industrialized earlier, who were able to pass on the negative
externalities of high growth on to others. And, in the process, some people get
screwed – it is not possible to make steel without mining (which involves all
that is described in the previous paragraph) and without running a blast
furnace (air pollution plus generous contributions to global warming), it is
not possible to run chemical plants without polluting, or to produce power
without displacing – not in the quantities that a 10% plus per capita growth
rate requires. And, no matter how much the world progresses, irrespective of
new laws on land acquisition that favor land losers, business responsibility
standards that recognize environmental and social factors, and woke corporate
bosses (mostly from the IT sector, which does little direct displacing,
extracting or polluting) spouting claims about people being stakeholders, a
community continues to be in deep shit if anything worth mining is found in its
vicinity, anywhere in the world. Dutch disease, the term for the negative
consequences of natural resource discovery for an area and its resident
communities, is an inevitable outcome.
The mining area stands in sharp contrast to the verdant
forest that is behind it. I visited with my colleagues Tulsidas Ganvir, the
boss of our work in Noamundi, and Mohit Gandhi, a young management trainee
attached to us for a short duration.
Some outcomes, though, are not
unmitigated disasters. One originated from a decision to train women
to drive dumper trucks in the mine, the 100-tonners pictured below that
transport the ore to the plant. The first batch of 22 were difficult to find,
and required much outreach within the communities in the vicinity of the mine.
But they have proved such a success (apparently they actually observe safety
rules, respect speed limits, AND do not constantly require smoking breaks) that
their numbers are being increased, and this time around a mere announcement of
vacancies got applicants. And now, many girls who had dropped out of education are
returning to school to complete class 10, the minimum educational qualification
for a driver, with the ambition of getting jobs as dumper drivers. The law of
unintended consequences playing itself out to advantage!
My colleagues and I posing with a 100-tonner Komatsu in the mine.
All very nice, some of you may be wondering, but surely time hangs a little heavily in the place. And, for its residents, I have no doubt that it does! But, as a short term visitor, I managed to keep myself reasonably occupied. On one occasion, I managed to wangle an invite to dinner at a home in one of the local villages, and sat on a charpoy in the open, took in the evening air and the surrounding jungle, imbibed homemade hooch aka haandiya and followed it up with home-cooked desi chicken, rice and chutney – no restaurant could compare. On another, I was asked to attend a function to inaugurate a local community hall – I demurred on the assumption that it would be full of politicos and their speeches and was told, don’t worry, it is being organized by the local adivasi association (and not the company) and that therefore there will be less talk and more festivity. The picture below is evidence that I was persuaded to change my mind.
