No absurd mining please.

Under the instructions from the prime minister, environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh has from increased the allotted area for mining of coal from 344000hectare to 380000 hectare, which means cutting of 36000 hectares of forest reserves. The current coal production is 53cr tons and coal minister Mr Prakash Jaiswal is willing to increase it to 1000cr tons. Even the prime minister agrees that India needs electricity so there is a need of increasing the production of coal. According to the report of the energy research institute we have coal reserves available for mining for the next 40 yrs. and rest of the coal are present very deep inside the core of earth. So if we double the rate of extraction the reserves will last for next 20 yrs. This won’t be right from the energy conservation view. It is being said that in the next 20 yrs. there will be some new technology coming up for meeting the energy requirements and therefore we should extract more coal and hence increase our speed of development. But it is difficult to forecast the advancements of technology as seen in case of USA, they promoted the consumption assuming there will be new high-tech goods produced by them every time and will therefore keep up the economy and in order to meet the demands they provided easy loans resulting in the economic crisis in which they are stuck at present.

Even if we talk about the electricity being consumed, a major part is being consumed by the things of luxury and not for the basic requirements, many of the villages are not having electricity but many of the city dwellers and shopping malls are wasting electricity for the decoration purpose solely. This type of wastage must not be tolerated in an energy deficit country like ours. The electricity bill for a business person in Mumbai is 70 lakhs; this is really an astonishing figure. To cut forests for such showbiz is not at all right.

After the mining we are presently having a very poor policy of leaving the land barren. Generally an area is dug up and the soil is deposited at a place in the form of a hill and there are no signs of afforestation done there. This is the open cast procedure and is very out-dated. If we see the way mining is done in other countries we will have a lot to learn. In Germany the Roor areas which were once used for extravagation have now converted into beautiful forests. In Congo basin it was found that the forests take 42 years to redevelop so they distributed the areas in pockets, in one pocket mining will be done for 42 years and then will be left for next 42 years when it will be done on the other pocket ,so they will be getting both the woods and the coal in an effective way. While in India we have divided our forests as ‘go’ and “no go” and the area under ‘go‘ will be used for mining.