Eat Dust: A reminder of what greed has done to Goa

There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences. 

-Wallace Stegner, All the little live things

So the Modi government is marking its two years in office and the peal of celebration bells are still audible. Big media is full of advertisements and analyses. Meanwhile Donald Trump is inching closer to Republican nomination and he is threatening to re-negotiate the climate pact. And in the recently concluded United Nations’ Summit after the global climate deal, in Bonn-Germany, the world got a reality check. It might take two years to draft the rules to implement the Paris climate deal of 2015. We have done two shows on the Paris Climate talks, here and here.

At the same time, Michael Temer, Brazil’s new president in-charge after ousting of Dilma Rousseff, has started giving contracts in the Amazonian rain forests. His name has also cropped up in financial leaks on hydel dam projects in Amazon. Bolivia has rescinded on its contract with Brazil on road project because it doesn’t want to be party to indiscriminate deforestation of Amazon and displacement of the indigenous population there. Closer home, another scam on natural resources and commodities’ trade surfaced last month. From Adani to Ambani, big names, have been accused of over-invoicing on coal imports which has resulted in spiking up our daily power tariffs.

This is a good time to revisit a visceral book on the mining scam in Goa: Hartman de Souza’s Eat Dust: Mining and Greed in Goa. The book takes a close, personal and fact-checked look at greed and its consequence on the salubrious environment, the quintessential Goan life, especially the lower caste and the poor.  Eat Dust is as much a personal rant — angst at seeing the mountains, the creeks, the vegetation, the vibrant rural landscape disappear in a cake of iron-ore laced red dust — as it is gritty journalism in its finest form. It is in equal measures heart and fact. But above all it is a dirge, with de Souza mourning over the consequences of easy money, crony capitalism and sheer greed. De Souza is a veteran journalist, a human rights activist and theatre person who has been the creative director of Space Theatre Ensemble. Above all, he is a pucca Goan, as thoroughbred as they come.

In its narrative and detail, the way Eat Dust sucks the reader into the village of Cawrem and the stream of Paik’s spring, the book is almost reminiscent of of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s description of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The description of the author’s journeys, the activism of the anti-mining citizens and the onerous work of Goa Foundation, which is meticulously chronicled, the illegal mining, the licensing excesses, the unbridled greed and the consequences, connects Goa to the mythical Macondo as it went through the banana plantation company’s greed, the colluding rulers and reached its final end.

But while One Hundred Years of Solitude was magic realism and a cocktail of history and fiction, Eat Dust is all fact. It’s a contemporary history of Goa and the elegy written by the author to two majestic mountains that he struggled to climb in his youth, that were reduced to flat-land dust within a few years of rampant mining.

But while the foreboding sense of gloom and anger is there, De Souza doesn’t lose his wry sense of humour. Describing the neo-rich miners dumping household waste into rice fields, De Souza writes, “a gold bangled hand emerges from a luxury sedan Honda Civic as the car slows down and the glass rolls down. The hand twirls a garbage bag, tightly knotted into the rice field. The glass rolls back up and the car speeds off.” And these hurled garbage bags will also choke the streams and water ways, De Souza later laments.

Since this was written in late 2015, after the Justice MB Shah Commission’s enquiry findings were tabled in the parliament, Eat Dust puts the scale and depth of the mining greed in Goa into perspective. In exporting 35 per cent of the country’s ore, mining has used eight per cent of the state’s richest land mass, and returned just four per cent to its exchequer by pocketing the rest. De Souza’s analysis is a shocking revelation on the appropriation of the state’s economy by private interests, who have steady access to the gatekeepers holding state office, and those who could influence it on demand. It is pertinent to point out that the mining scam in Goa alone is calculated at Rs 35,000 crores by Justice Shah.

Other than portrayals of village communities, the true value of this book is De Souza’s courage in naming names. He doesn’t shy away from identifying those he marks out as having wrenched Goa from a life of rural idyll to helter-skelter, unequal prosperity. Politicians from the first chief minister of Goa, Dayanand Bandodkar and his family, to arguably the most destructive from the perspective of mining, Pratapsingh Rane and a sub-species all by himself, Digambar Kamat, find prominent mention. The pre-eminent mining families, “Dempo, Salgaocar, Timblo and Chowgule” are part of the rogues’ gallery.

Eat Dust clearly spells out why the mining industry is often called the extractive sector. The author of this piece is from Odisha and Keonjhar district in Odisha is the ground-zero of base metal deposits, where Justice MB Shah Commission found the mining scam value to the tune of 60,000 crores rupees, almost double the size of the hole made by Goa scam in the public exchequer.

Prof Banikanta Mishra has done extensive meta-analysis on the impact of mining on the resource rich, but extremely poor state of Odisha. In a seminal paper redacted from robust inter-state panel studies, he pointed out that not only has the mining sector depressed wages and pulled down development indicators, it has harmed agriculture, the affiliated economies around agriculture, degraded the environment and unleashed the spiral of ill-health and poverty that doesn’t get discussed often.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly and Association (akin to the world’s correspondent on the status of implementation of a human right) led a submission on the status of human rights compliance in the extractive sector. In his final submission to the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights, he pointed out that the extractives sector was one of the worst human rights’ violators and called for binding human rights’ treaty on the corporates. Little surprise there!

Eat Dust is a must-read for anyone who believes India need not ravage to rise, who believes in the sanctity of planetary boundaries and who fears what pillage can unleash. It’s essential reading for anyone who believes that everyone is consequential.

Full disclosure: The author has led an audit of the Right to Information implementation status in the mining sector in Odisha, for the Odisha State Information Commission in 2011 and she has contributed to the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur’s submission on human rights’ status in the natural resources’ extractive sector.