Goa: Mining regime change a disaster for locals

Vishnu Kushta Gimonkar, 79, owns what used to be a 10,000-square metre field, in Pilgao, Bicholim sub-district, in the heart of Goa’s iron ore mining belt, 28 kilometres from capital Panjim. “Decades ago, it yielded two crop cycles of rice, beans, chillies, vegetables,” he says.

A tenant-owner, who came by this land from its previous owner under Goa’s 1964 Land-to-the-Tiller legislation, Gimonkar, like hundreds of other farmers in the mining belt, yielded to the economic pressures and trade-offs from the mining industry.

For decades, he abandoned agriculture and accepted the compensation paid out by the adjoining open-cast iron ore mine, for silting his fields with dust and mineral run-offs, as ore-laden trucks barrelled through and past his fields, from the mine to the Sarmanas jetty on the Asanora river.

Loaded onto river barges at the jetty, the ore made its way, via mangrove lined estuaries of the Mandovi river, to the Mormugao Port, for export shipment to China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and East Europe – an industry that began in 1951 with 4.36 lakh tonnes; peaked in the 2007-’11 China boom at 54 million tonnes per annum; and was shut down in 2012, following the Justice Shah Commission report.

A tussle for control of the Goa mines...

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