When farmers turned 'gold' miners

Karnataka's Bellary district, which has rich deposits of high-grade iron ore, mirrors a lawless wild-west situation.

Farmers here have given up agriculture and started digging their land for 'gold' from the bowels of the earth. Almost every farmer has turned a miner in search of easy money. No longer worried about crop yield, they are looking for iron ore reserves that fetch them $55 a tonne!

The situation is so bad that the district administration has had to introduce mobile squads that work round the clock to curb mining on farm land.

"What's wrong in it? Monsoon failure for successive years has forced us to mine iron ore from our land. If the government can let go big-time illegal miners, it can spare us as well. We are extracting ore for a living, not for export," argues Fakerappa, who owns two acres of land in Sandur, a part of the Ramanadurga range hills containing an estimated 1.50 billion tonnes of iron ore reserves.

Though private mining companies control almost 80 per cent of the land under lease for iron ore operations (an average lease size of 200 hectares), it is the smallest of these mines (1-4 acres) run by farmers and landowners that have become centres of illegal mining.

There are no excavators or heavy machinery to extract the ore. Farmers dig using farm implements. The modus operandi is simple.

"After extracting a tractor load (1.5 tonnes) of iron ore, we transport it to a local trader. We are paid Rs 1,300 per tractor load. Sometimes, our tractors are impounded by the local authorities, but we manage to free ourselves," points out Adimali Yenkaiah, another farmer.

Thousands of small farmers, ruined by years of drought, have cashed in on the boom by letting out their agricultural farms to illegal operators. The farmers collect a rent of Rs 25,000-30,000 per acre, or Rs 62,500-75,000 per hectare, on a monthly basis. Many of them have eroded their debts in the last two years.

These mines are the target of the anti-mining lobby as they witness some of the most serious violations of labour and environmental laws, including child labour and the failure to manage waste or soil erosion.

However, some observers see the opposition to such illegal mining as a red herring, to divert attention from the graver sins of large mining operations.