With the visit of the members of a Supreme Court-appointed committee to the forest-covered holy hills of Tiruvannamalai recently, the Jindals’ quest for iron ore in Tamil Nadu, which began a decade ago, has entered the final phase — and a big showdown is on the cards.

Ever since the State-owned Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation selected Jindal Vijayanagar Steel Ltd — in March 2005 — to take out the low grade iron ore that obtains in the hills of the Tiruvannamalai district, the project has got stuck in environmental objections. The Sajjan Jindal group company wants the iron ore to feed its steel plant in nearby Salem district, which today gets the ore from Karnataka.

In these nine years, project proponents have pursued the project unremittingly in the face of stridently adverse recommendations by a Supreme Court-appointed Central Empowered Committee. Now the court has acceded to the request of the Jindals and has asked the Committee to inspect the proposed site and submit a report. The earlier recommendations — of 2009 — were made after hearing the arguments of the two sides.

The opponents appear to be equally determined. “Lakhs of people are prepared to die,” says S. Sankaran, an advocate and a resident of the temple town of Tiruvannamalai. “We will not allow the project to come,” he told Business Line today. Major protest rallies have been planned; the protestors have formed an association to implead themselves in the case.

To them Tiruvannamalai is the abode of God, home to hundreds of ascetics and the spiritual capital of millions of devotees of Lord Shiva — hardly a place in whose vicinity dusty and noisy mining could be carried on.

Every year, thousands of devotees take a benedictory 14-km walk around the hill-temple, which is the leitmotif of a fund of Tamil literature dating back to the 7th century. The mining site is 8 km from ‘giri valam’ , the path of circumambulation.

Faith apart, the project opponents point to the observations of the Committee that “the ecological cost of felling more than 2 lakh naturally grown trees and the use of 325 hectares of undisturbed reserved forest for iron ore mining project far outweighs the financial benefits that may accrue by way of reduced cost of raw material.” It said it would “not be in public interest to permit” the project.

Further, the project would need water from the nearby Sathanur dam, putting stress on water availability for agriculture and drinking.

Salem side story

The Rs 400-crore project is to dig for ore in two reserved forests — Kavuthimalai in Tiruvannamalai district and Kanjamalai in Salem district. The area the Jindals wish to mine in Salem is much more — 638 hectares. While there is no ‘holy’ angle in Salem, other similar concerns exist and that part of the project is stuck too. Here too, the recommendations of the committee as well as a 2008 report of the Chief Conservator of Forests, are stridently negative about the project. In the Salem project, the company’s beneficiation plant will create a ‘tail pond’ of water used for washing. The Conservator’s report says that neither has the mining plan nor the details of measures to prevent flooding of tail pond water into agricultural fields been given.

Meanwhile, there are reports that the Jindals are willing to settle for a 23 hectare-area in Tiruvannamalai, against the 325 hectares originally sought. The Jindals have not responded to requests for project updates. But the locals are not ready to relent. “Even one hectare of mining will affect us,” says Arumugam Dakshinamoorthy, an Energy and Environment Consultant in Chennai, who hails from Tiruvannamalai.

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