SEEN's Bulletin on Fossil Fuel Projects and Development Aid

Burning Bright in India: Tigers or Coal?

This Carbon Watch also ran in the Ventura County Star April 18, 2000, 
and the Washington Times, April 19, 2000

March 21, 2000

During President Clinton's visit to India, trade, development and the environment are on the agenda as well as nuclear security. One issue that particularly deserves presidential  attention is a proposed massive expansion of coal mining that threatens to decimate forests,  dislocate villagers, and drive India's tigers to extinction.

US companies see a hot prospective market in India, where $250 billion will be spent on power-generating equipment in coming years. Coal is India's cheapest and most abundant indigenous power source, and until recently India's coal sector was the number one recipient of World Bank development dollars. The Bank justifies expanded coal mining in  India as a good thing not only for the economy but for the environment. Some of the planned mines it is backing are even touted as "environmental showcases." But these would-be "green" mines are sited in ultra-sensitive habitats India's tigers and other endangered wildlife can't live without.

In the Indian states of Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, some 400 new open-cast coalmines are planned. The World Bank in collaboration with Coal India, and with the tacit acceptance of the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF), is arranging to finance 25 such mines in ecologically sensitive areas of Bihar as models what it calls "good environmental practice." But the label is Orwellian; environmental devastation in the vicinity of opencast coalmines is total.

 These regions of India contain a large portion of the remaining wild tigers on earth, as well as many 
other endangered species including the Asiatic elephant. Its forests contain areas identified by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and leading researchers as a Level One Tiger Conservation Unit warranting the highest level of environmental protection. The forests are unique because they are still connected by fragile but working corridors that allow large mammals the range they need to survive. The planned mines will cut off the corridors, reducing the forests to islands surrounded by human activity. The stranded tiger
populations inside the islands will become inbred  and die out.

After initially calling the mine sites "degraded" forest unimportant to wildlife, the World Bank was joined by the MOEF in eventually admitting the vital function of the corridors and that the matter "merited serious consideration." It promised local groups that it would send experts to assess the situation, but never followed through. The Environmental Impact Assessments prepared by the Bank and the MOEF glosses over the impact of the mines on the corridors and the wildlife they host.

Nor do the official Assessments include an analysis of the atmospheric impact of mining and burning more coal, impacts whose brunt is inevitably borne by developing countries as  climate change accelerates. Coal is the dirtiest  and most carbon-intensive of fossil fuels, releasing more greenhouse gases into the
earth's atmosphere than any other source. The World Bank admits the poorest will suffer the most in a warming world.

The mines' considerable negative impacts on the  region's residents have also gone unheeded. The  planned mine sites are home to tribal communities and Neolithic art now marked for eradication. To make way for the mines, entire villages have been forcibly  evicted and resettled under conditions that ensure their pauperization. Those who do benefit from the  mines will do so temporarily. When the coal and the money run out, vast areas of the region will be laid waste, devoid of its indigenous communities and wildlife, and all too soon, of its short-lived mining economy. Coal expansion also effectively preempts development of affordable, clean, renewable forms of energy which are desperately needed and would be of sustainable economic benefit to the region.

For all these reasons, the price of these mines is wholly unacceptable. It is a cruel irony of President Clinton's visit that U.S. eagerness for Indian economic development threatens such perverse effects as extinguishing India's tigers and preempting sustainable energy development. U.S. taxpayers, who contribute the largest portion of World Bank funds, are unwitting participants;  they don't generally understand the consequences of how their money is spent in India. But scientists, environmentalists, and more than one million Indian children who have just signed an immense Save-the-Tiger scroll do understand. What better legacy and what better way to make his South Asia tour a lasting success than for President Clinton to join them and call for an immediate halt to the new mines and  redirection of World Bank investment into environmentally and economically sustainable energy projects?
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Bittu Sahgal edits Sanctuary, India's leading ecological magazine. Daphne Wysham is
a research fellow with the Washington DC-based Institute for Policy Studies.

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