KANAKAPURA, KARNATAKA
Monday, April 24, 10 a.m.

To the untrained and ecologically sensitive eye, the hills surrounding Kanakapura could well be Armageddon. Bare rock faces stare back at you and, in turning the earth's bowels inside out, greenery has been buried under mounds of loose, brown soil. Large slabs of uncut granite that have been blasted out, lie abandoned around the quarry. Today, there's no one in these quarries, except I, my photographer, a forest guard assigned to us by the forest department, and three forest officers watching over the quarries. But as recently as a fortnight ago, this part of the hills was a beehive of activity for some 150 quarry owners. Their heavy earth-moving machines would busily strip the sheer hill faces, while a fleet of trucks raced up and down these hills, transporting the Kanakapura Multi-grey Granite to Bangalore, about 50 kilometres from here, or to the railway station at nearby Bidadi for a journey upcountry. About 10 days ago, a swarm of police, forest and revenue officials descended on these quarries and shut them down for encroaching onto reserved forest land. "We are dealing with them with an iron hand and the guilty quarry owners will be brought to book," Karnataka's Deputy Chief Minister, B.S. Yediyurappa, tells this reporter in Bangalore.

According to the Indian Bureau of Mines, India is home to around a quarter of the world's granite resources, and Karnataka, along with Andhra Pradesh, is where a majority of the approximately 100 variants in the market are found. In Karnataka alone, granite mining is estimated to be a Rs 1,000-crore industry, compared to the overall market size of Rs 2,500 crore. In Kanakapura, villagers of nearby Kunur say, quarrying has been going on for more than 20 years now, marked by constant battles between the state government, quarry owners and the local villagers. So why wasn't anything done about it sooner? For one, the argument goes, it's only recently that the forest officials woke up to the fact that illegal mining had reached reserved forest land. For another, some officials in the previous governments were, it is claimed, hand-in-glove with the miners.

Quiet metal monsters: If the ban stays, the Kanakapura hills will get a chance to heal

The recent crackdown, then, happened after a public outcry over quarrying in the region. "We had been complaining to the government for a long time, and it's only now that they are acting," says a villager. Yediyurappa admits there was growing public pressure. "We received hundreds, if not thousands, of petitions from across the state and decided to act based on the complaints." He isn't the only one in the state administration taking quarry owners in the area head-on. "I have ordered a survey across the region at nearly 200 places to ascertain which mines are legal and which aren't," says Karnataka's Minister for Forest and Ecology, C. Chennigappa. The minister says he personally inspected some of the illegal quarries in Kanakapura and Sathnur before ordering their shutdown.

The raids seem to have literally stopped the illegal miners in their tracks. The forest department has seized heavy equipment, including 20 trucks, stopped the transportation of 82 slabs of granites worth crores of rupees at the nearby Bidadi railway station and four forest officials have been suspended, including an assistant conservator of forest. Policing these quarries is no easy job, though. The government says that the miners have encroached 200 metres into the forest land, but one could never tell just by looking at the site. There are no boundaries or fences demarcating forest land from revenue and private land.

Miffed Minister: Deputy CM Yediyurappa says this is just the beginning of the crackdown

Neither is illegal mining limited to Kanakapura. Bellary and many parts of coastal Karnataka are also victims of unscrupulous miners. "The issue with mines is that they are not suited to ecologically fragile areas such as coastal Karnataka, but quarry miners are always interested in going there due to their latent mineral wealth," says Leo Saldhana of Bangalore-based Environment Support Group. "Most of us follow the rules, only a few of them give the industry a bad name," says an official with the All India Granites and Stone Association.

Perhaps, but Yediyurappa isn't backing off just yet, with the forest department promising to spare no one in this bare-knuckles fight with the stone industry. "We have booked some 2,000 cases across the state and this is just the beginning," says he. So expect more mines to go silent and more heads to roll when the government completes its survey. For the hundred of villagers around Kanakapura, it will hopefully be the end of their struggle to reclaim their hills.