Rampant mining killing lifeline of people: Nallakannu

He said that the trees along the Musiri, Kulithalai and the adjacent areas close to the Cauvery have started to wither away. “At least, to my estimation, 10 lakh coconut trees had withered away along these stretches and this shows the poor ground water storage and is the sign of drought in well and small waterbodies too,” He told DTNext that the worst part is nearing as the people along the banks of Cauvery will be fighting for drinking water. 

He pointed out that there are big rivers in Kerala too where there is no sand mining and there are Godavari and Krishna river in Andhra Pradesh, but there is a restriction of using earthmovers for digging sand there. “But only in Tamil Nadu, earthmovers are widely used to mine sand and the damage is unimaginable,” he said. 

He added that the actual permission is to mine sand in an area of three feet depth and one metre length. “In reality they dig up to 20 feet in depth and 10 metre in length. Though the state government regulation in 2012 itself clearly states the norm that sand can be mined only beyond 500 metre from the drinking water borewells established along the waterbodies, the miners dig as close as 50 metres from the borewells,” he said.

“As sand used to act as a purifier of drinking water, such indiscriminate mining near the borewells will lead to deposit of silt and affect the quality of the water with no chance for purification,” he said. “If such indiscriminate mining of sand continues in the Cauvery basin, people will face too many problems in the near future as Cauvery is the main source of drinking water,” he warned. 

The alarming rate of ground water level depletion will sooner or later force the public to conduct agitations for drinking water and other purposes in a big way, he said and added that already the public have started staging protests against sand mining. We have been approaching the district collectors and staging a series of protests against sand mining in waterbodies, but the response from officials are lukewarm. “Anyway, we will continue to fight,” he said.