Challenging the EIA process

Activists contested the EIA process as failing to respect the right to autonomy and self-governance. Anjan from the FRW reinforced this with a story of how a mine owner near to Cauvrem took the land from village people, legally, without them realising it. Many activists said that the local governing bodies known as Panchayats were being

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overruled and with it, communities were loosing the right to self-govern. The elected Panchayat and full village assembly, Gram Sabha, have the right to be consulted on land acquisition (Oskarsson 2015, 430). But challenging the EIA process was made difficult because of the poor implementation of protective regulations and the lack of transparency in the way institutions handle the process. For example, petitions and requests for information had not been considered at the time they were filed which meant that they sat with the courts whilst others try to file the same case. This led to activists doubling up on similar work and finding it difficult to move forward with cases because of the long time delays.

Another challenge that activists faced was that mining companies accommodated changes in regulations and worked with them. This was a problem when activists focused on the impacts of mining, such as the impact on water. Nisha said that challenging the impact on water had led to more regulations requiring corporate reporting. These reports simply prove that the potential or existing impact on water is negligible and thus that their mining project complies with regulations.

ECs…They say you must not go below the ground water unless the ground water is not affected by your mining below it. So the law is that you must not go below the ground water level but a catch is put inside. So the mining company gets a study done saying that the ground water is there, that it is available, but it’s flowing into their pit. So the ECs enable them, but it should be blanket proof, do not cross the ground water.

This shows that whilst regulations are in place as a result of popular protest they exist in such a way that companies manoeuver their way around them. These hydrology reports were, like EIAs she said, “all the same” but were even less likely to get put back to villages for public consultation and therefore even more likely to be open to abuse.

The public hearing is considered by activists from mining affected areas, as the main opportunity to influence decision-making. A lot of work had been done by many long standing activists to get EIAs written in all three local languages and to be made available to communities 30 days before the public hearing. Raj, a teacher from a mining area in North Goa, was a widely respected activist who spoke out about silences in the reports and in decision-making. He said challenging the EIA process was difficult because of the lack of transparency from institutions and the financial and intellectual resources activists need to acquire. He described going to a public hearing in 2006 and organising the opposition,

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I organised them into 6 groups, 2 groups in front, 2 groups in the middle, 2 in the last courts and I was sitting amongst them. It went on the whole day, record the comments, get it confirmed, tell them something is missed out. It was well managed but people didn’t remember how they had said things so I had to stand up and say it was not in this manner, this is what he said, this way. They said - you sit with our people and do the corrections.

The significance of this story is that Raj managed to play by the rules of the EC game but the mining project he tried to stop was still approved. He stated, “that was all that, but they never cancelled it [the mine], it remains working”. This seems like a parody of democratic and inclusive decision-making, where opposition is heard, citizens are involved, but still mining is legally approved. This can be read as an example of performative participation where “interests, and needs are not represented but shaped, articulated, and constructed in the participation process itself” (Turnhout, Van Bommel, and Aarts 2010).

A similar story came from Ryan, an environmentalist from a mining area in North Goa who had worked for the protection of wildlife sanctuaries since the Western Ghat

Movement¹². His focus was environmental protection and he attended public hearings to this end. He said that he called on Professor Gadgil, an Indian ecologist, to ask him to request from the central government a three kilometer buffer zone for wildlife

sanctuaries. This shows that whilst Ryan was educated he needed the authority of an

‘expert’ behind him. In 2006, the MoEFCC approved a one kilometre buffer zone or eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) to protect wildlife sanctuaries under the Environmental Protection Act and states that any project within 10 kilometers of an ESZ requires additional approval. Ryan’s efforts slowed down some mining operations, but his goal of protecting the environment became just another regulation mining companies then worked around. Due to poor implementation, many mining leases were granted anyway without the new additional approvals (Bezbaroa 2017). The ESZ regulation can be seen to make the EIA process stronger because mining companies can show that their projects comply with the law, even if compliance is not enforced later on.

Both the Goa Foundation and FRW were working with local communities to challenge the EIA process. But breaking silences in the reports and process was hard for them

12 The Western Ghats Movement was a landmark event in environmental activism in India where in 1987 a march along the entire Western Ghats was taken to focus attention on environmental degradation.

Various initiatives developed in Goa as a result of this (Western Ghats Movement 2018).

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because of the nature of environmental legal activism. Legal intervention relied on judges’ that could be unreliable and was limited because of its timing; it always took place after mining had already affected an area. This means that compensation for environmental damage was often the most likely outcome of these efforts. As Nisha said, legal intervention meant “small reliefs…a small order to say tarpaulin should be covered, small small things”. This shows that success through legal means was rather limited, with compensation providing short-term relief.

Another avenue for challenging the EIA was to counter-map mining areas to prove certain existing or potential risks. This shows that it was not enough to critique EIA representations on socio-political reasoning; EIAs had to be proven with evidence, to be inaccurate. But an academic in Goa who specialised in land-use mapping said that local mapping attempts “have been really looked down on as unscientific” (interview,

Samrat). Although the Goa Foundation did produce maps that were used for the 2012 writ petition (PIL435/ 2012), even then, this led to a partial success, the two year suspension rather than stopping mining completely. In summary, in line with Aguilar-Støen (2015), “the frame of what is possible to achieve” through challenging EIAs is pre-determined. This is a way of exercising three-dimensional power; the EIA process steers its opposition into trying to improve the EIA process and then partially absorbs their efforts.

Conclusion

This analysis shows how the pro-mining discourse works through the EIA process in powerful ways. The EIA reports slide from technical claims into political ones in order to characterise mining as a technical and logical land use that will have specific positive only impacts. The pro-mining discourse works through representations of land, nature, people and mining itself to emphasise the potentiality of the MLA and the reversibility of impact. It emphasises these points by partially or completely silencing actual features of these places. Research has also found that power is exercised through institutional control over the process, as Aguilar-Støen and Hirsch have found (2017). The EIA process excludes the public through the lack of transparency and use of time, language and science. In public hearings, despite activists best efforts, business-state networks exercise two dimensional power by presiding over what will be decided (Lukes 2005, 111). Overall, two and three dimensional power can be found at work in the EIA,

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influencing understandings of mining for decision-making. In such a situation, Lukes suggests it is possible for the dominated to accord legitimacy to those who dominate them (Lukes 2005, 112). This chapter has provided insight into this effect; as the EIA process steers those who challenge it towards trying to improve and strengthen it. When better environmental protection regulations are created as a result of activist demands, these seem to be absorbed, partially, into the EIA process. Legitimacy is obtained through the pro-mining discourse as it exercises power in these, admittedly, elegant ways.

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6 CSR as a mode of legitimisation

In this chapter I examine how CSR as a corporate social technology contributes to the legitimisation of mining, by furthering corporate interests and relationships of power.

Firstly, I look at the implementation of CSR and how this facilitates a pro-mining discourse. Then, the analysis will focus on how the CSR discourse works through two main mechanisms, identified by Dinah Rajak. Rajak argues that CSR works through corporate claims of moral purpose and claims to progress development (2011a, 231).

The analysis shows that all other mechanisms are subsidiary, helping to sustain these more important claims, in a situation where they could otherwise be undermined. The third part of this chapter explores the anti-mining response to the CSR discourse and why resistance is not fully realised. I argue that CSR attempts to achieve a ‘social license’ to mine but instead works in a piecemeal way to establish an operational environment for business.