Whenever my grandchildren visit our home in Talcher during their winter vacation, the consistent complaints of them having irritation while breathing is a constant. As a grandmother, it saddens my heart to see that their complaints have anything but increased as years go by. The sadness comes from a sense of helplessness, that feeling when you know what is wrong but cannot change it.
I have lived in this city for 25 years now. I have seen it when it was nothing but settlements of coal field workers to it now increasing its population rapidly each passing day.
The Angul-Talcher industrial area is one of the oldest polluted areas in India. Since the British rule where mining emerged as an important industry right as industrialisation hit India through the colonial force and emerged into a force to reckon with as liberalization allowed for different factions of a mining plant to be divided into public and private controlled areas. Anyone who has lived as long as us in this city would remember the sporadic rise of residential colonies of new coal fields that opened in the mining belt.
As mining corporations increased in number in Talcher region, from Bhushan to Mahanadi CoalFields to Bhuvaneshwari Mines to much more, the city has become a ticking time bomb.
Mining in the Angul-Talcher coal mines happens as open cast mining, leaving the ground level of the earth to be kept hollow post the completion of mining of coal from the level. What this causes is a crater in the middle crust of the earth, giving way for land burrowing and weakening the foundations of buildings in the area, with more danger being at houses with more than 3 floors. To prevent this the government has issued limits on how many floors a house can have but as human greed never satiates, the number of floors keep on rising.
But this is not the least of the city’s issues that arise from mining.
I only open our house’s window in summer evenings. If I was living in a village, the air would be pregnant with the calmness of silent summer afternoons but here I live with closed windows. Heat is the not only reason, dust and suspended particulate matter is the main fatal reason. Talcher’s air is laden with dust, anyone who lives here survives through it each day and can testify even if air quality results can’t. It’s not dangerous to inhale (yet) like Delhi or New York, but it sure is on the way towards it.
Reports have testified to the fact that the industrial exhaust that contributes to the high SPM in Talcher air has a large concentration of nitrogen levels. Something that the local government officials have denied, just like how it has been all throughout the country— you get a bad result from an international trusted source, you change the narrative to make them the villain and then unleash a Twitter troll army behind them— but sure has been proven with how our gardens suffer through fruit rots when the first rain of the season falls.
On evenings there is a thick blanket of dust that covers the air, it is filmworthy. Oppenheimer wouldn’t need an artificial set design if it was shot here. With the classic old orange lights that thronge Talcher streets, the scene is eerie and ready to be shot. Respiratory diseases are as common as dengue and our lungs, I am sure, would be the perfect props for those anti smoking ads where they show lungs that when squeezed ooze blackened polluted fluids.
There is no saying what will save this city. Will stopping mining be the solution? But then what about the thousands of jobs that the industry has created and still sustains? Will an environmental based government program in cooperation with the companies to safeguard the surrounding residential areas from pollution be a solution? Potentially, but a long way to go.
Time is slipping away from my hands as I step into the 70s of my life. I too am a ticking time bomb much like this city but there is hope with both of us, we can sustain longer.