In the quarry-crushers spread over large tracts of land in the Kunnathukal and Perunkadavila panchayats, limits imposed by the government for quarrying exist only on paper.
Even these papers are outdated, in some cases. From the amount of explosives used to blast open the rocks to the amount of rocks loaded into the trucks and number of trips these trucks take, the norms and numbers are there to be flouted.
One morning in December 2016, local residents and activists, fed up with the uncontrolled exploitation of their land, gathered in front of the Perunkadavila village office and decided to block the trucks from the quarries. The blocking started around 5.30 a.m. Within half-an-hour, they had held up 20 trucks on the road. The Joint RTO arrived on the spot and took the trucks to the weigh-bridge, where the balance indicated that all of them were carrying weight beyond the limit.
“The trucks from quarries are supposed to ply only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., but here they run round-the-clock. The maximum allowed load a truck is 16 tonnes. Most of them were found carrying around 30 to 40 tonnes. Total fine amount of ₹2.98 lakh were imposed on them. But, that happened due to the intervention of the people. The officials have not taken any action against the trucks after that,” said S. Unnikrishnan, a resident and activist of the Thanal vedi, which has campaigned against illegal quarrying in the region.
Trucks pose danger
The plying of the trucks also caused accidents occasionally, in these narrow roads. In September 2016, two youths on a motorbike died after being hit by a truck carrying material from the quarries to the Vizhinjam seaport. The issue was settled after paying a compensation of ₹35 lakh.
The region, once filled with several hills, is now marked by large openings on the ground, many of them filled with water.
According to the people, some of the rocky hills here have disappeared in days, with ammonium nitrate explosives filled to great depths extracting huge chunks in a single blast, the impact of which is felt even kilometres away.
There are hardly any checks on the number of trucks or number of trips that each of them take a day, making it easy for the quarry owners to raze hills to the ground and go further underground in a matter of weeks. The cutting itself is done in straight vertical lines, instead of the step or bench cuts, which prevents caving in and also gives a hint on the amount of quarried rocks.
As a report submitted by a subcommittee of the Kunnathukal panchayat said, the electricity bill paid by one of the crushers in a month was ₹5.5 lakh, which points to the amount of time that the crusher unit operated beyond limits, during that period. The various certificates from the District Medical Officer, the Fire and Safety Department and others were found to be several years old. Explosive licenses were also non-existent.
