BOTTOMLINE: Discovery of lignite deposits could change the face of the cauvery delta

Coal or rice, what will Tamil Nadu choose?

Joseph Vackayil

Pitch your minds forward to January 14, 2050. The residents of Mannargudi, in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur district, are ready to celebrate Pongal against a backdrop of smoke columns and power station stacks, a different world from the one you see today in the region, lush with green paddy fields and verdant with trees. The glittering celebratory pot no longer has rice boiling in it; instead, it is filled to the brim with a dark brown powder, lignite, also called ‘brown gold’.

For lignite, a soft-brown, low-grade form of coal, is the latest gift of the sun, fruit of the earth and result of human labour, and so, most suitable as an offering to the gods. Lignite brings prosperity, but of a kind that is very different from what paddy has been bringing for generations. It generates power and cash in plenty, where paddy gave the people only rice, satisfaction and penury.

The green fields and harvests of yore are only a memory in the minds of the aged. The vast open spaces resound no more to the sound of the plough, the chime of bells clinking against the necks of the bullocks in time to their gait. Instead, there are the roar of the mining machines and the hum of the generators.

Now, standing amidst the endless greenery of the paddy fields in the Cauvery delta, all this may sound absurd, liable to be brushed aside as a splendid bit of fiction. But it could well become reality in the very near future.

For Mannargudi and an area of about 570 square kilometres around it in the Cauvery delta has been found to carry the largest lignite deposits in India—about 15,500 million tonnes (mt), more than 50 per cent of the total identified reserves in the country. Close by is Veeranam, which has another 1,164 mt of lignite deposits in just 124 square kilometres.

Unbelievable though it be, the rice bowl of Tamil Nadu is literally lying over coal, lignite to be exact. Paradoxically, the area is also among the best rice growing regions in India, with a productivity of close to four tonnes of rice per hectare.

“Now we can’t even imagine that those pretty green fields could become lignite mines,” says AK Sahay, chairman and managing director of the Neyveli Lignite Corp Ltd (NLC). “We have just identified the deposits.”

The discovery of the lignite deposits could have a far-reaching impact on Mannargudi and Veeranam. For at some future time, when all the coal and all the oil and gas in India are burnt out, the country’s planners may well choose lignite over rice. And it may not be such a difficult choice, either. Even now there are people who think that Tamil Nadu has no reason to grow a water intensive crop like paddy. After all, the monsoon is a casual caller in Tamil Nadu, and it depends heavily on its neighbouring states and occasional cyclones to meet its water needs, even for drinking and cooking. Several Chennai-based armchair journalists and policy enunciators have been heard arguing in this vein at conferences and seminars.

Enough rice can be grown in the Gangetic plains, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh to meet the needs of the entire country, they put forth. They point out that the water available in Tamil Nadu would be better used for drinking purposes, and for growing fruit, vegetables, coarse grains and pulses, all of which need far less water. The proposition does make sound economic sense.

However, Dr Sahay explains that mining lignite in Mannargudi will not be an easy task. The lignite deposits are 120 metres deep. The surface soil is very loose, fragile and unsteady. Once the soil is broken, water could gush forth from all sides. Mining the lignite here will be a test of man’s skill and endurance. Of course, these are all projections for the distant future. The NLC team has just conducted an initial exploration and identified the lignite mines in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. At the moment, there is no proposal to start mining in any of these newly identified mines. For the future, no one knows.