Bangalore: Yours, mine, and the ruins

There are thousands of seized lorries around, but little space to park them; and crews are jobless. Over 100 hotels had once sprung up along National Highway 63; a third of them have shut down operations. Crane operators who pocketed a neat Rs30,000 every month, can now barely rake in Rs7,500. Once there were many banks who virtually operated 24/7, but now make do with just a single shift. Most of the migrant labourers have returned to their native Jharkhand, and the price of land that had peaked at Rs30 lakh per acre can now be bought for Rs 10 lakh.

This economic desolation, in many ways the exact remnant you might find in a war-ravaged country, was bound to follow the ecological depredation of a few years back.

This is Bellary 2013. There was once a flood of the lucre here; today, cash is one of the scarcest commodities to come buy. Any then-and-now comparison is stark, tell-tale.

The sight of seized lorries is a case in point. No accurate figures are available, but informed sources put the number at 9,000. These were confiscated by financial institutions when the heat was on. And financial institutions, especially banks, have their own story to tell. Officially, none operated 24/7. But during the peak of the Great Bellary Mining Scam, executives of banks and other financial institutions were ready to attend to loan demands at any time of the day. Or night, if one pleased. These agents had opened offices that worked round-the-clock, but are nowhere to be seen today.

Only one bank, Vikas Souhard Cooperative Bank Limited, had sought permission from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to run its branch from 8am to 8pm. Even today, it does.

Anant Joshi, one of the directors of the bank, says, “Though we had not directly invested in lorries or ore-related activities, our transaction level was high. Now, we find that our transactions have been reduced by almost 80 per cent from the abnormal growth witnessed during the boom.”

According to him, the banking business in Bellary and Koppal have dwindled to 2001-02 levels.

“Private and cooperative banks are under scanner of the RBI, the income tax department and other authorities. As a banker, we welcome such measures.”

Yet, when cash flows peter into a faint trickle, life changes too — for many, quite drastically.

It may not be fair to comment on who’s more poverty-stricken today, but the condition of drivers and cleaners of lorries probably strike one’s imagination at first blush.

Their predicament can best be summed up by what Mohammed Hasan Dhayalath of Koppal has to rue about: “Though our task was to drive a lorry only from Bellary to Karwar, our monthly income would be nothing less than 30 grand. We were even able to get our children admitted to good English-medium schools. But there’s no way now that we can afford such luxuries. Our children now study in cheap government schools.”

And why not? During the mining boom, drivers would get Rs800 as a daily salary and Rs250 per day as incentive. Cleaners could earn almost Rs20,000 every month.

More than 20,000 such people are unemployed today. The number of lorries that operate are one-third of the peak-time number.

Suryanarayan Nargundkar of Gadag, who had bought two for transporting ore, says his vehicles have remained parked for a year. “I am paying the monthly taxes and waiting for resumption of legal mining by December or January.” Nargundkar, who also runs an educational institution and has been secretary of the lorry owners association, says over 20,000 families of Bellary, Koppal, Gadag, Dharwad and Karwar districts, involved only in the transport industry, have been badly hit by the closure of mining.

During the boom, five new lorries would be registered at RTO offices in Bellary, Koppal and Gadag every month. That number has since dropped to one. Many truck manufacturers would even introduce their new models in Bellary. But that’s history now, one that has devastated the lives of many others too.

Since lorries were prohibited from entering the city limits from 6 in the morning to 10 in the night, some 1,000-odd vehicles would halt on the outskirts of Koppal, Gadag and Hubli. The ones who made hay here were eatery owners. Dhabas had mushroomed, and would make business of Rs50,000 daily. “Today, we are lucky to earn Rs10,000,” says Venkatesh Talwar, the manager of Shimla Dhaba in Ginigera village.

The others who cashed in on the heavy movement of lorries were fuel pump owners. Business was brisk, and requirement of staff heavy. The average staff strength at most stations has come down to five from 20. “I joined a fuel station run by a noted company in 2006, and everything was fine till last year. When I was sacked, ironically it were our fields that benefited the most since they were spared the noxious fumes emitted by lorries,” says Shankrappa Goudar of Munirabad. The stations themselves would need six tankers of fuel every day; now the sale of diesel has reduced to one tanker a week.

It’s the same story all around. Yesterday seems like such a distant, albeit glorious, dream.