By Napoleon S Mawphniang
New vocabulary like “barren land” and “unlocking potential” sounds neutral until applied to actual landscapes, where these words segment life and turn commons into inventory. Policy on paper becomes dispossession in practice. Meghalaya has developed consent-washing—where signatures replace sovereignty and public hearings become security operations. In East Jaintia Hills, cement plants grew alongside unscientific coal mining, with communities’ concerns met by police. A 2023 public hearing in Thangskai turned violent when residents protested broken promises about jobs and safeguards. The High Court later suggested possible collusion between state actors and a cement unit operating beyond limits. We’ve lost over 3,000 bighas—land neutralised as “vacant,” its living uses invisible in files. This subsoil erasure severs water, memory, and livelihood connections, often with state approval. In West Jaintia Hills, a Kong’s paddy field failed after underground mining disrupted aquifers beneath her land. The mine didn’t take her land directly—it destroyed the land’s ability to sustain life.
We pretend rat-hole mining is a historical footnote. It isn’t. The National Green Tribunal banned rat-hole mining in April 2014, calling it illegal and unscientific, pointing to a pattern of deaths, environmental degradation, and a mafia economy that benefits the few while the state and public lose out. Yet even after the ban, illegal extraction didn’t vanish; it adapted, burrowed deeper, and dispersed responsibility. That’s the trouble with what I call perforation governance—when the state condemns with one hand and condones with the other, leaving the landscape riddled with small permissions and large denials. Years later, Meghalaya was still counting tragedies from clandestine pits, and activists who documented violations faced brutal reprisals. The hydrological and ecological damage is well documented: acidification of streams, collapse of aquatic habitats, destabilisation of slopes, destruction of forests and farmlands—effects that flow far beyond a pit-mouth. Those who insist such mining is only a labour issue ignore the truth: it is a land and water crisis first, a jobs crisis second, and a justice crisis throughout.
East Jaintia Hills exemplifies dual extraction—coal below and limestone for cement above. When the High Court questioned a cement company’s sanctioned limits and licensing, it probed core governance: who determines industry boundaries and profits from their ambiguity? A 2025 case mandating strict monitoring of licensed cement operations showed institutional weariness with post-facto justifications, demanding real-time accountability. Delayed oversight merely ratifies damage rather than regulating industry. Under the Sixth Schedule, District Councils (KHADC, JHADC, GHADC) can legislate on land allotment, occupation, and forest management except in reserved forests, to protect inhabitants’ interests.
The Khasi Hills Council’s 2021 land regulation act aimed to protect community interests in non-reserved lands. However, this protection becomes mere rubber-stamping. Council lands—community forests, commons, grazing areas, jhum fallows—are converted to projects through allotments without assessing ecological impacts, reducing consultation to formality. The crucial question isn’t Council authority but its exercise—stewardship versus transfer rights. The definition of “forest” remains critical. While Sixth Schedule recognizes community-managed forests beyond colonial “reserved” categories, state and corporate entities label living, culturally inhabited spaces as “unclassed” or “barren” to enable extraction. This definitional distortion reduces autonomy to administrative procedure.
Let’s be candid: there is no tribal identity and no tribal autonomy without land. Without the right to decide how water moves, how soil rests, how trees regenerate, “autonomy” is a visiting card, not a living covenant. We have ceded more than 3,000 bighas already—sometimes to cement, sometimes to corridors, sometimes to the pretence that a lease for minerals is a license for territory. This is the new colonialism of coordinates, where a survey number can silence a clan, and a “public purpose” file can un-people a landscape. The Councils must remember what their mandate forbids: becoming brokers of alienation.
What would honest governance look like? First, start with hydro-truths. Before any allotment, a subsoil impact audit—not just EIA rituals is needed. No rat-hole adjacent landscape should be touched by another deep extraction without a five-year aquifer recovery map. Where illegal mining has altered hydrology, any downstream agricultural loss must be treated as compensable harm traceable to a chain of negligence. The NGT already placed illegality and unscientific practice on record; now the line must run from that finding to restitution frameworks that farmers can actually access. In the Kong’s case from West Jaintia Hills, her field was not “damaged by weather”; it was damaged by an economy that treats the underground as a nobody’s land and the overground as a no-man’s future. A farmer cannot litigate a tunnel. The state must.
Second, de-concentrate industry. East Jaintia Hills shows cumulative capture—where multiple high-intensity operations in a compact area turn districts into emissions islands, with depressed social and ecological baselines. Industrial siting should follow district-level carrying-capacity caps, not unit-by-unit clearances that ignore previous approvals. When public hearings need armed policing, social license is withdrawn. The Thangskai violence resulted from years of unmet promises and localized burdens.
Third, restore forest definition to reality. Councils must codify Community Living Forests—including sacred groves, jhum fallows, riparian strips, and commons—with protection against alienation and mandatory cultural impact assessments. Paragraph 3 powers enable Councils to protect inhabitants’ interests in land and non-reserved forests. For claimed “non-forest” areas, Councils should require ethnographic maps, resource-use calendars, and clan testimonies before issuing NOCs.
Fourth, separate mineral rights from territorial control. Mining leases don’t authorize commons fencing, path rerouting, or converting community streams to industrial drains. For limestone mining with cement operations, companies must prove clean title and conduct. The 2025 High Court order demands vigilant oversight, transparent reporting, and zero tolerance for pre-license extraction disguised as “purchases”.
Fifth, end consent-washing. The Councils’ land and forest mandates carry a fiduciary duty. Any land allotment above a minimal threshold must require two-tier consent: village durbar ratification with recorded dissent notes and an independent Council audit panel that verifies the process and translates the implications plainly in the local language. Public hearings cannot be box-ticking ceremonies guarded by batons; they must be deliberations with the power to say “no.” Where hearings turn violent, the state should treat that as a regulatory failure, not a policing challenge, and pause the project pending social repair.
Lastly, name the losses. The 3,000 bighas already slipped away are not a statistic; they are the difference between autonomy as law and autonomy as memory. The streams acidified by coal, the air thickened by clinker, the paddy fields that cave months after a tunnel—these are not “externalities.” They are evictions by other means. The NGT’s 2014 condemnation of rat-hole mining was a line in the sand; our institutions blurred it through delay, exception, and the creation of compliance fictions. Activists who documented the illegalities paid in blood; miners kept dying in pits that should not have existed; and the public remained a spectator to a political economy that thrives on plausible deniability.
To JHADC, KHADC, GHADC – The Constitution entrusted a commons, not a notary’s desk. Paragraph 3 gives teeth to protect, not a pen to parcel out. Every allotment reducing a village from author to audience erodes the Sixth Schedule’s purpose. If Councils cannot define “forest” beyond colonial “reserved,” they manage fiction. If they cannot prove consent beyond minutes, they license silence. We can turn. Begin with a moratorium on high-intensity projects in East Jaintia Hills until a district-wide impact ledger is published—showing air, water, health, and livelihoods that communities can contest. Create a Rat-Hole Liability Fund from penalties on illegal operators, prioritizing farmers whose fields failed after subsoil tampering. Mandate public audits of cement units’ limestone supply chains with real-time disclosures. Legislate Community Living Forests with a presumption against alienation.
Without land, our autonomy is merely decorative. The page fills with others’ plans. We must write back in place’s language—naming forests as lived, counting losses as felt, refusing paperwork that reduces hills to plots. The law drew the outline. Councils must color within it for communities, not companies. In hills, memory is governance. It recalls streams before pollution, birds’ changed paths after kilns, and failed fields from tunnel mining. Memory testifies. Courts can listen. Councils must act. We must see beyond maps to terrain—which slips away as silence spreads like acid drainage.
(The writer is Advocate & Trade Unionist)