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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Journeys |
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Journeys |
Making it
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| The new fortunes of Meghalaya’s mine owners—and the meaning of money in today’s Northeast |
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DAVID HOGSHOLT / GETTY IMAGES |
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| The bottom of a mineshaft in Jaintia Hills, where abundant coal has created a new class of mining mega-rich.
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OLDING AN ALMOST PRETTY, sparkling black rock so I could see it up close, Donush Siangshai looked small against the dark mountains of coal stored outside his office in Ladrymbai, where we had come to survey his mining fiefdom one afternoon in December 2010. A modestly dressed and diminutive 44-year-old, Siangshai is an unlikely coal baron: |
the rough cut of his shiny faux-leather jacket and utterly plebeian baseball cap offer no hint that he pays  2.3 million in taxes and owns more than 100 mines.
Like many mine owners in Meghalaya’s coal-rich Jaintia Hills, Siangshai had no proper education; his first job was as a driver. He provided an uncomplicated account of his own success: “When I started, I saved and borrowed money to buy one mine. That one did well, so I went on to buy another one and another one; and I kept going.” As the mines multiplied, their output translated into stable capital. Their owner also maintains a small side business selling drinks locally. Siangshai still keeps a low profile, but this belies the sparsely known fact that he is today the most successful mine owner in the area.
Initially reticent, Siangshai was most at ease when talking about God and coal. He patiently ran through the details of his business: of the seven odd kinds of coal, three major grades make up a mining hierarchy. First is B grade or chieh rupieh (named after the site of its provenance), next is brown coal or mukhain (similarly renamed, locally), and third is medium or ‘ordinary coal’—at current prices, 100,000 can buy nine, 12 and 13 tonnes of each variety, respectively. The volumes are huge: a tonne of brown coal consists of 10,000 bricks.
The office, with plywood desks and narrow cupboards, was spread out on the first floor of a large, basic building, above a rough ground floor that we exited via a makeshift walkway before ascending the stairs. Siangshai sat at the helm, at the entrance of a suite of adjoining rooms, flanked by a hole-puncher, bill book and stapler; in the next room, three other men were at large desktop computers, their printers gradually filling files. Operations suggested there was no real hierarchy among the staff—or even among those handling the coal outside. Managers pay and supervise coalmine labour, in any case; mine owners are not directly involved with their organisation—they are veritable sleeping partners.
“It’s all in God’s hands,” Siangshai said, as a way of explaining the order of things, and his own spectacular success; this was hardly an unusual sentiment in the piously Christian Meghalaya, but it suggested the quiet satisfaction of a man quite in control of his own circumstances, someone who had patiently and diligently worked his way to the top, who had provided his own evidence that the meek shall indeed inherit the earth.
There was something of the Gandhian in this man, who sells alcohol but doesn’t drink it, who has watched others turn their wealth into flashy cars and plush accoutrements but continues to live modestly even as he sits atop a veritable fortune. Siangshai has austere habits—no rice, no meat, no sugar, a couple of light meals a day—and few vices, showing no inclination to pamper himself, though he has given money to some of the many supplicants who approach him seeking assistance. Stern and god-fearing, he embodies a set of old-school values: you must work hard so that your children can go to school and then work hard themselves—but not as hard as you had to—and prosper in a manner equal to, or surpassing, your strivings on their behalf, so that they might enjoy their wealth more than you did. After all, what else was money for, if not to provide your progeny with a better and more comfortable life than the one you had?
This question—what is money for?—hangs in the air here, for the pine-filled, mine-riddled Jaintia Hills have become an improbable outpost of India’s new rich. In outlying settlements near Jowai, the biggest town in these once-verdant, now increasingly friable hills, a formerly hardscrabble elite has accumulated vast personal wealth, about which one hears innumerable tales and rumours to this day. (Some have since moved to Shillong, the state capital, but most have retained their country homes.) “People outside of Jowai tell stories of how mine owners pay people to count their money,” a photographer who has been documenting the community for the past year told me. This is likely an exaggeration—though locals say it might once have been true, at least in a few cases—but such hyperbole is evidence of the myths inspired by the mining boom, myths that outsiders relish propagating, in no small part because of the striking disparity between origins and ends. “They have lots of money but not so much education, though the kids are sent to good schools in Shillong or even outside,” the photographer commented. “People like all the good things in life: nice cars, jewellery, branded clothes and shoes.”
| ZUBENI LOTHA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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Donush Siangshai, whose low profile and austere tastes belie his status as the biggest mineowner in Jaintia Hills.
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Indeed, mine owners are routinely ridiculed for what one Indian magazine has called their “‘cassata ice cream’ villas—front porticos plastered with black and gold bathroom tiles—of nouveau riche fantasy”, and frequently criticised for their failure to invest their wealth back into the community. For, even in the Northeast, where the affluent are excessively so, and generally invulnerable to the law, these serendipitously acquired fortunes stand out for their new invincibility. The area’s first coal mine, according to local lore, was worked by a lone Marwari way back in the 1970s. By the 1980s, mining had begun in earnest, and boomed wildly in the absence of any regulation, generating incredible success within a rural community whose luckiest speculators swiftly amassed considerable profits. Well in advance of the fortunes generated after liberalisation in the early 1990s, these northeastern mine owners represented an early blossoming of “new money”, bringing to mind the mercurial ascent of the West’s accidental oil barons.
Several decades on, the mood of a society suddenly flush with fortune still lingers. Showy mine owners’ houses stand out even in Shillong, home to prominent Jaintia Hills mine owners like Thomas Lyngdoh and the politician and Meghalaya MLA Nehlang Lyngdoh. Average quarterly bank deposits are said to range from 5 million to 20 million, according to sources intimate with the tight-lipped mine owning community—and this doesn’t include the considerable amounts that many mine owners, not overly fond of banks, are said to keep at home. Essentially simple people, they approach mining as a safe gamble, a steady process of plugging away at an identified hotspot until it yields its jackpot.
| ZUBENI LOTHA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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Bricks of coal for sale at a local market in Jowai.
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“It’s all a game,” said mine owner Herlington Shadap (pronounced “Shut Up”), when I caught him at breakfast at one of his regular tea stalls. A jolly Jaintia whose family was in the mining business, he had branched off into agriculture and a cement factory he owns. Coal was only one of many businesses, but it was still one of the most compelling. Over pork curry and local bread, Shadap broke down the costs of running a mine: oil and petrol for water pumps, a crane or lift, a drilling machine, blasting, water lifting, transport, hire of dumping area where coal is stored before transport, plus labour. According to Shadap, it takes anywhere between 5 million and 8 million to get up and running, and 1.5 million for each foot of drilling. “People take loans,” he said, waiving these considerable costs. “Maybe a crore or more.” Shrugging his shoulders, he added, “Kya parishaan—koyla ka kaam easy kaam hain. [What difficulty—coal business is easy business.] Just put your supervisor in charge and it happens.”
“I don’t even know where my mine is,” a wizened, middle-aged mine owner named Patti Phawa joked when I met her at an AIDS awareness assembly in a town called Sver. Her husband had owned a mine and when he was unable to run it, being an alcoholic, she had taken over. Her activities had been phased out and her son, the principal of the Ieng Sver Matriculation School in Sver, took care of the business. The mine, as she described it, represented a kind of divine providence: a distant and ever-yielding source of comfort, a necessary ecological evil and an economic boon. “Scientists say Shillong doesn’t need science,” she declared, devoutly. “We just dig and we find coal.”
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Rajiv
8 October 2011
05:04 PM
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Passed Jowai, Khlerihat many a dozen times on my way to my college in Silchar. Was always enamored by the moorish landscape of Ladrymbai, not to mention the perennially grayish skies. Have heard all the coal riches stories from my friends in Jowai. Finally we have them here in print...err.. cyberia. Kudos ... excellent writeup.
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H.H. Mohrmen
1 July 2011
12:01 PM
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Superb Rajni. Well done. Congrat Zub nice photo.
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