Udaipur's water threatened by India's largest reserve of phosphate

Huddled in the Aravali range in the southern part of Rajasthan about 26 km from Udaipur, is the largest reserve of phosphate in India. Also known as the Jhamarkotra mines, it is the only commercially exploitable rock phosphate deposit in the country. Phosphate is crucial for the sustenance of fertilizer plants but is available here only between 380 and 600 m below ground level, which can only be reached through deep excavation. The phosphate reserves came up for digging in 1968 when the Rajasthan State Mines and Mineral (RSMM) Corporation initiated open cast mining in the area. The mine, which covers an area of 18.44 sqkm and is divided into eleven blocks, contains approximately 74.68 metric tons of rock phosphate. The land was acquired in the late 1960s and then prepared for mining.

Rama Phosphate at Umarda village was the first fertilizer factory to be set up in 1998 near the mine but 7 others factories followed suit. Since then, the environment around has deteriorated and heaps of overburden (waste), barren open lands and felled trees are now characteristics of what was once a forest or cropland. 

Slurry, dust and exhaust -- three times the trouble

Typically phosphate, clay, sand and trace elements are extracted together from the mine. Then, the material is dumped into a pit in the form of a pile, which is technically referred to as ‘matrix’. This matrix is then blasted with high pressure water and the slurry obtained thereafter is processed in a plant called the beneficiation plant. This is where the ore is separated into desirable mineral and unusable waste. Dust and exhaust emissions are by-products of the beneficiation process. After processing, the slurry is dumped into a tailing dam. Many a times, the tailing dam acts as a settling pond and lets the water evaporate. In Jhamarkotra, the slurry is placed in the Bhekda tailing dam, a 50 metre high dam made of concrete.

Tribal communities such as the Bhils, Meenas and Gharasias dwell in scattered hamlets in the area. That they say that the tailing dam is completely filled with silt and that the water spills over is perhaps, not so surprising. According to a study in the area by Jagdish Purohit of SPWD, an NGO which studied the issue, "polluted water normally leaks out through many cracks in the dam’s wall. The base spread area of the dam is porous because of which polluted water contaminates the fresh groundwater of nearby areas. Villagers are experiencing harmful effects of the polluted water. People witnessed immediate death of many monkeys after drinking polluted water and there have been cases of abortion in some other animals. There is a fear that the harmful water may spread through the river to various areas and may create pollution in Jaisamand lake in the coming years". (1)