The natural gas development by RIL is adversely impacting agricultural activity in the fertile “rice bowl” area of the Godavari districts in Andhra Pradesh, former Union secretary EAS Sarma said in a letter

Moneylife Digital Team

EAS Sarma, former secretary of the Government of India, has again raised the issue of land subsidence in the Krishna Godavari (KG) basin due to the gas development work being carried out by Reliance Industries (RIL). The natural gas development by RIL is adversely impacting agricultural activity in the fertile “rice bowl” area of the Godavari districts in Andhra Pradesh, Mr Sarma said in a letter sent to chief secretary-AP, secretary-ministry of environment & forests (MOEF) and secretary-ministry of petroleum.

Earlier, the AP High Court had directed the MOEF to re-open the environment impact appraisal of the project to assess the impact of RIL’s gas development project in KG basin. An expert group constituted by the MOEF has since submitted its report to the ministry and at present the matter is pending before the court.

The Krishna-Godavari basin is spread across over 50,000 sq km in the Krishna River and Godavari River basins in Andhra Pradesh. The site is known for the D-6 block where RIL discovered the biggest natural gas reserves in India in 2002. It was also the world's largest gas discovery of 2002.

Recently, Prof G Krishna Rao, a retired Professor of geology, who is also a petitioner in the case pending before the high court, collected extensive evidence on the land subsidence that has taken place in the KG basin. Accordingly, there is increasing ground level evidence of land subsidence taking place in the KG basin as a result of gas development by RIL, Mr Sarma said.



He said, “Such land subsidence has already started affecting the irrigation drainage channels in the basin and agricultural activity, quite significantly, as corroborated by the “crop holiday” announced by the farmers of the Godavari districts during 2011. The farmers have already started feeling the increased cost burden that could be indirectly attributed to land subsidence. The land subsidence has also affected the quality of the ground water aquifers in the area by increasing their salinity.”

Instead of addressing the root cause of the deterioration of agricultural activity, Mr Sarma said, the state government is in a hurry to incur huge expenditure on ‘modernisation’ of the irrigation system that will benefit only the contractors. Even the MOEF and the ministry of petroleum have collectively failed to address this problem and its overall impact on the economy of AP, the former secretary said.

Due to the lethargy shown by the AP government as well as the central ministries, RIL has not cared to identify the magnitude of the problem as it is primarily interested in quickly recovering its investment and earn windfall profits without addressing the larger destruction that is wrought on the environment of the region and the economy of the state, Mr Sarma alleged.

A study done by a team of experts from Andhra University, and Marine and Earth Sciences Group of the Space Application Centre, which include K Nageswara Rao, P Subraelu, KChV Naga Kumar, G Demudu, B Hema Malini, R Ratheesh, S Bhattacharya, AS Rajawat and Ajai, also revealed that the impending sea-level rise would seriously impair agricultural activities in the lower parts of the AP coastal zone, especially in the low-lying Krishna-Godavari twin delta region, which is considered as the rice-bowl of the state.

“If the sea level rises by 0.6 metres as predicted by IPCC (2007), an area of about 532 km including 150 km in the Krishna-Godavari deltas presently lying between the shoreline and the 0.6 metres elevation would be permanently submerged under the future low-tide level. Further an area of about 1,233 km including 894 km area within the Krishna-Godavari deltas lying between the present high tide line (1.5 metres) and the future high-tide line (2.1 metres) would go under the future inter-tidal zone, affecting the cropland over 319 km, aquaculture over 499 km and plantations over 279 km, besides threatening the survival of 1.29 million people living in 282 coastal villages along the entire AP coast,” the study revealed.

Here are the details of the study…