Cultural Heritage impacted by mining

MY VALLEY : NORTH KARANPURA

You lie sedated as the lusting of their machines

Do with you as they please ;

The masters in white shirts and trousers

Uncover your most secret places;

And we make them our shrines of pilgrimage –

This worship is the debauchery I cannot tolerate

My Valley.

You whom I knew as an innocent teenager,

And in whom my first passions were felt ;

That passionate embrace of peacefulness and calm

Which have been torn away most brutally from you

My Valley.

Now they come to possess you again these monsters

And helpless and paralysed I stand before them

Your hand in mine in this brief winter sunshine.

Summer soon will suck out the  famished spring

When their mining begins in your depths

My Valley.

I only ask for your reassurance that I may stay

And that you will not submit passively,

But that you and I will meet these men

And their machines, and their secret ideology,

And strive to fend off their advances somehow,

My Valley.

And I know that eventually we shall triumph.

                                                        Bulu Imam (13-2-1998)

How green was my Valley… overlooking Piperwar opencast mine

The Karanpura Valley

The natural environment before and after opencast mining operations

Damodar river 30 km upstream from Piperwar and opposite at  Piperwar Opencast Mine

 Satpahar Range (Ashoka Opencast Mine, Western Karanpura Valley)

Cultural Heritage
impacted by mining