In Domiasat, in the West Khasi hills of northeast India there is trouble brewing. The story dates back to 1976, when the Atomic Minerals Division (AMD) of the Atomic Energy Commission set up its Northeastern Circle Office at Shillong, in Meghalaya. The AMD, known successively as the Rare Minerals Survey Unit and the Raw Materials Division and currently renamed the Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research (AMDER), soon commenced uranium exploration in the state and discovered large deposits of uranium oxide in Domiasat and Wakhyn, both in the West Khasi Hills, not far from the border with Bangladesh, in 1984.
The Uranium Corporation of India Ltd (UCIL), a state-owned company under the administrative control of the Department of Atomic Energy, and the only body authorised to mine uranium in India, soon formulated plans to set up a uranium-processing unit at Domiasat. This naturally enough provoked protests by various local organisations, which were conveniently ignored by the company. An assessment of the deposits was completed in 1992 and exploration activities carried on till 1996. By this time public opposition to the project had become strong enough to force AMDER and UCIL to terminate the exploration and abandon the location.
This retreat is clearly only temporary, and plans for mining operations have not been shelved. As the UCIL's website puts it, "[t]he large sandstone type deposit discovered in cretaceous tertiary sedimentary basin … has been planned for commercial exploitation. Different mining methods and extraction techniques have been studied to find the most suitable alternative keeping the cost and the environmental impact as low as possible". Mining has not commenced till date but that is no reason to believe that attempts will not be made in the future. The only factor that has come in the way of extraction is the strong local opposition.
The discovery in Domiasat is far too important for the nuclear establishment in India to give it up merely because of popular objection. For one, this is reckoned to be the largest and richest deposit to be discovered in the country so far. For another, the deposit is very near the surface and therefore will be more economical than the other UCIL mining operations, which are at some depth below the surface. The ore in Domiasat is spread over a 10- square-kilometer area, in deposits varying from eight to 47 meters from the surface. The significance of this can be gauged from the fact that at Jadugoda in the state of Jharkhand, the site of the UCIL's largest uranium mine has been prospected to a depth of about 800 m below the surface and it is expected that it would continue further in depth.