 Currently there are three blocks that have been handed out one block to ONGC and two blocks to Vedanta for exploration and these two blocks cover a very large area close to what three districts plus Karekal and Pondicherry. All these areas will be covered as part of the exploration license. Part of the exploration blocks are on land and a major portion of it is in the sea in the Bay of Bengal, near shore areas. Exploration part itself would involve the digging of a large number of wells. In the case of Vedanta, it numbers over 300. I don't have the exact number and a smaller number for ONGC which has only one block. It is true that Vedanta has a bad track record not just in Tamil Nadu but all over the world. The issue is that regardless of whether it is Vedanta or ONGC, the consequences for the people of Tamil Nadu and the environment will be roughly the same especially because we are operating in an unregulated environment. The government of Tamil Nadu and the Pollution Control Board has clearly demonstrated it is neither willing to nor will regulate industries like ONGC or the hydrocarbon sector. On the contrary what you also have is instead of pushing for enforcement, you have the district administration and the police working in collusion with environmental offenders and harassing local people, jailing them and intimidating them. These things will only increase because people are not going to, 30 years ago they allowed because they did not know that they were being lied to. Now people know that they are being lied to and they will not allow it easily and so the amount of tension between the state and the people will only increase and the use of police force not to preserve law and order but to protect those who are breaking the law will increase. The exploration that is proposed itself will have very dangerous consequences so especially at sea so there are a couple of things that have been said in both the ONGC and the Vedanta project feasibility reports. One that fracking will be one of the technologies that will be used in places so fracking doesn't have to be used everywhere. Where there is tight gas formations that is gas or oil is located inside extremely tightly formed shale pockets. There in order to liberate that gas and bring it into the oil well you will have to break the shale or the surrounding rock the bedrock and breaking it is done through fracking. Fracking essentially means you pump in very high pressure water so when you're taking a scarce resource we're just saying that Tamil Nadu is going through a massive drought. There is no water to drink but we'll be using something like you know 15,000 liters per day of water for each well just for the fracking purposes. So you're having a very major wasteful use of water to frack the substrate and when you frack because the rock at 3,000 meters has to be broken you create an instability in the land so areas that were geologically stable can become unstable and you can have earthquakes. We already had an earthquake in Pondicherry where earthquake is not it is not common to Tamil Nadu. So we had an earthquake I think it was in 2006 if I'm not mistaken in Pondicherry which is a very rare occurrence and those things will become more frequent and when you have fracking particularly in the local area you will find that there are smaller minor tremors and houses and other structures will be going under. We'll have cracks and things like that. Nobody will pay for it because you can't go and ask the villager goes and ask the police will come again. The other problem with this is that when you dig a well there is a lot of waste that comes out along with oil there's also something called produced water this is fossil water water that was you know the same level as the plants that went to make this fossil fuel. So maybe a several hundred million years ago the water the sea water that was there that is buried under there very highly salty water and full of toxins. So all this toxin rich water will come out as produced water and while it comes out if there is any compromise in the oil wells casing then it'll come in contact with groundwater and it'll contaminate the surrounding groundwater. When it comes out this produced water has to be handled. Now we know that the pollution control board is not looking and ONGC does not care and so this water will be taken and again pumped into some other well and that is what they're doing they're injecting it into deep wells. When they injected again in those areas you have the risk of contaminating the water. If you look at the what happens this is on the land if you look at what happens on the sea a major portion of the proposed exploration by Vedanta and ONGC is in the sea and the way they do exploration is in two parts. The first part is to identify the areas or the potential pockets. So a block is very large it could be several thousand square kilometers. So in the several thousand square kilometers what are the pockets where rich deposits are likely and I identify that by trying to identify the nature of the rock formations under the ground and in order to identify the nature of the rock formations I use a technique called seismic testing which essentially means that I make some explosions from a ship I will trail an array of explosive devices like air guns that will be facing the seas bottom and I will keep exploding it every 15 seconds very loud explosions a big energy wave will go down hit the surface of the sea the bottom of the sea and then it'll be reflected back and depending upon the waves that are received they would be able to tell to some idea they have a better idea of the nature of the rock formations below and they will then be able to say that these places are likely to be the places where an exploratory well well has to be dug now these explosions are extremely dangerous for local fish you take an aquarium tank and tap it the fish will run you think about putting an explosion in the sea so there'll be no fish in the surrounding areas so you'll have an the fish of folk with empty nets and not only that there are some marine mammals and some of the creatures like octopus, dolphins, whales all of these are found in the Delta region and these these are animals that navigate using the same echo process so they put out sound energy they get the waves back and through that echolocation they navigate they are very sensitive to these to the vibrations to under undersea submarine vibrations and there you go and put a bomb like this you can kill them their diaphragms can explode and they can die and so these are all protected species they're endangered species they're very important for the the biodiversity of the local seas so on the one hand you have a huge economic impact on the local fisherfolk on the other hand you'll have a huge impact on the biodiversity which has a longer-term impact on the local fishing economy as well