The mountains in Sikkim are being drilled with explosives to make long tunnels to dam rivers for hydel power projects, despite warnings of geological damage. Old Suleiman Rai's house, made of wood and standing on wooden pillars, shakes as the skies boom with deafening sounds of a hundred thunderbolts. The mountain on which his house stands at Kajur village in Singhik in North Sikkim is being burrowed for a 9-km tunnel for a hydel project on the Teesta. The blasting has just begun. It is somewhere in the middle of the mountain and is rather inaccessible from the road except for some tough grasses one can hold on to as one descends. The mountain is moist and noisy with streams of water flowing everywhere, one of them filling a vessel kept by his wife Martha. Will these continue to flow once the ground underneath is blasted for a tunnel? There are 60 houses in all and are not included among the project affected families. This is just the beginning of the work on the tunnel which will divert the Teesta before it is dammed for production of 1,200 Mw hydel power for Teesta Urja Limited. In a neighbouring mountain, already a 22-km tunnel has been successfully drilled to reach West Sikkim for another hydel plant. More mountains are in queue to be blasted by 26 different companies for tunnels varying in length from 9 km to 22 km. The people at risk are a population of 500,000, besides rare wild animals and birds living in forests that form 90 per cent of the area in a state which is in seismic zone 4, the second highest quake prone zone in the country. At least two very low intensity tremors occur in Sikkim every week, which is considered normal. Landslides are frequent and one can hear slopes collapsing even as one moves around in the mountains, whether it is in West or North Sikkim. Of course, there were warnings from the state's own Mines, Minerals and Geology Department about the implications of such rampant blasting of mountains prior to one of the projects, which the government of Sikkim chose to ignore. The project has been now completed. The report says: "Numerous slopes and fissures had developed all along the slope