When his friends queued for college acceptance, R Santhala was busy studying the Thadagam Valley plate in Coimbatore and the change had experienced the last decade.
Wanted to know about the ecosystem, the 17-year-old has created a map of the river flow to assess the level of damage to the flow because mining is immoral by illegal kiln brick units.
Santhala, who just finished class XII, was familiar with Medan.
During his frequent trip to the children through the valley, he made him a habit to calculate the flow of water that curled the area.
He decided to map him to better understand the ecology.
“If we want to learn the ecosystem, we need to understand it through the map and see river courses to understand vegetation.
I took the map of the Thadargam valley and began drawing the river ecosystem to understand the river flow,” Santhala said.
After getting the Pool Pool from Google Maps, he learned to work on the Quantum Geographical Information System (QGIS), open source software.
“I also obtained a digital elevation model file (DEM) which is a naked topographic surface of the Japanese space agency.
This has helped me identify plates on the surface and mark the flow path,” he said.
He found unprecedented damage to the natural path of water flow from the Valley of Thadagam.
“If we see the Thadargam valley in Google Earth software, we can see that every flow of water has a path.
Most seasonal flows, their natural path is damaged by illegal mining.
The flow of flow has sunk because the water stagnates in a small pool instead of flowing to Pallam Sanganoor, “he said.
Sanganoor Pallam was fed by the river in the Valley of Thasagam and in turn the waters of the Saranturur tank and tendrils.
“I remember the days of my childhood when a small dam on the flow used to overflow.
Now the Dam checks broken, and water stagnates in small holes,” he said.
Since March, approaching 200 units of brick kilns operating outside the valley closed for opposing environmental norms after the high court order.
S Ganesh, an activist from Thagam said there were only 30 brick combustion units which operated the cottage industry in the Thadagam Valley in 2010.
But in 2018, the number rose to 197 units of large brick kilns.
Santhala is now ready to dig deeper.
He is trying to map the extent to which mining in every hectare of land in the valley to zero in the unit that has carried out maximum mining.