The dust is so thick it starts swirling inside the bus as we lurch towards Lele. Near the Tika Bhairab shrine, we find the reason for the dust storm: hillsides gouged out by stone quarries.

The stone mining is feeding Greater Kathmandu's unrelenting construction boom. The trucks transporting the rocks have destroyed an already bumpy road. The ride is nauseating as the bus skids and bounces along the narrow trail pock-marked with pot holes. Come monsoon, this is sure to be a river of mud. The hills around here are increasingly landslide-prone. Quarrying by freelancers and contractors has become Lele's main industry. The incessant drone of the drilling and pounding carries easily across this scenic valley, punctuated only occasionally by jets descending into Kathmandu airport.

From the plane, Lele is a pretty U-shaped valley nestled on the flanks of Phulchoki with the idyllic Nallu river meandering through dazzlingly yellow mustard terraces in full bloom. But this agrarian facade hides the grim hillside truth: indiscriminate quarrying, especially toward the eastern and northern ends of Lele.

The ugliness reaches it height straight up the road from the main bazar, past the water-bottling venture aptly named "Mr Cool". Here you find yourself entering a canyon-like section of Lele, which looks like Tora Bora after a pounding by daisy-cutters from a B-52.

The quarries have gutted the hills on either side of the dirt road, creating mini-caves and hollows, which could implode anytime. Rocks jut out from or sit precariously on the scarred hillsides, threatening the workers, passersby and livestock below. Dust-covered workers, mainly Tamang, work the quarries unsupervised. Bollywood music blares from a cheap Khasa radio placed strategically on a boulder. Quarrying provides a less-than-minimum-wage along with health hazards to the worker, nothing more. The whole quarrying scene on this stretch reeks of illegitimacy. It's got the feel of a "hit and run" or "hit and miss" fly-by-night variety. The owners and contractors are nowhere to be seen.

As more and more hillsides in Lele succumb to the ravages of quarrying, the trend increasingly threatens biodiversity, watersheds, human life and livestock from landslides or falling rocks, the health of the Lele communities from increasing noise and dust pollution, and road safety. It will, moreover, create dependency on externally provided temporary jobs (the cursed precursor to rural-to-urban migration) and sever the eco-demographic (man-land) production relations that existed here for centuries that made Lele what it is.

This brutally exploitative extraction can surely be plotted in the larger scale of Valley-periphery relations. The people of Lele, or any other village on the Valley rim, have never been compensated for being environmental custodians. If the people of Lele had been compensated in the past for protecting watershed functions (water flows clear and plenty even in the dry season and is tapped by Mr Cool), they would not have allowed the contractors to come in and rape the hillsides.

If we are not to sit in judgment over cement plants and brick kilns and quarries we must ensure that the city pays for conservation action on the periphery. If the centre is to continue to sing the song of community forestry success, they must pay for every green patch on the rim-for the effort, for the abstinence that the periphery must practice for the greater common good.

Whenever urban folks complain about air pollution in Kathmandu Valley (see page 1,4-5) their collective action merely has the net effect of forcing old, worn-out gas-guzzlers to ply the rural routes instead. The unspoken development paradigm has been "dump the failures of planning (if any) or any negative externalities in the front or backyard of the rural poor".

This probably explains why many quarries and brick kilns have conveniently relocated or even flourished further and further from the urban core-far from the carping, madding crowd of enlightened elite. Whether one likes it or not, quarrying has found a perfect niche in Lele, as have countless failures of national and district level development planning across much of the hill region of Nepal: out of the ear- and eye-shot of the Centre.

Lele is perfect for this illegal extraction and trade. It does not sit on any major highway. It is not on the way to either Nagarkot or Pokhara. It does not lie on a hiking biking trail where development people may stumble upon it. It is the back of beyond for Valley people. Out of sight, out of mind.

Will a judge of the Supreme Court, treating this as a public interest litigation, initiate suo moto action? The idea is not to shut down the quarries in typical knee-jerk reaction, but ensure minimum wages and protection for the workers, environmentally sensitive extraction and a percentage of profits from every truckload for the villages that sit precarious on the hillsides.