RORO VILLAGE, India (AP) — Asbestos waste spills in a gray gash down the flank of a lush green hill above tribal villages that are home to thousands in eastern India. Neither the government nor the Indian company that ran the mines from 1963 to 1983 has made any move to clean up the estimated 700,000 tons of asbestos tailings left scattered across several kilometers (miles) of hilly mining area. The country keeps no statistics on how many people have been sickened or died from exposure to the mineral, which industry and many government officials insist is safe when mixed with cement. Most services and industries were nationalized, but some heavy industries and mining were opened to private companies, many of which operated opaquely. Kalyan Bansingh, lead plaintiff in the court case, worked more than a decade building scaffolding inside newly blasted mining caverns. Like many laborers across India, he took to chewing an unrefined sugar product called jaggery in the misguided belief that airborne fibers would adhere to the sticky bolus and stay out of his lungs. HIL said it followed strict health and safety policies, and that "no health or environmental damage was reported during the mine operations." "The idea that the environment, something that has always provided and been taken for granted, could be causing them harm is a notion that just doesn't occur to them," said T.K.