India grapples with coal's environmental, social consequences

India's coal conundrum

India is growing. It needs energy, and coal is cheap and plentiful. Now the country is grappling with the environmental and social consequences.

Photo: Boys play in Pasa, one of the villages threatened by Adani's proposed PEKB mine. (Supplied: Areeb Hashmi)

"It's not by choice. It's by compulsion," says Anil Swarup, secretary of India's Ministry of Coal. In India, 300 million people live without electricity.

Mr Swarup's job is to boost production at Coal India, the state-owned company that currently produces the bulk of India's coal. He is aiming for a billion tonnes of coal a year by 2020.

"We don't have any other option," he says when I visit him at his office in Delhi.

"Presently, per capita consumption of energy in India is at the level of late 19th and early 20th century US.

"If you're going to be called a developed nation, that will require a lot of power. Until an alternative becomes available, there is no other option but to bank on coal."

Coal is the biggest single contributor to global warming, responsible for 46 per cent of carbon emissions. Experts say the planet will cook if humans do not leave most of the world's coal in the ground.

But developing countries like India argue that they need to burn even more coal than they are burning now, if they are to provide their rapidly growing populations with energy.

Photo: Anil Swarup, the secretary of India's Ministry of Coal. (Supplied: Areeb Hashmi)

At the Paris climate summit in November 2015, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, declared that in the 21st century "the world must turn to the sun to power the future".

Mr Modi launched an "International Solar Alliance" to encourage investment in solar energy, and promised that India would install 175 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2022.

He described the alliance as "the sunrise of new hope, not just for clean energy but for villages and homes still in darkness", but for villagers in the coal-rich state of Chattisgarh in central India, this sunrise of new hope still seems a world away.

Adani, the same Indian company that wants to mine coal in Australia's Galilee Basin, already has one mine in the Hasdeo-Arend region of Chattishgarh, and plans to expand its operations here. If Adani gets its way, five villages and large areas of the nearby forest will be bulldozed to make way for mining.

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In February this year I visited Sahli, one of the threatened villages. At noon, in the centre of the village, two small children took it in turns to work a creaking pump handle at the village well.

Water gushed into their battered metal bucket, goats bleated and from across the fields came the rumble of coal trucks on the main road. Otherwise, the village was quiet. Most of the villagers were working in the fields or the nearby forest.

Sahli lies in Mowgli country. Many of the people of Sahli are Gonds, indigenous people whose ancestors Rudyard Kipling used as models for the villagers in the stories of The Jungle Book.

In an open-air hall outside the village, surrounded by dry rice paddies, I met a delegation of men from the Gram Sabha — the village council. The chief spokesman is Chetu Ram, a village elder.

"We are like kings on our land, we tribal people," he told me.

"If our land is taken away from us today there will be no one to look out for us."

Mr Ram is a commanding presence. Born in 1942, before the British left India, he looks as fit as a fiddle, and speaks into my microphone as though addressing the nation.

Photo: Chetu Ram, the head man of Sahli village, has campaigned against the PEKB coal mine. (Supplied: Areeb Hashmi)

He and his fellow villagers have made it plain that they will fight for their land and their way of life.

"We will not let them end our settlements like this," he says. "If our land is gone then everything is gone."

Under India's constitution, the land rights of India's adivasis, or tribal people, are protected by law. But these rights are increasingly coming into conflict with coal. A massive seam bearing a billion tonnes of coal runs right under Sahli and the surrounding forest.

"This is an area of rich, dense forests. The forests are rich in biodiversity and wildlife habitat," says Alok Shukla, who works with Jan Abhivakti, a local grassroots organisation.

"Previously the Environment Ministry had declared this whole area a no-go area for mining. They stated that mining would not be allowed here."

But in 2011, the then environment minister, Jairem Ramesh, approved Adani's PEKB coal mine just a few kilometres from Sahli, against advice from his own department and the Forest Advisory Committee.

Mr Ramesh told me in an interview at his home in Delhi that there was an "overriding economic interest" in the mine proceeding.

With the support of Jan Abhivakti and a local lawyer, Sudiep Shrivastasa, the villagers fought back. Shrivastasa filed a petition in India's National Green Tribunal (NGT) challenging the approval for the mine. The case was run by Ritwick Dutta, an environmental lawyer with Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE), based in Delhi.

"The principal issue was loss of dense forest," Mr Dutta says. "India has the largest number of forest-dependent communities in the world."

Photo: Adani's PEKB coal mine is just a few kilometres from the village of Sahli. (Supplied: Areeb Hashmi)

But it is not just humans who depend on the forest for their livelihood.

"What was very important in this entire issue was the fact that that this is an elephant corridor," Mr Dutta says.

"Maintaining that corridor is critical. If you disturb the corridor, you increase human‑elephant conflict."

Elephants can travel up to 1,000 kilometres in the course of a year, grazing as they go.

"If there are any houses in their way they destroy them and eat all the crops in our fields," says Ram Pravesh, a villager from Sahli. "They'll kill any animal or human that gets in their way."

In 2014, the National Green Tribunal overturned the minister's approval for Adani's PEKB coal mine. In its decision, the NGT said the minister had given too much weight to human or "anthropocentric interests", and not enough to "eco-centric interests" — the preservation of the elephants' habitat and their ability to move freely along the corridor.

Mr Pravesh says if it were a choice between a coal mine and dealing with the depredations of elephants, he and his fellow villagers would prefer the elephants.

"We can learn to coexist with elephants," he says, "but we won't give our land and forest to Adani. They will only destroy it."

Adani are appealing the NGT's decision to India's Supreme Court.

A spokesperson for the Adani Group said nobody from the company was available for interview.

Credits

• Reporter: Tom Morton
• Research and travel funding: Australian Research Council discovery grant for "The Coal Rush and Beyond"
• Additional funding: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney