The cracks in India’s underground coal fires
A week after returning from Jharia the evidence of my handkerchief was that there was plenty of coal dust still to emerge from my respiratory system.
Our team had just returned from a shocking sight, the burning coalfields near India’s coal capital Dhanbad.
It was undoubtedly a form of hell.
Lax standards in the coal industry over decades led too much of the area sitting on a bed of underground coal fires. Villages have been swallowed by the earth, and there is a choking cloud of acrid smoked carbon.
But nothing prepared me for the sight of what we came to nickname “Satan’s womb”. As I strolled through the Boka Pahari village (the Fool’s Hill) two locals shouted at me to follow them down slowly.
Hidden on one side of the path was the “Ag” or a fire – a molten crevasse at least ten foot deep, emitting fierce heat rays. The villagers told me it appeared only eight days previously.
Such cracks in the earth had appeared under people’s houses, we were told, killing entire families in one instance. One village was basically gone bar the eerie outline of an abandoned Hindu temple perched next to a mine.
There, Nagar Sur told me: “Our children can’t live well here. How can we live here? I am only 34-years-old but look at my face I look like I’m 50, don’t I?”
As well as the deaths there are serious health problems – one worker said that their treatment was “worse than under the British era”.
Channel 4’s excellent Unreported World last year, Children of the Inferno, investigated this issue in depth and is worth watching. The problems have not gone away.
But it doesn’t stop everyone’s getting in on the act. Further fires arise from the amateur coking of raw coal. A basket of the so-called black diamonds can fetch 30 rupees or about 40 pence. But the locals pay the ultimate price in the heart of India’s coal belt.
I put this to a senior government minister. He told me: “We have a very ambitious plan for reconstructing the entire Jharia coal belt – this will involve time to search livelihoods in alternative occupations but I can tell you it’s not a pretty sight – from an individual point of view and from the environment with all that coal burning in the atmosphere,” he said.
But coal is India’s future.
Four to five hundred years worth of coal reserves lie under India’s soil. So even the fires that crack open the land with deadly molten chasms, won’t slow its use. Even if solar, wind, hydro and nuclear take off, coal will represent 50 per cent of India’s electricity generation in 2030.
The Indian government is keen to get hold of cleaner coal technologies. However, the evidence from the coal heartlands is that the sheer speed of India’s coal run shows little pause for the local environment, let alone the global environment.
On Wednesday Channel 4 begins a special season of programming from India. You can view all the reports, blogs and articles in full here.