Fires of Jharia spell death and disease for villagers.

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The inhabitants of a remote village at the heart of India’s coal industry brave deadly sinkholes and toxic gases simply to survive.

Main image: Villagers carry coal that has been scavenged illegally at one of Jharia’s many state-owned coal mines. All photographs by Tom Maguire
▼ In the village of Liloripathra, in a remote corner of India’s eastern Jharkhand state, mother-of-three Sushila Devi grips the hands of two women sitting on either side of her. Coalfires spew clouds of smoke into the already heavy, polluted air.
At about 8pm, a policeman cradling a small body wrapped in black plastic bags emerges through the smoke and the crowds that have gathered around her home. He has come to deliver the body of her 13-year-old daughter Chanda, killed along with two others from the village when a coal mine caved in on top of them. They had been scavenging in a colliery operated by Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), a subsidiary of state-owned Coal  India.
“Chanda was a very beautiful, but quiet girl. I can’t believe God gave such a girl to me,” Devi recalls, after identifying the body.
“In the mornings after she’d woken up, she’d comb her hair and put lipstick on and then ask me how she looked before she left for the mine. That was her routine every day.”
At dawn the next morning, the village mourns as the victims’ bodies are loaded into the back of a truck and transported to the banks of the river Damodar, which straddles the border separating the states of Jharkhand and West Bengal. In nearby woodland, a group of men from the village take turns to dig three shallow graves, before bringing the bodies to be buried.

Relatives console Sushila Devi outside her home on the morning of her daughter’s burial
Custom dictates that women should not attend burials, but Chanda’s younger sister Laxhmi has persuaded the men to make an exception for her. Shrouded in white, she watches from a distance as her sister’s blackened body is lowered into the ground.
Accidents and fatalities of this nature are not uncommon across the 110 square miles of land that make up the Jharia coalfields, the heartland of India’s coal industry. According to the ministry of coal’s annual report  for 2017- 18, BCCL reported 27 serious incidents and 15 fatalities between 2015 and 2017. Local activists believe the numbers could be much higher; the data doesn’t include accidents that took place outside the mines, or the deaths of those who weren’t employed by BCCL.
BCCL have been running the mines in Jharia since the government nationalised the coking coal industry in 1971. In a rush to curtail financial losses and meet the country’s staggering energy demands, BCCL began switching from underground mining to open cast mining (where coal is mined from the surface), an easier and more profitable method of extraction. Over time, vast expanses of land were stripped and blasted into 400ft-deep pits, which today produce more than  32 m tonnes of coal a year.
But this unregulated expansion has been at the expense of the communities who once lived off the land. With few jobs available to those without a formal education, many of Jharia’s residents work as coal loaders for roughly 1,000 rupees (about £11) a week, or risk their lives scavenging coal to scrape a living.
Three miles from Liloripathra, in Laltanganj village, a crater of fire – one of at least 67 fires that  have been burning under Jharia  since 1916–  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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mazherali

We should be putting our efforts on cleaner sources of energy, education, affordable health care, etc. rather than earning the dubious distinction of being the largest arms importers in the world