Coal India un-Limited
20 images Created 31 Mar 2011
My first close encounter with coal came in 1999. That August, on one of my trips across India, I spent some time in Uttar Pradesh. I decided to take the short bus ride from Varanasi to Chandasi, a small town that hosts what is considered the biggest coal depot in Asia. I was dropped off at Mughal Sarai train station, about two kilometers from the depot. Many of the trains that passed through the place transported coal, which is brought in from Jharkhand and West Bengal and is then distributed to other parts of the country. Everywhere, hundreds of men and women shoveled and carried coal onto and off of trucks. The air was thick with dust; like a layer of delicate black velvet, fine particles of coal settled over everything—roads, shops, homes and people. Nothing and no one was spared.
I spent a few days in Chandasi, meeting people and taking photographs, but I knew there was much more to see of India’s coal saga, and that the impact of the industry was most stark nearer to the mines themselves.
The labourers I met, both men and women, were mostly from migrant families that had migrated here over half a century ago. They worked almost constantly through the day, but during lulls they would sleep out on jute cots beneath a livid sun. The men, especially, drank heavily every night. On slow days, I often sat with resting workers, sharing cups of tea while they told me about their lives. Sometimes the conversation went nowhere, and we would just sit quietly. I’m sure that they wondered why I spent so much time there.
On that trip, and on a few brief trips back over the next two years, the conditions I saw at East Bussuria and elsewhere were desperate. Jharkhand boasts of over 72,000 million tons of coal—29 percent of India’s reserves—and approximately 32 million tonnes of this are extracted each year. In Jharia, a major mining town about eight kilometers from Dhanbad, they were first started by private mining companies who came to the area about a hundred years ago, and are now a constant of life.
Seven years later, in September 2010, I returned to Dhanbad, wondering if anything had changed. Little had. Living conditions in the villages had not improved. More land stood denuded, and underground fires had spread farther still, causing severe damage to more homes.
I returned to Dhanbad again in January of 2018 to further document changes here as extraction of coal has shifted from underground mining to open-cast. A sense of urgency prevails among communities around these coal mines.
On all my visits, a sense of menace attended me through much of my work. One day on my trip in 2010, as I walked by a mine taking pictures, a motorcyclist, dressed in a nondescript shirt and trousers, stopped me to ask what I was doing there. I gave him some vague response. When I asked him who he was, he replied “Vigilance,” and rode away.
I spent a few days in Chandasi, meeting people and taking photographs, but I knew there was much more to see of India’s coal saga, and that the impact of the industry was most stark nearer to the mines themselves.
The labourers I met, both men and women, were mostly from migrant families that had migrated here over half a century ago. They worked almost constantly through the day, but during lulls they would sleep out on jute cots beneath a livid sun. The men, especially, drank heavily every night. On slow days, I often sat with resting workers, sharing cups of tea while they told me about their lives. Sometimes the conversation went nowhere, and we would just sit quietly. I’m sure that they wondered why I spent so much time there.
On that trip, and on a few brief trips back over the next two years, the conditions I saw at East Bussuria and elsewhere were desperate. Jharkhand boasts of over 72,000 million tons of coal—29 percent of India’s reserves—and approximately 32 million tonnes of this are extracted each year. In Jharia, a major mining town about eight kilometers from Dhanbad, they were first started by private mining companies who came to the area about a hundred years ago, and are now a constant of life.
Seven years later, in September 2010, I returned to Dhanbad, wondering if anything had changed. Little had. Living conditions in the villages had not improved. More land stood denuded, and underground fires had spread farther still, causing severe damage to more homes.
I returned to Dhanbad again in January of 2018 to further document changes here as extraction of coal has shifted from underground mining to open-cast. A sense of urgency prevails among communities around these coal mines.
On all my visits, a sense of menace attended me through much of my work. One day on my trip in 2010, as I walked by a mine taking pictures, a motorcyclist, dressed in a nondescript shirt and trousers, stopped me to ask what I was doing there. I gave him some vague response. When I asked him who he was, he replied “Vigilance,” and rode away.
