Miners illegally break down and collect fresh coking coal from inside a BCCL state-run mine, November 2015. Melanie Cura Daball. All rights reserved.Jharia, at the heart of India’s largest coal belt, within the northeast state of Jharkand, sits on one of the world’s largest coal reserves. What would seem to be an economic blessing, however, has become a curse for the local workers and villagers of the Dhanbad district. While coal-burning power plants play a vital role in India’s endeavour to become a regional superpower, local villagers and workers are paying the price: forced to endure poisonous air, scorching heat and hazardous fires.
Living on fire
On the outskirts of Jharia one of more than 70 large open fires burns at night billowing noxious fumes into the atmosphere, November 2015. Melanie Cura Daball. All rights reserved.Jharia’s vast opencast mines lie on top of underground fires that have been burning for over a century now. A shift from underground to opencast mining and dramatic lateral expansion have caused these flames to erupt into more than 70 open coal seam fires on the surface of the 110 square mile coalfields. Noxious gases have been fuming from fissures around houses which frequently collapse as the fires blaze their trails under the villages. Over the past three decades, Jharia’s once abundant woodlands have become a blighted landscape of contaminated soil, water and air.
In the name of economic development, the prevailing greed for profit, vested interests and the hunger for power have also left the region — one of the most mineral-rich in the country— economically backward. While India’s metropolises like Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai reap benefits from the opencast mining in the Dhanbad district, “development” has further marginalised the local poor and deepened social inequality across the state.
