One afternoon in 2010, in a hilltop village called Kete in the forests of central India, a man arrived at the doorstep of Shri Prasad Khusro. Khusro shared a mud hut with his wife, children, elderly parents, and siblings, on land where his family had lived for many generations. The man introduced himself as a collector, or local administrator, and told Khusro that a coal company wanted to mine there. If his family agreed to move, they would receive thirty-three lakh rupees, or, at the time, about seventy thousand dollars. Khusro had never seen that much money in his life. “You’ll become really big people,” the man told him. “You can buy a bungalow, a car, and even pass the inheritance on to your children.”
Khusro was tempted by the offer. His family made a living by foraging in Hasdeo Arand, as the local forest is called, and by running a corner shop that sold chips and biscuits. As members of the Gond tribe, they are considered Adivasis, or original inhabitants of the subcontinent—one of the most marginalized groups in India. The man seemed very knowledgeable, and he was offering Khusro a status that he could only dream of attaining. “I didn’t finish my schooling beyond the seventh grade,” Khusro told me. Out of caution, he asked whether the offer could be made in writing, and the man shrugged off those concerns. Khusro remembers him saying, “Why do you need a piece of paper when my word is my stamp?”
Kete was torn down. The hilltop was levelled. In its place, the Adani Group, a conglomerate run by Asia’s richest man, Gautam Adani, dug an enormous pit—its largest operational coal mine in India, known as the Parsa East and Kanta Basan. Today, the mine stretches over two thousand seven hundred hectares—almost eight times the size of Central Park—and looks much like the pitted mining regions of West Virginia. Drills regularly pierce the earth in search of coal. A tiered pile of rock prevents boulders from tumbling into other parts of the mine.
Khusro split the compensation money between himself and two brothers. Their displacement from Kete, however, broke his family apart. “We are all scattered now,” he told me. “We were fooled in every way.” A few years ago, his younger cousin bought a motorbike with his own household’s compensation money; soon afterward, he died in a crash. At times, Khusro has gone months without seeing family members in person. His parents now live in the district of Korba, some seventy miles away.
The Hasdeo forest spans more than six hundred and fifty square miles and nurtures endangered species, an elephant corridor, valuable water reserves, and thousands of forest-dwellers like Khusro and his family. The estimated five billion tons of coal that lie underneath the forest, however, have made it one of the most contested sites in India. More than a decade ago, villagers created the Hasdeo Aranya Bachao Sangharsh Samiti—the Save Hasdeo Forest Committee—and argued that planned mines have disregarded the Forest Rights Act, which enshrines tribal land rights and requires the consideration of elected village councils. Global activist groups got involved; the government ministries in charge of coal and forests declared it a “no-go area” for coal mines. But, a year later, the environment minister approved the construction of the mines anyway.
In August, I flew to Raipur, the enterprising capital city of the state of Chhattisgarh, and hired a driver for the six-hour journey north to Hasdeo. As urban towers and malls gave way to little shop fronts, and then to verdant forest canopy, the only thing that remained constant was the bumpy highway that we were driving on. At one time, villagers told me, a line of trucks heaped with coal clogged this road. Then Adani laid a railway through several villages to the state of Rajasthan, which buys the fossil fuel for electricity.
About a decade ago, many of Kete’s displaced residents were relocated to a village called Basen, which is situated a few miles away from the edge of the mine. As part of a rehabilitation package, a new colony was erected, made up of concrete homes that share a toilet complex. But most residents I spoke with, including Khusro, declined to squeeze their families into its tight two-room homes. Instead, Khusro spent a portion of the money he received to build a mud hut nearby.
When I arrived at Khusro’s new home, he invited me inside, pulled out plastic chairs, and called his wife to make us some tea. He was dark-skinned and muscular, with shoulder-length black hair. A silver amulet, in honor of the gods of the Gond tribe, dangled from his neck.
Khusro’s hut, which surrounds a small courtyard and herb garden, was sprawling by local village standards. Some of its walls were made of brick, a rare commodity for impoverished villagers, but the roof above our heads consisted of wooden beams and rope. Water dripped erratically from a tap. Outside, I could hear heavy rain and the snapping sounds of electricity. He wished that he had never agreed to leave his home. “Today, when we sit down to eat, I feel like crying,” he told me. “Even talking to you hurts.”
When Khusro arrived here from Kete, he lost track of many of his fellow-villagers. “We still don’t know where everyone went,” he told me, shaking his head. Suddenly, he looked at me—a dominant-caste, English-speaking outsider whom he called didi, or sister—and said, “We are not free like the way you are free.”
The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi—a right-wing authoritarian and a close ally of Adani—has depicted coal as a crucial engine of India’s future growth. As part of his Atmanirbhar Bharat campaign, which aims to make the country “self-reliant,” Modi presided over an event called Unleashing Coal, which auctioned forty-one new tracts of land for coal mining. “If India is the fourth-largest coal producer in the world, then why can’t we become the largest exporter?” he asked.
India is already the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases—and, as unprecedented heat waves foreshadowed this summer, it will be among the nations most devastated by climate change. Meanwhile, coal is responsible for a larger share of global warming than any other source of energy. Last year, at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, India pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2070, in part by increasing tree cover and cutting back on the burning of fossil fuels. But mining in forests runs the risk of undermining both of these strategies at the same time. In Hasdeo Arand, mining not only increases India’s supply of fossil fuels but could ultimately destroy an estimated eighty per cent of the forest, along with roughly thirty villages, according to an official at a local environmental group. (Neither Prime Minister Modi’s office nor the Adani Group responded to a request for comment.)
Even as the Adani Group expands its coal-mining operations, it is also touting its contributions to sustainability. Though the company controls coal deposits around the world and controls a third of India’s coal imports, it also operates one of the world’s largest solar-power plants and plans to funnel tens of billions of dollars into green-energy investments. A company brochure declares, “Achieving the right balance between growth and goodness while providing energy needed today as well as tomorrow has never felt so vital.”
When I asked Khusro about the growth of India’s economy—as the Adani Group points out, India must meet the energy demands of 1.4 billion people and counting—he laughed bitterly. “Our ancestors were alive and thriving before all this talk about growth,” he said, pointing in the direction of the coal mine. “Tell me, how much progress have we made since?”
In the middle of our conversation, Khusro got up from his chair and opened a nearby cupboard—a steel Godrej almirah, the staple vault of Indian households. He pulled out a framed photograph, which had gone blurry where monsoon rainwater had dripped onto it. I could make out an old Gond man, bare-chested and cross-legged atop a big rock in the forest. A stream flowed in the background. “It’s my uncle sitting in his favorite bathing spot,” Khusro told me. He pointed to his uncle’s dreadlocks. “He would only brush his hair three times a year.”
Khusro took this photo in 2006. He spent five thousand rupees, equivalent to sixty-one dollars, on the camera—his first-ever purchase with the savings from his old shop. “I wanted a picture of the man who raised me like his own son,” he told me. The photograph is the only family heirloom that remains from that time. After Kete was torn down, his uncle passed away, from what Khusro believes was stress. When Khusro’s young son came over and playfully tried to tug the picture out of his hands, Khusro shook his head and held on tightly.
Khusro is now part of the Save Hasdeo Committee, and most afternoons he attends meetings at its main protest site, on a hill near the coal mine in neighboring Hariharpur. He shares his own family’s story as a warning to other Adivasis. Once, he spoke out against mining at a village-council meeting. Afterward, he told me, a police officer came up to him and said, “These people with money could easily make you disappear if you speak too much. You’re no bigger than an ant to them.” Khusro replied, “What good can their money do? They gave me so much of it before, and look at me now.”
The reserves around Kete were supposed to last thirty years, according to government documents, but much of the coal has already been depleted. Now, the Adani Group intends to mine other parts of the forest. In two nearby villages, Ghatbarra and Parsa, residents are being courted to relocate for coal mining. The Adani Group has built a large, modern school where local kids can learn English, and is advertising well-paying jobs. Still, some are resisting: last October, some two hundred and fifty villagers made headlines by marching a hundred and eighty-five miles in protest. In my three weeks spent in the area, many people told me they would continue to protest so that their villages would not go the way of Kete. “If we don’t fight for our land today, our future generations will be completely wiped out,” said Jainandan Singh Porte, a villager from Ghatbarra.
The Adani Group is also trying to expand its mines to Basen—a place that was supposed to offer Khusro and his family a fresh start. Shortly before my visit, Khusro told me, collectors knocked on his door once again and asked him to vacate. They’ve come by many times in the past year, he said. This time, though, he is adamant that he will refuse their offers and stay put. “This is my forest,” he said. “Where will we go if we become homeless again?”
(Astha Rajvanshi is a reporter in London who covers human rights and marginalized communities. Courtesy: The New Yorker, a US magazine renowned for its in-depth reporting, political and cultural commentary, fiction, poetry, and humor.)
