The elephant in the room: A graphic narrative on coal mining in the Hasdeo forest

Sunday | 1.30 pm Bilaspur Bus Terminus, Chhattisgarh The Korba and Surguja districts are accessible from Raipur through rail and road. We’ve taken a bus from Raipur to Bilaspur and now another bus from Bilaspur to Morga, after which we will take yet another bus to Madanpur, which is our destination. Chhattisgarh has no public bus transport system. All the buses are private and collect cash from passengers; no tickets are issued. The roads farther away from Raipur are awful and a journey of 200 km can take up to seven hours or more. The buses are spacious, rickety and filthy; the view — wonderful. The landscape is largely uniform: paddy fields and small forests peppered with hills and factories. Unlike most other rural landscapes in India, there are hardly any temples or other places of worship. [imgcenter]

[/imgcenter] Sunday | 5.30 pm Madanpur, Sarguja District, Chhattisgarh Sehr — my friend and guide, who has been here on and off for the last three months — and I are staying at the office of the Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, a local movement to save the Hasdeo forest from indiscriminate coal mining as a result of the coal block privatisation earlier this year. The lead up to privatisation of coal blocks, however, started as far back as 2011 when the environment minister of the previous government was ‘promoted’ and replaced , allegedly to ease the clearance for zones hitherto demarcated as no-go for mining. The move was meant to improve mining technology but several vital safeguards against exploitation of human and natural resources were diluted . The industrial district of Korba that we crossed to come here, with its power plants, aluminium factories and eye-popping levels of air pollution in what used to be a large forest, serves as a reminder of what Sarguja can become. S, a newly employed resident researcher and activist, brings Sehr up to speed on whatever has happened since she was last here, while preparing rice and dal for dinner. I offer to make some egg bhurji for our meal and they let me, because “How wrong can one go with egg bhurji?". I observe that the rice is as good as it is back home in Andhra Pradesh, and not like “North Indian rice”. “This is central India”, I am corrected, a region that happens to be known as the rice bowl of India. We sleep on charpoys, covering ourselves with rugs. The girls are in the living room; I am put up in the office. I stare at the large flex print map of the Hasdeo basin, trying to take in as much information as possible as I drift off to sleep. I want to wake up early to try and catch “tower”, as signal is called here, for my cell phone. [imgcenter]

[/imgcenter] Monday | 5.15 am On the road  to Madanpur, outside the Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti office I manage to catch “tower” right under the third twig of the fifth branch from the south eastern part of the mango tree. I call my father because my parents haven’t heard from me in over a day. “I am just outside the office… No Appa, I didn’t get eaten up by a tiger… No, like I already told you, there has been no Maoist activity here in the last 10 years… Yes it’s a really beautiful place. Every shade of green, now that it’s monsoon. There’s bamboo, mushrooms, mango trees, tendu trees. There’s a mahua tree right in our backyard! We are next to a cow and poultry farm, like from an illustration in a book… Yes, I’ll be careful. No, no Maoists for sure. Or tigers for that matter. Bye.” All night we had no power and no signal and now suddenly, in this specific spot, I have 4G internet and I’m video chatting from the middle of the forest with my girlfriend who is studying Sociology at Johns Hopkins University in the US. Happy that I was going to the non-sexy part of Chhattisgarh, she had given me a bunch of research questions I had dutifully found the answers to. “Yes, so the coal privatisation bill was passed earlier this year… Well, so now coal is open for non-captive mining… Yes, exactly, it is no longer necessary to define the end use. Coal can be sold on the market to the highest bidder. And it is… Yes, I’ve mailed you the links for the reports that say power plants have not been receiving their mandated coal, but there is also a private power plant in Maharashtra that has been producing only minimal power and selling the coal instead! Exactly, so to sell more coal, Adani is being given mining permissions in an elephant… Hello… Hello…” And just like that, there is no internet. And in a moment, no “tower” either. Sehr and S wake up an hour or two later. Here, time runs differently. It is less precise and more accommodating. J, a sangathan-ka-saathi from the nearby village of Tara, has very sweetly agreed to show me around the Sarguja district on his bike. Sehr wants to mainly show me the coal mine and the rehabilitation colony that the Adani Group has built for the villages displaced by the coal mine. A kilometre away from our village, the road is not just damaged — it is literally broken in two. So we traverse the 1,200 or so metres to where the road gets better so Jayanandan can pick us up. [imgcenter]

[/imgcenter] Monday | 10.30 am PEKB coal mine, Parsa East I look around, taking the customary photos and videos that I’ll never get around to posting on Facebook or Instagram (an app I have, but do not use). The company represented an elephant corridor as a ‘thicket with no wild life’ to get permission for mining. A forest dug up — just so government-subsidised, labour law-flouting, cheap Indian coal could be sold internationally for private profit. The deal defies all logic. And yet the move finds support widely. Right from the times of Asoka to the British Raj, the villagers’ right to mine their coal and use forest resources sustainably has been taken away from them. And now the Indian state was doing the same thing, pawning their forests to corporations with the aid of the Forest Department that functions like a relic of the Raj. My mood darkens. Is ‘impotent guilt’ a thing? While Sehr talks to displaced villagers whose houses have been damaged by herds of elephants that officially don’t exist, I splash cold water on my face and peer into the flora around me, hoping to spot an elephant, hyena, wild boar or may be even the sloth bears that live in these forests and frequent these villages. Perhaps noting my moroseness, Sehr proposes we next go to Ramgarh, where it is claimed Kalidasa wrote the Meghadūta, near the Sita Bengra caves. An age-old inscription on one of the caves bears testimony to the site being the chosen gathering spot of lovelorn young poets who “sat by these streams on moonlight nights, composing beautiful songs”. It is like a scene straight out of Dead Poets Society, albeit one from 1,500 years ago. This is also where the dancing festival Karma Tyohar was celebrated. Men and women would dance in rows, and the former would court the latter by dressing up as peacocks and impressing them with their moves. We climb up to all the caves, walk through the elephant resting spot (called Hathipal), explore a little more of the forest — and emerge ravenous. On the ride back, prompted by Sehr, I ask J, “Didn’t you say drink mahua with lunch after a tiring morning?” Jayanandan smiles. “Let me make a call while we have tower.” Sehr is indignant. “I’ve been asking him for three months and he’s been dodging me.” On the way to Jayanandan’s village, the Adani name is everywhere: On the bus stops, on the Rural Development Centre walls, on signposts on the road. Ironically, they have even branded one warning sign about elephants. There’s not even the customary Raman Singh or Narendra Modi hoarding. The complete absence of government makes me a little uncomfortable. A volunteer back in Raipur had told us that even though the move to privatise was to ostensibly make the bidding process transparent, it also created a backdoor entry provision in the form of direct allocations. Adani seems to be a prime beneficiary . [imgcenter]

[/imgcenter] Monday | 4.30 pm PEKB Rehabilitation colony, Sarguja The rehabilitation colony is a village compacted to the size of a tiny suburban colony. All the houses are uniform — 15x10 concrete boxes with an 8x8 unattached toilet. The sheer thoughtlessness behind the design of not just the houses but the colony itself makes me feel like I am back in a city. I feel a little more comfortable. The buzz from the mahua is certainly helping. It’s a working day, so mostly only the women are around at this time. Sehr talks to them, with J playing interpreter. The women understand Hindi but speak only Sarguji. I wander around the colony for a while. Many of the houses are unoccupied because the people who could afford to, bought land in other villages and moved there. After a while, J calls me over to meet R, who works as a blaster in the mines. R speaks fluent Hindi and a bit of English, so we get a conversation going. R makes Rs 10,000 a month. The government pays Rs 40,000 a month but all corporations pay less than a third of that. R, his wife and children live in one house while his parents stay at the other end of the colony in another house. Does he like his job? I ask. He smiles wryly, “I make ends meet, but I’ve actually felt poverty. When the village was there, we could grow our own food, get our own fresh water, pluck the herbs our doctor prescribed from the neighbourhood. We stayed in a large house we made ourselves. On top of that we sold rice, fruit and mushrooms and handicrafts made of bamboo and other grass in the market. Anything we earned was just saved. Now my job is to blast my village so I can get Rs 10,000 to buy all the things I got for free.” Does he hope for things to change? R laughs. “I have completed Class 12, so I was really hoping they’d give me an office job. The blasting job is very demeaning. An office job would be nice.” [imgcenter]

[/imgcenter] Monday | 7.30 pm HASS office, Madanpur, Sarguja We cook a tender bamboo shoot sabji, dal and rice for dinner. The bamboo tastes delicious and requires no seasoning at all. O, who owns the property and has leased it to the organisation for free, joins us for dinner. Everyone was a little outraged that signatures were collected on a blank sheet but no one was surprised. The morning of the previous meeting, all the men had been supplied with generous quantities of mahua. Everyone chatted for a while and I tried to listen more than speak, though I must say I failed. The lasting memory of the evening is O showing me a photo on his phone. The President of India, the chief minister and the home minister standing under umbrellas and watering a plant, in the midst of a downpour, to launch an afforestation project. O laughs heartily again at the memory and says, “This is so symbolic of ‘development’ in a forest area. Drowning a plant in excess water when the monsoon is already doing its job.” — Art, text and concept by Satwick Gade