India Indigenous People Coal
From dust to dust: Adani's Talabira coal mine
Around the fringes of a huge Adani-operated coal mine in India, the local people maintain a daily battle for survival. Fugitive emissions of coal dust from convoys of coal trucks have coated their dwellings and crops. Pastures lie abandoned and streams have been polluted. The people have not received compensation because their lands were not taken over by the coal company. The houses shake when blasting takes place at the nearby mine, as if to emphasise the precariousness of these people's continued existence here.
Basic facts and figures
- Name of project: Talabira II & III Opencast Coal Mining Project
- Location: Sambalpur and Jharsuguda, Odisha, India
- Name of owner: NLC India Limited (a public-sector enterprise)
- Mine Developer & Operator: Talabira (Odisha) Mining Private Limited (an Adani Group subsidiary)
- Coal reserves: 589.21 million tons
- Peak output: 23 million tons per annum
- Villages, population affected: 5 villages (Rampur, Malda, Patrapali, Talabira, Khinda); 2973 families
- Cost: Rs 2401 crore (US $288 million)
- Current status: Operational as of December 2019; expansions expected
Talabira: The highway connecting Sambalpur and Jharsuguda, two industrial cities in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, is yet to come to life when we drive to the Adani-operated Talabira II & III coal mine. The cool morning breeze betrays no hint of the ongoing peak summer season. The sun is still low in the sky. Tall trees, known locally as Palash or ‘flame of the forest’, dot the landscape, their blooms splashing the morning with fiery bursts of red against the backdrop of the waking countryside.
The serene and picturesque surroundings fade into desolation as we reach a junction from which a bitumen road branches off the highway into Khinda, a village hit hard by the Adani mine. From this junction onwards, shabby eateries, soot-covered garages, dinghy tea stalls and snack vendors fight for space along a small section of the road. Trucks for transporting coal have been parked overnight along the highway leaving hardly any space for other vehicles to move. Our car crawls for several minutes to reach the junction of the coal-transportation road.
More trucks – hundreds of them – are parked along the coal-transportation road as we branch off the highway towards the mine. The wheels of our car crunch against the gravel of the road. Along either side of the road, everything is cloaked beneath a thick blanket of coal dust. The vegetation seems to be gasping for breath, struggling under the weight of the oppressive conditions. Not a single water sprinkler can be seen to settle the fugitive coal dust hanging in the air. The only bit of dust suppression occurs at the load-dispatch gate of the mine, where a patch of the road is covered in slush.
As the day progresses, the trucks grind to life and rumble towards the mine like huge, hungry monsters. A few men seated under a canopy hand out orange-colored slips to the truck drivers before they enter the mine. We stop at a tea shop, the only other sign of human activity along the road. Its owner, who identifies himself as Situ Rout (57), is rolling open the steel shutters of the shop. The shop’s exterior is weathered by dust.
‘Coal dust is all there is to this place now,’ said Rout, dusting away layers of dust settled on wafer packets and plastic jars containing cookies. ‘It’s in our food, in our water, everywhere.’
The settlement of Demulpada, with its two dozen households, lies behind Rout’s tea shop. When the coal-transportation road was constructed a few years ago, this settlement was left untouched by NLC India Limited, the public-sector enterprise that owns the Talabira II & III coal block.
‘It is our misfortune that our houses were left alone,’ said Rout. ‘We are forced to bear the full brunt of the massive air pollution caused by road transportation of coal.’
Rout told how Demulpada used to be a self-sufficient village surrounded by green forests which produced abundant fruits, flowers, seeds and timber. Just metres in front of his shop, trucks rolled by as he talked.
‘The majority of families in Demulpada, including my own household, used to depend on farming a variety of crops. Now, agriculture is gone because of the pollution,’ continued Rout. ‘For me, the only way to eke out a living was to set up this tea stall. Earnings have been good because most truck drivers stop by to have a quick cup of tea or a snack. But I inhale toxic coal dust all day long. It has been a curse’.
(Story continues below)
Beside Rout’s shop, a narrow dirt track leads into Demulpada from the coal-transportation road. Ironically, this is the only road that was left for the villagers to connect to the outside world after Adani’s coal mining commenced. A towering Banyan tree, a silent witness to the endless convoys of coal trucks, stands to the left of this dirt track stoically greeting visitors to Demulpada. Men diligently repair a fishing net under the shade of this tree as a young boy looks on. A huge pile of rocks, perhaps excavated from the pit, rests under the tree behind the men.
Krushna Chandra Rout (56), a member of this group, says fishing remains their sole occupation after the coal mine took shape. His bare upper body and loincloth tell a tale of a life steeped in hardship accentuated by environmental pollution.
‘There is a small rivulet nearby which used to yield plenty of fish’, he says. ‘Now, coal dust is always settling on the water while rocks land in it when blasting takes place. Accumulated coal dust has formed a thick sludge of black clay at the bottom of the stream. This is toxic for aquatic life. The yield of fish has gone down substantially because of the pollution.
‘Nevertheless, it is our only source of livelihood at present as farming is no longer feasible.’
The men sell the daily catch of fish in makeshift stalls along the highway after keeping some of it for their own consumption. They narrate how water tables in the area have gone down, making farming even more difficult.
‘We do not even get adequate supplies of drinking water. All handpumps have gone dry or give out contaminated water that makes people sick. We don’t even give this water to our livestock,’ added Krushna.
The men ask the boy, who is seated on a log felled for the construction of the road, to give me a demonstration of the state of drinking-water facilities in the village. I accompany him to the nearest handpump, a little distance away. The boy pushes at the lever continuously but the spout yields no water. A trickle eventually emerges. The boy walks back exhausted from the sudden spurt of physical activity.
‘Bad lungs - due to breathing air laden with coal dust,’ said Krushna.
Demulpada villagers used to grow rice, millet and seasonal vegetables on their farms. Together with fish, they used to form the staple diet of the local community.
‘Over the past few years, the buds wither prematurely. Forest produce like mahuli (a bud used to brew an intoxicating liquor) and tendu leaves (used for wrapping traditional Indian cigars called beedis) are no longer available. We are not entitled to jobs because our land and households were not taken over for the mining project. The government has forgotten our existence,’ said Dharani Ray (32), describing the agricultural devastation wrought by the mining project.
The men experience a haunting fear of living in their own homes, where the walls and roofs tremble with each blast from the nearby mine.
The dust contamination extends beyond their farms and water, infiltrating their food supplies. Jairam Nayak (50), owner of a village grocery store, arrives on a scooter after seeing his friends engaged in a conversation with me. He describes how pervasive coal dust has become.
“I have decided to close my store for a few days because the number of trucks has suddenly increased,’ Jairam told me. ‘Despite numerous appeals to local authorities, our pleas for intervention against the massive air pollution have gone unanswered.’
Dharani and Jairam guide me to a small one-storey building with a corrugated iron roof which used to serve as a community gathering spot for Demulpada’s residents. A sign painted on one of the walls says the building had been renovated in the financial year 2019-20 with funds from the central finance commission. But its shut doors are testament to the ubiquitous pollution.
‘We used to socialise at this club in the evenings over a game of cards or just chatting,’ lamented Jairam. ‘Today, it has become difficult to step inside it. No matter how hard and how often we mop the floors, it’s just a matter of a few hours before the entire verandah is covered with fine coal powder again. It is particularly bad in summer when the breeze blows in dry dust that accumulates on the road. Now we have no place for community activities.’
Tired of the continuous fight against environmental pollution, the villagers decided to shut down their clubrooms for good. ‘At least the furniture and electrical work will survive until we find an alternative place,’ added Jairam.
I accompany the two men to the dwelling that is closest to the coal-transportation road, a ramshackle mud house with asbestos sheets for a roof. Dharani holds open a wicker gate through the fence – twigs held together with ropes – for me to enter a courtyard which is caked with coal dust.
Vedmati Ray (65), the matriarch of the family, shows me around the house pointing out damage from the reverberating blasts that occur several times a day at the nearby mine.
Vedmati's family is mired in poverty with no farmland of their own. Vedmati’s son, who worked as farm laborer or sharecropper, has no source of income left in Demulpada after the farm stopped providing for the family. He left early in this morning for the nearest construction site to find work as a daily wage labourer, leaving his wife and infant daughter in Vedmati’s care. The two women are cleaning moringa leaves, plucked from the courtyard to fry as a side dish with rice for lunch. A pile of rice has been spread out in the courtyard to dry. Vedmati’s infant granddaughter is clearly unsettled by coal dust floating around as she crawls about in the courtyard.
‘Kids in our settlement cannot be sent outside alone on minor errands or even to play because of the danger from speeding trucks,’ said Vedmati. ‘We have never had a piped water supply here. Now even the wells have run dry. A water tanker comes every morning with potable water. But it is not enough. We must rely on other sources including a well that we dug in the courtyard several years ago.’
Vedmati’s frail body is the result of a lifetime of hard work. Her daughter-in-law seems dejected but indifferent to the bleak situation in which the family has been forced to live. The two women accompany me to the well which is covered with asbestos sheets and black tarpaulin, which they pull open so that I can peek inside.
‘We must always keep the well covered to prevent coal dust from getting in,’ Vedmati said. ‘The water table has gone down after mining disturbed the underground aquifers’.
The family said that it has not been granted funds for construction of a lavatory under a much publicised scheme of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They also complained that the coal-mining company has not bothered to provide funds for drinking water or toilets under its corporate social-responsibility obligations.
When we leave, trucks have already created a traffic snarl at the junction of the coal-transportation road and the highway. Deposits of coal dust are thick on the ground. My shoes leave clear imprints in the dust. The car wheels seem to be buried half an inch deep in it. Everything here, including trees and shrubs as far as the eye can see, is covered in a thick black coat of coal dust.
Despite the environmental degradation caused by trucking of coal, the construction of a railway siding is still pending. In the financial year 2023-24, the Talabira II & III open cast mine produced 12.641 million tonnes of coal. This cargo was transported by road, causing severe damage to the ecology and human beings living in the region. Owing to delay in the construction of the railway siding, the project proponent is looking to transport coal by roads until at least 2027. There have been protests by local people against the menace caused by large numbers of coal-laden trucks and dumpers. But the acquisition of land for construction of a railway siding has been delayed because local landowners have not been offered enough compensation.
We take a detour through Khinda village on our way back from the coal mine. Here, farmlands lie abandoned due to loss of production caused by environmental pollution. Some areas have been slated for takeover by the coal mine. Most of this farmland is now covered with undergrowth. We see tribal families trying to eke out a living from minor forest produce amidst rubble-strewn forests; other impoverished people scavenge coal from the piles of overburden.
These tribal communities, many of which have never owned land, have no reliable source of income.
We meet a local woman who identifies herself as Sebati (37), a member of a local tribal community. With a sickle in her hand, she goes about expertly chopping sheaves of grass. But what will she do with this harvest of wild grass?
‘It’s used for making household brooms. We boil these sheaves in water and put them out in the sun for drying. Once dried, these are tied together to make brooms,’ said Sebati.
The process of cutting the grass is hard; Sebati must remain stooped for long hours. She has arrived fully prepared for the day with a water bottle and a tiffin box [a set of stacked pots containing cooked food].
‘We have lost large swathes of forest to the coal mine. Our livelihoods have been degraded. We know that even this wild grass will not be available to us when the area is dug up for coal,’ she added.
We witness several tribal women, bearing loads of cut grass on their heads, walking along the road. The stories they tell are of resilience in the face of corporate takeover of natural resources and degradation of remaining farmlands. They are poignant reminders of their communities’ relationship with the forests despite ongoing environmental challenges.
As we stop for tea at a roadside stall in Khinda, a frail-looking elderly man walks up to us and listens to local people telling me about the impact of the coal mine on their lives. He taps me on the shoulder and identifies himself as Nirakar Budhia of Budhiapali, a village soon to be blitzed for the expanding coal mine. But the project-impacted people have nowhere to go because the resettlement and rehabilitation colony has not been completed (Read AdaniWatch’s report on the pending construction work of the colony, here).
‘Spend an afternoon in my house when the blasting takes place,’ said the 80-year-old man. ‘I challenge you to calmly bear it without getting startled or shocked. We feel as if the heavens are going to crash right over our heads when the blasts occur. If you survive that ordeal, you will realise the true impact of this coal mine.’