There are few winners in the kingdom of coal.
We’ve looked at the burdens India’s heavy coal use places on its people, here and here. Now we look at coal-dependent communities themselves, where the challenge is not just coal today but also what happens when coal goes away.
For the eastern Indian district of Angul, among India’s first and most productive coal mining regions, that day admittedly may be far the future. The district’s five mining operations unearthed almost 100 million metric tons of coal last year, more than a tenth of India’s total. Last summer my travels took me to Talcher, where the first underground mine in the area was dug more than a century ago. It’s the biggest city in the Angul district. The roads were chock-a-block with trucks ferrying coal from mines to rail cars, from mines to electric power generation plants, from mines to steel mills — all desperately trying to keep up with the country’s growing demand for energy.
Demand is even higher this year, the scramble for coal even more intense. India’s electricity consumption has climbed at a double digit pace so far this spring. It’s turning out to be even warmer, even earlier than last year, when India experienced the hottest spring in a century. But it’s not just the heat waves, which boost air conditioning use, that are driving up consumption. India has a growing population that will become the world’s largest this year, and an expanding industrial base. Both have Indian authorities hustling, year after year, to find more fuel. By short-term necessity and long-term habit, they lean heavily on coal.
And yet, coal use must wind down if India and the world are to meet their decarbonization goals. The only viable, long-term solution is continuing to accelerate the use of renewable energy, particularly solar, which luckily is already cheaper than coal almost everywhere in India. That doesn’t mean coal can be gotten rid of overnight, or even in decades if you ask the Indian government. But as renewables continue gaining momentum, especially when partnered with energy storage systems, coal will wind down. The stage is being set with India’s target of drawing half its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. The upshot: If some long term planning for coal’s demise isn’t undertaken, then coal country — concentrated in the eastern states of Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal — will be plagued as much by the disappearance of coal as by the presence of it now.
Caught in this paradox are communities such as those in Angul. Like many mining dependent regions globally, compared to the rest of the country locals receive disproportionately few benefits from the coal that’s unearthed here. Nearly all of it is shipped elsewhere in India, along with the profits and economic growth it helps deliver. Coal mining states are among the least developed in India. Their communities suffer from diseases and environmental contamination, and from the social fallout caused by dislocation. And yet, what little they do have comes largely from the coal industry — from white collar jobs right down to scavengers who gather lumps fallen from trucks and trains and sell them for cooking fuel.
Bibhuti Bhusan Sahoo is typical in many ways. His grandfather worked as a lift operator in one of the first mines in Angul, an operation that began in 1921. During that era, before coal mining really spread, Sahoo’s father stayed in the nearby village and worked the family fields. By the time Sahoo grew up, mining had spread and the mining company took the land where their village, Balanda, was located. Families from the village received new land a few miles away, ironically a stone’s throw from the now depleted original mine his grandfather worked. Adult men were offered jobs. That’s how Sahoo, then 19, started work in the mining company. His family moved to New Balanda, a ramshackle housing development the local government sporadically hooked up to water and electricity as the mining company fitfully paid for the construction of new homes.
Today, the homes are dilapidated and a few plots still have yet to be connected to services. Almost 500 families ultimately moved here from the original Balanda as the mine there grew through the 1990s. Sahoo and some of his neighbors drove me through the old village and surrounding area, now deeply scarred by environmentally destructive “open-cast” mines, where the coal is literally stripped from the surface. Mining companies are obligated to restore the landscape when the coal is depleted, but many of the mines are simply abandoned on the claim they’re not completely tapped. This saves on clean-up costs, and leaves many coal regions a toxic wasteland for decades after actual mining stops.
Yet the prospect of the end of mining also unnerves Sahoo. He worries the community will be left with no money to clean up an environmentally despoiled landscape while economic prospects shrivel for the generation that winds up holding the bag when the digging ends.
“This is all going to be a desert. There’s no plan to reclaim the area for further development. There’s no planning at all,” he says.
“Look around,” he says, gesturing towards their housing enclave within view of the now-closed mine where his grandfather worked. “Here there’s no coal anymore. They’ve moved on to other areas. For the next generation, there’ll be no coal industry. What can they do?”
Talcher was once a kingdom, albeit a small and sleepy one. It’s roots go all the way back to 1471. I learned this during a visit with a local association of truck owners.
The truck owners are yet another group that’s deeply dependent on the coal industry, even as the living they derive from it has become ever more precarious. They don’t drive the trucks, but rather are small business owners. They or their fathers used the compensation coal companies paid for their family land to buy a truck. Over time, some have fared better than others, building fleets consisting of a dozen or more trucks. All of the trucks transport coal all of the time. They’re driven by an even more vulnerable, even more dependent, cadre of drivers. Many of them, or their parents, were once laborers for the former agricultural landowners who now own the trucks. Divorced from this rural economy now, the whole lot of them felt disconnected from the community to which their families once belonged.
Unexpectedly, one truck owner asked if I wanted to meet the king of Talcher. It turns out there really still is one, the Raja of Talcher, Rajendra Chandra Deb Birabara Harichandan Mahapatra.
Sure, I said, and thus followed a sort of mad-cap afternoon tour that included hobnobbing with the royalty of Talcher, such as it is these days.
We piled into my car and headed to his palace, undergoing renovation about a 20 minute drive away. The trucker who invited us called Talcher’s nominal king — not actually a sovereign, anymore, just the official descendent of one — repeatedly on his mobile phone. He hadn’t reached him by the time we arrived. But he got out of our car, walked to the gate at the dilapidated palace and threw it open for us to pass.
Talcher was among the almost 565 “princely states” that constituted much of India during the Raj, the imperial British governance structure that often ruled indirectly through local proxies. Talcher was small, at just under 400 square miles and a population in the tens of thousands. A few, like the state of Hyderabad with a population of 16 million in 1947 (the year India gained independence), were larger than many European countries at the time. They were ultimately subsumed into independent India, peacefully and voluntarily with a few exceptions, with the royal families retaining some of their properties and gaining an allowance from the government for a time but ultimately losing the riches that went with ruling. That’s mostly led to their demise, other than those who have successfully turned their estates into plush tourist hotels or other savvy investments.
We hung out, alone, for a while in a courtyard overgrown with vegetation. A dachshund was chained to a cage on the porch. The Raja wouldn’t be able to join us, our truck-owner guide eventually informed me. He said there was another place worth visiting, though.
Back in the car, and off we drove to…Scotlandpur. Yes, that would be the name of the constituent country of the United Kingdom appended with the Hindi-language suffix “pur,” meaning “place.” It turns out that the Raja’s great-uncle, Promod Chandra Deb, spent time in Scotland and upon returning home decided his own estate reminded him of the Scottish highlands. So he renamed the village, still home to several dozen families.
Scotlandpur palace was equally run-down, but we were received there by Sarat Chandra Deb, one of Promod’s grandsons. Sarat, who still lives in the estate with his family, guided me through the capacious rooms, decorated with stately photos of ancestors, and stuffed hunting trophies from leopards to buffalo. He shoots skeet off the front porch sometimes. Cows and a turkey wandered through the gardens in front. There was a fishing pond. There once was match-stick factory on the grounds, and a lawn tennis court, now overgrown.
“Who’s here to play now, anyway?” Sarat said, wistfully.