IN A NOTEBOOK, BHOLE NATH SINGH ARMO drew a map of his village. He pointed his pen at the middle to mark the temple where the village deity had lived. To the west, he noted a settlement of more than 200 houses where he, his father and his grandfather were born and raised. Then, to the north, another temple for a female deity. This was how his village, Kete, looked until nine years ago, when it was destroyed by a company controlled by a $260bn conglomerate. The conglomerate is named after its owner, Asia’s richest man, Gautam Adani.
The village was located in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, on the edge of the Hasdeo Arand forest. One of India’s few pristine tracts of forest, Hasdeo Arand sprawls across more than 1,500 sq km. It is home to rare plants, endangered animals, and sal trees so tall they seem to brush against the sky.
The forest also contains an estimated 5bn tonnes of coal, located close to the surface, making it easy to mine. The federal government has divided the region into 23 “coal blocks”, six of which it has approved for mining. The Adani Group has bagged the contracts to mine four of those six, including the one that encompasses Kete and adjoining villages. The construction of these mines will destroy at least 1,898 hectares of forest land. The specific coal block under Kete has about 450m tonnes of coal, worth about $5bn.
India is the world’s second-largest producer and consumer of coal (after China), and Kete’s story is like others across the country. In 1998 it was calculated that more than 2.5 million Indians had been displaced by mining projects since 1950; many more will have been displaced since. The coal sector generates about 70% of the country’s annual electricity and employs at least 2.9 million people. While India has pledged to reduce its carbon emissions by 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, it has no plans to phase out coal.
That’s bad news for the environment but good news for corporations like Adani. Over the past three decades, Adani has built his mammoth conglomerate by penetrating almost every sector of India’s economy, from sewage treatment to data processing, transport to media. Among these ventures, few are more profitable than coal. Until a few years ago, more than 90% of India’s coal was mined by government-owned companies. However, in recent years, prime minister
