Asha Devi sensed something was amiss when a wisp of smoke shot out of a hitherto unnoticed crack in the floor of her one-room house a year ago. She chose to ignore it until the floor exhaled again a few days later. And again and again, with the subterranean smoke getting thicker, darker, and smellier every time.
The crack in the middle of her house in New Colony, Jharia, Jharkhand, has also widened with each puff forced through the fissures in the soil from a furnace — fuelled by unmined coal on an auto burn — deep down. She fears the crack could get wide enough for the fire beneath to leap out someday and destroy her house.
Kultan Sharma, her husband who works in one of the collieries in Dhanbad district, has often requested the officials of Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) and Jharia Rehabilitation Development Authority (JRDA) to relocate them before it is too late. “The acrid smoke is getting unbearable by the day. We want to get out fast, but our pleas have not been heard yet,” Devi says.
Hers is not the only family living through a nightmare. The ordeal is similar for some 1 lakh families in New Colony and other settlements at 595 identified sites within a 27,000-hectare area where the public-sector BCCL mines coal.
About 150 km northeast of Jharkhand’s capital Ranchi, Jharia is the hub of coal mining in Dhanbad district. The open-cast mines across the 34,000-hectare coal belt in this region are more than a century old. So are the underground fires caused when coal comes in contact with oxygen and generates high-intensity heat. About 5 sq. km area of this belt is prone to such fires.
Blackened dystopia
Over the years, the underground fires have displaced thousands of families. Jharia’s coal-blackened landscape is dotted with the ruins of hundreds of houses, most having collapsed suddenly due to the heat generated beneath them. Those that stand have cracked floors and roofs, their inhabitants struggling for food and water while inhaling the toxic fumes almost every day.
A house destroyed by underground fires. | Photo Credit: Amit Bhelari
Aarti Kumar, also of New Colony, said she feels so suffocated that she often goes out of the house in the middle of the night to catch her breath. “My father has developed asthma because of the toxins we inhale. My class 10 studies are affected due to the smoke. We go to sleep unsure of what will happen the next morning,” she says.
Darogi Yadav’s family has been staying in the Ghanuwadih locality nearby for three generations. The coal burning beneath has not found an escape route through his house yet; the ‘terrestrial chimney’ is barely 15 metres away.
“Politicians visit our area once every five years to seek votes. They always promise to solve our problem, including shifting us to a safer location, but forget about us as soon as the elections are over,” he says.
The promises were repeated ahead of Phase 6 of the Lok Sabha elections in May this year, and he says it will be no different when Jharkhand’s Assembly polls are held in November. Jharia is one of the six Assembly segments of the Dhanbad Lok Sabha seat. The others are Bokaro, Chandankiyari, Sindri, Nirsa, and Dhanbad.
A pet poll promise has been the uninterrupted supply of water. The BCCL provides piped water, but it is not enough, making many across the settlements trek at least 3 km to fetch water from Bagdigi, another coal town where BCCL operates. The shortage of water often forces Yadav, his wife Seema Devi, and their three children aged between 3 and 10 years to go without a bath even when Jharia bakes at more than 40 degrees Celsius under the summer sun.
The smoke-emitting cracks have their uses for a few like the Yadavs, who survive on selling milk from the three cows they rear. They boil water for drinking, in the milk containers, by placing them inside the cracks that have enlarged to a tandoor-like shape.
Holes in the roof
Sanjay Kumar, who has lived in Jharia’s Lodma Kunj area for 30 years, is tired of showing the cracks in and around his house to anyone who will listen. “My home is almost like the coal mine where I work the whole day. The pit, however, seems safer because at home, you feel the ground can explode any time,” he says, worried about the future of his two children studying in a government-run school.
The roofs of some houses are cracked too. Pakhira Bhuiya, who shifted from Bihar’s Jamui, lives in one such house. “Blasting to fragment rocks above the coal seams is routine here. One of these blasts made a big stone drop on the roof, creating a hole. Luckily, nobody was inside the house then,” he says.
The houses have developed cracks from the explosion-induced vibrations apart from the flying stones. “The blasting stops only after sunset. We have been requesting the [BCCL] officials to settle us somewhere safer, but they keep saying that the JRDA is working on it,” says Ziaul Khan, who followed in the footsteps of his miner father. He lives with his wife and three daughters in a house provided by the BCCL.
Asha Devi and Aarti Kumar standing outside their house in Jharia, the walls of which have developed multiple cracks because of its exposure to uncontrolled underground fires. | Photo Credit: Amit Bhelari
Not so far away, Bal Govind Bhuiya wonders which is worse: the perforated roof above his head or the cracked earth beneath his feet. “We have lost hope in our netas who come occasionally and say we will stay in a better, safer house somewhere else. They do not seem interested in what we are going through,” he said.
Politics at play
Political leaders did take up the issue of the underground coal fire in the Lok Sabha in August 2023. Replying to a question on steps taken to control the burning, then Minister for Coal and Mines, Prahlad Joshi, had said the mines of Jharia had been burning due to unscientific mining before the nationalisation of the coal mines during 1971-73.
Mihir Salkar, Dhanbad’s district mining officer says underground fire is a natural phenomenon. “Heat is generated due to an exothermic reaction whenever the coal comes in contact with oxygen. If it is not dissipated, the heat accumulates and reaches the ignition point of coal and this applies to every coalfield in India. For the Jharia coalfield, this incubation period (proneness to spontaneous heating) is 6 to 9 months,” he explains.
“Mining was not regulated before the Central government nationalised the coal mines. There were no rules and regulations, and unscientific mining led to exposure of coal here and there and subsequent ignition. This is the only reason why the coal beneath has been burning for more than a century,” he says.
Since the 1970s, the government has issued 104 mining leases in Dhanbad district, 82 of which are held by the BCCL. The public sector undertaking, which extracted 38 metric tonnes of coal during 2023-24, surveyed and identified 595 sites within its area of operation as vulnerable to damage from the underground fires. The survey teams marked 81 of these sites as “high priority”.
Darogi Yadav’s family looks on as smoke rises from the ground in the background. | Photo Credit: Amit Bhelari
“There are more than 1 lakh households across the 595 sites, and 14,000 of them are in the high-priority category. We have to sift the legal occupants of these vulnerable houses from the illegal ones. There are a lot of encroachers on the land leased out to the BCCL. Of the 14,000 households in the high-priory sites, only about 2,000 are held legally, but the people in the 12,000 others have been staying there for more than 20 years,” Madhvi Mishra, the Deputy Commissioner of Dhanbad and the managing director of JRDA told The Hindu.
“Of the 14,000 families, some 700 have been shifted to a safer place in Belgaria [village, about 10 km away from the high-priority zone, but in the same district]. The others will be shifted phase-wise in three to five years according to the JRDA’s evacuation plan. Work on the relocation plan began in 2007 but the shifting process started only after 2017,” she says, adding that only the encroachers on the land under BCCL operation have been complaining about the lack of basic amenities.
Expensive firefighting
BCCL officials say measures such as nitrogen flushing, sanctioned by the Ministry of Coal, have been undertaken to control the underground fire. “More than ₹2,000 crore has been spent on controlling the fire, but things have not changed much,” an official says, declining to be quoted.
“We firefight whenever an issue related to the underground fire and smoke crops up. We are equally concerned about landslides in the area, which happen during the rainy season because the crust is thin. People have died in these landslides. We push the BCCL to take measures to prevent the loss of lives,” Mishra says.
She adds that the JRDA has been facing problems from a section of the people who refuse to budge from the danger zones for their “vested interests”.
A cracked surface in Jharia. | Photo Credit: Amit Bhelari
Allegedly backed by bahubalis (musclemen), many among the settlers in Jharia engage in illegal mining. People loading sacks of coal on bicycles for sale is a common sight in the coalfields.
“This is our only source of income. We sell this coal in the open market and get ₹500-1,000 per sack to sustain our families,” an unauthorised miner says. He fears relocating, as that could make it that much harder for him to make a living. Those deemed illegal settlers are not a part of the relocation plan.
Relocation, despite the positives, is somewhat worrying for Asha Devi too. “Uncertainty is inevitable in a new place,” she says, hoping the turn for her family to shift comes before the dhuan (smoke) from the dharti (earth) affects the lungs and longevity of her three children.
