Hello,

The dirt on coal mines. That’s what you get from our latest investigation.

To begin, let’s flip the calendar back to October 2021. In the first week, media reports carried an alarming statistic: India’s coal-fired power plants were scraping at the bottom of their coal barrels and would last only four days.

Just as stories of potential blackouts rolled out, some reports got facts straight: Shortage isn’t because coal production has gone down but because there aren’t enough rail rakes to haul the coal to the plants.

But somebody saw an opportunity in the crisis.

Ashok Khurana, the director general of Association of Power Producers and former bureaucrat in the Power Ministry, emailed the then Coal Secretary drawing attention to the news of coal shortage.

Khurana wrote in the letter that we need to dig up more coal to fulfil the energy needs of the nation, buttressed with government’s pet phrases such as atmanirbhar abhiyan. By playing up coal shortage rumour, he was making a case, strangely, before the coal secretary who is expected to have a pulse on the coal stocks in the country.

Khurana named two blocks inside the densest forests of Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh and Hasdeo Arand in Chhattisgarh that he thought should be “included in the upcoming coal auctions.

But they had a problem: The Environment Ministry had ringfenced these sensitive forest patches from the prying eyes of miners.

But the lure of the coal was too strong.

The Collective’s investigation found that the Union Coal Ministry defied the Environment Ministry to open up the country’s densest forest areas for mining after lobbying by the association of top private power producers.

The association was successful in opening up one of the two blocks it lobbied for.

Adani Group, a member of the lobby, was the lone bidder for one of the two blocks the government opened up after overturning years of advice from the Environment Ministry against such a move.

The Coal Ministry not only acted on the association’s demand to open up the two blocks but also pushed for a review of the environment ministry’s suggestions in 2018 that 15 coal blocks should be exempt from coal mining auctions since they fall in areas that of high biodiversity value and need to be conserved.

So did the environment ministry manage to open up all 15 coal blocks? How did the coal ministry get the environment ministry to come around? 

Find out by reading the first part of our investigative series by Shreegireesh Jalihal published on our website.

Click here to read the full story published on our website.

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