Beneath a sky made opaque by billowing dust, a mechanised shovel driver steered his vehicle toward the vast wall of an open coal mine. It was the middle of a central Indian summer afternoon, and outside, the temperature had hit 45C. Up in the cab, 15 metres above the black, shiny ground, it was comfortable, air-conditioned.
The driver tipped the steel-toothed rim of the shovel’s bucket downwards, then slammed it into the coal seam wall in front of him. A few hours earlier, a drilling rig mounted on caterpillar tracks had drilled deep holes into the coal from the flat ground above, and filled them with explosives.
Their detonation broke the coal into diggable chunks, some of them pebbles, others a metre across.
The seam being worked was 20 metres thick, and lay some 300 metres beneath what was once the ground’s surface – the deeper of two black stripes of coal. Overlying the seams, until it was blasted and dug away, were much larger quantities of grey-brown shale, what miners call “overburden”. Having been stripped from the coal, it lay stacked up in mountainous piles on either side of the mine, the walls of an artificial Grand Canyon. The surfac
e area of this mine, Dudhichua, is 16 square kilometres.
In the year ending March 2015, Dudhichua produced 15m tonnes of coal – more than the UK’s entire remaining production. But it is only one of 16 mines in the Singrauli coalfield, which spans parts of two districts in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. All but one are owned by the state-run Northern Coalfields Ltd, a subsidiary of Coal India, one of the country’s biggest firms. As is the case with other Indian coalfields, Singrauli is home to numerous coal-fired thermal electricity plants, some almost on the doorstep of the mines. Their current aggregate capacity is about 20 gigawatts, nearly 10% of India’s total national generating capacity.
(By comparison, peak electricity demand for the entire UK is only 57GW.)
Singrauli may be one of India’s biggest energy hubs, but it is also isolated. Apart from the mines and power stations, the coalfield is home to a handful of towns, poverty-stricken villages and some prosperous corporate “colonies”, with their own schools, sports fields and clinics. To visit the area involves a 220km drive from the nearest airport at Varanasi, on a chaotic road that often lacks a proper surface: the journey can easily take eight hours. Phone signals and internet are intermittent. The only communications that really work are the high-voltage power lines that carry Singrauli’s output to the teeming cities of northern India’s plains. Last year, the coalfield’s total production was about 87m tonnes. (When the British coal industry began to decline with the outbreak of the 1984 miners’ strike, it was producing about 130m tonnes annually.)
Singrauli’s significance – and that of the subcontinent’s many other coalfields, which span the length and breadth of India, with further large reserves in Pakistan – extends globally. In 2013, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that in order to restrict the increase of world average temperatures to 2C above pre-industrial times, the world must adopt a strict “carbon budget” for emissions. According to the IPCC, the current rate of fossil fuel burning will exhaust this within 25 years, after which fuels must either be left unexploited, or have their emissions kept from the atmosphere by carbon capture and storage.
India has the world’s fifth-largest coal reserves – and very few cleaner fossil fuels, such as natural gas. Its leaders are also determined to spread the benefits of economic development more widely among its population of almost 1.3bn people – one third of whom still have no access to electricity.
Anil Swarup, the permanent secretary at the coal ministry in Delhi, said in an interview that last year Indian production from both private and state-owned mines was 620m tonnes, more than 85% of it from open-cast workings.
A further 400m tonnes were imported. At Singrauli and elsewhere, he added, production is set to increase rapidly, with strong encouragement from the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which swept to power last year. Modi is determined to restore the sustained GDP growth rate of 8-10% that India enjoyed for a decade until 2011.
