Blacked out by coal

The term “black as coal” has acquired a new connotation in today’s India. Without the dirty black mineral, the country’s economy would come to a grinding halt. Without coal, power generation would come down by roughly two-thirds. Without coal, we would not be able to manufacture steel or cement.

There have been hundreds of scandals associated with coal mining which has been going on in different parts of India for more than a century. So what’s new about the scandal that the media calls “Coalgate”.
Five years ago when this columnist was working on a documentary film series titled Hot As Hell, which seeks to explain why underground fires — literally and metaphorically — are raging for so many years in and around the township of Jharia in Dhanbad (often called India’s coal capital) district in Jharkhand, one could hardly have imagined that Coalgate would become such a huge political issue.
For decades now, tens of thousands of residents of Jharia have been living on top of a veritable inferno. There are powerful mafia organisations that rule over this region and exploit the underprivileged — by mining illegally, supervising organised pilferage, running extortion rackets and bagging lucrative contracts. At least one former mafia don of the area (who was a member of the Legislative Assembly of the undivided state of Bihar) was known to be rather close to a former Prime Minister of India.
Anurag Kashyap’s recent two-part film, Gangs of Wasseypur, is a gratuitous cinematic offering of gore, violence and abuse in the towns of Dhanbad. In the opinion of this writer, an opinion which is evidently not shared by quite a few critics who went gaga over the film, the repeated depiction of violence in its many forms and manifestations in Gangs of Wasseypur ends up becoming grotesquely pornographic. This film may be a highly exaggerated depiction of reality. But the metaphorical fires sparked by modern gangsters of the country’s burning coalfields threaten to singe Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, even if his government may continue till the next general elections.
As Jharkhand Mukti Morcha supremo and former Union coal minister Shibu Soren moved in and out of prison and the chief minister’s home in Ranchi, charge over the ministry of coal automatically devolved on the Prime Minister. He said he was in favour of public auctioning of captive coal blocks soon after he became the Prime Minister in May 2004. The rules of the game had been changed much earlier, in 1993, during the P.V. Narasimha Rao government in which Dr Singh was the finance minister, by allowing private players to enter a sector that had been largely monopolised by Coal India Limited since the early-1970s.
But the reason why captive coal blocks continued to be allocated by a screening committee operating in an opaque and often arbitrary manner was not only on account of the opposition to auctions from BJP-ruled governments in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, the Biju Janata Dal government in Orissa and the Left Front government in West Bengal. Though coal is a Central subject, the representatives of states wanted to have a say in the allocation of coal blocks not just to favour their cronies but ostensibly to ensure that the promoters of companies which got rights to mine coal also set up projects in the state where coal blocks were located and not elsewhere.
More importantly, opposition to auctioning of coal blocks came from within the UPA government. The implementation of the new policy was delayed when the coal ministry was under the tutelage of two former Congress ministers of state for coal, even as Dr Singh remained a silent spectator. Not only was a regulatory mechanism not put in place, promoters of companies (some of whom were not even eligible to grab the coal blocks in the first place) deliberately squatted on the blocks after obtaining mining rights for next to nothing in anticipation of windfall gains. It was known that coal prices would rise and that the firms would make huge profits by selling their stakes to other companies. This was exactly what happened.
What has been particularly damaging for the already battered UPA-2 government is that many beneficiaries of Coalgate have been linked to influential Congress MPs and MLAs and certain Congress ministers. For the Congress, it’s perhaps small consolation that the reputation of BJP MP Ajay Sancheti, who is close to party boss Nitin Gadkari, also took a hit.
This is indeed crony capitalism at its most brazen. The legacy of criminal mismanagement of the nation’s natural resources will be borne by future generations. The people at large are paying a stiff price for the corruption of a few — in the form of higher prices and lower production of power, steel and cement. The very objectives of government policy have been deliberately inverted and subverted.
While making the documentary series on Dhanbad, this columnist met Amit Raja, an exceptional journalist who has authored a book titled Aag Mein Jharia (Jharia on Fire), He perceptively remarked: “For some this coal means diamonds and gold. For others, the coal signifies bread. They go underground not to take out coal but to sustain their life. They put their lives at risk. They are ready to face death at any moment. But they don’t earn much. The bulk of the profits generated by mining coal are appropriated by the mafia. This is the main reason for poverty here.”
The story of Coalgate is more violent than any fictionalised story on the screen. Move aside Anurag Kashyap. Make way for Manmohan Singh who, like the three monkeys, never saw, heard or spoke evil.

The writer is an educator and commentator