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A young woman stumbles as she tries to carry a large basket of coal as she and others illegally scavenge at an open-cast mine in the village of Bokapahari in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand where a community of coal scavengers live and work.
AP PHOTO
BOKAPAHARI, India — The villagers set out from this shattered hamlet long before dawn, walking without flashlights on trails they can navigate without looking.
They pass small mountains of mining slag that, in the darkness, are just blurry silhouettes. They weave barefoot through brush. When the trail reaches a dirt road, they descend into the open pit of a coal mine. Then, as the night sky starts turning to gray, they begin hacking coal from an exposed black seam.
A few hours later the scavengers return to their villages, their baskets filled with stolen coal.
They return to visions of the apocalypse.
They come back to villages where smoke pours from fissures in the earth, where flames from underground fires lick at trails, where oily fumes leave visitors gagging. In places, Bokapahari looks like nearly every other village around here — cramped stone houses plastered with mud, children playing in dirt roads, tangled electricity lines — until, off at the edge of town, the earth is buckled and warped, riven by cracks and scorched by burn marks.
Beneath the scavengers’ villages are dozens of underground coal fires, one dating to 1918. Above the fires are thousands of people living at the ragged edge of existence.
This is home.
“There’s no beauty here,” said Mahesh Prasad Verma, 40, who has spent his life on the fringes of the thriving but deeply troubled coal city of Jharia, in the remote eastern state of Jharkhand. “Everywhere there is just mines and fire, smoke and dust.”
Behind that smoke, though, the dozen or so villages where fires have erupted into the open reveal a complex portrait of modern Indian life. There is economic opportunity, government incompetence and environmental afflictions. There are nearly 700 families who have reluctantly moved to an isolated resettlement project, and 54,000 more families across Jharia who officials say need to move.
There are thousands of people who desperately fear losing their grip on the bottom rungs of India’s economic ladder.
“The government officials visit us and say we have to leave, because of the fire,” said Verma. “But where could we go? Where would we live?”
And, most important: What would he do to survive?
“We scavenge coal and we sell it,” said Verma, a seventh-grade dropout, standing amid the smoke of a half-dozen bonfires lit to reduce raw coal to sellable chunks. “That’s all we do here.”
India is increasingly a land of opportunity, a country of 1.2 billion where galloping economic growth created 40,000 new millionaires just in 2009. There’s an exploding middle class buying up flat-screen TVs and sending their children to English-language private schools.
If much of the new money is concentrated in a handful of cities, with their clusters of software engineers and real estate developers, hints of wealth have reached deep into India, even to Jharia, a city of 500,000.