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print versionThe Indian Coal Mine That Razed a Village and Shrank a Forest
A company run by Asia’s richest man, Gautam Adani, is strip-mining tribal lands for fossil fuels. Forest-dwellers are fighting back.
by Astha Rajvanshi November 18, 2022
One afternoon in 2010, in a hilltop village called Kete in the forests of central India, a man arrived at the doorstep of Shri Prasad Khusro. Khusro shared a mud hut with his wife, children, elderly parents, and siblings, on land where his family had lived for many generations. The man introduced himself as a collector, or local administrator, and told Khusro that a coal company wanted to mine there. If his family agreed to move, they would receive thirty-three lakh rupees, or, at the time, about seventy thousand dollars. Khusro had never seen that much money in his life. “You’ll become really big people,” the man told him. “You can buy a bungalow, a car, and even pass the inheritance on to your children.”
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