I have never witnessed anything like India’s coalmine fires. Two images will always stick in my mind.
Related programme: India: Children of the InfernoIndia: Children of the Inferno
One is the sight of an entire cliff of coal on fire, millions of tonnes of coal burning out of control with red and blue flames in the smoggy twilight. The scale of the fires -- caused by coal seams heating up on exposure to open air due to poor mining practices until they burst into flames – is frightening as they spread across 360 square kilometres of Jharia’s coalfields in Jharkand state.
The other is when we saw Devanand, an eight-year-old boy, rolling two heavy lumps of coal across a wasteland. Too poor to go to school, he was pushing the coal home for his mother to cook with -- but there were no houses for miles around and he was making such slow progress it was agonising to watch.
And that was the paradox of the story. India wants to extract as much coal as it can to drive its economy and drag citizens out of abject poverty.
But are people like Devanand victims or beneficiaries of this master plan? Multitudes of local people here once lived as farmers. They were poor but they had dignity and now – well, many of them are just poor. And now India’s state coal mining company wants to move 500,000 people out of the fire-hit area of Jharia, the largest migration of people in India since Partitition.
India already extracts 400 million tonnes of coal a year and that figure is set to increase. While India has a right to economic growth, this surely does not excuse the country from allowing coalfields to burn unchecked, an act of extraordinary environmental vandalism mirrored in other countries including the USA.
At a time when the world debates how to urgently cut carbon emissions, the sheer scale of the inferno alarmed me. I wondered what the point of putting a little windmill on your home is, or fussing about your personal carbon footprint, when there’s this going on.
Shooting the film was a physical ordeal. Producer Ed Watts and I would come out of the mines each day blackened head to foot with coal dust. The searing heat of the fires and poisonous fumes scoured our lungs and smarted the eyes. We went through three cameras because clouds of dust kept clogging them up.
It astonished me that people had to live in this hell, where so many of those toiling as coal scavengers and miners were children. They suffer terrible illnesses due to the pollution and life expectancy is shorter than most parts of India.
But at the same time I found the beauty of the locations stunning. We’d be filming in clouds of smog and dust and out of the murk would emerge a line of women in brightly coloured saris, walking out of the mines and into a village with golden straw haystacks and waggle-eared water buffalo chewing the cud among cosy mud houses.
The forests being eaten up by the coalmines are the places where the Buddha lived and found enlightenment 2,400 years ago. This is the fast vanishing home of India’s indigenous tribal people – and until recently it was a natural paradise. The name ‘Jharkand’ means ‘land of trees’ and it was once full of tigers and wildlife. This is now just a memory as trees, hills, rivers and springs are pulverised by the bulldozers.
It was a privilege to make this film about an issue for a country at such a crossroads.
