Welcome to Singrauli -- where tall, mushrooming coal-powered thermal stations tower over the skyline on the pretext of fuelling India’s development reality. Singrauli’s story is riddled with paradoxes. Back in the colonial days the region was known for impenetrable forests so hard to maneuver that the king used it as open-air prisons. Today the forests have made way for massive over-burdens from the open-cast mines that dominate the landscape. The prisons still exist though -- in the form of human bunkers that have been given to the forest communities in exchange for their homes. They were given in the name of rehabilitation, when their forests were taken away to mine coal -- the black gold that our political leaders tout as the roadmap to steamroll India onto the path of development.
Posted on: Mon, 12 May 2014 13:35:50 +0000