India is experiencing a growing demand for coal in recent years to meet its rapidly increasing energy needs. A major portion of the country’s coal is mined around Dhanbad, mostly by state-led mining companies. The mining causes major damage to the environment as well as the villages that have populated the area long before the mining first started. It has turned the area into a brown and dusty, moonlike landscape. While villagers depend on the coal for their livelihood, they suffer horribly from the hazardous effects caused by the mining.
Just outside of Varanasi, some 400 kilometres west of Dhanbad, is the Chandasi coal depot – India's biggest coal depot. Hundreds of coal workers live, sleep and work here. Chandasi serves as a coal market place. It's a complex informal trading system involving illegally sourced coal, truckers, traders, commission agents, politicians and local mafia. Small businesses such as brick factories rely on the coal from Chandasi as they typically cannot get access to India's formal coal distribution chain.
Workers face dreadful living and working conditions as well as health hazards. Due to the informal nature of the labour, labour and human rights are non-existing.
