For three days starting 21 December 2023, several hundred policemen and district officials kept watch as more than 600 workers with chainsaws felled an estimated 15,000 trees in northern Chhattisgarh in India’s forested heart, home mainly to Adivasis.

The trees stood on 91 hectares (about 58 football fields) of land in the Hasdeo Arand forest, one of India’s largest contiguous forest tracts, spread across more than 1,800 sq km, about three times the size of Mumbai, home to “rare, endangered and threatened fauna”, according to a government research institute.

The forest clearance marked the clearing of decks for continuing of mining operations at the Parsa East & Kanta Basan (PEKB) coal block. The block was allotted by the union government in 2012 to the Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (RRVUNL), a state power generation utility, which was waiting through 2023 for additional forest land to mine coal it needs for the desert state’s thermal power plants.

Since the first phase of mining operations began in 2013, the Adani Group has excavated coal from PEKB mine as RRVUNL’s “mine developer and operator” (MDO).

Besides being a source of livelihood from timber, fruit and medicinal herbs and leaves, the more than 30 species of trees ravaged, including teak, neem, mahua, jamun and others, were also worshipped by local indigenous communities as deities.

Not long after the forest clearance work was completed, a herd of wild elephants—the PEKB block falls within an important elephant corridor that has recorded growing human-elephant conflict—charged through a hamlet near Surguja district’s Udaipur town, local residents told Article 14.

Located 12 km from the site of tree-felling, the hamlet saw 10 homes destroyed, and the death of a tribal man.

Onn 7 February, 30 legislators of the Congress party, the main opposition party in Chhattisgarh, were suspended for entering the well of the state assembly to demand a discussion on the floor of the house on the razing of 15,000 trees.



Read more - https://article-14.com/post/in-lush-ancient-chhattisgarh-forest-thousands-of-trees-cut-to-mine-coal-for-rajasthan-threatening-adivasi-homes-water-livelihoods--65d2bdd0e264a