Before mining came to Chhattisgarh, a landlocked state in central India, Hasdeo Arand was a remote forest with a dozen tribal hamlets. Spanning more than 650 square miles, the forest is often called the “lungs of central India” and is home to endangered elephants, sloth bears, and leopards, as well as valuable water reserves. Many of the local villagers are Adivasis, or “original inhabitants” hailing from the Gond tribe, who cultivate crops in their backyards and sell woven grass baskets at the market. For them, this land is sacred.

This is how Umeshwar Singh Armo remembers growing up in Jampani, a small hamlet crowned with guava trees. This is where his ancestors were buried, and where he hopes future generations of his tribe will thrive. Today, the 43-year-old is the village chief of the local district of Paturiadand, home to around 900 villagers.

The area’s nearly 250 plant and bird species aren’t the forest’s only resources. Armo remembers when, as a schoolboy, he learned about another one: a shiny substance called “coal.” But it wasn’t until 2007 that surveyors sent by the state government began roaming the forest, using satellite cameras and laser scans to look for the stuff.

“We would all gather around to watch them survey the land. We were curious, even excited, about what it all meant,” Armo recalls. “But we could not imagine they would dig the ground out like this.”

What the surveyors found was a miner’s jackpot: more than 5 billion tons of coal sitting under the pristine forest. In 2013, Chhattisgarh’s government marked out coal blocks, or designated areas for mining, and gave approval to Rajasthan, another state government, to extract the fuel. The Rajasthan government contracted the mining operations to Adani Power, India’s largest private operator and developer of coal mines and coal-fired power plants. Shortly after, a chunk of the forest roughly the size of five football fields was torn out to establish the Parsa-East Kanta Basan (PEKB) mine, named after two hamlets that once stood on the land. Today, what remains are large black craters.

Of course, the problems with coal don’t end with extraction. As a major consumer of it, India is also the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gasses (though its per capita emissions are around seven times lower than that of the U.S.). Most developed nations are winding down coal capacity to meet climate targets, but India and China continue to account for about 80% of all active coal projects. And while the U.S. and the E.U. have set goals of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, India says it will get there by 2070—another decade behind China’s goal of 2060.

In light of the most recent IPCC report’s stark findings, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres stressed that all countries need to move faster to reach those targets. India, which previously argued that phasing out coal would be too detrimental to its economy, may be succumbing to global pressure. In May, during a committee meeting as part of this year’s G-20 Summit, India’s secretary for coal, Amrit Lal Meena, announced that the country will close around 30 coal mines over the next three to four years.

But as the experience of Hasdeo’s residents shows, even efforts to prevent the damage coal does in the long term can have surprising—and damaging—effects in the short run.

Reuters reported that India also plans to stop building new coal-fired power plants—apart from those already in the pipeline. Not making any new commitments to coal is good news, says Tim Buckley, the director of the think thank Climate Energy Finance, but there’s a downside for those affected by existing operations: “'No new coal' means you rush to complete all the mines that are already there,” he said.

“If you’re a villager in that coal mine, you’re screwed,” he added.

Interviews conducted over three months in 2022 with more than 40 people—including locals who oppose the mine as well as those who support it; Adani workers at the PEKB mine; and teachers, police, and activists in the area—revealed how life in the forest has been transformed by the presence of a mining giant. For many, the transformation won’t end there.

“If we look far ahead, we all know that coal mining will only last 30 years,” Armo says. “But after that, our land will be destroyed. Then what? We have nowhere else to go.”

When coal is extracted from PEKB, its journey has just begun. The fuel itself travels north by rail and truck to Rajasthan, while the rewards of selling it are reaped by Chattisgarh’s state capital of Raipur. There, the dizzying development of towers, malls, and hotels stands in stark contrast to life for the Adivasi forest dwellers who work the mines, 90% of whom depend on agriculture and forest produce for their livelihoods.

It’s a pattern repeated across India, the world’s second-biggest importer, consumer, and producer of coal. By next year, amid growing demand for electricity, its government plans to have extracted over a billion tons just since 2022.

The Adani Group is key to these ambitions. Founded in 1988 as a commodity trading business by Gautam Adani, now India’s second-richest billionaire, it has become one of the country’s largest conglomerates, operating ports, airports, and thermal power production plants. Currently, the group also has government contracts to produce and sell more than 29 million tons of coal in India every year, claiming 50% of the country’s market share in coal trading. In June 2022, when the government issued 22 million tons’ worth of coal import orders to overcome domestic.