Hasdeo Arand is a forest in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh in central India. The forest is 170,000 hectares in area and is home to a diverse ecology and adivasi communities such as the Gonds. It is on top of the Hasdeo Arand coalfield in the north of Chhattisgarh. The Government of India has proposed to mine the coal, which would destroy the forest. The Hasdeo river runs through the forest. The forest comes under the Korba, Surajpur, Surguja districts of the state.
People
The Hasdeo Arand forest is estimated to be home to 10,000 people from the Gond, Oraon and other tribes. A Wildlife Institute of India report also estimated that around 60–70% of the annual income of the local communities came from forest based resources.
Ecology
The forest is home to 82 species of birds, 167 varieties of vegetation out of which 18 are considered threatened, and endangered butterfly species. The forest is a habitat and a major migratory corridor for elephants, and has had confirmed sightings of tigers. Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education has described it as "the largest un-fragmented forest in Central India consisting of pristine Sal and teak forests." The forest also acts as the water catchment area for the Hasdeo river, thus maintaining its perennial flow.
Hasdeo Arand coalfield
The Hasdeo Arand coalfield is spread over an area of 1,879.6 km2, and comprises 23 coal blocks. Hasdeo Arand is a large coalfield with 1.369 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves and 5.179 billion of estimated coal reserves.
Mining
The coalfield was recommended to be mined in by the Chhattisgarh government in 2010 by diverting 1,898.393 hectares of forest to the Parsa East and Kanta Bavan (PEKB) coalfields which would be allotted to RRVUNL, a state-owned power utility of Rajasthan. In June 2011, the forest panel under the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change recommended against allowing this on the basis of the ecological value of the forest and the amount of trees to be felled, however they were overruled by the then environment minister Jairam Ramesh, who cleared the proposal. This was challenged in the National Green Tribunal (NGT) which suspended the mining work in 2014, but the order was stayed by the Supreme Court, where the matter remains pending.
Jairam Ramesh had justified his approval of the project by saying that the PEKB coalfields were located at fringe of the biodiversity rich area of the forest with a separate watershed, and that the coal power plant which would use the coal from PEKB coalfield was a supercritical thermal power plant with lower emissions, for wildlife concerns he suggested drawing up a wildlife management plan from the Wildlife Institute of India. He also said that the plan had been subsequently revised and the mine would be built in two phases, with phase 1 covering 762 hectares and phase 2 covering 1,136 hectares of the forest. These arguments were rejected by the NGT as anthrpocentric reasoning which did not take into account eco-centric reasons which would be necessary for judging whether the development was sustainable.
On April 13, 2013 Adani Enterprises announced that its subsidiary Adani Mines would become the mine developer and operator for the PEKB coalfields under a contract with RRVUNL, giving it access to the 450 million tonnes of coal reserves of the mine. The ongoing mining has been considered to be a fait accompli as the case challenging it is still pending in the supreme court.
The Chhattisgarh government approved the phase 2 extension of PEKB coalfields on 22 March 2022, and approved mining in the adjoining Parsa Coal block on April 6, 2022. Activists alleged that this would've required the felling of 2,42,670 (242,670) trees in the forest, while local villages contended that the felling of trees violated their Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights granted under the Forest Rights Act, while Chhattisgarh government had previously attempted to annul those rights, under the current act there is no provision to do so. This led to large protests and the local police intervening to pause the felling of trees. Coal mining was halted in the PEKB coalfields by mid-August 2022 following widespread protests against the phase 2 extension of it led by local villages that would've been displaced or affected by it.