scavenging to survive in india\'s belt of fire

BOKAPAHARI, India-villagers set out from this broken small village long before dawn, walking without a flashlight, and they can navigate without looking.
They pass through the hills of the mining slag in the dark, which are only blurred outlines.
They weave barefoot with a brush.
When the trail reaches a dirt road, they fall into the open pit of the coal mine.
Then, when the night sky began to turn gray, they began to mine coal from exposed black coal seams.
Hours later, the pickers returned to their village with baskets full of stolen coal.
They returned to the vision of revelation.
They returned to the village, where smoke poured out of the cracks of the Earth, and the flames of the underground fire creaked on the trail, with greasy smoke choking visitors.
In some places, Bokapahari looks like other villages here --
A narrow stone house full of mud, children playing on dirt roads, tangled wires --
Until the edge of town, the Earth is distorted, torn by cracks, scorched by burn marks.
There are dozens of underground coal fires under the village of the pickers, one of which can be traced back to 1918.
Above the fire, thousands of people live on the edge of life. This is home.
\"There is no beauty here,\" said Mahesh Prasad Verma, 40 . \" He has lived all his life on the edge of the prosperous but troubled coal city of Jharia, in the remote eastern state of jakhandd.
\"Mines, fire, smoke and dust are everywhere.
\"However, behind that smoke, fires in more than a dozen villages have erupted in the open air, revealing the complex portrait of modern Indian life.
Economic opportunities, government incompetence and environmental problems exist.
Nearly 700 families reluctantly moved to an isolated resettlement program, and officials said they needed to move to another 54,000 families in Jharia.
There are thousands of people who are very afraid of losing control of the bottom of India\'s economic ladder.
\"Government officials visited us and said we had to leave because of the fire,\" Verma said . \".
\"But where can we go?
Where do we live?
\"The most important thing is: what will he do to survive?
\"We collect coal and sell it,\" Verma said . \"
Drop out of grade and stand in the middle of the smoke
To reduce raw coal to saleable coal blocks, more than a dozen bonfire fires were ignited.
\"That\'s all we do here.
\"India is becoming more and more a country full of opportunities.
In 2 billion, rapid economic growth created 40,000 new millionaires in 2009.
There was an explosive middle class who bought out the apartment.
Watch English TV for children
Private schools of language.
If most of the new funding is concentrated in a handful of cities where their software engineers and real estate developers gather together, then the hint of wealth has gone deep into India, even Jharia, it is located in a city of 500,000 people in the center of the national coal belt.
The city is booming in a country where energy demand is strong and heavily dependent on coal.
Today, shoppers can buy massage washing machines and Sony TV on dusty, pitted streets of dusty aria.
They can buy used Honda on glass
For motorcycle dealers.
This is an ugly city troubled by troubles, but it still offers a lot more opportunities than in the past.
Bokapahari and its grim neighboring villages are a dark reflection of India\'s new world.
The only opportunity here is the recovery of coal.
Because as part of Indian society is promoted to the middle class, hundreds of millions of others are left behind, which has expanded
The gap between rich and poor continues to expand.
If the Indian government praises India as a modern economic power, many statistics tell a different story: 20% of children are malnourished;
The rural unemployment rate is close to 30%, and more than one population lives on less than $1 a day.
They say that in places like Bokapahari, at least they earn more than that.
They are villages where suffering and opportunity meet. in the eyes of outsiders, hell is like survival for residents.
No one will be confused. eyed about it.
These villages are a mixture of daily life and surrealism, where the old man can chat on the front steps, while the smoke spews out at a distance of only 30 feet from dozens of cracks, some big enough to swallow a child.
Feet when the light is right-
Blue flames can be seen from many cracks.
Everyone tells the story of the collapsed house, about the story of a sleeping person missing when he opened a sinkhole under the bed.
\"Slowly, the fire crawls under them,\" T. N.
Singh, a retired scientist at the Central Mining Institute, said of villagers.
\"One day, the fire will consume them.
\"Life is already very difficult.
Alcohol abuse is rampant and up to 40% of people in some villages suffer from asthma.
In the past six months, a local doctor has found six patients with tuberculosis dead.
\"I know this is a bad place . \"G.
Martin, 26, had a strong tar smell in the air around him.
A crack cracked a wall in his cottage, which was accidentally caused when the laborer destroyed his home when the neighbor agreed to relocate.
Officials don\'t want someone to move back once someone leaves.
\"This is where we make a living and I can\'t just leave like this,\" he said . \".
It is dangerous, dirty and illegal to make a living.
The pickers were buried by mudslides, fell off the cliff and endured the beating of the miners.
They breathe in endless dust from coal.
They grow old at an amazing rate.
But it also brought them $2.
Hours of work cost $4, more than about $1 as a casual worker.
The work maintained families for generations and prompted immigrants from the poor parts of the country to move here.
Villagers say the money is enough to pay for powerful people who ensure the miners\' guards do not interfere.
So there are pickers who let their children go to school, buy TV, and save money for motorcycles.
A young lady said she would pay for college.
This is a world where no one leaves easily.
The provision of free government apartments rarely attracts villagers to leave until the fire hits their home directly, and an officer is waiting with a mobile truck and an envelope with 10,000 of it --rupee ($215)
Placement bonus
The head of the government agency Jharia Rehabilitation Development Authority has tried to transfer thousands of families from nearly 600 locations in and around Jharia that have become unsafe due to underground fires and illegal mining, more people are actually entering dangerous areas.
Gopalji said they came \"to make a living, not anything else\" and he only used one name.
It is difficult to see the danger in these 600 locations.
Trouble is underground, hidden deep in the ground with fire and unstable soil, scattered in Jharia and surrounding areas.
But every few years, the ground breaks apart and fear spreads again.
A 1996-square-meter sinkhole damaged 150 houses in the city, and the rest swallowed up the whole house.
However, the trouble is obvious in Bokapahari.
There are not many villages like it, maybe a dozen, but they are home to thousands of people, and almost all of them live by clearing.
All of these are located along many open-air coal mines in the area.
Singh estimated at least 70 fires around Jharia.
Some started with \"contact fire\", such as when burning garbage ignites exposed coal seams, and some started with a cooking fire ignited inside the coal mine.
Unlike the most famous underground coal fire in the United States
A fire has been burning in the heart of Pennsylvania since 1962, forcing the government to relocate almost the entire town --
Many fires in Jharia are caused by ongoing mining, which opens cracks and provides oxygen to flames, Singh said.
At least some fire can be extinguished by digging on both sides of the burn, he said.
However, this will require cooperation between Indian authorities and countries
A company that owns a mine.
When they worked together, as they did in their 1970 s, he said, they managed to put out 5 of the 21 fires and then burn.
Since then, there have been more outbreaks.
In the end, however, the government decided to take dramatic action. in 1990, officials began to make plans.
Around 350,000 people need to be transferred.
It took officials several years to find a construction site. 11 kilometers (7 miles)
Town away from public transport-
It will take several years to complete the first phase of construction.
After spending $24 million, 662 families moved into the tedious Belgarhia.
A floor building set up in an empty field.
But another reality is that more than 1,600 apartments are empty there.
Even the poorest residents are not easy to move.
The resettlement bureaucracy, Gopalji, is still shocked.
\"We have given them every comfort other than a job,\" he said . \".
But work is all about it.
Many new residents were ecstatic at first.
While these apartments are small and some are already crumbling due to inferior buildings, they have running water, concrete floors and indoor toilets --
Unknown luxury goods in the village
Tara Devi, 32, said: \"I live in a mud house, a cottage, and I am excited when I see this . \"year-
Looks at least 10 years older than her, gestures around her 27 years oldsquare-meter (290-square-foot)apartment.
Until moving to Belgarhia in December, she and her husband had been living in Ghanuawadih, another village where an underground fire had broken out of the ground.
They make about $4 a day there.
It\'s not a good life, but it\'s enough to send their two children to school and buy a TV.
Now, she said she should not leave.
Belgarhia did not hear any work, she said.
They ran out of savings.
Her husband goes to the coal mine several times a week for two hours each time.
She will move back if she can.
But when the family left, the worker with a hammer and iron stick was waiting to smash it down.
Today, it has only a few bricks left, scattered in a village where coal stinks.