Reportage on a planet without equitable or sustainable development.
The Chandasi Coal Mandi
Today’s ET carries a story on Chandasi – also spelt as Chandausi. It is a mandi — like the agri markets of India — but one dealing in coal. It is a fascinating place. Its architecture is similar to that of a farm mandi even though the commodities the two trade in are so different. It corrects a state failure — inability to supply coal to small businesses — but does so by sourcing illegal coal. Which makes it a benign institution. But it is also malign. The mandi is mired in local mafias, coal syndicates and what have you. And so, while the illegal enterprises supplying coal to the mandi make pots of money, the labour, the buyers, some of the traders, lead marginal existences.
The story in the paper, here. A longer version of the story, up on my ET blog, Anomalocaris.
near the trucks from jharia. across the road, behind these trucks, stood trucks from ramgarh.parmeshwar patil, commission agent at the mandi. business is down. big traders extend credit. we cannot. a similar narrative as what one hears in farm mandis.7 in the morning. trucks coming in for the auction clustering around ‘punjab kanta’, the point in chandasi where the selling/buying happensbuddhiram. works 20 days a month at chandasi as labour. it takes about 7 hours to load a 20 tonne truck. the pay is about rs 800 per truck. a sum that needs to be split between all the workers. however, the ‘mate’ (labour contractor) takes about rs 230 out of that 800. the rest is what is left for the workers — say 3 per truck. it was a long chat. we started talking about chandasi. and then, the chat switched to the changes in his life which resulted in him coming to chandasi as labour, the grim state of the school where his children go, and more.life in a coal mandi. walk down chandasi and you see people loading, unloading, sitting around, bathing to get the coal off, trucks lurching down rutted roads…life in india’s largest coal mandi. we treat the informal economy like shit.between the highway and the village stand 700-800 depots. small yards owned by relatively large traders — the smaller ones have been all but pushed out as the coal business became a volumes play.preparing to move coal from one truck to another.as in farm mandis, the coal mandi also categorises the coal it receives into different categories — by origin, by quality, by size of the coal pieces, etc. buyers, in that sense, get coal tailored to their needs. this is quite different from the coal india approach where the only customisation is per grade/calorific value.the obligatory cycle photoanother view of chandasi.
I am an Indian journalist with interests in energy, environment, climate and India’s ongoing slide into right-wing authoritarianism. My book, Despite the State, an examination of pervasive state failure and democratic decay in India, was published by Westland Publications, India, in January 2021. My work has won the Bala Kailasam Memorial Award; the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award; five Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism; and, more recently, been a finalist at the True Story Award and GIJN’s Global Shining Light Awards. Write to me at despitethestate@protonmail.com.
“Westland closure: Titles that are selling fast and a few personal recommendations,” by Chetana Divya Vasudev, Moneycontrol. (Because this happened too. In February, a year after DtS was released, Amazon decided to shutter Westland, which published the book. The announcement saw folks rushing to buy copies of Westland books before stocks run out.)
Fractured/Earth 
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