The Tara coal block auction was paused, yet adjacent mines operated by the Adani Group have already cleared 94,460 trees, shattering critical elephant corridors.
SURGUJA, 8 September — The Union Coal Ministry pulled the Tara coal block from auction last summer. Politicians claimed a victory for Hasdeo Arand, central India’s oldest and largest contiguous forest.
That victory is a bureaucratic illusion.
While Tara sits technically unallocated, the machinery of extraction has not stopped. It simply shifted a few hundred metres next door. The Parsa East and Kete Basan (PEKB) coalfields share the exact same ecological vein as Tara. The Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (RRVUNL) holds the mining rights for these adjacent blocks. The Adani Group operates the heavy machinery as the official Mine Developer and Operator.
The environmental mathematics are staggering.
According to the Union Environment Ministry’s own admissions in the Rajya Sabha, operators have already felled 94,460 trees across the PEKB site. The devastation is not over. Official government projections indicate another 273,757 trees are slated for the axe to expand the mining footprint.
When 94,000 ancient sal and teak trees vanish, the forest does not just quietly recede. The wildlife panics.
Hasdeo Arand spans roughly 170,000 hectares. It is the primary corridor for central India’s wild elephant herds, alongside endangered sloth bears and leopards. The chainsaws have fractured these ancient migration routes. Disoriented elephant herds now routinely smash through peripheral Adivasi hamlets. Following the rapid clearing of 15,000 trees in late 2023, displaced elephants charged through a village in the Udaipur block. They destroyed ten homes. They killed one tribal resident.
The human cost mirrors the ecological collapse.
Elected village chiefs report that stage-one mining displaced thousands, leaving 85 percent of the evicted villagers from settlements like Kete unable to rebuild their livelihoods, effectively rendering them homeless.
The crisis begs a fundamental question: Why tear open the country’s most critical carbon sink right now?
India is rapidly pushing towards renewable energy. Yet the Ministry of Coal simultaneously plans to extract over a billion tons of coal annually. Hasdeo Arand’s coal is not the only option. The Tara block alone contains 337 million tonnes of coal. But extracting it means annihilating 19.6 square kilometres of 81-percent density forest.
This forest is the water tower for northern Chhattisgarh. It forms the catchment basin for the Hasdeo and Mand rivers. Stripping the vegetation triggers immediate, catastrophic topsoil erosion.
Who is responsible? The accountability fractures across state lines.
The Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) clears the forest diversions. The Coal Ministry drives the auctions. The Rajasthan state power utility consumes the fuel. The Adani Group extracts it. The Chhattisgarh state government oscillates between passing legislative resolutions to protect the forest and deploying armed police to oversee the logging.
Meanwhile, Tara waits.
If the adjacent PEKB expansion exhausts its boundaries, Tara’s 337 million tonnes will become the next target. The Union government has not permanently canceled the block; they simply paused the bidding.
The chainsaws are currently operating less than three kilometres away
