he indigenous communities of Thar are adapted to seasonal migration to fertile and urban areas in search of livelihoods. Most of them undertake return migration to their homes when it rains as rainfall creates livelihood opportunities closer to their homes in the form of agricultural activities.

After the rainfall, pastures green up, creating the grassland resources for their livestock to thrive on, and land becomes cultivable.

This year, owing to coal mining operations in their native land, the option of returning to their homes was not available to many Thari locals despite a good rainfall in the area.

One of the villages, Senhri Daras, once stood where the mining site of Thar Coal Block-II is now located. It was the first village displaced in 2018 and resettled as New Senhri Daras 13.9 kilometres away. The new settlement village was declared a model village by the Sindh government and the Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company, who claimed that the houses were built with proper planning and a school, a dispensary, a reverse osmosis water treatment plant and a market were provided.

Senhri Daras had been home to 172 families, 111 of them belonging to Bheel and Kolhi communities that have lived in Sindh for centuries.

Landholders to labourers

Dhai Bheel, 45, now lives in New Senhri Daras along with her husband and four sons, three of them married. Having spent almost all her life in traditional thatched huts, called chaunras in Thar, Bheel’s family would raise cows and goats besides cultivating crops on a small patch of land. The family migrates twice or thrice a year to the barrage areas, such as those in Mirpurkhas and Badin districts 100 to 200 kilometres away.

“We lost our land to coalmining. We can’t raise livestock as there is no gauchar [pasture] available. No livelihood is available to us now” says Bheel adding that her family now migrates to far-off fertile lands in various parts of Sindh for labour to work on wheat, rice, cotton and sugarcane farms.

In the old Senhri Daras, villagers had had 4,000 acres of surveyed land and 1,250 acres of gauchar (pasture). All that land was acquired by the government for coalmining. Now, there is no land for the villagers to cultivate crops or raise livestock.

The villagers say they were not fairly compensated for the land they lost to the coalmining projects. Naru Bheel, a 55-year-old displaced villager now living in New Senhri Daras, says that his grandfather had owned 300 acres of land in the old village. However, he says, his family got compensation for only 100 acres at the rate of 190,000 per acre. “We are nine brothers. The money I got as compensation was spent quickly,” he says.

Having lost his land for what Naru Bheel calls “an insignificant amount,“ he has to travel to far-off places to find work. Two years ago, he went to Badin district, some 200 kilometres away from his new home in New Senhri Daras for the first time in his life to work as a labourer. “Initially, I was no good at the work because I had no experience of growing or harvesting crops other than in Thar, but I have learnt a bit now,” says Naru, adding that there is no other option available to him.

Tharparkar is home to 1.65 million people. Most of them have traditionally been agro-pastoral (cultivating crops and raising livestock). After rains [July-August to October-November], they have traditionally cultivated their lands and raised livestock for the rest of the year. The traditional, yet sustainable, lifestyle came to an end after they lost their lands and gauchars (grazing lands) to coalmining (or development, as government officials describe it).

Putting his abrupt transformation from a livestock and land owner to a labourer in perspective, Naru Bheel says: “At the time of leaving our old village, I had 15 acres of land and about fifty cows. I can’t even remember the number of goats I had. Now, I have only three cows. All I had is gone in two years. We were not given a gauchar. Where could we raise our animals?”

For Dhai, who now lives in a three-room house in the model village, made of baked bricks and cement, the modern-day housing facilities mean nothing in the absence of livelihood options. “The land that fed us and our animals was everything for us. Now, we have nothing. Only one of my sons works in the company for a daily wage. The other three are jobless” says Dhai. She adds: “The very land was the resting place of our loved ones.”

Broken promises, poor compensation

With the inception of the Thar coal project, the government of Sindh acquired lands from local communities using a colonial era law, the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. Villagers say that the government had promised them two jobs for every household. The promise is yet to be fulfilled.

The coalmining companies, however, contest this claim. “We acquired their lands and houses and gave them money as compensation. Each family is also receiving Rs 100,000 annually. But no jobs were promised,” says Farhan Ansari, general manager of Thar Foundation, a company that runs on the CSR fund of Thar Coal Block-2. He, however, says that they prefer locals in the company. “ 75 percent of our employees are locals,” he says.

Kamran Khosa, a researcher from the Policy Research Institute for Equitable Development, a think tank on climate justice, says livelihood in the Thar desert is connected to land. “But gauchars are more important [for the indigenous people] than agriculture lands. Agriculture is occasional since Thar faces frequent droughts,” he says, adding that “livestock is what their survival depends on.”

According to Khosa, the government acquired the lands invoking emergency conditions in which people don’t have a right to appeal. They obtained their surveyed land for Rs 180,000 to Rs 190,000 rupees per acre, Khosa says. He added that the government did not pay them for yaksala, leased government land in people’s possessions for a fee.

The people have also not been paid for gauchars (pasture land), Khosa says. Gauchar land was allocated by the British government in the sub-continent, especially in Tharparkar, which includes part of the desert in India’s Rajasthan state, to the people who relied on livestock. The title typically remains with the government so that no influential person or family should claim it as their exclusive possession.

“In my research, I have found that due to loss of gauchar, the livestock population in some villages has decreased by 20 to 70 percent,” says Khosa.

Arsam Saleem, a senior research associate at Karachi Urban Lab, says that before initiating any project, the planners need to understand the lifestyle of people who live there, their sources of livelihood, how they think about the project and how it can make their lives better. “For the Thar coal projects, these things were not considered” he says. He adds: “They acquired their land and compensated them with some land in nearby areas because that land happened to be cheaper. Now if the government decides to work on other blocks, it will result in displacement of the [already] displaced. There will be still more displacements besides the loss of livelihood, worsening of water quality and subsequent migration.”

Coalmining in Thar is also causing environmental pollution, which also acts as a trigger for migration. Gorano, a village of 20,000 population, has been affected by a 1,500 acres man-made water reservoir, Gorano Dam, for the discharge of wastewater from Thar Coal Block-II. “After the building of Gorano Dam, water table has gone up by 20 to 25 feet” says Lachhman Meghwar, “[but], the water has become unfit for drinking.“

Warvai, a village of 1,000 households, is now encircled by barbed wires. On the south and east side, the village is surrounded by the mining site of Thar Coal Block-I. On its north, there’s a power plant; on its west a wastewater disposal system.

These things limit the mobility of people and their animals, the villagers say. Allah Jurio Rahmoon, one of the residents, says that he has shifted to Islamkot City, 11.7 kilometres away from the village. “We can’t breathe here, especially when the northern wind blows. I’ve developed a lung problem. I have decided to move away from here,” Rahmoon says.

A study by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air estimates that coal projects in Thar could expose 100,000 people to harmful gasses. More than 29,000 people could die from air pollution-related causes over the 30-year operating life of the plants.

“Apart from their other losses, the carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury could affect their health, physical as well as mental. These gases numb minds, limiting people’s ability to think clearly. Children are particularly affected by these gases,” says Dr Suleman Otho, a pulmonologist.

Many villagers from Gorano and Warvai have moved to other places. Their villages are yet to be resettled by the government. Till now, only two villages, New Senhri Daras and Allah Dino Hajam, have been resettled by Thar Coal Block-II. These were directly affected by coalmining activities. However, many villages affected indirectly are not included in the resettlement plan.

Resource development anomalies

Out of Thar desert’s 19,637 square kilometres area, about forty-five percent (9,000 square kilometres) is covered by an estimated 175 billion tonnes reserves of lignite coal. The area is divided into 13 blocks. Currently, only two blocks, Block-1 and Block-2, are being mined. These contribute 2,640 megawatts of electricity to the national grid.

A decade ago, when coalmining started in the Thar region, a slogan was promoted: “Thar Badlay Ga Pakistan“ (Thar will change the fate of Pakistan). The region appears to be living up to that slogan, assuring “a positive change” for Pakistan, a country struggling with foreign exchange reserves but dependent on fuel imports. Pakistan imports almost 90 million tonnes of coal annually, half of which is consumed by the power sector. Now, there is a proposal to run all its power plants on indigenous coal to save approximately $2.5 billion in energy imports.

But, while coalmining in Thar might be helpful to Pakistan, experts say it comes at a huge cost for the people who have lived in the region. Noor Muhammad Bajeer, a development practitioner, says that the social impact of these coalmining projects isn’t entirely visible as all the impacts on the inhabitants are not being documented.

Because of the coalmining in Thar, people are not only losing their land and homes but also their social relations, cultural capital and peace. “The rapid transition for which people were unprepared has resulted in social and psychological problems them. Its long-term effects can be horrific” Bajeer says.

Also, focus on coal, at a time when the world is seeking to produce energy from renewable resources such as solar and wind, is not anomalous. According to a World Bank report, Pakistan has the potential to generate 40 gigawatts of electricity from solar. If the country utilizes just 0.071 percent of its area for solar power generation, it will be able to meet the current electricity demand. In the Paris Agreement, Pakistan pledged to produce 60 percent of its total electricity from renewables by 2031. In May 2015, Pakistan had started its 100-megawatt solar power project (Qauid-i-Azam Solar Project in Bahawalpur). As per Indication Generation Capacity Expansion Plan 2023, the number of power plants that will be set up by 2031 will be decided on a cost-effective basis.

Currently, the share of alternative energy in Pakistan’s energy mix is four percent. The rest is generated from hydro, thermal and nuclear sources. “Currently, solar energy is the cheapest source of energy in Pakistan,” says Muhammad Mustafa Amjad, programme manager at Renewable First, an energy think tank based in Islamabad. “Currently, the problem for the people of Pakistan is that electricity prices are going up. To bring that down, you have to bring down the basket price. The more you integrate renewable energy sources, the lower the prices will go. Therefore, sooner or later, Pakistan has to move towards alternative sources of energy,” he says.

But, despite its pledges, Pakistan’s inclination towards fossil fuels has not decreased. While it has decided to get rid of imported coal, it appears to be aggressively utilising indigenous coal despite its impact on people and their livelihoods besides the environmental implications, experts say.

According to Amjad, the main issue is that “to shift to renewable energy, it has to retire its old projects. We are talking about moving towards alternative energy. At the same time, we are investing in coal and nuclear energy. There is no clear policy,” Amjad says.

He also says no investor came forward to bid for a 600MW solar power plant at Muzaffargarh, because “our market is not lucrative for investors.”

*This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network

The writer is a multimedia journalist based in Karachi