The first time we saw a photograph of an “eco park” was in a press statement released by India’s Ministry of Coal in August 2024. It was grainy and felt as if it was taken from a phone camera and then enlarged to the point of pixelation. It featured a serene body of water with two hills in the background. The nearer one was covered with straggly trees. At the center, a ferry with passengers wearing orange life vests was floating on water that seemed to reflect dark clouds in the sky. “NCL is converting mine lands into lush green havens!” said the poster. “Come, relax, and be part of this transformation.” (NCL is Northern Coalfields Limited, a subsidiary of Coal India Limited, a company owned by the government of India.)
The idyllic photograph was of Mudwani Dam Eco Park, one of 31 parks built on unused land along many opencast coal mines in central and eastern India. The body of water is nestled between two mines owned by the NCL in Singrauli, a town in central India. Singrauli is one of the country’s top coal-producing areas, and its mines supply India’s largest thermal power plant, which was commissioned in 1987 and financed by the World Bank. It has an installed capacity of 4.7 gigawatts — almost 2% of India’s thermal power generation capacity. While this plant draws coal from multiple sources, the closest are the mines that surround Singrauli itself.
Faced with global pressure, India continues to resist demands to reduce its carbon emissions. A year ago, it was among countries that argued to “phase down” and not “phase out” emissions at the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP) in the United Arab Emirates. India, still a developing country, argued that hastening the closure of coal mines and thermal power plants could leave millions of vulnerable people without basic, affordable electricity.
Despite its official position — and even as India continues to target high records of coal production of 1.5 billion tons by 2030 — wheels have begun to turn in India’s ministries to change the language around its coal production. Much of this has come from the Ministry of Coal itself, the de facto owner of India’s coalfields. It produces 91.2% of the country’s coal and is the controlling entity of seven publicly owned coal mining companies.
Assisted by the World Bank, in 2021 the Ministry of Coal began charting its plans for a “just transition” to close its coal mines. According to the World Bank, a just coal transition involves having a transparent government mechanism for transition, helping the coal workforce transfer to other livelihoods, ensuring that existing social divisions are not exacerbated by the transition, promoting job creation in other mines belonging to the company and repurposing land use to attract new opportunities.
In March this year, the Indian government released its final iteration of this plan. One of the ways the government is hoping to restore this ecological balance is by building “eco parks.” Others include replanting of native vegetation, restoration of bodies of water and rehabilitation of wildlife habitats in a bid to repurpose or reclaim the land.
The concept of eco parks is new and somewhat murky, however. Construction on the majority of these eco parks began around 2015 — some are along bodies of water, some have landscaping and still others have fountains and wave pools. What unites them all is that they have been built on or around coal mines by coal-mining companies owned by the state. In fact, it was after Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned a 2015 project in the state of Maharashtra — which featured a pool, toy train and an underground mine model — in his weekly radio show that the Ministry of Coal decided to build more such parks.
While the plan envisions eco parks as something that will help to restore flora and fauna in the area, the ministry believes they can also benefit local communities by providing jobs and developing local tourism. Germany has previously experimented with the idea of building parks on coal mines with some success. One of its parks, Zollverein, built on the bones of a depleted coal mine, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and renowned for its museum as well as recreational grounds for visitors.
But what exactly are eco parks? Are they landscaped like public parks in the cities? Or are they environmentally sound because of having indigenous flora in a less engineered biome? Do they fit into the local ecological niche?
Usually, public parks in Indian cities tend to be lawns with a tiled walking track around their circumference, marked with occasional nonindigenous trees and shrubs. Dipti Pillai, an official at the Centre for Mine Planning and Design Institute Limited — a government-owned consultancy to the Ministry of Coal, told New Lines that an eco park is just a regular park — built on a reclaimed mine.
An official from NCL was more eloquent on the subject. “If you build a park where you use man-made [resources], that’s a normal park,” they said. “An eco park makes it easier to understand and complement the process of nature and draws forth some art from that while not disturbing the beauty of nature.”
“We are definitely trying to give it a new form, but using as little man-made intervention as possible,” they added. The existing beauty of the area “is not touched — the lake or forest around it is not shifted. That is an eco park.”
However, when we visited the Mudwani Dam Eco Park, what we found was a hill of debris from the coal mines — called overburden — on which local varieties of trees had been planted under a different public program. There was a broken pathway surrounding an inky black lake of water that had been expelled from the mines over time. It did not even have the facilities of a typical public park: Its concrete fencing was broken, there was no playground, or any space for one, and no place to sit.
Chhotelal Baiga, 70, a man from an Indigenous Baiga community that lives along Mudwani Dam, was unruffled as rumbling explosions sounded in the distance. He sold tickets at the eco park. It was the daily soundtrack to his life as workers in the two opencast coal mines — named Jayant and Nigahi — set explosives to expose coal seams.
What agitated him instead was the water in the dam, which abuts both the eco park and his own house, half a mile away along the bank of the lake. One day in December 2024, he gestured vehemently as he spoke about the quality of the water. “There is clean water in the eco park, you can drink it and see,” he said sarcastically, pointing to the water.
If the water seemed to reflect the clouds in the press release, up close it was pitch black. A haze of polluted air settled low on the lake, opening up to patches of blue above. Far from being an idyllic spot divorced from the landscape-scarring mining, the lake water is a sump of the two mines. It is also polluted by air thrown up from explosives that blast for coal, and coal dust from the steady flow of trucks that carry the fuel to the nearest power plant.
Boat attendants at the lake have to wipe down the boats daily to keep the coal from getting into the engines. Yet it is this water that Baiga and others from his community collect and drink daily after crudely filtering and boiling it.
Maya Baiga, no relation to Chhotelal, has to make multiple trips downhill from her mud house during the day to draw water from the local town despite being pregnant. Otherwise she has to trek down to the Mudwani Dam and filter the coal-filled water through a cloth, which removes some but not all of the pollutants.
“The birds that drink this water die here,” Chhotelal said. And the fish unfortunate enough to live in it die, too, he added.
Pollution from the coal mines dominated most conversations with residents of Singrauli. Reporters and researchers regularly descend on the town to write about the polluted air and water. Even so, the Baiga are so marginalized that local activists have not raised the issue of their drinking water, whether in newspapers or through protests.
“People from the Adivasi [Indigenous] community have never been connected to the mainstream society and … they have been further divided in the name of caste and religion,” said Ratibhan Singh, district president of the Aam Aadmi Party in Singrauli, explaining why these issues have not come to the fore.
Officials have avoided critiques of the water quality of this lake, however. One federal official told New Lines it was “an exaggerated statement” to say that the water was black. It was not possible that the mine could have had any polluting effect on the water, they said. Another official, who represents NCL, said that while he could not deny that the mines pollute the area, it was inevitable that there would be “a little impact” from the coal.
NCL officials did not respond to repeated requests for copies of studies done to assess the toxicity of this water before the eco park was built. Pillai said that there was no need to study the water. “Singrauli is already a polluted stretch and there is [an] impact of transportation there,” she said, referring to the high levels of air pollution caused by fly ash in Singrauli. “To say that the water is black is an exaggerated statement. It could be dust.”
Singrauli is one of 22 “critically polluted” places in India that have been identified by the Central Pollution Control Board. A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Southampton in the U.K. and the National Institute of Technology in Rourkela, India, found that plants in the eastern state of Odisha with just “one gram of mining dust on their leaves absorbed around 2-3 grams less carbon per square metre.”
Chhotelal, who is around 70, remembers the old growth forests that covered Singrauli more than five decades ago before the government brought the coal mines in. He spent his youth roaming the forest that is now submerged by the lake he lives near. Years of coal mining created the lake; it formed when groundwater filled the excavation site. Along with others of the Baiga community, he used to fish and hunt, and eat what he caught. They foraged for yams and “drank the god-given rain,” he said, referring to the catchments that were filled with rainwater.
“They dug up and threw away the entire jungle,” he recalled, referring to the government-owned coal mining companies. “The old jungle is completely finished.” These were the dry deciduous forests of central India, home to towering trees such as sal, mahua and banyan, which are indigenous to the region and part of a unique ecosystem that now remains only in a few increasingly endangered pockets of the area.
The sal trees, for example, are a hardwood species native to India, Bangladesh and Nepal and dominate whichever forest they are present in. They are also notoriously hard to regenerate once cut down. They coexist with other species like the Cuddapah almond tree; the mahua tree, known for its many uses, such as the liqueur made from its flowers, the cooking oil made from its seeds and the role of its bark in traditional medicine; and Coromandel ebony trees, known as tendu in Hindi, whose leaves are collected for hand-rolled smoking tobacco.
Forests were first cleared for industrial use in central India when a British company opened India’s first commercial coal mine in 1774. By 1947, when India first gained its independence, there were several mining companies, almost all owned by the government. In 1971, India started nationalizing private coal companies, absorbing them into a gigantic state apparatus and actively planning and researching its coalfields to decide how best to exploit them.
In 1973, the Indian government, along with scientists from the Soviet Union, had assessed that the Jayant mine in Singrauli could yield up to 10 million tons of coal per year, which doubled to 20 million tons per year as of 2017. A historical satellite analysis of the area shows that the two coal mines continue expanding.
With that expansion, forests have rapidly shrunk. Each year, thousands of acres of forest land are “diverted” to open new mineral mines. One study found that just three coal mines in central India led to the loss of up to 17% of forest cover in their areas between 1994 and 2022. In all, the mines led to the loss of 35% of local land cover in this period.
The greenery now seen in the latest version of Singrauli’s map is likely from afforestation programs that have focused on species native to India, but not on restoring the original forest biodiversity.
Apart from the lake, a fenced concrete pathway has been built along the bank of the dam in the eco park. The bank also holds runoff water from the two mines. With the dam on one side and a forested hill on the other, the path provides access to “picnic spots” but is not a complete loop.
The only significant structure is at the entrance of the park — a concrete building with an open stone lattice roof and no shelter in case of rain. A massive “I Love Singrauli” sign serves as a selfie point and also leads to a jetty for the paddle boats and tourist ferries in the lake.
The trees on the hills that surround the park were planted on the overburden of the mine around five to 10 years ago, Chhotelal said. Casually called “OBs” by locals, the hills of debris loom over the town.
Enfolded by the arms of the Jayant and Nigahi mines to the north and east, Singrauli is divided into different zones, separated by fingers of the mines. Several of these zones are partly gated townships maintained by NCL with planned roads, foliage lining the streets and distinctly less construction debris and dust. The others are less manicured and administered by the Singrauli Nagar Nigam, the municipal corporation that manages everything from civic services to health care and local elections in the town.
Singrauli’s disparate suburbs, a mix of both urban and rural areas, sit at the brink of opencast coal mines that sprawl across almost a hundred square miles. With a population of 220,000 as of 2011, Singrauli has housed people displaced by the mines for decades, along with a dam that serves the thermal power plant and people who work for these mines. Many of the people who live in the town’s unplanned quarters run businesses that are ancillary to the mines.
Together, the two organizations reign supreme over Singrauli. The Singrauli Nagar Nigam built the eco park on land owned by NCL, at a cost of 450,000 rupees (almost $5,300), and has been managing it since.
A small community of Baiga lives less than half a mile from the eco park, and their settlement is divided in two by a road. Uphill is a rough and informal settlement with mud houses and dry grass-fenced compounds, while downhill on the bank of the dam are more permanent structures, some of which open directly onto the lake. They are about as far removed from the planned quarter of the town as possible. The settlements are poorer and more makeshift than the rural quarters of the town. Interventions by the state government or municipal corporation are limited to one-time distributions of blankets or chairs.
When we asked an NCL official about the living conditions of the local community, he immediately instructed another official to “make arrangements” to move the community out. According to NCL, they do not want people to live there. “There is a problem with the Baiga people,” he said, complaining about their resistance to leaving. “They don’t tolerate interference from outside influences after a certain point. If you tell them we will take you away to a better place, we will give you facilities, they don’t want to go.”
It is the stubbornness of this “simple and easygoing community” that leads them to not want to move, he said. “It’s a very slow process to make them understand.” The NCL has been making efforts to drive out the Baiga community since the 1970s but has been unsuccessful. Multiple people blame the Baiga’s condition on their reluctance to change, and the fact that the community relies on contaminated water is overlooked by both local activists and newspapers.
Despite indifference from the town, the eco park still receives visitors and generates employment, however meager. Birbal Baiga, also not a relative of Chhotelal, estimated that around 10 people received employment but alleged that the number has since decreased, since the Baiga have been replaced by other communities from the city. “We don’t have the capacity to fight, so we could not do anything,” he said. “They should give us the work.” Chhotelal complained that his “salary” was a percentage cut of the tickets he managed to sell — nothing stable or permanent.
The Singrauli Nagar Nigam did not respond to requests for comment from New Lines.
The Mudwani Dam Eco Park is one of several recent attempts by the Ministry of Coal and its Sustainable Development Cell to rebrand coal mining as more community-friendly — a curious contradiction for an industry long linked to environmental degradation. While such projects may offer local recreational value, their primary goal seems to be image management, so that public perceptions of coal mining soften — especially since global entities such as the World Bank are keeping an eye on “just transition” initiatives.
By creating a mining tourism circuit, the government appears to be curating a more palatable, even marketable, version of coal. “Social media posts of tiny eco parks set within wider degraded coalfields mainly serve to greenwash the coal companies rather than representing meaningful restoration work on the ground,” said Patrik Oskarsson, associate professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, whose research covers coal mine closures in India.
While these initiatives attempt to green the image of India’s continuous coal expansion, the question remains — what is just transition and who benefits from this exercise?
“The enormous funds and the skills within the mining companies can be put to use in much better ways than via eco parks,” Oskarsson said. “To my mind, a just transition is about justice, it is about giving the poorest of the poor a voice in the planning and execution of restoration and mine closure activities. It is thinking through distributional and procedural forms of justice.”
In Singrauli, where a blackened lake masquerades as a symbol of renewal and the voices of its most marginalized are ignored, the eco park seems less a site of just transition and more like a stark reminder of how easily the appearance of restoration can eclipse the realities of those left behind.
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