‘The forest is everything’: indigenous tribes in India battle to save their home from Adani – in pictures

The Adani-managed Parsa East and Kanta Basan open-cut coalmine carved out of the Hasdeo Arand forest in Chhattisgarh. It produces 15m tons of coal a year.

Trucks carrying coal dust from coal washing leave the Hasdeo thermal power station.

The Hasdeo thermal power plant. Adani sends coal to the state-run electricity generator and mine owner, Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam.

‘Mining will be our death … It is going to devastate everything nature has given us. One-time compensation for the land is not enough,’ says Bhual Singh, a Gond from the Ghatbarra village.

Mathura Prasad leads his cattle through the Hasdeo Arand forest in Chhattisgarh. The forest and the lives of the forest residents will be lost if new coalmines go ahead.

Watched by Righuram Porte, Budhram Mariam elicits help from his five-year-old daughter Kiran with the rice cropping in the village of Fatehpur in the Hasdeo Arand forest.

Manoj Kumar Yadav carries harvested rice on his bicycle to the village of Ghatbarra in the Hasdeo Arand forest.

The Adani-managed Parsa East and Kanta Basan open-cut coalmine in the Hasdeo Arand forest has been operating since 2013.

A Gond resident of the village of Fatehpur arrives at the protest meeting against further mining of their Hasdeo Arand forest homes.

Gond gather to protest further mining of their forest.

Gond women gather. Their village homes are due to be demolished to make way for the Parsa coalmine.

A local family on the edge of the Adani-managed Parsa East and Kanta Basan open-cut coalmine, Chhattisgarh.

Coal trucks pass a sign on the highway through the Hasdeo Arand forest warning to beware of elephants. There are already a growing number of reports of incidences of human-elephant conflict as the elephants’ habitat diminishes due to the open-cut coalmines.

The Parsa open-cut mine operated by Adani Enterprises through its subsidiary Rajasthan Collieries
has received approval to clear more than 841 hectares of forest next to the Parsa East and Kante Basan. According to Adani, the new mine has
a mineable reserve of 200
tonnes of coal and a lifespan of 42 years.