WHAT'S YOURS IS 'MINE'

Using virtual reality, a short documentary transports viewers to Chhattisgarh’s Korba, where a quarter of India’s coal is mined at a heavy cost to humanity.

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Aruna Chandrasekhar,
Former Senior Researcher at Amnesty International

Soon after joining human rights NGO Amnesty International in June 2013, I started researching coal mining in India and human rights violations associated with it. I decided to look at Coal India, the largest coal producing company in the world. It is also a public sector company, which means every Indian is a shareholder in some sense.

The government is responsible for the company’s functioning and uses a law which allows them to acquire land for ‘national interest’ without taking the consent of people. In late 2013, I made a whirlwind solo field trip to coal country, during which I visited 22 mining sites in 20 days across Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha.

Among all the places I visited, the Kusmunda mine in Korba, Chhattisgarh really struck me. On the edge of the mine was a village called Barkuta. I went to see the houses there and was introduced to a woman named Nirupabai. She was living with her elderly mother, her younger sister and a brother with a mental disability. Nirupa was the sole breadwinner. She used to farm her father’s land but it had been taken away. To make matters worse, she had not been given a job because the coal company said that women cannot work in mines. Nirupa went from being the proud owner of her land to a slave of Coal India.

That sense of injustice hit home. Nirupa struck me as someone who was strong and articulate but had been cursed. We ended up striking a friendship.

I first interviewed her outside her home which was filled with grain. She and the other residents told me that they had been receiving threats to vacate the area. Nine days after I left, Nirupa was on her way to work when her home was bulldozed along with those of 17 others. Everything was destroyed and they weren’t even allowed to take their belongings and their grain out.

On hearing this, I knew we had to work there and do something to bring out her story. So I kept coming back to Kusmunda. During a visit three months after my initial trip, I noticed that Nirupa’s grain had been mixed with rubble and she had rebuilt her house from the remains of the nearby school. I had been taking photographs throughout and I put out a report, which got a lot of coverage.

Coal has always been such a contentious issue. People see a mine and think it’s scary, but you never get to see a mine and a village in the same frame. I’d been visiting these mines for quite sometime and I wanted to communicate these surreal and manufactured industrial landscapes replete with thermal power plants and gigantic ash ponds. The Kusmunda mine is just 45 minutes away an industrial township where there are hotels and even a Domino’s Pizza outlet.

I think it’s something that people don’t get to see - we draw power from coal and yet we invisibilise it. We don’t want to ask questions about its origins. We take so much of this power for granted.

During my research, I would sit on the edge of mines and have these conversations. I wondered what it would be like to transport people - not necessarily into the shoes of people who are displaced – but at least to enable them to see what I saw. It’s good to immerse people in difficult subjects.

Memesys Culture Lab approached us for a documentary and I saw immense potential of using Virtual Reality as a platform to tell this story. The novelty of the format also appealed to me. It started with me writing parts of the story and imagining a script. We decided to shoot in areas where I had already worked and interacted with the locals and activists there. We discussed different ideas and the possible characters. We considered telling it as a journey of coal, from being formed in the forest to being mined to being scattered around cities. But I wanted to bring out Nirupa’s story and show what it’s like living in this suspended state, not knowing when your land will go – it’s a landscape you are forced to accept.

I felt it was important not to exoticise what was happening and we thought Faiza Khan would be the right person to direct the film given her previous work in understanding communities. In all, we shot for around two weeks and there were plenty of challenges. The crew, which had fewer than 10 members, came down to Chhattisgarh and we got familiar with the VR format. We wanted to pick the most non-invasive gear, which was difficult given that VR involves multiple cameras and that is not easy to disguise like a DSLR. It was dicey getting the landscape shots because the company guards could well have spotted us and for VR you need to leave the camera alone for timelapse shots.

We also used a drone to capture aerial shots of the mine. This was another dangerous move because we could have been caught. The risks were not limited to the crew as several locals went out of their way to help us figure out where and when we could shoot despite not being entirely sure what the end product would be.

Over a period of two years, I saw the mine in Barkuta expanding and more and more people leaving the village. There used to be around 50 families living there and now only two remain. I saw Nirupa lose her home and then rebuild it in another village and now she has a hut.

In the film, you see women worshipping at a sacred grove. The day after that was scene was shot, the grove was gone. Cultures and identity from both maps and memory are being erased forever. Nirupa wasn’t alone and thousands of families stand to be displaced from land that is rightfully theirs. People are scared to leave their village because they don’t know when their house will be demolished and what will happen to their families. I now carry coal with me from various places as a symbol of their suffering.

Zain Memon,
Co-founder, Memesys Culture Lab

We’d been looking at ways to tell stories in the strongest possible way and in 2015, we started experimenting with virtual reality. There were no tutorials or experts so we were pretty much groping in the dark.

The narrative styles of cinema built over decades don’t work in VR. For example, you can’t take a close-up shot. We found ourselves about a hundred years back in terms of telling the story in the best way visually. And apart from the visuals, there were also new elements like binaural audio, where the sound changes as the person moves.

For Cost of Coal, the idea of using VR was not only to transport someone somewhere else but also to transfer their empathy somewhere else. It’s the best tool to force someone into action.

I handled the shooting and the technicals of the film. In a regular film, you can’t see me when I’m holding the camera. But in VR, you can see everything. So on the editing table, we actually had to be “rubbed” out of the shot.

We wanted to get a shot of the mine blasting, which is like a mild earthquake. The equipment weighed about 5-kg and consisted of 14 GoPro cameras. In that heat, the camera batteries would only last a little more than 30 minutes. The cameras were mounted on a monopod and I had to sit down at the edge of the mine and hold it for an hour for a one-minute shot. If the blast was too close or powerful, the earth would have caved in and I could have fallen right into the mine.

It was a powerful experience, considering it was my first time visiting a coal mine, which in this case is the size of central Delhi. I fell asleep on the drive there and when I woke up, I found myself atop a hill. But it later occurred to me that it was not a hill. Mining had transformed the entire landscape and the ‘hills’ were in fact piled up dirt that had been dug away.

When we met Nirupa, she pointed to a crater and said that was where she grew up and where her ancestors lie. It hit me really hard to think that those memories were now just a big cavity in the ground. The government has knowingly taken away the land of an entire generation of indigenous people. People who don’t have have strength are being oppressed. It is a fight against someone who cannot fight back.

AS TOLD TO NILESH PINTO AND SIDDESH SHETTY