Coal news and updates

Thario Halepoto village is located in the Thar desert in south-eastern Pakistan, around 400 kilometres east of the port city of Karachi. You can hear the scream of peafowl and bells sounding around the necks of grazing goats and cows. Women wearing colourful clothes carrying water pitchers on their head walk between the sand dunes.

 

Around 1,000 households live in the village, the majority of them part of the Halepoto clan. But life here is about to change, with the arrival of Chinese and Pakistan joint venture to excavate the massive coal deposits that lie beneath the sand and build coal fired power stations to meet Pakistan’s energy demands.

 

Mehmood Halepoto’s family has lived in this village for centuries. Like other residents, Halepoto is a herder who ploughs the fields when it rains. In 1990 officials came looking for coal and found huge deposits under the village.

The Thar desert in Sindh province contains 175 billion tonnes of lignite coal – one of the largest untapped coal deposits in the world. It is also one of the most populated deserts in the world – home to world heritages sites and endangered species. Most of the 1.6 million people who live in the Thar desert region live in poverty and are highly vulnerable to extreme weather events. Twenty five percent of people live within the proposed coal development area. They thought they would benefit, but that has not been the case.

SOurce: The Wire.in