‘It was a set-up, we were fooled’: the coal mine that ate an Indian village

The Parsa East Kete Basan coal mine carved out of the Hasdeo Arand forest in Chhattisgarh, central India. Photograph: Brian Cassey/The Guardian

In a lined notebook, Bhole Nath Singh Armo, a lean 28-year-old man wearing a blue shirt and matching baseball cap, drew a map of his village. He pointed his pen at the middle to mark the temple where the village deity had lived. To the west, he noted a settlement of more than 200 houses where he, his father and his grandfather were born and raised. Then, to the north, another temple for a female deity. This was how his village, Kete, looked until nine years ago, when it was destroyed by a company controlled by a $260bn conglomerate. The conglomerate is named after its owner, Asia’s richest man, Gautam Adani.

Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center Photograph: Pulitzer Center