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The hillocks dotting the coal hub of Chandrapur are a green oasis in the central Indian region pockmarked with coal mines, where even rain puddles are black and a coal-fed thermal power plant belches smoke into the sky.
Yet locals live in fear of these hills - dunes formed with the sand removed from coal mines and covered by a blanket of green - as they have created a new habitat for tigers and other wild animals responsible for a string of devastating attacks.
Coal mining is more commonly criticised by environmentalists for polluting air and water, degrading landscapes and fuelling climate change than for creating new wildlife habitats.
But Santosh Patnaik, who manages programmes aimed at securing a green and fair transition with New Delhi-based Climate Action Network South Asia, noted the coal industry “has outcomes we don’t really know about yet”.
India is the world’s second-largest coal producer after China, yet supplies are falling short for the needs of its domestic industry and the government is ramping up production.
The impacts are mostly negative for local communities, said Patnaik - from increased poverty and health damage to the human-animal conflict now happening in Chandrapur.
“Human interference is the main reason behind disturbance in the environment - and fossil fuel extraction is posing an existential threat to the entire ecosystem,” he added.
With a dense population of 1.3 billion, India is vulnerable to human-animal conflict as people encroach on wildlife habitats, with Chandrapur especially at risk as its mines are close to a forest, experts said.
Bandu Dhotre, a member of the wildlife board of western Maharashtra state where Chandrapur is located, said the area had seen leopards, bears and now tigers, whose numbers are rising in tandem with species protection efforts.
“They have a conducive habitat, access to water and prey. But people are not foreseeing the future... This will be a big problem,” said Dhotre, founder and president of environmental organisation Eco-Pro, pointing to the hills on a rainy morning.
Chandrapur is home to the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve - one of 50 such reserves in India - and its tiger and leopard populations have doubled to about 85 and 105 respectively in the last decade as conservation efforts bore fruit, officials said.
There is no mining activity in the forest or its buffer zones but mines and power plants have been built on the natural corridors the animals once used to move between forest areas.
Meanwhile, the tree plantations mandated by India’s environmental laws on the dunes - spread over about 2,300 acres (928 hectares) in Chandrapur alone - have inadvertently provided a new habitat for migrating wild animals as their numbers rise.
Villagers living near the hillocks, called overburdens by the mining industry, dare not venture out alone or after dark following attacks on them and their livestock in recent months.
“We feel scared all the time. We have lost cows and buffaloes to tiger attacks on our farms,” said Pankaj Dhingare, a farmer and council member in Khairgaon village, which is located next to an overburden.
“We are bearing losses, when the miners are making a profit. They should compensate us financially, or at least give us work,” said Dhingare, showing a video on his phone of a tiger on a village road the previous night.
