Stolen India Coal Sold at Black Market in Modi’s Backyard
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Every night, about 30 tractors loaded with coal arrive at the edge of a forest in eastern India. A fleet of trucks, engines and lights switched off, is waiting to ferry the cargo to the country’s biggest black market for the fuel in Varanasi.
Stolen coal from Coal India Ltd.’s mines and other quarries may reach as much as 60 million metric tons a year, about 13 percent of the annual output for the world’s biggest producer, according to Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, a senior fellow at Australian National University’s Crawford School in Canberra. It’s worth about $1.5 billion and is a small but growing part of the widespread energy theft that reduces India’s GDP by more than 1 percent a year.