Varanasi a well known city in India, a mystical location and one of the most sacred places in the world is also home for the coal business. In the north part of the city we can find a local government coal mandi (deposit) , right beside a train station dedicated to this business. Trains arrive with the precious load and are quickly unloaded to fulfill the demand of a line of trucks that are waiting for the coal, this is a process that is repeated throughout the day.

Workers are subject to a tremendous load of work, in a very harsh environment.

Being government property it was not very easy to talk to the workers since the presence of a foreigner did get some unwanted attention.

Up north at Chandasi (14km away) we can find coal mandis who supply coal to nearby small industries (brick kilns, glass manufacturers) who have difficulty to access coal from the formal sector. These mandis play an important role in the local economy, they work as intermediaries, trading with sellers representatives and commission agents representing buyers. Price discovery is through auctions. They operate in the boundaries between legal and illegal coal as they move coal, from those who want to sell, to those who need to buy.

Today Chandasi operates near 200 trucks per day to a total of 4000 tons, huge numbers that are small compared to the heights of other decades, at its peak 20 years ago this mandi had 1200 trucks a day! The coal workers labour conditions are as expected very bad, they are subjected to hard temperatures, heavy loads and to coal dust, very harmful to the respiratory system. This is a 364 year/day job and hey start working at 5h30 and finish 8h00, to earn 3 to 5 USD/day depending on their skills, it´s really hard work. Many of them came from from distant locations as far as 300km, to work on these mandis. In the Chandasi mandi these people, work, eat and sleep inside the mandi, it´s 24 hours to 24 hours work for them.

Coal Industry is in heart of today global warming discussion since it has a massive impact in the environment, producing tons of CO2 emissions and using very dangerous materials in the process, producing hazard waste such as AMD (acid mine drainage) that contaminates our precious water.​