India, Sept. 25 -- In Jharkhand's Rajhara village, energy transition begins in the kitchen and the field. A family may cook lunch over coal dust and firewood because an LPG refill costs too much, while a few hundred metres away, a solar pump draws water from an abandoned mine pit to irrigate crops. Coal and clean energy are not opposing chapters here. They occupy the same landscape, often the same household.

For generations, Central Coalfield Limited's open-cast Rajhara colliery shaped how people worked, earned and lived. Even after parts of the mine fell silent, its presence remained in the pits that filled with water, the coal scavenged for cooking, and in communities whose livelihoods had grown around extraction. As India plans for th...