An interesting article in the Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE) documents the activities of itinerant coal-sellers in eastern India who form a distribution network from mines to individual homes, shops and foodstalls. Incredibly, these sellers carry up to 200 kg on standard or modified bicycles. Some undertake two-day journeys of 60 km to reach their markets.
The coal is from shallow village-dug mines or abandoned mines, or scavenged from official mines: all illegal. Driven by desperation born of environmental degradation and extreme poverty, the cycle wallahs have found a gap in the transport market. Previously, coal was delivered by truck to village coal dumps, but as the middle class households moved to LPG and kerosene as fuel sources, trucks stopped delivering. Nationalisation of the coal industry pushed up prices, making illegal mining more profitable, and the coal cycle wallahs emerged.
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