The firemen

The idea of the coal mine fires appealed to the jury too when Aggarwal travelled to Singapore to present his case. Out of the 3,000 applications sent in,11 were shortlisted and Aggarwal and Sanjeev Sivan,the co-director of the movie,Underground Inferno,set about their task. Apart from the plight of the five lakh-odd population in the Jharkhand district,the fact that coal mine fires were a global phenomenon and one of the reasons behind global warming was also taken into consideration,and the two decided to focus on Jharia as well as Centralia,a small place in Philadelphia,about three hours away from New Jersey. “In the early eighties the US government relocated the entire village because it faced a similar predicament. Only 14 people stayed back. When we went to film the place only 11 people were alive and we captured the human story from the perspective of this 35-year-old who acts as a keeper of this small forgotten place,” says Aggarwal,who is also the producer of the movie.

The two directors also travelled to Germany,to a place near Munich for a potential solution to the problem. Scientists there had come up with a satellite device to map the movement of the underground fire,something which is being considered a revolutionary technique to tap the movement of the fire. “If a tragedy does occur in Jharia,the scale is bound to be enormous,because of the volcanic foundation of the town. This new satellite technique can at least alert people of a potential disaster,” says Aggarwal. The movie premiered on National Geographic channel this month.

Aggarwal has also put his previous experience of working on television to good use by putting together a series of 20-second advertisements with celebrities on the ‘Bharat Meri Pehchaan’ campaign by the I&B Ministry. “Each of these people are icons of modern India and we got them to interpret what it means to them to be an Indian and we came up with a wonderful gamut of ideas,” he says,of the campaign which premiered this Republic Day.