Nergish Sunavala |
Apr 18, 2016

Ranjit Kumar's voice is so soft you have to lean in to hear him. "I have this nightmare," he says. "I'm in a mine and I see this shining piece of mica. I try to grab it but it's out of reach. I walk towards it but it moves still further away. And then everything goes dark."

In 2010, eight-year-old Ranjit was working in an open pit mine outside his village Chanako in Jharkhand's Koderma district when a part of the periphery collapsed. His nightmare stems from suffocating in the debris for a few minutes before being rescued.

Ranjit takes us to the spot, even posing for pictures while holding scraps of mica up for the camera. The quarry was shut down when the precious mineral ran out. Now, there's a deep crater with scraggly bushes growing along the edges. As we turn to leave, the shy 14-year-old points to an unremarkable patch of mud and stone. "When the mine collapsed," he says, "that's where my mom got buried."

Ranjit's village is in the heart of India's mica belt, which runs through the dense forests of northern Jharkhand and southern Bihar. The belt loops across seven districts -Jharkhand's Koderma, Giridih and Hazaribag and Bihar's Nawada, Jamui, Gaya and Bhagalpur.

The entire landscape glitters in the sunlight. Imagine a giant brush coating the baked earth with rouge-the shimmer is uncannily similar because top cosmetics brands use mica powder, sourced from this region, to give lipstick and eye shadow their sparkle. Mica also gives automotive paints their shine and is used in food colouring, pharmaceuticals and electrical appliances like toasters and electric irons.

With few employment opportunities but an abundance of mica, illegal mining has become a family business here with children working alongside their parents to put food on the table. The mica is first sold to small-time traders, changing hands multiple times before reaching Giridih--Jharkhand's mica processing and export hub. Industry insiders value the export trade--both legal and illegal--at about Rs 125 crore.

Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi's NGO, Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), has been working to extract children from this industry since 2005 in conjunction with Estee Lauder. BBA estimates about 500 villages are dependent on the mica trade. The NGO has managed to root out child labour in its 105 `Bal Mitra Grams' or child friendly villages but that still leaves about 400 villages or 60,000 children--assuming a rough average of 150 kids per village--at risk. Occupational hazards include head injuries, cuts and abrasions, skin and respiratory infections like silicosis, TB and asthma.

Earlier this year, the Natural Resources Stewardship Circle (NRSC), French nonprofit whose members are from the beauty, fragrance, and flavour industries, hosted a Responsible Mica Sourcing Summit in Delhi. The goal was to make 63 stakeholders including community leaders, brands, suppliers and representatives from the Bihar and Jharkhand child labour commissions aware of the mica supply chain's social and environmental risks.

An agreement was reached to focus efforts on "traceability and transpar ency , community empowerment and multi-stakeholder governance", reads NRSC's press statement. Estee Lauder, Chanel, Yves Rocher, Clarins, and L'Oreal helped organize the summit along with pharmaceutical giant Merck and pigment manufacturer Sudarshan.

The children toiling in these mines have no idea why adults are so obsessed with this shiny mineral. Sangeeta*, who doesn't know her age but looks fourteen, laughs drily when she hears that it adds 'chamak' to lip stick and blush. "We never think about these things," she says. "We just do the work."

Her dupatta looped around her waist, she rac out of pits--30-feetes in and out of pits--30-feet deep--with the dexterity of a ninja. Her village, Pipratand in Giridih, skirts the gaping rat holes where she works alongside mostly women and teenage girls, earning Rs 10-25 per kilo--the mica's size and quality decide the price.

Sangeeta's father once worked in a legal mine. When it shut down, he began farming but couldn't earn enough to support his family. Three years ago, she started working to supplement his income.

Her family's story mirrors the region's history. The British first chanced upon the area's vast mica deposits while laying railroad tracks in the 1890s. Mining activities began soon after and Koderma district was dubbed 'Abhrak (mica) Nagari'.

Until the 1950s, over 700 legal mines existed employing about 24,000 people. Mine owners, flush with cash, built palatial bungalows in Koderma's Jhumri Tilaiya, imported foreign cars and Arabian thoroughbreds. Their employees had steady jobs and access to healthcare at the Central Mica Mine Labour Welfare Hospital, a 100-bed super-speciality institution.

But the discovery of a mica substitute, coupled with the restrictions on mining imposed by the 1980 Forest (Conservation) JHARKHAN Act and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991--India's biggest mica importer--led to the industry's slow decline. When most legal mines shut down--just a handful are still operational--Koderma's sprawling medical facility became a ghost town.

The Chinese economic boom and the global craze for "natural"cosmetics revived the flagging industry in the 2000s. But by then, it was a shadowy black market forcing entire families, impoverished by the closure of legal mines, into dangerous pits without protective gear. The new modus operandi involved a local trader levelling a patch of forest and arming villagers with a shovel, hammer and chisel.

Vishnu*, a resident of Koderma's Tilaiya Basti, is busy wielding these tools in a shallow pit on the outskirts of his village. Intermittently, he tosses baskets of dirt up to his wife and four kids to seg regate the mica scraps (dhebra) from mud. Even his five year-old daughter--who has her own tiny `katori' to fill must earn her keep. A year ago, Vishnu saw two people die when a mine collapsed. "I wouldn't do this job if I had another option," he says. To crack down on such operations, the state has set up "flying squads" of mining and forest officers. But a former illegal mine operator says greasing the palms of local Maoists and officials keeps the mica racket running smoothly.

After being extracted, the mineral is sold to processing units. A top Giridih trader, who owns such a unit, claims he exports 1,000-1,500 tonnes of mica flakes per year at Rs 30 per kg earning Rs 3-5 crore.The government charges export cess but doesn't ask where the mica comes from, he says.

"The day they pay attention to this, we'll all be out of business."

The 2014 Indian Minerals Yearbook shows that one lakh-tonne more mica was exported than produced in 201314--a clear indication that the balance was illegally sourced.

The Giridih trader names German company Merck and the Chinese pigment manufacturer Kuncai as his clients. However, Merck insists they source only from five legal mines whose output is tracked through production logs. If these figures were inflated, explains Gangolf Schrimpf from Merck's media team, mine owners would have to pay a larger royalty to the government, which wouldn't make economic sense. Additionally , third party audits are conducted to ensure compliance with Merck's "environmental protection, safety , and working standards". Kuncai also carries out on-site inspections and asks for government certificates stating that the supply chain is child labour free.

Recently, mica was reclassified as a minor mineral, making it easier for the state to issue licences to small operations. Buyers say legalization could potentially rid the supply chain of child labour. The main hurdle, though, is that most mines are on protected forest land, explains Jharkhand's deputy director of mines Shankar Sinha.

But there's light at the end of the tunnel. BBA's model of empowering villages through education and advocacy is yielding results. Ranjit is now in school and got elected 'sarpanch' of his village's first 'Bal Panchayat'. This, despite the fact that his mother was left paralyzed after the mine collapse in 2010. She succumbed to her injuries last year.

In the last five years, BBA has enrolled 3,650 at-risk kids in school. And Giridih's Tisri Block education officer claims over 90% of the approximately 35,000 kids in BBA villages stay in school. BBA achieves this by helping poor families access government schemes and by supporting grassroots initiatives against truant teachers or alcohol addiction, which strains a family's already-scarce resources.

Badku Marandi, a former child labourer whose father was an alcoholic, led such a drive in his village. A vocal crusader for child rights, the 15-year-old vividly recalls crying when forced into dark, scorpion-infested mines until BBA intervened to send him to school. He was recently invited to attend NRSC's Delhi conclave. He went hoping the story of his horrific past would brighten other children's futures.
(Names with an * have been changed)

(Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/)