Date | Nov 09, 2016:
Just after the dawn on May 28, a mining accident at the Turamdih Uranium Mine near Jamshedpur, run by the state-owned Uranium Corporation of India Ltd (UCIL), killed three miners. 24-year-old Sonaram Kisku, a tribal contract worker, 42-year-old safety officer Surya Kant Singh and Milan Karmakar, 35, a general foreman died after they accidentally got buried under the wet radioactive slurry that they were reportedly clearing at a depth of over 250 metre in the Turamdih mine, 6 km from Jamshedpur in Jharkhand.
Three workers of Singareni Collieries Company Ltd (SCCL) — T Hanmantha Rao and G Posham, both were timbermen, and D Kistaiah, a mason — were crushed to death when a portion of the roof of a structure inside the coal mine collapsed on them when they came in to drink water around mid-day on April 14. Of the four workers at the Shanthikhani main site near Mandamarri, one escaped with minor injuries.
Including the six lives that were lost in the two recent accidents, there were a total of 65 deaths during the first six months of this year in a series of accidents at the country’s coal and non-coal mines — translating into a fatality every three days. For a sector, where the safety record is far from inspiring, there were a total of 122 persons documented as having met with a serious accident of some sort in India’s mines during the six month period, translating into a serious accident every one-and-a-half days.
Of this, there was a fatal accident every four days, making it arguably the most dangerous profession in India. The latest trend shows that the situation could be headed for its worst in numbers this year.
There are other two grim issues. One being that the compensation for disability or death — ranging between Rs 5.4 lakh and Rs 8.5 lakh per person last year — is under process for long. The other being that a number of those who perish are contract workers, who, or their immediate families, have practically no safety net apart from this payout.
In the Turamdih case, for instance, among the three killed, 24-year-old Kisku was a contract worker and not an employee of the UCIL. Technically, according to the safety and environmental regulations at the UCIL, “most of the operations underground are mechanised, eliminating the direct handling of ore”. A contract worker such as Kisku, as per regulations, should not have been removing the slurry, at least not manually. According to an official with a state-owned coal-mining PSU, he should also not have been deep inside the mine, since he was a contract worker and thereby ineligible for any compensation. Rules were flouted twice over. A detailed questionnaire sent to UCIL CMD C K Asnani did not elicit a response.
In the wake of the SCCL accident, the management did announce Rs 25 lakh to each family of the victims and also employment to one of the immediate members of the families right after the accident. Queries sent to B Ramesh Kumar, SCCL director (Operations) and A Manohar Rao SCCL director (Planning and Projects) on the accident, however, remained unanswered.
The official statistics, also do not reflect accidents that happen during illegal mining inside a number of coal and non-coal mines across the country. For instance, an hour after sundown on May 3 this year, at Baraboni in Burdwan, at least six illegal miners reportedly died when a section of a closed coal mine collapsed on them when more than 200 illegal miners were extracting coal from a mine allotted to Sanjiv Goenka-owned CESC, but was not operational. A magisterial probe was ordered by the Collector in the wake of the Baraboni incident, but illegal mining deaths happen across mines and deaths are always under the radar, something that official statistics fail to capture.
Going by the official statistics, though, the trend of average fatality rate and the number of serious accidents seem to have been coming down over the years. That may be a cold comfort for policymakers considering that for extracting 100 million tonnes of coal, seven lives were lost on an average in 2015. Considering last fiscal’s coal production target of 700 million tonnes, the annual fatality rate works out to nearly 50 for the 12 months, of which, a majority were accidents involving roof and side walls collapses of a mine. An uptick in the economy, experts point out, could invariably lead to increased pressure on Indian mining utilities to ramp up output, prompting calls for re-evaluating the safety of those toiling deep in the bowels of the earth.
Alongside ship-breaking, mining has the distinction of being the most dangerous profession in India, as is the case in a number of developing economies such as China and Brazil. Industry insiders, including senior officers employed by the world’s largest coal miner, state-owned Coal India Ltd, concede that official numbers could be much lower than the actual deaths that take place deep inside the mines.
India produces 89 minerals by operating 569 coal mines, 67 oil & gas mines, 1,770 non-coal mines, and several more small mines, running into over a lakh, all of which translate into direct employment of about 1 million on a daily average basis and an overall sector contribution of about 5 per cent to the country’s gross domestic product. However, the fact that disasters strike at regular intervals in coal mines and some of the metalliferous mines — iron ore, soapstone and granite mines — is a pointer to the Indian mining industry’s abysmal safety record and the failure of its utilities to learn from the ‘standard operating procedures’ (SOPs) implemented in countries such as Australia, the US and even China.
Between 2009 and 2013, there have been 752 documented fatalities in mining operations in India, according to the Office of Directorate General of Mines Safety, Ministry of Labour and Employment. These include accidents at mines run by state-owned CIL, Neyveli Lignite Corporation and Singareni Collieries. One of the reasons why the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act was enacted in 1973, taking over private sector mines, was their poor safety records. Yet, work at public sector mines remains highly dangerous.
The Directorate General of Mines Safety figures suggest fatality rate of 0.21 in India, down from 0.36 about five years ago. Lack of investment in coal mines is cited as one of the main reasons for the high casualties. Accidents during surface transport by heavy machinery in open-cast mines, apart from the use of explosives, are the other key reasons. Though employees of state-owned coal firms are governed by the same set of rules as, say, those of Air India, payout rates in case of accidents are low. The compensation for injuries or death rarely crosses Rs 10 lakh.
Officials in the government say that the vigil has been stepped up. “The law enforcing agency / regulatory authority under the Mines Act- 1952 — the DGMS under the Ministry of Labour & Employment conducts statutory inquiry and investigation to analyse the causes and circumstances leading to all fatal accidents and suggests remedial measures to avoid recurrence of such accidents. Apart from inquiry conducted by DGMS, all fatal and serious accidents are also being investigated by the Mine Manager or any Assistant Manager authorised by the Mine Manager and the Safety Officer of the respective mine as per provisions made under the Coal Mines Regulations- 1957. The inherent dangers ensure that deaths in mines are not just a phenomenon in India but can occur in even the safest of working environments. In 2010, explosions in the Pike River Mine in New Zealand and the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, the US, killed a total of 29 men,” said a mines ministry official.
In India, though, the problems stem from issues such as the causes of accidents and the contravention of statutory provisions during inspections repeating themselves. Even more worrying is the fact that states are willing to sidestep safety rules. As recent as June 24 this year, the Meghalya cabinet petitioned the central government to exempt the state from the purview of the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, 1973, following a May 2014 ban by the National Green Tribunal on what is called “rat-hole coal mining” — a dangerous practice that involves digging pits ranging from five to 100 cubic metres into the ground to reach the coal seam and then making tunnels into the seam sideways to extract the coal.
Despite the risk to workers, Meghalya’s cabinet mandated the state’s mining and geology department to take up with the central government to exempt coal mining in the state from the purview of the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, 1973. Section 3 of the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, 1973, states that the right, title, interest of the owners in relation to the coal mines shall vest absolutely with the central government.
(Source: http://indianexpress.com/)