By Ángel L. Martínez Cantera
February 3, 2015
Whispers lead the way down the slippery path, through the thick poisonous air. Flickering torches unveil more than a dozen shadows working inside the rat-hole. Barefoot men, children and women equipped with just a few shovels dig out rocks and fill up baskets with coal on the outskirts of Kuju, a little town in the northeastern Indian state of Jharkhand.
"I collect coal before going to school, and my parents give me some money," says 8 year-old Kishor Kumari while packing the mineral into dusty bags. "Transporters pay us 200 rupees ($3.20) for every 200 kilos (441lbs) we collect, but we also have to bribe police," explains Kishor's father, who lost his brother when a mine collapsed couple of years ago.
NGOs estimate that around 100,000 children work in the coal industry in Jharkhand state.
Thousands of families like the Kumaris work in coal mines in Kuju. The Jharkhand State Commission for Protection of Children (JSCPC) declines to provide an approximate figure for minors involved in illegal mining until it completes a scheduled survey. However, Kuju-based foundation Srijan estimates there are roughly 100,000 children and their family members involved in the business across the state, home to India's largest coal reserves.
"There're no children working in the area," insists Ragendra Prashad, Kuju's on-field senior supervisor at Central Coalified Limited (CCL), India's fourth largest coal company. Like all companies operating in Jharkhand, CCL is a subsidiary of state-owned Coal India Ltd (CIL), the world's largest coal producer. Ragendra points to the families collecting coke in the horizon, around half a mile away from the company's working bulldozers, saying: "We close underground mines but villagers break into afterwards to extract the coal. It's a problem with management because we need more guards."
Families put themselves in danger braving precarious abandoned mines in order to eke out a living.
India's Mines Act (1954) prohibits not only the employment of minors but also their presence on the field. But critics accuse the coal companies, and often local authorities, of turning a blind eye to or sometimes being complicit in black market activities. From CCL's headquarters in Jharkhand's capital, a manager who refuses to provide his name admits that not all unused mines are properly sealed: "We should put brick and concrete in all abandoned mines, but we don't because that's costly and we're a profiting company. Whoever enters in the mines is out of our control and therefore not our business."
CCL produced coal worth 25.26 million rupees ($406,765) last year and justifies the lack of investment on security by pointing to the central government's focus on increasing output. Last November, Union Coal Secretary Anil Swarup promised that Coal India Ltd would mine 1,000 million tons by 2019, doubling its present production.
Knowing they are part of an illegal business, many do not report deaths and injuries in the abandoned mines.
To a great extent, the government's drive for economic growth and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's promise to provide round-the-clock power to all Indians by 2022 depends on coal. India is the third world's largest user of the fossil fuel, according to the World Coal Association, and it accounted for 44 percent of the country's energy consumption in 2012. But it isn't enough and, earlier this year, the government estimated that domestic shortfall would range between 185 and 265 million tons by 2016/17. Although Jharkhand is India's third largest producer of coal, power cuts are still common in Kuju.
Already the world's fourth largest energy consumer, India has become increasingly reliant on imported fossil fuels as demand soars off the back of its swelling economy. It is a situation Modi's ministers have pledged to redress, renewing the country's drive for total self-sufficiency in energy resources. The government is also expected to address the environmental consequences of India's dependency on coal. Although it is only responsible for only about 6 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, it is the world's third largest single emitter after China and the United States, a fact which received significant attention at December's United Nations climate change conference in Lima.
Cyclewallahs — illegal sellers — pay the miners just $3 for around 440 pounds of coal.
According to Rich Lands, Poor People, a report published 2008 by India's Center for Science and Environment (CSE), the coal industry is responsible for most of the waste generated in mining, bringing about three to four tons of waste per ton produced. The same study notes that to reduce costs while increasing production, coal extraction has shifted from costly underground to opencast mining, which results in more insecure abandoned mines.
The so-called "resource curse" has also led to the impoverishment of local communities. Uncontrollable coal mine fires in Jharkhand's northern town of Jharia have prompted the state government to begin a phased relocation around 250,000 inhabitants. The displacement is also profitable to the local mining industry, officials have noted, allowing for the exploitation of coal worth 600 billion rupees ($9.7 billion) lying untapped beneath the town. But livelihoods and homes have been lost. "Miners have been denied their right to life. They've seen their land and houses burned so that our houses have electricity," says Xavier Drias, director of the Jharkhand Mines Area Coordination Committee (JAMACC). His alliance has been fighting for decades to bring in regulations like the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (2013), in attempt to redress the neglect of these marginalized communities.
Coal fires have been burning underneath the town of Jharia for almost a century.
As unseen trains feed India's growth, traveling across the country to power plants that light up high technology industries, thousands of transporters or cyclewallahs — illegal coal sellers on bicycles — ride hundreds of miles through Jharkhand to fire up mobile kitchens, restaurants and hostels with cheap illegal coke. Dilip Kumar has grown up working with coal and now carries tons of it on his three-day journey to Ranchi, the state capital. "I used to collect coal until I was 12, when I begun transporting it", explains Dilip while paying 60 rupees ($0.97) to the van driver. Groups of 5 to 6 cyclewallahs tie their bicycles to vans which drive them up the steep hills of Jharkhand's highways. Van drivers can earn around 6,000 rupees ($97) a day, reserving about 500 ($8.10) rupees to bribe the police waiting for their cut in nearby roads.
Cyclewallahs pay local van drivers to pull them up the state's steep highways. The drivers in turn bribe police.
But only few benefit from this business. According to the report Illegal Coal Mining in Jharkhand and Control Strategies published by the Jamshedpur-based Xavier Labour Relation Institute (XLRI), 1.37 million tons of coal were trafficked in 2009. The study estimated that the annual losses amounted for Rs. 1.06 billion ($17.2m) — to the coal companies and Rs. 0.34 billion ($5.5m) as royalty to the state exchequer. The state-funded study gave recommendations to combat the phenomenon, such as the inclusion of communities in decision-making processes or the application of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, such as local development projects. However, the report's author Raghu Ram says his suggestions have had little success, complaining that in reality the initiatives were not being implemented on the ground. "Doing so will actually lead to win-win outcomes for the small scale supply chain actors and the coal companies," he said. Latest official figures published by Coal India Limited revealed that of its 24 corporate social responsibility programs nationwide, only one is active in Jharkhand.
The opacity of coal companies' operations doesn't help efforts to fight the illegal trade, with claims of corruption and a lack of official oversight surrounding the awarding of contracts and day-to-day mining activities. in August, India's Supreme Court canceled more than 200 illegal coal block allocations made since 1993, ruling that the award process had been arbitrary and legally flawed. Studies published by the national alliance Mines, Minerals and People (MM&P) estimated that there are around 80,000 illegal mines across the country. "There are more than 100 discontinued mines under CIL and these may not be profitable but there may be coal which is unlawfully taken out," Nishant Alag, communications manager at MM&P, told VICE News.
Community advocates say companies pay lip-service to ideas of corporate social responsibility but that these are rarely reflected on the ground.
MM&P proposed to dedicate 26 percent of companies' profits from mineral production to the development of affected districts in the new Mining Bill 2010. Although it is still pending approval, the organization notes that the measure has been watered down to just 26 percent of the state royalties from mining activities.
The state's political landscape might soon change, following the recent victory of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in legislative elections. But community advocates say the shift is unlikely to bring a brighter future for the marginalized of Jharkhand. Tthe first non-tribal chief minister in the state's history, Raghubar Das has already been embroiled in a corruption scandal involving the awarding of construction contracts when he was deputy chief minister in 2010. "It is again pure business, economic growth," concludes Alag.
(Source: https://news.vice.com/)