(The following is an extract from a forthcoming book by the author on the plunder of the ‘commons’ in India.)
— Yogi Aggarwal (yogi.aggarwal[at]gmail.com)
Introduction
Two major events took place in India’s coal sector in the last few months.
First, on the night of December 30, 18 coal miners were killed after the mine collapse at Eastern Coalfields Ltd’s Lal Matia coal mine in Jharkhand. This pushed mining fatalities to over 100 in 2016, of which 65 deaths occurred during just the first six months of this year, for which data is available.
The Ministry of Mines has termed the Lal Matia accident an “unprecedented” event. “Prima facie, it is observed that the incidence is unprecedented, since an area of 300 m length by 110 m wide solid floor of the Over Burden dump area has slid down by about 35 m involving around 9.5 million cubic metres of earth material. This could be due to failure of the bench edge along the hidden fault line/slip,” the ministry said in a statement.
In fact, the disaster at Lal Matia was a result of two factors: one, increased pressure to ramp up output to meet ambitious targets; and a policy of outsourcing to private contractors, a form of semi-privatisation of coal operations. Lal Matia supplies almost half the annual production of Eastern Coalfields Ltd (ECL). ECL awarded a contract in 2015 to a private contractor, Mahalakshmi Infrastructure Pvt Ltd, to handle an overburden of 20 million cubic metres. Repeated complaints by social workers In the first nine months of the previous year, production at Lal Matia grew at the rate of 9.5 per cent. In the course of 2016, several complaints were made to the ECL management regarding the danger of the overburden, but these were ignored, leading to the calamity of December 30.[1] One of the reasons why private coal mines were nationalised in 1973 was precisely their poor safety record and the abysmal condition of the workers. (more…)