NEWSLINKS
US EDITION
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
THE STATES
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES
SEARCH REDIFF

Rediff Shopping

Shop & gift from thousands of products!   Books     Music       Apparel   Jewellery   Flowers   More..      Safe Shopping

Search the Internet          Tips

The Rediff Special/ Rifat Jawaid

Coal dust hai kahtray ki naani, is mein chheeto hardam paani (Coal dust is the grandmother of all dangers, always sprinkle water on it).'

'Production dispatch must, but safety first.'

The signs are ubiquitous, in any colliery that falls under the Bharat Coking Coal Ltd umbrella in Dhanbad. But one very important homily is missing -- to wit, 'Practise what you preach.'

Thus, the management that has plastered the walls of the mines with noble intentions has not been similarly diligent about ensuring the safety of its miners. Ergo -- two mine tragedies inside seven days, the first claiming 29 lives in Bagdigi colliery, the second claiming one (shot-firer Ramachandra Mahto, trapped beneath 200,000 gallons of water that flooded Chetudih mine). The latter toll could well have been 114, what is more.

The recent tragedy is best understood by looking back at the past. In 1995, the overflow from a nearby river flooded the Gazlitand colliery, trapping 64 miners. The BCCL management found itself lacking the skills and the resources to pump water out of the mine, and abandoned the trapped miners to their death. A court of inquiry was instituted to probe the disaster.

Six years later, the inquiry has produced no result. Meanwhile, the roll call of death and disaster continues to mount.

Bagdigi was the culimnation of years of criminal negligence. The miners complained of constant water seepage, yet the authorities turned a deaf ear to their warnings. Colliery agent A K Sengupta and manager A K Upadhyay allegedly forced the miners to work the mines, tempting disaster with each passing day.

Temptation, finally, accepted the invitation.

"Safety measures inside the mines just do not exist," says A K Roy, the former member of Parliament from Dhanbad. "And everyone is to blame -- the BCCL, the Union coal ministry, every single body has been guilty of gross negligence.

"Look at it from another angle -- ever since there was talk of privatising the coal sector, the concerned officials have been apprehensive about their jobs. Their morale is shot to bits, they are unsure of their future, and it has all led to a situation where there is no sense of responsibility among the officials, no interest or inclination to do any long-term planning."

The government merely compounded the confusion when it made huge budgetary cuts to this sector -- resulting in a situation where key posts including those of the chairman, managing director, and general manager have been lying vacant.

In fact, BCCL did not even have a CMD of its own, with Eastern Coal Limited CMD Ashok Kumar Mehta heading its operations on a part-time basis. The Union coal ministry finally condescended to appoint a CMD for BCCL -- B N Pan, to give him a name -- only in the wake of the Bagdigi disaster.

In any case, it is debatable whether a CMD -- or three -- could really have made any difference. The problem, experts believe, lie in the structure of the mines themselves. A Directorate General of Mines Safety survey indicates that the BCCL mines are the deepest and most congested in India.

"Congested collieries of varying depths and at different stages of production need to be treated very cautiously," says A K Bhattacharya, mine expert and member of the rescue team. "The slightest carelessness can cause monumental disasters. Further, the mindless mining in Bagdigi had weakened the barrier separating the colliery and the water reservoir of the adjoining Jai Rampur, reducing the thickness from the optimum 200 feet to just 30 feet. Walls so weak cannot withstand a dynamite blast -- and lo, you had the makings of a tragedy."

Available data indicates that of 15 major mine tragedies, seven have occured in the Jharia region, controlled by the BCCL, and all have been the result of water inundation.

The logic would seem to be simple enough -- why, then, did it escape the attention of the officials? Simple, say experts -- laws have been made, but never followed.

Section 127(3) of the Act prohibits mining in the vicinity of abandoned or adjoining mines -- an edict that is broken with alarming regularity by BCCL.
The post-mortem of the disaster can in fact be summed up in one word -- apathy. Director General of Mines R L Arora told rediff.com that he had, as lately as January 2001, inspected the water quantum stored in the Jai Rampur reservoir, and warned the BCCL about the inherent dangers. However, no one thought to tell the shot-firers that 16 million gallons of water lay on the other side of a dangerously thin wall.

"The accident is a result of neglect of surveying," Arora says, pointing out that during the early stages of rescue operations, navy divers had in fact complained that they had been given wrong maps and blueprints. "The navy divers kept bumping into seams that were not on their maps, they couldn't find their way to the spot where the miners were trapped. The mine has undergone a complete metamorphosis over the years. Zeal to increase production indiscriminately weakened the mine, and apathy in surveying and updating the mines, ensured that the dangers were not seen and safety measures upgraded."

"Senior officers don't ever enter the mines, they are scared," says Jagdish, a miner whose close friend, Abdul Hamid, was one of the casualties. "I remember how in the old days, the saabs used to come inside the mines with us. But not today -- the officers today don't have the stomach to enter the mines, they send us down to our deaths without bothering to check the conditions we work in. We have been asking the officers to install wooden pillars to support the roof. And you know what they said? Kaun zyada qabil hai, hum ya tum ( Who is more knowledgeable, we or you)?"

Any of the factors listed above would suffice to precipitate disaster -- but there is more. The Coal Mines Regulation Act of 1957 mandates that abandoned mines are to be filled with sand, in order to prevent fire or water percolating to adjoining mines. If this is not done, experts say, the cavities inside the mine serve as breeding grounds for dangerous fires during the summer season.

So was this done? No. Why not? Because the BCCL has been playing favourites while allocating the sand-filling contracts, is the concensus.

"Because there has never been any supervision of the sand-filling job, the contractors got away with sub-standard work," says Jagdish. "As a result, if you go to the Jharia region, you see fires erupting all the time. It is not just the mines -- it has even begun effecting the houses in this area, you can see the cracks. Crores of rupees have been spent on sand-filling -- and this is the result."

“The BCCL is a topless, mindless organisation with a bottomless pit," says A K Roy.

That the tragedy coincides with the centenary celebrations of the DGMS is, of course, merely Fate's parting irony.

Design: Lynette Menezes

The Dhanbad disaster: Complete Coverage

The Rediff Specials

Your Views
Name:
E-mail address:
Your Views: