Covering over 280 square kilometers, Jharia, in the north east state of Jharkhand, India, is ground zero for the women and
children who slave in its scores of illegal open cast mines.
It is arguably one of the most horrifying landscapes in the world. Sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide seep from the ground.
Hundreds of small blazes smoulder as giant underground fires that have raged for over a century break through the surface of the
earth. These inhuman conditions coupled with a ruthless appetite for profit keeps the labourers who work these mines in a state of
hopeless bondage.
Illegalised mines ( A legal twilight zone that means neither legal nor illegal) are exploited by the coal barons of Jharkhand.
The ‘mafia-mode of production’ is not an irregularity, but a kind of complementary department, outsourced by the nationalised
industry. The law of the land puts on blinkers and pretends the issue does not exist.
But it does: almost 700,000 people, over half of them women and children, work in inhuman conditions of bonded labor, with
pervasive violence and wide-spread gender and caste discrimination.
‘Offering jobs’ and small business opportunities the illegalised mines became an important factor in local politics.It is estimated that
20 to 30 per cent of total coal production in India stems from illegalised mines.The mine then enters the labour intensive, low wage
and precarious realm, where workers are under extra-pressure of mafia-type of middlemen.
As India nurses ambitions to take her place at the high table of economic super powers, high quality coking coal, used for steel
and thermal power production, becomes critically important.
India is the third largest coal producer in the world.The BJP led government is driving to double India’s coal production by the year
2020. To this end, the government has announced that they intend to open a new mine every month.
But for every legal mine that opens or operates, there is an illegal coal mine that runs alongside.
Just like the sulphur dioxide that sears lungs indiscriminately across the wasteland that is Jharia, these women and children
struggle as modern day slaves, without even the hope that one day the Indian government would awaken to their plight.
