Stealing or Survival?
In the opencast mines in Jharkhand’s Jharia Coalfield, men, women and children go into the mines as early as 3 a.m., where they collect coal until noon, before it is burnt into soft coke and loaded into sacks is done.
They sell it to middlemen who pay around 100 rupees ($1.20) per bag.
Many of them are second or third generation coal scavengers, and resent being identified as coal “thieves”.
“What we do is like picking up leftovers from a rich man’s feast. How is this theft?” 35-year-old Sanjay Kumar Pandit, a coal sweeper, asked while breaking off large chunks of coal with a hammer.
Pinaki Roy, a teacher who runs classes to help children living in the coalfields find alternative careers, said it was wrong to define these poor families – who number about 100,000 people in the district – as thieves. Was.
“These families are earning their livelihood only from coal. They have nothing else here,” he said.
Context spoke to several security officers working in various subsidiaries of Coal India, they agreed that the problem lies in unemployment, and said that leniency is usually applied to poor locals who are barely able to make ends meet. choose coal for
An official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said many people dig their own “rat-holes” to extract coal and pay bribes to avoid arrest.
“But in cases where there is organized theft, we use technology to track and stop it,” he said.
Another senior official of Bharat Coking Coal Limited, a subsidiary of Coal India in Dhanbad, insisted that illegal coal lifting cannot be justified under any circumstances.
‘Coal People’
16-year-old Ravi Kumar thinks he would be taller than his 5 feet (152.4 cm) if he had not spent his childhood carrying baskets of coal on his head as coal sweepers in his slum.
“We stop just a little,” he said, standing near an opencast mine at sunset in Jharia, “and from behind the rocks appeared a frail man, pushing his bicycle strapped with 10 sacks of coal, while a girl walked behind him.” There was a basket of coal.
Growing up in neighboring Chhattisgarh, activist Sahu recalls his grandfather receiving a token from the mining company that entitled him to a bullock-cart-load of coal for his domestic needs.
In the past, poor coal pickers, often called “coal people”, sold the fuel at low prices to middlemen, local eateries, and coke-manufacturing plants.
But after the mines became state-owned in the 1970s, their activity began to be branded as piracy, mining rights campaigners said.
Describing the coal as “government property”, a senior security official, requesting anonymity, said, “It was difficult to explain to illiterate people that they have no right over it”.
According to teacher Roy, in the last five to 10 years, more than 100,000 people in Jharia became coal pickers after losing their jobs when the mines started outsourcing most of their work.
Roy said, “Many illegal pickers were earlier employed in coal mines. It is a social problem. By calling them coal thieves, you are shirking your responsibility of giving them jobs. are not included.” ,