The
Predicament of Women Labourers in a Particular Colliery
Dr.
Mousumi Ghosh
1.
Introduction
Pramila ,Hiramuni, Sumitra, Jaharun,
Kailashi, Ramani, Sajani, Sauri and Uma
are the women labourers of a colliery in the Raniganj coalbelt. They
perform heavy and unskilled works. The
present author has visited a colliery in the Raniganj coal belt to get a first-hand
knowledge of the status of women labourers in the nationalised collieries
today. That was the objective.
2.
Methodology
The colliery that she visited has now
twenty women labourers aworking in a total workforce of ninety. And it was
learnt there that the Eastern Coalfield Limited is no longer recruiting fresh
women labourers. The women that are working over here are also being encouraged
to take voluntary retirement. The present author met some fifteen women
labourers at the colliery she visited and interviewed ten members of the
targeted population. By the grace of God, a rapport could be forged
between the author and the labourers that she interviewed in spite of the
language barrier. Maybe this was possible as because the author herself is a
woman. Consequently it seems that they unlocked their hearts and shared their
secrets and predicaments with the author. . Surely what each one of them said
is a narrative Thus semi structured interview method and case studies were the
major tools in our micro research. A visit to a colliery, interviews
with different stakeholders and a quest for authentic narratives from the lips
of the few workers that still work with the colliery are the methods with which
the present author seeks to outline a pen picture of the few women labourers
who are lingering in the collieries .Secondary data are being used as fillers
in the pen picture wherever required.
Below we recall some of the narratives
in brief.
3.
Narratives
Pramila Singh
was a native of Giridh district, now in the state of Jharkhand. She came in the
Raniganj coalbelt after her marriage in 1972. Pramila’s husband came here as an Tendel/ mechanic in
electrical department in 1965.She has two daughters and two sons. Her husband
died in 1984.She got a job on compensatory ground in 1985 as wagon loader. Her
father came from her native village to look after her children .She had to
carry coal basket on head and she was paid at piece rate. Her income was around Rs.3000 per month.
Later she has been employed at time rate as a CC maker making small earthen
balls required for blasting. Time rate payment reduced her earning at the
outset (Category 1-Rs.2000). According to her, family pension has also been
decreased from five hundred forty rupees to two hundred seventy rupees per
month. She is in category three since 2003 but she is drawing salary in
consonance with category two. Though illiterate, she is aware of this anomaly.
She has also preserved all the old pay slips. Her income at present is Rs.33,
737 per month .Her duty time period is from eight in the morning to four
in the afternoon .She used to make one thousand earthen balls per day.
However, for the last one and a half year, blasting has been
stopped as the coal mine is on the verge of closure. Production of earthen
balls is no longer required. Now, she has no work at hand. She will retire after
four years. She wants to stay here
though none of her children is employee of ECL
at present.
Hiramuni Mejhan stays in the neighbourhood of the
colliery. She is a wagon loader and kamin[1].
She breaks the large chunk of coal into smaller pieces .she is also entrusted
with the job of sweeping, cutting and cleaning shrubs. She was employed on compassionate ground after the
death of her husband .Her husband died eighteen years ago in cancer. He was a
haulage khalashi[2]
in a colliery in the Raniganj coal belt. Their native place was Jharkhand. She has three sons and a daughter. Her eldest
son was then only twelve years old. She got the job after one year of her
husband’s death. Her duty hour is from eight in the morning to four in the
afternoon. However, during slack time, duty ends earlier. Since, the mine is on
the verge of closure, production is practically nil. Her starting salary was
three thousand and now she earns twenty six thousand. She is illiterate but has
a fair idea about the gross, net salary, income tax she has to give. She
complained about the hard task of coal breaking. The hammer, with which she
breaks coal, weighs one kilogram.
Sumitra Meijhan does not know her age and she does not
remember how long she works here. She is employed from the time of Bengal Coal
Company. Though her father was an employee here, but probably she was not
employed on compassionate ground. She got her job first and got married later.
Her husband is unemployed and she has a daughter. She lives in the colliery
quarter. Her net salary is twenty thousand rupees per month. She said that it
is very laborious to break stone. This colliery is on the verge of closure. The
coals are mainly known as fall coals which
are left in the underground. When these activities are not available, these
workers are entrusted with the job of forestry clearing. It is a risky job due
to the steep slope of the coalpit. The chance of physical injury is high.
Moreover, they need to clean the shrub sometimes with their bare hands She
complained that sometimes it would injure her hands. She confessed that she drinks
haria, a local liquor made from rice,
sometimes. The price is Rs.5 per bottle. She has justified her drinking by
saying that the hard work pattern needs drinking. She lives in a single
quarter. She referred it as a half quarter. It has no toilet and she has to go
to the field. There is no electricity as the company has cut off the line. It
has well for water.
Jaharun Bibi is also in wagon loading and kamin job.
After her husband’s death , she got the job fifteen years ago. Earlier she was
a piece rated labourer and now she is a time rated labourer. She said that she
had to toil very hard earlier. She has three sons and a daughter. Her daughter
has been married to a well off family but for that Jaharun Bibi spent rupees
five lakhs during her marriage. Her daughter has studied in local school and
knows Urdu, English and Hindi. Her sons
are also now doing jobs like tailoring and working in the shopping mall. Though
she has cordial relation with them, but they do not give any financial support
to their mother. Her gross salary is around Rs. 23, 000 and her net salary after
tax deduction is Rs. 18,000. Her expenditure for food- Khoraki in her language
is Rs.6000-7000 per month. She took loan from two money lenders for her
daughter’s marriage and has to give interest of total Rs. 10,000 per month. She
has multiple corns in her both palm. They are the injury from using hammer. She
also complained about the risk of cutting trees from the jungle along the steep
khadan or pit. She said that they have conveyed their fear of death from
falling to the manager and the manager allotted them other jobs. According to
her, there were more kamins around 10-12 two years earlier. Some of them have
retired and son of a few were given job by ECL in place of their mother’s job.
She will retire after ten months. She is hopeful that the youngest son will get
a welder’s job but she has not submitted the requisite form. She is Mohammedan.
She does not face any difficulty for being a minority. She lives in staff quarter.
It is a full quarter, i.e. family
quarter having two rooms, a verandah, kitchen, and toilet. However, she
disclosed that she has constructed the latrine and spent Rs. 50,000 as the colliery
is short of fund. Water is free but for electricity use, 1% is deducted from
the salary. They get free coal, which is known as domestic coal. Those who not
want that get money for cooking gas. Most of the employees want cooking gas
instead of domestic coal as fuel and ECL also encourages that. It is alleged
that huge coal is looted in the name of
domestic coal.
Kailashi Devi is a fan operator. There are two fan
operators in this incline. Their time of operation is from 8am to 4 pm. They
are in time rate from the beginning. They are technical staff .Kailashievi has
come from Gorakhpur, UP and is working here for 5-6years since her husband’s
death. Her husband was a habitual drinker. He died after having suffered from
paralysis. She is a Kahar[3].
Her four sons are labourers in Gorakhpur.
She lives alone in a quarter. She will retire after 3-4 years. She
lamented that this job has no prestige. Since the coal mine is on the verge of
closure, there is a persistent tension and restlessness among all. Her starting salary was Rs. 2000 per month
and now she earns Rs. 20,000 per month.
After paying tax of Rs. 5000, she receives a net income of Rs. 15,000.
She needs to send money to her native place Gorakhpur where her sons stay. She
will return there after retirement. Some three to four women labourers stay at
the quarter premises where Kailashi Devi stays.
4.
A close reading of the narratives and inferences thereof
A close reading of the narratives might
throw a light on the status of women labourers in the collieries belonging to
the ECL. Firstly, most of the narratives above, over and over again say that
the colliery is on the verge of being closed. That is a refrain. This is not
only true of the very colliery that the author visited. But in fact the other
collieries in the ECL are also facing decline. This is evident on two counts.
Firstly, the recruitment of women labourers in the colliery has been fully stopped. Moreover,
the ECL has been kind enough to offer voluntary retirement to those few women
who are still working with the collieries. In times to come collieries will be sans women
labour force. Besides the total labour of the ECL is declining in count. But
may be the decline in the count of the workforce might be due to the
introduction of modern technology in the colliery. Because the ECL thinks that
its profit has been escalating ever since its inception.
Be that as it may since the very colliery we
visited is rather unproductive, the women labour force as well as its men does
not have much work at hand. They could be transferred to other collieries. But
that is not the case. It seems therefore that collieries are in general are
saturated with enough labour force and they do not have the room for anyone
transferred to them or for new recruits. Besides as one of the ladies lamented
there is no status now a days in working with coal mines She told the present author
that she and her fellowmen and fellow women suffer from some kind of tension
because of the dismal state of the collieries. Now as to the ladies excepting one,
the rest of them were recruited on compensatory ground. That shows that the
recruitment of women labourers unless on compensatory grounds was stopped
decades back. In a flashback we can digress into the history of coal industry
in India and especially in the Raniganj belt.
The
history of coal industry in India is symbolic. It could be looked upon as a
comment on the industrialisation of the eighteenth century. It was in the
eighteenth century that England underwent industrial revolution. Impact of the
same was felt in India too. As early as during 1774, the first coal mine was
explored in the Raniganj coal belt by Suetonius Grant Heatley and John Sumner,
the employees of East India Company. For a time the British capitalist stood in
the way and the mining industry here in India was not profitable. But the Sepoy
Mutiny or the Battle for Freedom in 1857 opened eyes of the British government.
Exploring coal mines in the Raniganj belt became their priority. The local
zaminders and private initiatives were given fillip. Capitalists from far and wide
Gujaraties, Marwaries , Armenions , Englishmen participated in the coal
industry as entrepreneurs . The
first Coal Company was established by M/s. Alexander & Company in 1820. Prince Dwarakanath Tagore purchased the coal mines at Raniganj from
Alexander & Co and in 1835
first Indian Enterprise M/s.Carr &Tagore Company was formed in
collaboration with one Mr William Carr. In 1843 the first joint stock Coal
Company , M/s.Bengal Coal Company was formed by amalgamating the concerns of
Carr, Tagore &Co and that of Gilmore, Humphrey and Co.
Industrialisation needed labourers. In
England lot of the common men in the villages under the rule of the barons was
dismal and hence they rushed to the industries to rid themselves of the
shackles of feudalism. But the situation in India was not like that. So the
people had to be seduced to work in the industry. Rails were set up to reach
the adivasi areas where from the adivasis[4]
were brought to the collieries. Whole families were transported to colliery
belts. They were given land so that they could perform cultivation to which
they were used since time immemorial. At the same time, both the husband and
the wife used to go into the coal pit and retrieve coal thereof. That was the
nascent phase of industrialisation. The coal generated by the colliery belt was
distributed all over India and different kinds of industries raise their heads
being fuelled by coal. The march of technology however change the production
system . In the 1920s, emergent technology was brought to coal industries . It were the men who
were taught the knowhow of technology while the women were left out . Thus
women were disempowered and men were empowered. Technology is a male device .
With the advent of technology all over the globe, the equality of male and
women became tilted. So since 1920s, it was the men who could go into the pit
whereas women could work on the surface of a colliery. Time rolled on.
With independence in 1947, the welfare
state of India felt that speculation must not be the order in the realm of coal
market. Coal is the basic industry and it must be used to the end of the
welfare of the masses. Finally the
coking coal collieries and the non-coking ones were nationalised in 1971 and in 1973. Thanks to
nationalisation, there were no individual capitalists to grapple with the
surplus value of coal production. Surplus value if any is distributed among the
very employees of the coal mine. Because who distinguishes labour from capital?
It is the labour who produces the capital. It is the seeds that produce the
plants. So on a level every plant whatever is a seed. Capital whatever is
labour. Consequently the pay-packets of the nationalised sector became heavy.
Their salaries shot up. But everybody’s business is nobody’s. In fact
industries are built space or space created artificially. It seems that there
is no innate love for working in the industries and there must be somebody who
must drive the employees to work. But nationalised sectors failed on that
count. Because unless it is the state, no one else owns the mines and it is the
owner only who wants to keep his hens in good health so that the hens could lay
eggs regularly. But the government all of a sudden being aware of management principles
promised incentives to those who lift up more coal. And all over the coal belt
a tournament started among the agents of the collieries. The man who would
produce highest coal would be awarded. This incentive led them to unscientific
coalmining. Consequently underground coalmining has become more difficult than ever
and coal mining industry has traced its steps back to unsustainable open cast
mining. The table below gives an estimate of the productivity of the
underground mines , nearly three decades after nationalisation.
Table 1
|
Year
|
1974-75
|
2002-03
|
|
Open Cast
|
2.66 MT (11%)
|
16.226 MT (59%)
|
|
Underground
|
20.50 MT ( 89%)
|
10.953 MT (41%)
|
|
Total
|
23.16 MT
|
27.18 MT
|
Source:
Journal Udyog(Asansol)
The highly qualified and the highly paid
agents of the collieries could not look beyond their lifetime. These great men
felt that it was enough if they had won the necessary award. Who bothers for
the future? They must live in luxury and prosperity. Who cares that their
children get their daily bread or not? So history is not one long story of
progress. History is not linear. It becomes retrograde now and then.
Coal industry and especially Eastern
Coalfields Limited is rather panting for breath now a day. In the year 2007,
there were one hundred and seven operating coal mines in the Eastern Coalfields
Limited and now they are ninety eight. Moreover, it seems that there is an agenda to
shell out the nationalised collieries to private hand again. The nationalisation
act of 1973 was amended to pave way for the entry of the captive mines and that
of the emergence of the private sectors.
We have to go back to the place
where we began. But that is perhaps the faith of all the industries that shot
up during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thanks to technology jute
cannot be marketed any longer and the jute mills in Bengal are now suffering
from market crunch. The tea industry has lost its glory and it is decadent. It
is in this backdrop that we must study the women in the colliery industry.
We have already noted that earlier women
were working hand in hand with their male counterparts. But with the
introduction of technology in coal production, the women were debarred from
getting into the pits. Thus the process of eliminating the women from the coal
industry started. And of late the women workers in the coal industry have to be
descried with a microscope. The table below gives the statistics of total
employment in coal sector in India.
Table 2
Employment in Coal Sector in India, 2005-2010
|
Category
|
2005
|
2006
|
2007
|
2008
|
2009
|
2010
|
|
Total Employment
|
3,98890
|
3,85,705
|
3,79,456
|
3,69,414
|
3,73,950
|
3,28,864
|
|
Women Employment
|
12,065
|
13,027
|
12,355
|
11,252
|
11,475
|
11,276
|
|
Percentage Share
|
3.02
|
3.37
|
3.25
|
3.04
|
3.07
|
3.05
|
Source: Statistical profile of women
2012-2013
It shows that within five years from
2005 to 2010, total employment has been decreased and employment of women has
been decreased from 12,065 to 11,276. The percentage of women employed in the
coal mines in India in 2010 is only 3.05% of the total work force. Moreover,
the reduction of women is significant within a gap of three years from 2007 to
2010.
The percentage of the women workers
constitute only 3% of the work force is a staggering figure. That eloquently
announces the attitude of the industry towards women. As we have already
pointed out after 1921, the women were allowed to go into the coal pit. On the
surface this speaks of how caring the society is towards the women. And may be
the same attitude persisted through the decades till the number of women
labourers have declined to 3% of the workforce only. But on another level, we could surmise that
since 1920s if it were the women who learnt the technical knowhow of working in
the coal pits , then it would be the women who could dominate in the coal
industry. Although the equal opportunity for women in every field of economic
activity has been acknowledged, that acknowledgement seems to be a leap service
only. Even during the second decade of the twenty first century, no woman is
allowed to study mining engineering in any acknowledged mining college in
India. On the contrary during a chat
with a colliery officer of high echelon told us that he saw women hailing from
China extraordinarily skilled in blasting –one of the most difficult tasks in
raising coal .
Be that as it may, the women we
interviewed lamented that breaking coal with hammer and uprooting shrubs are
too difficult for them. That is after all women are not at par with men in our
country. But the women working with coal are rather self-dependent. They do not
lament that their children are not with them. Furthermore, they do not look
forward to becoming dependent on their children after their retirement. They hailed from remote villages. But thanks
to colliery they could afford lakhs of rupees to spend during the marriage of
their daughters. This shows that even when working women earn quite a lot from
the nationalised sector, they cannot trust that their daughters could be given
away in marriage without dowry. The decadence state of the collieries is
evident from their comments on the quarters they reside in. One of them got a
toilet built on her own as an appendage to the quarters of the ECL. This tells
us that even in collieries after decades of nationalisation, there is not
enough sanitation. And the collieries cannot afford any longer the facelift of
the quarters.
5.
Conclusion
In fine the widows of working women
–lonely figures indeed- in the foreground, against the background of the
denudating landscape of the colliery is
a sad sight that could function as a theme for paintings of Van Gogh or
Cezanne.
Acknowledgement
The author is indebted to Dr. Ramesh
Chandra Mukhopadhyaya , retired College teacher, B.B. College Asansol, Shri
Anup Kumar Mukhopadhyaya, social worker and Dr. Mahalaya Chatterjee , Director,
Centre for Urban Economic Studies, Department of Economics University of
Calcutta for this write up.
References
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Gupta, Ranajit (1985). Migrants in Coal Mines: Peasants Proletarians,
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Ghosh,
Mausumi (2007): “Asansol er Nagarayan(in Bengali) - Urbanisation in Asansol”
in Mukhopadhyaya, Ramesh Chandra [ed], Nagarayan, Kolkata, Underground
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Mukherjee,
N. and Banerjee, R (Dec 2003): Privatisation of Coal Industry: A Review Udyog,
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Rothermund,
Dietmar (2000): An Economic History of India, 2nd Ed., London and New
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Web
Resources
Labourbureau.nic.in Statistical Profile of Women Labour 2012-13,
Labour Bureau, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India,
Chandigarh/Shimla(
www.
revolutionarydemocracy.org : Journal Udyog (Asansol) Privatisation of Coal
Industry: A Review
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20 Lahiri-Dutt ,
Kuntala (2011), The Shifting Gender of Coal: Feminist Musings on Women’s Work
in Indian Collieries
[1]
Kamins are the Indian mine workers working at manual jobs in the
mines
[2] Haulage operator
[3] They
are mainly concentrated in the North India. Their main occupation is to
officiate at the various holy occasions which occur along the banks of the
river Ganga. With changing times this community has shifted to new avenues of
modern living ( Kahar- Wikipedia).
[4] Aboriginal tribal peoples living in
India
