A Union labour ministry report on coal miners deaths from 1980 to 2010 suggests 160 miners die annually due to coal-mining accidents.
With reference to your investigation report, ‘Every 24 hours a coal miner dies in India, but who cares’ (September 21, 2011), we would like to know how did you arrive at the conclusion that ‘every 24 hours a coal miner dies in India’. We believe this claim is factually incorrect.
— Coal India Limited
DNA replies
A Union labour ministry report on coal miners deaths from 1980 to 2010 suggests 160 miners die annually due to coal-mining accidents. These are the ‘official’ figures. However, there are many coal mining related non-statistical deaths every year too.
DNA interviewed several families affected by such deaths.
Leaders of all five recognised trade unions and their safety committee members have said many deaths are never recorded and have demanded that they should be recorded so that families could be compensated.
Even top CIL officials across its various subsidiaries confirmed that many miners die of heart attacks, strokes, etc while in mines. Unions estimate that at least 7-10 people die this year every year in each CIL subsidiary. If you take all CIL subsidiaries into account, at least 50-60 such deaths occur annually. Add this to the 160 deaths in the labour ministry report, bringing the toll to 220 deaths. Apart from this, several traditional miners (villagers) who are labelled illegal miners after nationalisation of coal mines, die every year. We visited several villages in Jharkhand and found several such miners had died. Even Jharkhand police records show hundreds of such deaths. Many of them occur in mines abandoned by CIL and its subsidiaries. This takes the figure to over 360 deaths a year. Therefore, if you calculate the average, it can be safely said “Every 24 hours a coal miner dies in India”.
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