Glück auf! Coal mining and safety

Last week efforts have been made, which are still continuing, to rescue the 15 miners trapped in an illegal coal mine in Meghalaya. The events which unfolded make us believe that due to unemployment and poverty there are still a large number of people in the country who are willing as compelled by the circumstances to risk their lives in coal mining, and that too in illegal mines, which do not have the standardized safety measures. These mines are operated only and only for profit making without any permission by the government.

These coal mines have been flooded with water, something similar to what had happened more than four decades ago on 27th December, 1975 in Chasnala – the disaster which was made on celluloid by Yash Chopra as a multi-starrer called Kala Patthar – which had resulted in the loss of 380 miners. Unfortunately, mining in India, especially illegal mining which continues without much of regulatory and governmental control and check, is still highly unsafe despite tremendous development in technology, which can let even ordinary persons like me using easily available and inexpensive gadgets – which are not even primarily meant for a person’s safety – to know how many steps have I walked, how many calories have I burnt, and I can share my location while on the move to almost anyone with the accuracy of about 10 meters.

Putting miners’ life in danger is unbelievable and unacceptable particularly in today’s world when there are paradigm shifts to be made in policy making from non-renewable energy to renewable energy, and coal is surely not the favourite source of energy. There are typically newer methods of creating energy so that one does not have to rely on coal – major source of energy for about two centuries since industrial revolution and steam engine – so heavily in any part of the world. Remarkably, about ten days back, the German coal miners presented the last piece of football size chunk of coal to the German President which they had brought from the black coal mines, once famous for powering the engines of the German economy, with the words “Glück auf”. This phrase is the common form of greeting for German miners and which loosely translates that one should be lucky to get more lodes opened, and, also expresses somewhere deep in the heart the desire that miners should return back safely from the mine.

Ironically what we see is that several economies in the world still rely on coal not only for their needs of energy but also for pushing their economy. It is most shocking that a first world country like Australia is also relying on it and there has been a huge controversy for the Carmichael coal mine and the Indian company Adani contracting for mining it. 

There have been issues regarding the steep price escalation of coal from Indonesia which has been responsible for pushing the cost of power generation towards the higher side in India and forcing the parties, that is the private companies generating power and the state governments, under the supervision and guidance of the electricity regulators. The Supreme Court allowed renegotiation of tariff mentioned in these agreements because of changed conditions in a foreign land.

Dependence on coal for energy needs must change fast, however, heavy industrialisation and very high demand for energy may not let that happen in the very near future, particularly due to immense lobbying by businesses and indirectly controlling the policy formulation. Political fortunes are related to keeping everyone happy, businesses included. So, the practical and realistic solution, for the time being, is to make coal mining safe and technologically sound. Why should human beings need to do it? When robots with artificial intelligence can drive a car, work as a waiter in a restaurant, take up hazardous works in unsafe surroundings, etc., why can’t coal mining be done by programmed machines?

With technology at the service of human beings, there should not be a situation for anyone in life that one has to do such a risky work as going deep down in the earth to illegally mine coal. The unregulated grey market for coal must come to an end.

As of now, wishing the trapped miners in Meghalaya Glück auf!

The author is a professor at IIM-A, akagarwal@iima.ac.in