It may not be eerily reminiscent of the coal mine catastrophe at Chasnala, near Dhanbad, in December 1975, but the tragedy in Jharkhand’s Lalmatia open-cast coalfields has yet again thrown up the defects in maintenance and safety. With 17 killed and at least 50 miners still gasping under mounds of coal and rubble, the focus of the investigation will hopefully be riveted to the inherently fragile construction. That mining wasn’t in progress when the walls caved in is of academic interest to the technologically inclined; the casualties would have been far higher if extraction of coal was on. However, this version has been contested by a section of the Eastern Coalfields (ECL) staff, who claim that work did not stop even when one of the walls of the mine started collapsing.
This isn’t the moment to engage in a discord over the mining schedule. What matters most of all is that there were what the ECL authorities call “landslides” down under. The plural form of the geological phenomenon is critical in the greater scheme of things. It is now fairly confirmed by the management that “landslides in the hard rock area below ground zero led to the collapse of heaps of earth from the upper portion of the site”. No one denies that this is “something rare”; it is pretty much obvious though that the minimum precautionary measures were not in place to avert the kind of disaster that befell Lalmatia last week.
The accident lends no scope for any feeble excuse in the face of an ugly truth, still less an attempt by ECL to cover its tracks. The fact that Jharkhand’s Chief Secretary and DGP swiftly left Ranchi for the disaster site in Godda is suggestive of the magnitude of the tragedy. That magnitude was borne out by the Chief Secretary’s assertion that “we will not spare anyone found guilty of negligence”. It remained for the administration in Ranchi to intervene before an FIR was filed against Eastern Coalfields, which had hired the miners from a Gujarat firm. The public sector subsidiary of Coal India is palpably on the mat.
Direly imperative, therefore, is to ensure safety and maintenance if ECL is to avoid egg dripping down its face. In the aftermath of the Lalmatia disaster, it shall not be easy to dispel the dominant impression of negligence that has overwhelmed the mining belt.
Also to be probed is whether the collieries boast emergency teams in suitable strength to countenance an accident. Personnel of the National Disaster Response Force and units of the CRPF and CISF were sent from Ranchi to supplement the inadequate local effort. Every minute counts when an accident occurs on the rail track or inside a coal mine. And yet negligence plagues both the Railways and the collieries.