Following report was written after a two weeks visit in Dhanbad-Jharia, one of the main coal mining areas in India. Seeing the area and talking to the coal-mining comrades of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (Marxist-Leninist) was insightful and inspired us to dig a bit deeper into the historical material of Dhanbad-Jharia. From the past and present of this area we can raise important general questions for the wider political debate about capitalist development, re-composition of the working class and the state regime:

June 13, 2011

I

*** Introduction
*** Overview on Coal Mining in India
II

*** The Dhanbad-Jharia Coal-Mining Area
*** The Coal-Mining Sector during Colonialism and after ‘Independence’
*** The Period 1971 to 2011: A Short Summary
*** The Nationalisation 1971 – 1973
III

*** The Illegalised Mining
*** The Dhanbad Mafia
*** The Jharkhand Movement
*** The Mechanisation
*** The Casualisation and (Re-)Privatisation
*** The Situation Today: A Visit in Dhanbad

I

Introduction  

Dhanbad, India – Report from a Visit in the Coal Fields

* Jharia coal fields are a rural industrial area. Debates and research about the formation of the working class tend to focus on urban industries and ‘slum cities’, while quantitatively, at least in the global South, rural industries keep on being an important sphere in the process of proletarianisation. Around 70 per cent of the population in India might still live in rural areas, but only a small minority survives as peasants. The step into urban areas is still a big step, too big for many landless, therefore a large share of proletarians in the country-side make their first industrial experiences in the rural areas themselves. Coal mining in the Dhanbad-Jharia area started on a significant scale in the early 19th century and formed a base for the development of the early working-class generations in India.

* There was and still is a particular importance of the product coal itself, as an energy resource needed for industrial development – currently the regime in India sources around 60 per cent of it’s total energy from coal and has become the third largest coal producer globally. Total coal production has increased nearly sevenfold between 1980 and 2010 and India’s coal imports increased during recent years. Instead of ‘being plundered by imperialism’ India-based steel companies increasingly invest in mines in Australia, the US and Africa. But India’s energy regime is squeezed: after the nuclear disaster in Japan in early 2011 the path towards nuclear energy is contested, protest against the construction of reactors is gathering strength [1]. India has to import most of its oil and gas – a difficult source given the inflated trade deficit and shell-shocked global oil prices. On the background of this squeeze, coal mining seems a bad, but the only stable option for the near future.

* Capitalist development depends not on the mere availability of a specific energy resource, but also on its (preferably low) price for generally profitable conditions. The global crisis from the mid-1960s onwards pushed the Indian regime into nationalisation of the mining industry in order to centralise the command over productivity – the state of Emergency was the political ‘repressive’ side of re-structuring. By the end of the 1980s the mechanisation drive in the India mining industry crashed into the contradiction of capitalist productivity: output productivity increased, but production costs per ton did not come down enough. The debt crisis from the 1990 onwards focused the attack on labour costs again: casualisation and outsourcing of mines. Since the 2000s the ‘commodity price bubble’ increased the importance of mining beyond the immediate profits from production. In India the mining areas are increasingly militarised – the 100,000 para-military forces of ‘Operation Greenhunt’ are part of the investment regime. Current steps to privatise the world’s biggest coal mining company Coal India Limited – by launching a record initial public offering raising 3.5 billion USD in late 2010 – has also to be seen as an desperate attempt to deal with the rapidly increasing state debts in a global crisis.

* Both output and low price depends on the control over the undesired by-product of coal mining: the control over a large mass of potentially unruly industrial workers. In the mining areas re-composition of the working class through migration, ‘uneven development’ and technological attacks is a constant process. We can see in a very concentrated local space and time struggles ‘within a proletariat’ which represent the main lines of segmentation of the global working class today. The proletariat in Dhanbad has many faces: the pauperised Adivasi (‘indigenous’) and ‘rural poor’ population at the fringes of the mining areas – main base for the Maoist armed insurrection; the village workers in the ‘illegal mines’; the casualised workers in the main mines earning ten per cent of their permanent work-mates; the unemployed sons and daughters of local peasants and permanent workers, organised in an ‘unemployed movement’. As a whole the local work-force is under-layered by various waves of migration since the 19th century.

* This peculiar composition of the local work-force and industry brought about very specific forms of ‘mediation’ of class struggle. Dhanbad became infamous for its ‘mafia’, a particular network which ‘organised’ the reproduction of the working-class through money-lending and labour contracting; which reproduced itself materially as transport contractors, by illegal mining and later on real estate deals; which provided the Coal India management with both gangs of strike-breaking thugs and large integrative trade union organisations; and developed strong links with the political class. The ‘mafia-mode of production’ was not an irregularity, but a kind of complementary department, outsourced by the nationalised industry. The trade union / mafia connection in Dhanbad was historically and essentially paralleled, e.g. by the regime of Boyles United Mining Workers in the US of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1990s the liquid force of neoliberal policies dissolved the mafia into ‘normal business’.

* Parallel to, and over the time increasingly intertwined with the ‘mafia’, a ‘regionalist liberation movement’ developed, demanding a Jharkhand state independent from Bihar – the Dhanbad-Jharia mining area used to form part of southern Bihar. The Jharkhand movement first tried to mobilise the impoverished Adivasi population against ‘the outsiders’, but fairly quickly included non-Adivasi ‘Jharkhandis’, who had come to the area in the early 20th century and had developed ‘local economic’ interests in a separate state. After nationalisation around 50,000 mainly ‘local’ mining workers were replaced by ‘outsiders’ within the space of weeks; this gave material back-up for the regionalism, last but not least within segments of the working class. The emerging Maoist-influenced movement, e.g. in form of the Marxist Coordination Committee (MCC), provided the regionalist movement with an ideology of ‘anti-feudal class alliance’, later on the subaltern discourse of ‘indigenous identity’ helped to integrate segments of the proletariat into the ‘state project’.

* The ‘regionalist project’ seems discarded since the formation of Jharkhand state in November 2000 and its unaltered repression and displacement of the ‘Jharkhandi’ proletariat. Today the working class in the Dhanbad-Jharia area has to discover and re-compose itself through its own activity. The class conflicts in the area are relentless; they reach from strikes in the mines, to piquetero-type blockading actions of the unemployed, to protests and riots against displacement and environmental damage, attacks on mining infrastructure. The questions raised by these fragmented local struggles – united by the mines and mining work – are global questions.

Coal Mining in India

We want to give a brief overview on the current scope of coal mining and consumption in India [2].

In 2009, India (526 million tonnes) was the third biggest hard coal producer after China (2,971 Mt) and the USA (919Mt). 85 per cent of coal is produced by Coal India Limited (CIL), the world largest coal mining company, currently employing around 380,000 permanent workers and running around 500 mines in India.

Around 55 per cent of energy production in India stems from coal, compared to around 3 per cent from nuclear energy. Around 75 per cent of total coal stock is consumed by the energy sector. Global market prices for coking coal increased by 70 per cent during 2010 – the regime in India is forced to import coal for energy production and at the same time put more pressure on production costs ‘at home’.

Production costs in India are 35 per cent higher compared to Australia, Indonesia or South Africa, which is not due to higher wages, but lower out-put productivity. The Coal India Ltd. subsidiary SCCL claimed in 2010 that wage costs account for 44 per cent of total production costs. The average mechanised mine in India had an out-put of 3.8 tons per man-shift in 2008, while manual mines operate on levels of 0.4 tonnes. In comparison, the United Colliery in Australia reports to achieve an output per man shift of 65 tonnes. In order to increase productivity there is a shift towards large scale open pit mining. In 2005 around 80 per cent of coal production in India came from open-cast mining, this compares to 20 per cent in 1971. The underground production declined from 50.56 to 43.54 million tonnes during the period 2001 to 2008.

The imports of coal increased rapidly over the last three years, from 59 million tonnes in 2008-9 to 73 million tonnes in 2009-10 to 84 million tonnes in 2010-11. There is also a significant increase in direct investment of steel manufacturing companies from India in coal mining companies in the US, Africa and Australia, while CIL in turn outsources whole open-cast mines to international companies and companies previously only engaged in transport and logistics.

Total coal production in India

1945 30 Mt
1972 72 Mt
1979 89 Mt
1992 200 Mt (by Coal India Limited alone)
2001 345 Mt (by Coal India Limited alone)
2011 526 Mt (out of which 430 Mt by Coal India Limited)

Estimated official work-force before nationalisation

1951 350,000
1972 1,100,000

Permanent workers at CIL

1981 700,000
2003 650,000
2008 450,000
2011 380,000

The Dhanbad-Jharia coal-mining area

Dhanbad coal fields are situated in the state of Jharkhand in the East of India, neighbouring West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The Dhanbad-Jharia area forms part of a mineral rich corridor, most of India’s reserves in coal, copper, iron ore and uranium are located in the Durgapur-Dhanbad-Bokaro-Jamshedpur triangle. Industrial coal mining started in the second half of the 19th century, subsequently both steel manufacturing and power generation came up in the region. Bokaro is known as India’s steel city, location of India’s biggest steel plant, and currently major investment hub for ArcelorMittal and other multinationals. The steel industry attracted manufacturing industries. After having set-up their steel plant in 1907, Tata opened their truck plant in Jamshedpur in 1945 [3]. In 1952 Nehru opened the Sidri fertilizer plant, which he called ‘temple of development’ and which became the symbol of ‘independent’ India’s industrial 5-years plan regime and cornerstone of the Green Revolution [4]. Up to the early 1980s around one fifth of India’s total public infrastructure and industrial investment went to this ‘Ruhr Area’ of India. The mining and industrial clusters are surrounded by agriculturally backward and jungle-dominated areas. The ‘local’ population in these areas belong to the poorest rural sections in India. They have become important bases for the Maoist armed struggle.

The Dhanbad-Jharia coal fields form part of this heavy industrial triangle. They are a rural mining area, with about 110 official coal mines and probably the same amount of unofficial mines. They are India’s main centre for coking coal, a particular sort of coal important for steel production. Scattered in the region are the vast open-cast mines, interspersed with villages and miners colonies. Trucks loaded with coal and heavy machinery dominate the scenery, interrupted by push-carts and bicycles – loaded with coal. The Dhanbad-Jharia region is said to be one of the most polluted areas of the world. Mining in itself is a rather forceful intervention in the environment, but capitalist social relations have resulted in forms of mining, which aggravate the attack on nature and, as part of it, on the human bodies. The productivity drive towards open-cast mining has increased the dust production, the whole area is covered with fine coal dust, causing epidemic respiratory suffering. In order to cut costs, many mines – and not only the unofficial mines – are not re-filled with sand, once the coal is extracted. This results in gas accumulation, underground explosions, underground fires and caving in of whole areas. Since years a large-scale underground fire burns under the surface of Jharia, under the living area of about 600,000 people. [5] Here and there the earth cracks open, gas, smoke and flames emerge. Skeletons of trees, burnt from within. Jharia was declared eviction area in the early 1980s, an official master-plan was set-up to re-located hundred of thousands of residents, but was either not put into place or displaced people were not given compensation – which increased the resistance of people towards being displaced, be it for mining or for ‘their own safety’ in order to escape the underground flames.

The industry destroys nature and harms humans – and it creates a different social environment. The industry brings together thousands of people from all corners of Northern India, they live in village-type of settlements, but without the traditional village hierarchies of caste, individual land-ownership and agricultural dependency. Neither is the social atmosphere polluted by the urban stress and feeling of anonymity. One of the major divisions and tragic separation which capitalist development creates is the division into town and village. The town offers a break-away from the misery and cultural oppressiveness of the village, but this urban freedom turns out to be a mirage, hiding stress, lack of breathing-space and social coldness. There seems to be no alternative to this quasi natural dichotomy and the communist trajectory to abolish both village and town seems utopian. The Dhanbad-Jharia coal-fields are everything but a utopia, but they demonstrate that there is a material link between form of community and social activity; that because of the mining work the atmosphere in the villages is more intimate than in a town and more egalitarian than in a traditional agricultural village; that there is the potential of an alternative. Manual workers, degraded and trapped by centuries of caste-based division of labour and still largely culturally oppressed are praised by heroic monuments in the mining region. The acknowledgment of working class’ social power is petrified in the miner’s statues, which can be seen in many squares of Dhanbad area. At the same time we can see the looming nightmare once mining capital would leave the area as the main social cohesive and source of income – yet another desolate place of stranded individuals. The question will be whether we manage to turn the current, destructive form of industrial socialisation into something better.

The atmosphere within the mining village is one of relative equality – if we ignore the structural gender inequalities, also imposed by the ban of female employment in the official mines. But between the mining villages themselves are significant differences, reflecting the hierarchies within the mining work-force. This becomes visible in the Bhuli colony, which was built by the Coal India in the mid-1970s, after nationalisation. It was the biggest industrial housing scheme in Asia at the time, comprising schools, hospitals and other ‘planned infrastructure’ for the about 40,000 mine-working residents – while appealing to their rural background by leaving some space for gardening and animal husbandry. If we compare this housing scheme with the current conditions, where a well-planned Industrial Model Town would feature all kinds of access roads and industrial infrastructure, but no provision for workers’ accommodation what-so-ever, Bhuli seems like a proof for the ‘worker-friendly’ character of the nationalisation of mining industry. These company colonies seem the ‘role-model’ of a welfare-type of capitalism-socialism. But more than that Bhuli is an expression of spacial separation within a divided work-force. During the first weeks of nationalisation around 50,000 to 60,000 mainly local workers – some people stress the fact that a lot of them were Dalits (untouchables) and Santhals (tribals) – were replaced by better paid ‘permanent workers’, who mainly came from other regions of Bihar and who were accommodated – and separated – in townships like Bhuli. Today Bhuli or Munidih Project, like many other ‘colonies’ of permanent workers of Coal India, look rather run-down. The three-room family houses with separate gardens are rented to the workers for about 150 Rs a month (they earn about 1,000 Rs a day), but they officially have to be returned when workers retire. No worker has been made permanent since the early 1990s, in Munidih Project colony around 25 per cent of the houses are empty. There are constant struggles of both company and administration against ‘illegal squatters’. Nowadays the majority of mining workers are hired through contractor or work in unofficial mines. They live in the villages surrounding the mines, some of them are still referred to as ‘tribal villages’. They lack the infrastructure of the colonies, they are even more threatened by displacement, but they are ‘mining villages’ in the sense that their economic and social daily life evolves around the mines, either by direct employment or related services.

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