The Coal-Mining Sector during Colonialism and after ‘Independence’  

 In the following we have at the historical development of the mining industry and workers’ struggle in the area – from the ‘Colonial Times’ to ‘Independence’ after 1945 and nationalisation of the mining industry in 1971-3. On this background we then focus on the re-structuring process which took place since then: through ‘mafia mode of production’, mechanisation and casualisation.

Colonial Times

In the Dhanbad area, mining activities on an industrial level started by the mid-19th century. Before that village population engaged in small-scale mining, but mining became industrialised only with the colonial extraction efforts to connect the main trading and manufacturing centres with the ports via rail-ways. Mines were mainly ‘privately-owned’, although factions within the colonial regime proposed nationalisation. Early on the mining industry developed a separation into large mines, often employing over a thousand people, and small mines operated by less than 100 workers. This dualism persisted over time.

Around the 1910s larger mines and mining workers started to get exploited by ‘Indian’ owners, mainly coming from Gujarat and from the Railway contracting sector. Tata opened mines in Dhanbad in 1910 in order to supply their steel plant in Jamshedpur. Already earlier on, by 1870s a ‘national bourgeoisie’ had developed in the textile sectors, benefiting from the global crisis, which had hit the industry in England. With some decades delay, ‘Indian’ mine owners started to develop links with the emerging Nationalist movement, in addition to their collaboration with the colonial regime.

In 1920 around 100,000 people were employed in the official mines in Dhanbad area, this figure rose to 150,000 during the Second World War and stayed at around 130,000 till the 1970s. The composition of this work-force changed drastically over time. Initially local population, mainly ‘tribals’, were employed as ‘family gangs’ on piece-work system. From the 1910s onwards workers arrived from as far as Gurakhpur, Patna, Allahabad and even from the Punjab. They clearly outnumbered the ‘local’ workers by the 1950s. The other main shift concerned the gender composition. Women mining workers accounted for nearly half of the work-force during the early phase of mining. In 1938 female employment in mines got officially banned, but the regime continued to depend on the female work-force due the increased demand for coal during the World War period. After ‘Independence’ female workers were expelled from the main mines and pushed into the unofficial mining fringe.

The re-placement of ‘local’ workers by migrant workers was part of the mine owners’ effort to enforce a higher degree of work discipline. Local mining workers tend to work until their ‘financial needs’ were met and then stop for a while, either working on their fields or engage in other activities. Chief Inspector of mines’ annual report noted in 1904: Even in normal time the Dehatis would not work regularly. Some of them worked for six or seven days at a stretch and then returned to their home for a week and rest. The migrant workers had more difficulties to escape the work regime. The other main measure to enforce regular and extended working-times was the electrification, which took place in the bigger mines from the 1920s onwards. Electrical pumps were used in order to be able to continue work during the raining season and electrical lights facilitated longer working hours in the open-cast mines. [6]

An ‘official’ labour movement amongst the Dhanbad miners appeared during the upsurge of workers struggles all over India after the First World War, a second wave of disputes surged in the period 1938 to 1941 and then again after the Second World War up to 1948. In that sense the local struggles followed a very generalised global rhythm. The official unions remained integrated either within the tactical ‘class collaboration’ of the Nationalist movement or degenerated into company unions. In late 1921, the Jharia Trade Union Congress called for strike and the bigger collieries were practically shut down for a week. A strike occurred in the Giridih coalfield in January 1923, but the workers returned unconditionally within a fortnight. The only trade union found to be in existence in the coal industry at the end of the 1920s was the Indian Colliery Employees’ Association, but this association had only 2,000 members. The leadership of this union was in the hands of those who were part of the supervising staff.

In 1938 strikes took place at Bird and Co’s Katrasgarh collieries. It lasted for about three months and affected about 7,000 workers. This time labour protests were accompanied by formation of trade unions. At the end of the 1930s, three registered trade unions were found to operate in the Jharia coalfield – the Indian Colliery Labour Union, the Tata’s Collieries Labour Association and the Indian Miners’ Association. Their numbers of members were around 3,500 respectively. This cycle of struggle was interrupted by the intensification of the Second World War and the Nationalist (Congress) backing of the Allies – the backing of the imperial British state. Coal was essential for the Allied war production, so Congress dominated trade unions were held back from any action threatening to interrupt coal supply.

In sync with mining workers in the US and South Africa and the wider Indian working class unrest, struggles re-emerged from the abyss of the World War and rocked almost entire coalfield during 1945-48, mainly relating to the sharp general price increases. In Bhowra and Amlabad colliery production stopped for around three months and thirteen days in 1948. The ‘independent’ state reacted with both, repression of struggles and legal integration of the official labour movement, e.g. by passing the Factory Act in 1948, which guaranteed the ‘right’ to formal representation, and by setting up the First Pay Commission. [7]

Independence

Similar to other industries under the colonial regime, mining as well was characterised by low level of productive investment except in a few central mines and in times of increased demand. In 1951, the regime in ‘independent’ India faced following situation: Around 70 per cent of all mines did not use electrical power; only around 18 per cent of the underground mines operated coal cutting machines and less than 1 per cent of the coal was mechanically loaded. During the following two decades of five years plans the state had to centralise command over coal production: a World Bank loan was used during the Third Plan to push investment in 225 central, formally still private mines. The ‘developmental gap’ between the main mines and the smaller, but quantitatively dominating mines widened.

Between 1951 and 1971 the number of coal cutting machines went up by 118.9 per cent; mechanical loaders and conveyors by 537.5 and 1257.0 per cent, respectively – having started from a very low level. Mechanically cut coal accounted for 32.4 of the underground output in 1971, having increased at an average annual rate of 13.5 per cent. Mechanical loading increased to 2.7 per cent. Output levels rose from around 30 Mt after the Second World War to about 72 Mt in 1971, while official employment increased from about 350,000 in 1951 to a peak-level of 450,000 in 1963. With the onset of the crisis by the mid-1960s employment dropped to around 380,000 in 1971.

Together with the central economic plans, large-scale credits and state-controlled coal prices, institutions like the central pay commissions were set-up and the Congress state-party affiliated trade union INTUC was put in high-command over the representation of the mining work-force – which included physical attacks on any other forms of workers’ organisation which might have threatened the trinity of state-management-union [8]. The state in India had guaranteed price levels for coal, both for producers and industrial consumers, in the hope that stable prices would lead to more investment in the still private mines and relatively cheap energy provisions would boost the wider industrial sector.

The Period 1971 to 2011: A Short Summary

The mining and energy regime in India was pushed through various phases of re-structuring in the rhythm with the general cycle of capitalist development and crisis. The industrial crisis from the mid-1960s onwards and particularly the oil-shock and global inflation in 1973 pushed many developing capitalist nations into dictatorial policies towards the working class, not at last towards workers in the energy sector. In India this ‘crisis-regime’ took the form of nationalisation of the mining sector in the early 1970s and the state of Emergency from 1975 to 1977. The ‘state of Emergency’ in 1975 nationalised banks and introduced a severe regime of central planning of proletarian re-production (e.g. through enforced mass-sterilisation), at the same time it ‘opened’ the Indian economy further to the world market and relieved big ‘private’ capital from taxes and custom duties: it ‘liberalised’ the economy. The 1980s in India were characterised by a ‘stuck development’. In the mining industry this ‘stuck development’ was best expressed in the emergence of the Munidih Project in Dhanbad, Asian’s first fully mechanised mine, in combination with a general degeneration of Coal India’s profitability. The 1980s culminated in the state foreign debt crisis in 1991, which widened the attack on the working class by debt management and controlled application of market forces in order to lower wage levels. In the mining areas of Dhanbad no worker was hired on a permanent bases since 1992 and the outsourcing process of mines accelerated. Each push of re-structuring was managed by a combination of World Bank or other external loans and a re-adjustment of the legal frame-work. In each phase the regime tried to make use of both the pressure of ‘market-forces’ and the centralising command of burocracy and ‘plan’.

In the following sections we first locate the ‘NATIONALISATION’ within the crisis attack on the working class. We then see how the ‘nationalisation’ of the central mines solidified the ‘uneven development’ within the mining sector in legal terms: the law drew a sharper line between the official and the ‘ILLEGALISED MINING SECTOR’, while the actual production process integrated both. The merger of trade union collaboration and ‘illegalised economic sector’ created the back-bone of the DHANBAD MAFIA. The mafia was intrinsic part of the mining regime during the 1970s to 1990s. The specific composition of the (local/migrant) mining work-force can partly explain the populist success of the JHARKHAND MOVEMENT, the other main form of class collaboration in the Dhanbad mining area. While mafia and regionalism controlled the reproduction of the impoverished rural proletariat and the labour intensive mines, MECHANISATION in the central mines attacked the core work-force and at the same time deepened the separation between workers in the centre and the periphery of the mining industry. The crisis 1991 the re-focussed the attack on the labour costs through CASUALISATION and OUTSOURCING.

 The Nationalization 1971 – 1973

Formally the coking coal collieries – main source for steel production – were nationalised in 1971, and the non-coking ones in 1973. Subsequently, all coking and non-coking collieries were merged into the Coal India Ltd. (CIL) on 1st of November 1975. [9]

First of all, the ‘idea’ of nationalising the mines was neither new, nor did it express any ‘popular’ of socialist shift within the ruling class. Factions within the colonial regime had opted for nationalisation and later on, during the Nehru developmental regime, steps towards ‘centralisation’ were taken, e.g. through setting up the Committee on the Amalgamation of Collieries in 1955. Formally the main mines might have been ‘privately owned’, but they were dependent on institutional (World Bank) credit, state controlled prices, mainly state-run industries as consumers. The mining sector itself was already very centralised: a few mining houses accounted for 70 per cent of the total output; in 1971, 34.5 per cent of the mines produced only 1.32 per cent of the total output and 60.9 per cent barely 10.6. In this sense ‘nationalisation’ was a rather formal step.

The onset of the crisis by the mid-1960s forced the state towards this formal step: the wider industry was eager for lower energy input costs. It is revealing to see how the regime made use of ‘controlled forces of competition’ in order to implement the formal act of nationalisation – how state and market are not separate entities, but mediating forms of class power. In 1967 the state ‘de-controlled’ the coal prices, which passed the price pressure on to the coal producers. The railway apparatus became a main price negotiator with the mining industry. This happened for three reasons: the railways used to run their own mines and therefore had insights in mining activities; the railways were a main consumer of coal themselves; the mining industry depended on the railways for transport. The negotiated ‘Loco Price’ became a generalised price for the industry and pushed the ‘private mines’ into a formal bankruptcy by 1971.

The regime used and shaped the ‘competition’ of its internal apparatus, like the railways, in order to negotiate its way through the crisis. The ‘class cohesion’ behind this ‘competition of different interests’ revealed itself subsequently, once the general attack on the working class emerged. In the following years this attack hit workers in all ‘competing sectors’, from the mines, to the railways to the manufacturing industry. In a single week following the nationalisation of coal mines nearly 50,000 miners in the Dhanbad region lost their jobs and were partly replaced by ‘newly immigrated workers’. During the first three years of nationalisation total production went up from 70 to 90 million tonnes, the fatality rate through labour accidents per thousand jumped from 0.42 in 1974 to 1.4 in 1975. In May 1974 tens of thousand railway workers were arrested during their general strike, which hinted at the general repression of workers’ unrest during the State of Emergency, which was declared in the same year as when the ‘state-owned’ Coal India Ltd. was formed.

After nationalisation in 1971-73 it was not sufficient to merely change the formal owner-ship of mines, the actual production process had to be re-shaped. The first main shift in the Dhanbad area was a kind of selection process between mines, which were to be incorporated into Coal India Ltd. and mines to be left out in the ‘illegalised fringe’. For following reason this process was the most intense in the Dhanbad-Jharia region: Coking coal reserves – coal with high energy content important for steel production – constitute only 15-20 per cent of the total Indian coal reserves and these reserves are concentrated in the two fields of Jharia and Ranigunj. In 1972, Jharia coal fields accounted for about 66 per cent of India’s total output of coking coal. At the same time these coal fields were characterised by the highest share of small mines, over 300 small mines in total. The dualism of ‘illegal mining’ and ‘centralised mines’ became the sharpest in this particular area. The emergence if ‘the mafia’ was also based on its bridge function between these to sectors of uneven development.

The mining regime tried establishing a stable core-workforce, in certain terms ‘privileged’, in order to find secure conditions for the mechanisation process – while the mechanisation process in turn was driven by the ‘flight’ from an unruly mass of industrial workers. The wider proletarian unrest of the 1967 – 1974 period had also entered the coalfields and was only shortly interrupted by the Emergency. In 1977 workers struggles, mainly among the contract work-force, broke out again – see for example movements in the Rajhera mining area, which were brutally quelled by the post-Emergency democratic government. [10] From 1971 we can see a shift towards capital-intensive open-cast mining and intensified international cooperation with ‘mining capital’ from Soviet Union, Poland, Australia, Germany and the UK – which was not only a ‘technology transfer’, but also a transfer of experience with a century of ‘class struggle management’.

The ‘nationalisation’ also re-defined the formal border-lines between different stages of development, by de-marketing more clearly what is called ‘the illegal mining sector’.

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