Life in India's coal mines are deplorable. Many workers and their families gather coal for a meager wage without any aid or protection from the occupational exposure to coal and silica dust, heavy metals, and ergonomic stress. The article in National Geographic describes the personal experience by a photographer on their journey throughout India.

1. Presented by: Bernard L. Fontaine, Jr., CIH, CSP
The Windsor Consulting Group, Inc.
Photographs by: Robert Kendrick, National Geographic
LIFE IN INDIA’S COAL MILES

2. Coal is a paradox. It’s a cheap and plentiful energy source that created
and continues to power our modern world, yet our continued reliance on
coal threatens the very world it helped create.
Coal powered the Industrial Revolution, and remains the leading energy
source worldwide for generating electricity. And despite a recent decline
in U.S. coal use, globally we burn more coal than ever.
But coal is dirty. Pollutants are released when we burn it, one of them
carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas scientists see as a driver of rising
global temperatures.
Photographer Robb Kendrick collaborated on this project with during his
1985 summer internship here, persevered in the face of many refusals,
locked doors, and barred gates to get this article’s powerful photography
showing coal’s visible impacts.” –Dennis Dimick, photo editor for “Can
Coal Ever Be Clean?” in the April issue of National Geographic.

3. Meghalaya, India. Men unload a
cart from a “rat hole” mine.

4. Being lowered 400 feet into an illegal mine is unsettling. You quickly
realize how fragile your existence is. Everything around you is a wisp
away from failure—rickety ladders descending into wet darkness, no
escape route, no water pumps, no lighting, no ventilation systems, miners
in flip flops and shorts lighting a cigarette in the dark while taking a break.
One falling domino can bring the whole place down and with it, all those
working inside. This is the reality of illegal mining in eastern India and for
these miners, this is the norm.
Taking these risks every day, miners work 3-foot tall coal seams, called
“rat holes.” While lying on their backs picking away at the coal, they dig
1000 feet horizontally in unsupported seams with nothing more than a
headlight.
Collapse of these rat hole mines is not uncommon and many quietly die
in the process.

5. Meghalaya, India. A coal miner
climbs a shaky ladder to
daylight.

6. Coal is lifted out of the mine
shaft two tons at a time and
trucked to a depot, where it is
sorted by size and quality.

7. Endurance.
That one word best describes the people in India. Whether an illegal
miner working a rat hole 400 feet down, a child laborer loading 50-pound
coal baskets into trucks, coal sorters in a coal depot, or women in the
villages within a coal mine acting as the glue that keeps family and
community together, they all showed tremendous endurance,
graciousness, and kindness. No one was bitter, no one complained, no
one asked anything of me.
Life is cut to such a basic level that properly cremating their dead was a
burden, though this ceremony is a vital part of proceeding to the afterlife.
One group of miners, living in a coal mine that has experienced
underground fires for nearly a century, simply wrap the deceased in cloth
and stuff the body down one of the many crevasses where the body will
burn.

8. Jharkhand, India. Separating and
breaking coal in a depot gets you $2
USD per day. This man along with
his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and
one of his two grandsons all work in
the depot. The five of them make
$10 USD per 11-hour day.

9. Drive and determination.
An older couple was working a coal depot in Jharkhand. The man, in
his 60’s, was breaking coal with a small hammer while his wife
shoveled broken coal.
After 30 minutes of view their work and showing the results, their was
a powerful realization about the work and their lifestyle and, more
importantly to learn that the young boy sitting next to him was his
grandson. His daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons were all living
and working in the coal depot.
This was a powerful moment, not because the image was powerful,
but because of the pain that could felt for this man who was doing
what he could to support his family and having it come to this thin
existence—three generations living in plastic covered structures with
dirt floors, no toilet, no water, and hammering and shoveling coal into
piles.

10. At a mine in the village of Bokapahari,
working in teams, men and women load
baskets of coal by hand onto trucks that
are waiting to carry it to coal depots for
their clients throughout India.

11. Circumstance, something beyond our control, plays a huge role in all
our lives. For these miners and their families, these jobs pay enough
to risk their lives.
As Americans, even the poorest of us, are born into a circumstance of
such comparative excess and comfort, but so few of us could endure
these same working and living conditions. It’s not that we are less
durable, maybe just mentally more fragile.
It is ironic that many of those risking their health and lives to provide
coal in India do not have electricity. In fact they have very little that
would qualify as a basic necessity.
These remote mines insure that most Indians never see the unsafe,
deplorable conditions these people live and work in. They do not see
the lives that are considered necessary and in the same breath
disposable.

12. Miners and their families work under
deplorable conditions – exposed to air and
surface contaminants from coal and
crystalline silica dust, heavy metals, heat
stress, and physical exertion

13. Jharkhand, India. Families living near the
Jharia mine mainly work for the coal
company. Existence in these villages is
rough, and no area suitable for a garden.

14. Jharkhand, India. A young boy carries a
chunk of coal into the mining camp where he
lives.

15. Jharkhand, India. A coal miner tends
a fire in the mining camp where he
lives with his family.

16. Human suffering happens in many places. This situation is not unique,
but entire communities being pushed down so far to provide
something that comforts some just seems grotesque.
It would be like a farmer growing food for others while seeing his own
family face hunger. The hope is that images such as these may inform
and start a conversation that will lead to small changes, and
eventually larger ones, for the betterment of those who experience
these hardships.
Occupational health risks associated with exposures to coal mine dust
over a working lifetime may lead to occupational respiratory diseases,
including simple coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP), progressive
massive fibrosis (PMF), and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
(COPD). Epidemiological studies have clearly demonstrated that
miners have an elevated risk of developing deficits in lung function
when they are exposed to respirable crystalline silica are also at risk
of developing silicosis or mixed-dust pneumoconiosis.