[Suresh Thapa, 17, said
that he has worked in the mines near his family’s shack “since he was a kid,”
and that he expects his four younger brothers to follow suit. He and his family
live in a tiny tarp-and-stick shack near the mines. They have no running water,
toilet or indoor heating.]
 |
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
A young coal miner studied English during a break in
Khliehriat, India.
The few nearby schools teach in local dialects. More Photos»
|
KHLIEHRIAT, India — After descending 70 feet on a wobbly bamboo staircase into a dank
pit, the teenage miners ducked into a black hole about two feet high and
crawled 100 yards through mud before starting their day digging coal.
They wore T-shirts,
pajama-like pants and short rubber boots — not a hard hat or steel-toed boot in
sight. They tied rags on their heads to hold small flashlights and stuffed
their ears with cloth. And they spent the whole day staring death in the face.
Just two months before
full implementation of a landmark 2010 law mandating that all Indian children
between the ages of 6 and 14 be in school, some 28 million are working instead,
according to UNICEF. Child workers can be found everywhere — in shops, in
kitchens, on farms, in factories and on construction sites. In the coming days
Parliament may consider yet another law to ban child labor, but even activists say more
laws, while welcome, may do little to solve one of India’s most intractable
problems.
“We have very good laws
in this country,” said Vandhana Kandhari, a child protection specialist at
Unicef. “It’s our implementation that’s the problem.”
Poverty, corruption,
decrepit schools and absentee teachers are among the causes, and there is no
better illustration of the problem than the Dickensian “rathole” mines here in
the state of Meghalaya.
Meghalaya lies in
India’s isolated northeast, a stump of land squashed between China, Bhutan,
Bangladesh and Myanmar. Its people are largely tribal and Christian, and they
have languages, food and facial features that seem as much Chinese as Indian.
Suresh Thapa, 17, said
that he has worked in the mines near his family’s shack “since he was a kid,”
and that he expects his four younger brothers to follow suit. He and his family
live in a tiny tarp-and-stick shack near the mines. They have no running water,
toilet or indoor heating.
On a recent day, Suresh
was sitting outside his home sharpening his and his father’s pickaxes —
something he must do twice a day. His mother, Mina Thapa, sat nearby nursing an
infant and said Suresh chose mining himself.
“He works of his own
free will,” she said. “He doesn’t listen to me anyway, even when I tell him
something,” she added with a bittersweet laugh.
Ms. Thapa said that
three of her younger sons go to a nearby government school and that they would
go into the mines when they wanted to.
“If they don’t do this
work, what other jobs are they going to get?” she asked.
India’s Mines Act of
1952 prohibits anyone under the age of 18 from working in coal mines, but Ms.
Thapa said enforcing that law would hurt her family. “It’s necessary for us
that they work. No one is going to give us money. We have to work and feed
ourselves.”
The presence of children
in Meghalaya’s mines is no secret. Suresh’s boss, Kumar Subba, said children
work in mines throughout the region.
“Mostly the ones who
come are orphans,” said Mr. Subba, who supervises five mines and employs 130
people who collectively produce 30 tons of coal each day.
He conceded that working
conditions inside his and other mines in the region were dangerous. His mines
are owned by a state lawmaker, he said.
“People die all the
time,” he said. “You have breakfast in the morning, go to work and never come
back. Many have died this way.”
While the Indian
government has laws banning child labor and unsafe working conditions, states
are mostly charged with enforcing those laws. The country’s police are highly
politicized, so crackdowns on industries sanctioned by the politically powerful
are rare. Police officers routinely extract bribes from coal truckers, making
the industry a source of income for officers.
“Child labor is allowed
to continue in Meghalaya by those in positions of power and authority, as it is
across India,” said Shantha Sinha, chairwoman of the National
Commission for Protection of Child Rights.
In 2010, Impulse, a nongovernmental organization based
in Shillong, Meghalaya’s capital, reported that it had found 200 children —
some as young as 5 — working in 10 local mines. The group estimated that as
many as 70,000 children worked in about 5,000 mines.
Its findings led to
images in the Indian news media of small children working in horrifying
conditions. State officials angrily denied that there was any child labor
problem.
Investigations soon
followed by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, as well as
the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, one of the
nation’s most respected independent research groups. Both confirmed the
presence of child laborers.
Despite visiting during
the monsoon season, when many mines are closed or barely operational, the Tata
group found 343 children age 15 or younger working in 401 mines and seven coal
depots. The group had intended to conduct a more extensive investigation, but
the “researchers had to stop data collection, as local interest groups
threatened them with bodily harm if they continued with the study,” the report
noted.
“The mining industry is
clearly aware of the issue of child labor and the illegality of the act, and
yet children continue to be employed,” the report concluded.
Bindo M. Lanong,
Meghalaya’s deputy chief minister for mining and geology, flatly denied the
investigations’ findings.
“There is no child labor
in Meghalaya,” he said in a telephone interview this month. “These allegations
are totally absurd. They are not based on facts.”
Mr. Lanong also said
that mines in Meghalaya follow national safety regulations.
Yet, several mines
visited in Meghalaya had no ventilation and only one entrance; they followed no
mining plan, did not use limestone to reduce explosion risks and had minimal
roof supports, among other illegal and dangerous conditions. Their bamboo
staircases were structurally unsound and required miners to walk sideways to
avoid falling. Miners said those conditions were endemic.
Mr. Lanong responded:
“What should we do, stop mining? I ask those people if rathole mining is
banned, you will be interfering with the liberty of the landowners.”
Despite offering high
pay, mine managers nonetheless have trouble finding enough workers in this
area, according to the Tata report. The local tribal population largely shuns
the jobs, so children and other laborers are brought here from Nepal and
Bangladesh in informal networks that advocates have decried as trafficking.
Many are soon trapped in a classic swindle: although pay is high, mine
operators charge huge premiums to deliver drinking water, food and other
staples to mining camps. As a result, many child laborers are unable to send
money home or earn enough to leave.
There are few schools
near the mining camps, and those that are available teach in local dialects —
languages that immigrant children generally do not speak. So even if they want
to get educated, many children cannot.
Wildcat mining has
become so endemic in the Jaintia Hills district of Meghalaya that much of the
land resembles a moonscape, denuded of trees and brush. Roads are choked with
coal trucks, and roadsides are covered with piles of black rocks. Mining has
led “to a host of issues such as subsidence, degradation of soil and water
resources as well as air pollution,” the Tata report stated.
But it has also brought
money for those who are from the region. Suresh said he earns $37 to $74 a
week, a healthy salary in a country where two-thirds of the population lives on
less than $15 per week. He gives the money to his family, he said.
After lunch, Suresh got
ready to return underground. He said that he had seen people die, “but I
haven’t had an accident yet.”
“Well,” he amended, “I
hurt my back once when the mud fell in, but we still had to work the next day.”
“How can we not work?”
he asked. “We have to eat.”
Sruthi Gottipati contributed reporting from
Khliehriat, and Niharika Mandhana from New Delhi.