Opinion - Editorials

The coalmine tragedy

WHAT HAPPENED AT the Singareni Collieries Company (SCCL) in Karimnagar district of Andhra Pradesh was another tragic manifestation of the dangers lurking in the coal mines around the country. This was not the first incident of its kind, but every such tragedy only drives home the message that on the safety front, there is so much more to be done. The Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, braved the rough weather and met the families of the victims and has also announced the Union Labour Ministry's decision to get a sitting judge of the Andhra Pradesh High Court to probe the tragedy, which claimed 17 lives. A whole package of relief and compensation has also been offered, but that cannot possibly offset the loss of precious, bread-earning lives. The fact that the LEP underground mine was flooded in no time, leaving little room for any of the workers to escape only heightens the potential for danger. This was no fire, no freak accident, no failure of equipment and perhaps no human failure either. But the fact remains that safety at the mines, particularly in respect of flooding, leaves a lot to be desired. What began as seepage at the 18th level, led to a flooding of the 19th level, where the 17 miners were at work on the morning shift.

It took a couple of days to pump out the water that went down to a depth of 78 metres. So there were no survivors and only their bodies could be pulled out. In the era of globalisation, it should be possible to get the best safety measures and techniques to make the Indian mines a safer place to work in. When safety audits have become the order of the day and international consultants have been hired by Coal India to carry out such exercises here, it needs to be seen why this tragedy was allowed to happen. There have been reports that seepage of water was indeed noticed earlier, but no action was taken. Similarly, the sand-filling exercise, after coal extraction, may not have been done properly. In addition to the statutory enquiry by the Deputy Director-General of Mines Safety, there is also going to be a detailed probe by a sitting judge of the High Court. This should satisfy the demand from the miners for a thorough investigation into the tragedy and the need to get to the root of the problem — in this case, the seepage of water. Even if there is bound to be an overlap in the two inquiries, the probe will have to ascertain if there were indeed complaints about water seepage earlier and whether any action was taken by the company. That should address the immediate concern of how this happened, but would still leave the larger issue of safety precautions wide open.

In the modern safety audits, there is an assessment of the threats and the preparedness in each mine, including the regular mock rehearsals of the emergency action plans. The dangers could be through fatal falls, failure of equipment, underground fires, from the mine environment and of course water gushing in without a warning. Once the enquiry report identifies the cause of the tragedy, there has to be a follow up on safety measures that need to be taken in this case. The focus has tended to be on roof bolting, travelling roadways, two-way haul roads and reducing the concentration of workers at the active coal face. When it comes to flooding, devices will have to be found to signal a warning about water seepage in time, so that the workers could find an escape route. The management of not just SCCL, but all other collieries, will have to undertake their own threat assessment and that too in the pre-monsoon phase, to prevent the recurrence of such tragedies. Instead of being just a statutory body to go into disasters, the mines safety authorities must step up their activity to identity the threats, create awareness and come up with new, practical, preventive safety measures.

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