Proudly a Miner

I just want to ask a question before putting my thoughts into words. Do we ever pay our reverence to a soldier who guards our nation round the clock, a laborer who builds our abode in spite of building one for himself, a farmer who gives his sweat and blood to feed the nation but dies of hunger, a coal miner who energizes this nation but himself lives in dark ? I know most of you might be grinning by seeing this contemporary question and would definitely answer ‘yes’. But if I ask how frequently, you might go dumb or take a long pause before answering. This is something that disturbs me the most, something which is against humanity, something that can be called highly eccentric and obviously unsustainable.

Friends, let me introduce myself, I did my Engineering from IIT (BHU), Varanasi after which I worked four years in an underground coal mine located in Wasseypur ( Dhanbad ). Presently I have left job and the pursuing MBA. Though I have left mining, I still feel so connected to this industry. It pinches me the most when I find that people don’t recognize coal miners as drivers of nation. As most of my coal workers are illiterate and cannot pen down their thoughts, I took the responsibility to speak their heart out, make their hardship public so that people pay obeisance to these workers and they take pride in their job.

In order to give you a feel of how difficult their life is let me tell you how a typical miner spends his day. He comes to the workplace, wears personal protective equipment and cap lamp (total weight around 7kg.), walks 4km down the ground to reach a working point. There is extreme scarcity of fresh air, high humidity, high temperature, inflammable gases such as methane continuously oozes out of strata. There is high risk of water inundation and caving, in short the nature is always ready to crackdown. He digs coal, inhales huge amount of coal dust despite knowing that it will ultimately kill him. Finally, once the shift ends he again walks for 4 km along a steep gradient to come back to surface. Once back from workplace he consumes liquor (he knows that it will kill him) because its recommended by doctors ( it cleans your lungs and blood), sleeps and again comes back to work the next day.

Now that you know the hardship of a coal miner, I ask u a question, Can the wages ever compensate for his substandard and hazardous lifestyle!! Never, they deserve even more.  One way to dole out our support is lend them a salute, a respect, a special status, but it’s very disheartening to say that very few of us do so. Most of us have a stereotype that they are a sub grade heavily paid worker who does a menial job. This calls for a complete overhaul, so I urge people to be the part of change.

Revere them, respect them, so that they pour more blood into the vein of our economy, our nation becomes more healthy and so do we.