Point of Departure

Some scholars have argued that, in many instances, employers neglected requirements for the safety and health of workers and denied rehabilitative assistance to bereaved working families. Employers sacrificed workers’ health for profits for a long time.Footnote ¹⁰ When the laws of compensation, safety, and penalty for accidents were stipulated, capitalists compared the cost of implementing safety measures with that of accidents and compensation. Based on this cost–benefit comparison, in countries such as the US, Germany, and Britain, profitable and capital-intensive industries chose to invest in safety measures from the turn of the twentieth century, while less profitable industries looked the other way.Footnote ¹¹

Another strand of scholarship has pointed out that the adoption of measures for the recognition of occupational risk, protection, and rehabilitation was painfully slow. Employers and the state, in most instances, ignored the application of these measures or only implemented them selectively to suit the logic of profitability, cost minimization, and socio-political imperatives.Footnote ¹² These arguments regarding the profits of death, accident cost, and selective-cum-minoritarian welfare – though not ignorant of the underreporting and invisibilization of casualty cases – are preoccupied with the nature of the workplace and financial considerations. They underestimate the role of the classification praxis worked out by employers to project a benign image and avoid paying compensation, as well as other stakeholders’ contestation of the classification schema.

My discussion on the techniques of managing the statistical and discursive representation of work hazards and human losses speaks to the observations of some other commentators. Mills and others suggest that neither the profit motive nor capital's negligence of occupational health and safety fully determined the classificatory exercise in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.Footnote ¹³ They underscore the invisibility of occupational risk and stakeholders’ attempts to make such risk visible, as well as the limits of such efforts, which included engagement with geophysical and medical sciences, laws, stakeholder bargaining, and economic factors such as employment, profitability, cost of reproduction, and so forth.Footnote ¹⁴

Roy formulates a similar argument in a study on natural disasters in colonial India. Roy describes the colonial government as a modern (capitalist) power founded as a knowledge-seeking enterprise.Footnote ¹⁵ The state invested in the development of knowledge to deal with climatic risks on a historic scale. The social contract and coordination influenced the adoption and outcome of relief schemes and disaster control measures. State power appears, in Roy's account, to have been proactive and judicious in its mission. In contrast, the native commoner usually surfaced to disturb and disorient the disaster management undertaken by the colonial authority, while their voice in the knowledge enterprise remains out of sight. My study extends Mills's and Roy's approaches to the study of classification exercises in Indian mines. However, it observes that, contrary to Roy, the state and managerial power seem not to have been proactive or forthright in perfecting the classification exercise, nor did mine workers remain indifferent towards and insulated from the knowledge-seeking enterprise.

Work, Workforce, Management, and Casualty

Occupational risk and its classification patterns arose out of the modality of production process, workforce organization, management institutions, and an accident control mechanism. In the Indian coalfield of Jharia, coal output grew about sixfold – from approximately 4 million tons per annum to over 23 million tons – from 1900 to 1971. The first major increase in output occurred in the 1910s and the second in the 1950s–1960s (see Figure 1). These two periods of increase were related to the demand arising from World War I and the increased industrial investment under planned development. The average workforce on the payroll trebled in the period under study, with sharp increases occurring in the 1910s and the 1940s, again in direct response to the world wars (see Figure 1). A combined view on the trends of output and workforce indicates growth in productivity from the 1950s, a period associated with greater use of machinery, an efficient workforce, and mineworkers’ welfare.

Figure 1.

Output and workforce in India and Jharia coalmines.

Source: Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Mines (hereafter, ARCIM) for 1899–1971 (Calcutta, 1900–1971). It provides figures for average daily employment in a year, excluding absentees, who were in the range of 20–25 per cent up to the 1930s, about twelve per cent in the early 1950s, and about nine per cent in the mid-1960s.

The ownership of coalmines was private and included both British and Indian owners, although Indian owners’ control expanded in the wake of India's independence in the 1940s. The management of collieries was frequently in the hands of mostly British management agencies and, below them, predominantly Indian labour contractors.

Mining work was very labour-intensive, with a low capital-to-labour ratio and little mechanization prior to the mid-1950s. The use of a large number of manual labourers and a small proportion of mechanical, supervisory, and managerial personnel characterized the organization of work. The share of mechanical, supervisory, and managerial personnel increased as greater mechanization and enhanced safety regulations were introduced from the 1920s, and particularly from the 1950s. Such personnel constituted about fifteen per cent of the workforce in the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁶

As mining techniques advanced, coalmines went ever deeper and mining took place several levels below ground in both large and medium-sized coalmines. These mines reached depths of approximately 1000–1400 feet by the late 1930s, and 2000–2500 feet by the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁷

In the early decades, production workers were largely migrants, originating from 120–700 kilometres away, but they gradually came to settle in the area of the Jharia coalfield. The recruitment of workers usually depended on the labour contractor, called sirdar, and a few colliery owners who leased the zamindary land and maintained tenants-cum-mineworkers.

Production workers included men, women, and children, with jobs differentiated along gender and age lines. Women and children primarily worked as loaders, carriers, hauliers (called trammers), and coal screeners, both below ground and on the surface of the collieries, while men undertook coal-cutting, blasting, timbering, running water pumps, and other mechanical and supervisory tasks. The Indian Mines Act (IMA) of 1901 prohibited the employment of children below the age of ten. Its amendment, in 1923, raised the minimum age to thirteen, and in 1935 to fifteen. The prohibition on the employment of women in belowground mining in 1929, and its full enforcement from 1946, led to a rupture in the social composition of the workforce.Footnote ¹⁸

Coal-cutters (called malcutta), loaders, and trammers worked in gangs of ten to twelve in the belowground workplace. They often maintained “autonomy” in the execution of tasks, executing a mining plan outlined by the manager and the overman. The gang, consisting of coalminers, a gang headman, and a lineman (called timber-mistries), was responsible for the testing of gases, the supporting roof and sides, and for determining the right size for pillars. Coal workers, under the leadership of a gang headman, relied on their collective practical skill.Footnote ¹⁹

Forms of occupational risk included fatality, serious injury, minor injury, and occupational disease. Work hazards varied according to class, rank, and gender. Those who worked below ground faced roughly ninety per cent of workplace risk. Almost 85–90 per cent of victims were adolescent and adult men, as women and children were withdrawn from belowground mining after the 1920s. Prior to the mid-1920s, women and children constituted, respectively, approximately forty-five and five per cent of the belowground workforce and were susceptible to a variety of occupational risks.Footnote ²⁰ Women were the chief victims when employed as carriers in the quarries. The narrow and sharply sloped pathway was the site of many lethal accidents, either from the worker falling or from coal pieces falling from the carrier baskets. Children and infants were especially vulnerable to tubs of coal being moved around on the surface. Most of the victims were production workers, employed for cutting, blasting, loading, and hauling coal and for preparing supportive and safety measures. Very occasionally, managerial and supervisory staff, such as overmen, junior managers, and inspecting officers, became trapped.

Unsafe mining methods caused an increased number of casualties before moderating in the late 1960s. The fatality rate, that is, deaths per thousand workers, increased up to the mid-1940s, after which it declined. In contrast, the rate of serious injuries causing permanent or temporary disablement worsened up to the mid-1960s before showing signs of moderation in the late 1960s (see Figure 2). At the same time, however, instances of minor injury causing workers to be absent from work for a few days remained high and appeared to worsen (see Table 1). The recognition and categorization of occupational disease, such as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP), advanced from 1952, and it became a compensable source of injury in 1959. While its documentation was belated, gradual, and faced persistent managerial prevarication, the Mines Inspectorate reported general cases of respiratory disease, including asthma, tuberculosis, black lung, and occupational disease. The rate of respiratory disease cases per thousand workers, occasionally classified as occupational disease, was fairly high. It generally hovered above twenty per cent and marginally moderated in the 1960s (see Figure 3). Among them, the detection of CWP cases shot up in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the official statistics (see Table 2), based on annual submissions from colliery management and the Mines Inspectorate, fell far short of capturing this painful experience.

Figure 2.

Fatality and serious injury rates (per thousand employees) in the coalmines in India and Jharia. “Serious injury” is defined as a permanent loss of or injury to the sight or hearing, or fracture of limbs, or the enforced absence of the injured person from work over a period exceeding twenty days as per the Workmen's Compensation Act (hereafter, WCA) of 1923 and its amendment in 1959.

Source: ARCIM for 1896–1970.

Table 1.

Minor injury in Indian mines (over sixty per cent of mineworkers were in the coalmines) for selected years.

“Minor injury” is defined as an enforced absence of the injured person from work for a period exceeding ten days, according to the WCA of 1923, and seven days as per the WCA's amendment in 1959. It figured in the statistics after the 1935 International Labour Organization (ILO) convention on mining safety and was discontinued for unknown reasons from 1962.

Source: ARCIM for 1939–1970.

Figure 3.

Respiratory disease cases recorded in Bengal coalmines, 1950–1964. The Chief Inspector of Mines reported this series for the Bengal coalfields, from the 1950s, and discontinued it after 1964.

Source: ARCIM for 1950–1964.

Table 2.

CWP cases officially recorded in selected years, 1952–1972.

Sources: Indian Labour Year Books (ILYB) for 1963–1970 (Delhi); ARCIM for 1901–1971.

The article, therefore, annotates a non-linear pattern of work hazards. Casualties increased over time: the fatality rate moderated from the late 1940s and the serious injury rate from the late 1960s, whereas minor injuries and occupational disease appeared to worsen. Amidst all this, the campaigns for safety, compensation, and proper classification advanced. Indeed, a successful classification exercise contributed to all three areas – proper identification of occupational hazards, safety design, and compensation claims. The next section discusses the causes and intricate procedures of recognition, classification, and documentation of casualty cases, and the claims and counterclaims made by stakeholders.

Ascertainment of Work Hazards and Its Techniques

The casualty trends outlined in the previous section are based on reports submitted by the colliery management and compiled by the Mines Inspectorate from 1895. The influence of the Berlin International Labour (Mining) Convention in colonial India in 1894, the introduction of the IMA in 1901, and its subsequent amendments necessitated these official and managerial activities.Footnote ²¹ Scrutiny of the source materials indicates that managerial reporting, and the consequent official casualty statistics, suffered from underreporting, irregularity, and misleading categorization-cum-representation. They had an imprint of questionable techniques of ascertainment, statistical manipulation, efforts at (in-)visibilization, and unreasonable perceptions of risk. Over time, a shift in these techniques, statistics management, and perceptions resulted from the critical intervention of, and new knowledge brought to bear upon them by, contending stakeholders.

The regulation of mining by public authorities on issues such as the safety and health of mineworkers was the chief instrument that gradually generated statistics and knowledge on mining. Prior to 1894, colliery firms did not provide any casualty records, even though the Raniganj coalfield in eastern India had been mined since the 1820s. At the turn of the twentieth century, colliery owners opposed any regulation of mining techniques proposed by the state to ensure the safety of workers and of railway property in mining areas. They argued: “It will be seen that India, in spite of its backwardness, compares well with Great Britain itself as far as the figures of mining accident are concerned.”Footnote ²² Three decades later, they reiterated the same view before the Whitely [Royal] Commission on Labour (headed by J.H. Whitely).Footnote ²³

Many colliery firms resisted the demand for sufficient investment in, and attention to, accident-control measures. Low levels of capital investment, profit maximization, and cost minimization were the influencing factors, alongside the operational dimension of the conservative attitude of industrialists that involved a normative assumption known as the customary Common Law. The Common Law presumed that workers bore liability for casualty, that is, “workers’ liability for casualty” (hereafter WLC), as part of the employment contract. Mining companies appear to have drawn upon the British tradition of Common Law and WLC.Footnote ²⁴ The Fatal Accident Act of 1855 in colonial India stipulated that the victim had the right to claim damage compensation in case of a casualty suffered because of a “wrongful act, or neglect or default” by the culprit. Working people had to prove their claim of employer fault in court. In the late eighteenth century, the management of the Ichapur Gunpowder Manufactory (Calcutta) offered pensions to its employees who suffered casualties.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, artisans of the Mints under the English East India Company received pensions in their old age after long years of service or infirmity caused by work.Footnote ²⁶ The policy arose out of its specific labour–management relationship and partly mirrored the modern military labour contract. A link between such social security schemes and a legislative mandate, or any sustained formal guiding principle, is not yet traceable in the case of mining. Mining management successfully insulated its labour–management relationship from previous Indian instances of pensions/compensation in its industrial employment contract.

Additionally, management's view was based on an ascertainment of casualty that included two heuristic and discursive devices: the control of statistics and the issues of (in-)visibility and classification. These operational dimensions were located in the dialectics of social forces, such that counterclaims by contending stakeholders for definitive recognition of casualty had to reconstitute the very classification praxis.

The IMA of 1901 and the mining regulations of 1904 empowered the Mines Inspectorate to insist on the prompt and mandatory submission of reports by mine managers. They also laid down safety clauses mandating punishment for persons responsible for accidents and casualties. Colliery management negotiated this twofold regulatory requirement by hushing up accidents, human losses, and their causes in a variety of ways. J.R.R. Pickering, the Chief Inspector of Mines (hereafter CIM), expressed his dismay about management's unreliable reports on an accident that occurred at the Central Kirkend Coal Company's mine:

Pickering rightly observed: “If the sirdar did know of the slip, and especially as the man was breaking the rules by being beyond a fence, he ought to have insisted upon the man at once withdrawing.”Footnote ²⁸

The propensity of the colliery authority to avoid punishment increasingly led to the mysterious disappearance of eyewitnesses and afflicted workers. Pickering noted in the same report that another accident had occurred at the Jharia Colliery Company's Bhaga mine:

The mysterious disappearance of mineworkers in the aftermath of fatal accidents soon became commonplace in the colliery settlements, a feature that has been captured by Ilyas Ahamed Gaddi and Sanjeev, non-fiction novelists from the Dhanbad–Jharia region, in Fire Area and Sawdhan! Neeche Aag Hai, respectively.Footnote ³⁰

The Whitely Commission noted in 1931 that the rise in the number of accidents and human losses in the 1920s could be ascribed to better reporting and more accurate classifications in the aftermath of the IMA (Amendment) of 1923–1924, rather than any real increase in accidents. Contrary to this assumption, the urge to hush up relevant information appeared to intensify following passage of the Workmen's Compensation Act (hereafter WCA) of 1923–1924. The Act had some contentious clauses in favour of employers and against victims’ compensation claims, for example in cases of casualty resulting from disobedience or disregard for safety precautions by the victim. It also stipulated that the victim should have regularly worked for six months or more for the same employer.

The protests organized after the mid-1920s by labour unions, such as the Indian Colliery Employees Association (ICEA), over the right to compensation and restitution of bereaved working families condemned this tendency towards irregularities in employers’ submission of reports to the Compensation Commissioner Office and Mines Inspectorate. P.C. Bose, Vice President of the ICEA, pointed out that Mines Inspectors were occasionally appointed to conduct inquiries and determine responsibility for fatalities, but only in response to protests initiated by the labour unions.Footnote ³¹ In response to such sustained pressure, the Coal Control Board, formed in 1942 under the Coal Commissioner, sternly dealt with industrialists by taking them to court for fabricating their annual statistics and providing fictitious figures concerning accidents and human losses.Footnote ³² The Mines Act of 1952 made it mandatory for colliery management to put up a public notice board listing casualties so that an aggrieved worker's family could seek restitution. These countervailing pressures exerted by legislation and organized labour put a check on underreporting and misrecognition. Such countervailing pressures resulted from a significant expansion of state capacity to deal with the exigencies of World War II and the pre-eminence of the labour question in the logic of decolonization in India.Footnote ³³

Let us consider the lawsuit filed by Modiba Bibi before the Compensation Commissioner for WCA in 1923.Footnote ³⁴ Shabaddi Mian, her husband, was a coal-cutter at Deoli colliery. On 18 December 1951, he succumbed to injuries received when a shower of coal and stone fell on him. On 9 April 1952, the Commissioner awarded the bereaved family compensation in the form of a lump sum payment of Rs 2400. He took into account that the deceased coal-cutter had worked at the mine for fifteen years and was earning Rs 72 a month. Mondal, a manager of the colliery, challenged the compensation award on 14 June 1952. He argued that the fatality occurred due to Mian's negligence and wilful disobedience of the safety measures adopted for the protection of workers. The site of the accident had been declared dangerous and was fenced all around. “Hence, the accident did not arise out of, and in the course of his employment. Furthermore, the deceased was not a coal-cutter till about 6 years ago. He worked for several days only and was a casual worker. His daily wage was Rs. 1/8/- only.”Footnote ³⁵

This was a contestation over various aspects of the accident compensation rule and the attendance register. On average, the colliery management contested half of all official compensation claims filed by grief-stricken families.Footnote ³⁶ The control of circumstantial evidence determined the result of this case in favour of the management. Notably, Modiba Bibi's lawsuit and contestation exemplified the growing tendency of compensation claims and brought Shabaddi Mian's fatality into the public record. This is because the management had not submitted any report of this case to the Inspectorate. In my oral-historical survey, Singhjee (a trammer-cum-labour contractor in the 1950s and 1960s) recounted the forced removal of victims’ bodies from the scene of an accident and the threat of the Boiler – recalcitrant workers were threatened with being thrown into the boiler chamber – in the Dubaree colliery.Footnote ³⁷ These exercises were a prerequisite for the statistical manipulation, or corruption in documentation, undertaken by employers. However, it was only one method among many of controlling the statistics.

The category of casualties of a non-mining nature, as classified by the colliery authority, emerged as a site of contention over time. Labour activists, including lawyers, teachers, nationalists, and union leaders, drew attention to the exclusion of some casualty types, such as the death of a seriously injured person a few days or a week after an accident. In the late 1930s, the Mines Department began to monitor the health of injured mineworkers and to record off-site fatalities and “minor injuries”. The “other fatal accident” category, devised in 1908 to represent fatalities that were presumed to have been “non-mining” in character, was an ingenious instance of controlling the statistics, reducing the fatality figures by 10–15 per cent. A fatal accident at Srikristopur coalmine (Balliram & Company Limited) was, for instance, classified as “other fatal accident” in 1921: “A deceased was found drowned in a sinking shaft, 42 feet deep.” Management reported that the deceased person was “mentally defective”.Footnote ³⁸ Management similarly assigned deaths caused by subsidence, deaths in huts due to the explosion of underprepared gunpowder, deaths of persons knocked down by railway wagons in colliery sidings, and similar incidents to the category of “other fatal accident”. The same happened with the deaths of all children and infants working in contravention of the Mines Act. The figures of “other fatal accident” reveal that not a single year passed without a number of children being crushed to death or injured on the surface by moving or overturning coal tubs and railway wagons.

At times, mineworkers confronted employers over the dodgy classification strategy. The Mudidih colliery compensation case of 1928 was such an instance. Juman Khan, a trolley-man, was killed while inside his dhowrah (barracks) on the colliery premises. His death occurred owing to subsidence in which several dhowrahs were wrecked, killing six and seriously injuring forty others. Juman Khan's widow filed a compensation claim under the compensation laws, but it was denied. The management argued that the fatality did not occur “in the course and out of the deceased's employment”; hence, it was reducible to “other fatal accident”. N.P. Thadani, the Compensation Commissioner at Dhanbad, made a recommendation to the government that all accidents like that of Juman Khan should be regarded as occupational hazards, and the victim should qualify for compensation. All cases of mining fatalities should merit compensation, irrespective of causation.Footnote ³⁹ Claims for compensation and counterclaims against them in the context of fatalities reduced to the category of “other fatal accident” by management increased and became the most contentious practice in this history of workers’ rights. Three decades later, the 1959 Amendment to the WCA favourably addressed this lacuna by incorporating Thadani's recommendation.

Casualties that occurred at an abandoned quarry were discounted. A person visiting a quarry for a bath could fall or drown, as could those who visited a coalmine to get coal from an abandoned seam. The colliery authority classified these mishaps as attempts at suicide by persons suffering “mental depression”.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Coal Mines Committee (headed by L.B. Burrows), constituted to look into the sharp increase in disasters in 1935–1936, recommended the stowing and fencing of abandoned collieries. The IMA (Amendment) of 1939 instituted the Stowing Board and empowered it under the Coal Mines Safety (Stowing) Act of 1939 either to financially support owners of abandoned mines to undertake stowing and fencing, or to take initiatives of this kind on its own in order to reduce mishaps.

(In)visibility and Recognition of Occupational Disease

The omissions and discrepancies in the statistics referred to in the previous section seemed purposeful. By contrast, the accounting of occupational disease was impacted by uncertainty over public knowledge of it and contending efforts at (in-)visibilization.

The first Coal Mining Committee, headed by James Grundy (a mining expert from Britain, employed as Mines Inspector in 1894), did not find mining in India injurious to health. To the Committee, ill health meant the stunted growth of persons employed, which it did not find unusual in Indian mines compared with the rest of the population.Footnote ⁴¹ As early as 1896, Grundy observed that Indian mineworkers regularly took breaks from mining and visited their rural homes to recover their health and strength:

Grundy's astonishment that workers behaved in such a way to protect their health was characteristic of several subsequent observations shared by the Inspectorate and employers. They interpreted the work breaks and rural visits that mineworkers undertook to rest and recover their health as an expression of the migratory character of Indian workers.Footnote ⁴³ Employers also approved of it, in the interest of preserving the workers’ health.Footnote ⁴⁴

Public authorities were concerned with the destabilizing effects of regular outbreaks of cholera and smallpox, and occasionally of plague, on the workforce and, consequently, on the output of coal. They collaborated with the mining authority to undertake corrective measures and address the problem in the lead-up to World War I, from the early 1910s.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, the preponderance of hookworm (ancylostomiasis), which caused anaemia among mineworkers, did not count in the employer's view as an occupational disease: “This is […] common to all classes of Indian labour.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In this view, any consideration of why a general health problem, such as hookworm, was so pervasive and acute as to adversely affect ninety per cent of barefoot belowground mineworkers was irrelevant.

This blinkered vision by colliery management of the conditions of working-class life and work necessitated a discursive investment in explanations of the health effects stemming from the mining environment. Employers introduced the categories of “natural death”, “heart failure”, “loss of eye-sight and suicide”, “death in room after work due to ganja (marijuana) smoking”, “respiratory diseases”, and “epileptic fits”, with a view towards explaining away many casualties.Footnote ⁴⁷ In hindsight, we know that disease and casualty resulted from the workers’ excessive exposure to: coal dust; silica; nitrous fumes (nitrous oxide, nitric oxide, di-nitrogen trioxide, nitrogen oxide, and nitrogen dioxide); carbon monoxide; methane; arsenic; beryllium; cadmium; fluorine; lead; mercury; and other factors, such as noise and the gruelling heat. Sulphur, carbon, and hydrogen in coal seams generated heat, and workers’ regular and excessive exposure to these toxic and enervating effluents resulted in the deterioration of their health and pathological and mental disorders, leading to what Amalendu Das calls their “silent, slow, and steady demise”.Footnote ⁴⁸ The belated but systematic research on occupational disease conclusively introduced this knowledge only from the mid-1940s in India, as discussed below.

The official misrecognition of the deleterious effects of the mining environment on the pathological and mental conditions of mineworkers was contrary to what mineworkers experienced and observed in their quotidian life. They looked for a mix of remedies to come to terms with the exigencies of occupational health. Many described spending a high proportion of their income on alcohol consumption, in the belief that it helped bring out the coal dust inhaled during mining.Footnote ⁴⁹

A coal workers’ ditty offers insights on how they negotiated mining hazards:

This folksong reflects mineworkers’ existential anxiety and their coping with difficulties such as coal dust, black lung, heat, injury, and pain. It conflicted with the employers’ naturalization-cum-pathologization of occupational disease. Nevertheless, mineworkers appeared to accept the principles of the Common Law of industrial employment: they recognized the scope of occupational risk and the argument of WLC when taking up employment, unless employers wilfully inflicted injury on their employees. Instead of any pre-capitalist orientation among Indian mineworkers, their belief in the argument of WLC, resonating with the Common Law, was characteristic of several other early industrializing societies in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵¹ The persistence of this “preindustrial belief”, as Mills and others have argued, owed to the work relationship defined by piece-rate payment and contractual workload. These conditions underpinned their independent, self-sufficient, and adventurous propensity, resulting in unorganized politics and pessimistic religious views.Footnote ⁵² Indian mineworkers initially lived in similar conditions, but, over time, they underwent a makeover, to which we now turn.

Coal workers began to organize and form unions in the aftermath of World War I. They began articulating a labour welfarist view of occupational risk and human loss. They received encouragement from the new philosophy and politics of progress and the impact of the International Labour Organization's (ILO) campaign for a humane and civilized life for working people.Footnote ⁵³ One of the offshoots of their efforts, the WCA of 1923–1924, fell short of addressing occupational disease and the misleading categorizations of several types of casualty. LaDou rightly suggests that the ILO's advocacy for workers’ protection from injury, disease, and sickness suffered from its weak enforcement capacity in bringing about any recognizable improvement for the great majority of working people around the world.Footnote ⁵⁴ Coal workers slowly took up a two-pronged initiative – compensation claims and the visibilization of casualties – that influenced state inquiries and regulations in India.

Workers increasingly filed compensation claims for casualties, gradually shifting the boundaries of compensable human loss. The case of Kulada Kahalini was such an instance.Footnote ⁵⁵ Her husband, Raju Rawani, a mineworker at Khas Dharmaband colliery, went down the pit at 2 pm on 9 September 1951. While he was cutting coal, he lost consciousness and later died; his cause of death was reported as “heart failure”. The management described it “as a case of death due to natural cause rather than arising out of and in course of employment, which is not uncommon on the mines”. On this basis, it contested the award of compensation, of a lump sum payment of Rs 2100, to the widow Kulada Kahalini, which the Compensation Commissioner adjudicated on 19 May 1953.

The Compensation Commissioner rejected the managerial argument. He decided the case on the basis of evidence deposed by two eyewitnesses, Heru Rai and Babu Lal Rai, who worked alongside the deceased. In his opinion:

Notably, this verdict came in the aftermath of the Mines Act of 1952, which recognized the problem of occupational diseases and called for their diligent documentation. The legislative mandate seems to have informed the view of the Commissioner, even as the management appeared habituated to the older classification of human loss in the mines. Kahalini's lawsuit and the testimony of the two eyewitnesses allude to the transformation in workers’ beliefs. It impacted classification exercises, including the genesis of the Mines Act of 1952. Mineworkers and their families, along with activists, pursued a vigorous intellectual debate on this front which conditioned the expansion of state capacity in the 1940s and 1950s.

Though belatedly and gradually, medical experts sensitive to workers’ welfare, along with labour unions, became some of the key players to initiate and foster the recognition, classification, and documentation of occupational disease cases. As late as 1944–1946, the Bhore Health Enquiry Committee, the first survey on health in the Indian subcontinent, found no sign of CWP, silicosis, cellulitis, or miner's nystagmus (night-blindness) among mineworkers. It confirmed pervasive hookworm infection, the consequent anaemia, and the respiratory problems of belowground mineworkers. It recommended regular inspection of the prevalence of occupational disease.Footnote ⁵⁷

In a remarkable contrast, Dr V.R. Khanolkar, in a memorandum submitted to the S.R. Deshpande Labour Inquiry Committee in 1945, presented the earliest exposition of health problems resulting from the occupation of mining itself:

Dr Khanolkar's memorandum thus defined a novel social development agenda and contributed to the progress of a new “plebeian public” who critically engaged with development policy, recognized remedial measures, and became involved in the mobilization of public opinion. Dr K.B. Roy's work reinforced it through the irrefutable documentation of CWP cases by the mid-1950s.Footnote ⁵⁹ Their persuasive scientific exposition, and the mineworkers’ compelling responses, inaugurated a new age. They persuaded the National Ministry to model its laws on the advanced social and scientific views that were already in currency. In Britain, CWP was classified as a compensable source of injury in 1943, almost three decades after the classification of silicosis as the first compensable occupational disease in South Africa.Footnote ⁶⁰

The democratic government of the Republic of India arguably followed the logic of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the Labour Member of the Viceroy-Council (1941–1946), in the sense that it sought industrial efficiency by creating a stable, experienced, healthy, and contented workforce in strategic sectors such as coal.Footnote ⁶¹ Previously, employers were preoccupied with the continuous supply of migrants and cheap labour to ensure that the haggard workers in the coal pit did not become a drag on the industry. The 1959 WCA (Amendment) identified silicosis, fibrosis, bagassosis, and CWP as compensable occupational diseases. By 1950–1951, the newly formed Coal Mines Labour Welfare Fund Act (1944/1947) set up well-equipped central and regional hospitals to address the problem of lack of equipment such as X-ray machines required for examining afflicted labourers.

Under the Mines Regulation of 1956, the government of India appointed a committee in 1960–1961, headed by M.N. Gupta (Deputy Chief Advisor of Factories) and involving the Mines Department, to investigate and report on industrial diseases. The Committee reported that in contrast to 12.1 per cent in the UK, 18.7 per cent of coalminers were suffering from CWP in the Jharia and Raniganj coalfields in 1960–1961 (Figure 4), with the Jharia coalfield leading at twenty-six per cent.Footnote ⁶² In the following years, the problem of occupational disease was further exacerbated. In the late 1960s, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), with the help of M.N. Gupta, thoroughly surveyed the situation and reported CWP rates of up to forty-five per cent in the coalmines of the Bihar region.Footnote ⁶³

Figure 4.

An illustrative case of CWP. In this X-ray, the white dots in the chest are evidence of coal dust, which caused other smoky shades around it.

Source: M.N. Gupta, Report on Pneumoconiosis in the Coal Mines in Jharia and Raniganj Coalfields (Delhi, 1961).

The official documentation of occupational disease, belated but systematic, was slow to overcome the managerial prevarication over it. Occupational disease took on a public image as an antithesis to the quest for industrial efficiency. Mining communities began to hold colliery management responsible for the scourge of “slow, silent death” and to claim restitution benefits against lung deterioration.Footnote ⁶⁴ The wide gap between the low number of occupational disease cases annually reported by managers (see Table 2) and the worst rates of CWP captured by the two surveys undertaken by the M.N. Gupta committees was attributable to two factors. Firstly, management's control over attendance registers created a hindrance for afflicted workers to prove their regular exposure to coal dust for three or more years, as required by the WCA (Amendment) of 1959. Secondly, many afflicted workers were anxious about filing compensation claims, owing to fears of being declared “medically unfit” and consequently laid off.Footnote ⁶⁵ A growing public outcry led to heuristic and political engagements, offering workers the possibility of some relief.

Perceptions of Human Loss and Its Narratives

The previous sections covered the trends of, and approaches to, casualty statistics and classification. They also foregrounded the role played by mining and compensation laws, forms of knowledge, and stakeholder bargaining. However, statistics never existed as a set of abstract figures. The perception of human loss, and the narrative built on it, shaped classification exercises, the agenda of accident-control measures, restitution schemes, and their implementation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Industrialists initially resolved workplace risk in two ways: (i) They often talked about “inevitable risk” and “unavoidable” casualties that resulted from “uncontrollable” geological features associated with mining. They treated such incidences as an interruption in the production cycle. (ii) They frequently regarded workers as a disposable commodity, variously called needy “coolies” or “rats” in the everyday parlance of colliery management.Footnote ⁶⁷

Industrialists frequently reported that the general health of mineworkers was satisfactory because of the good supply of labour, the absence of cholera outbreaks, and the lower death rate in the mining settlements compared with the rest of the population from the 1920s.Footnote ⁶⁸ This is what Reeder, the officiating Inspector of Mines, reported to Viceroy Curzon, whose tenure saw the establishment of the first IMA in 1901:

Reeder bemoaned employers’ disregard for human life and the little concern they showed for mineworkers’ safety. The colonial authorities had woken up to the problem around the turn of the twentieth century. Their initiative was aligned with the new approach adopted by public authorities towards the occupational health and safety of workers in Britain itself.Footnote ⁷⁰

The focus on regard for human life and the safety of vulnerable working people, and the fight against casualties, constituted a new perception of human losses. It spread slowly in terms of the ethics of preservation of working [public] bodies and society in general. In their recent study, Breman et al. refer to such ethics and approach as a new social question framed around labour welfare from the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷¹ This new social question was reflected in Prof. V.G. Kale's address to the Indian Industrial Conference at Lahore in 1909, where he proposed the Indianization of the mining industry in the interest of progress and safety.Footnote ⁷² One of the roots of this new thinking and ethics lay in the spirit of republicanism and modern modes of power. Foucault argues that the republican polity and its cultural system aspired to the protection of the “body of society”, which was regarded as a new agent and the source of the functioning of a republican power.Footnote ⁷³ The limitation of Foucault's argument is its overgeneralization and its inability to explain historical patterns of slow, selective, or adversarial actualization of the republican spirit and ethics. It is equally silent on the shifting contours of republican ethics, for instance, from its focus on human rights to the welfare of working people. Others have proposed additional explanations, including the roles of political economy, stakeholder interests, organization, and public reasoning. This article annotates the development of the labour welfarist perception of human losses that confronted the industrialists’ conservativism and contributed to the measures designed to ameliorate occupational health and safety. These measures included the adoption of safety measures, along with punitive provisions of fines and incarceration for the infringement of safety rules, and the introduction of compensation and restitution schemes.

Compensation schemes seized the imaginations of both the public authorities and the mineworkers’ association. Labour associations undertook everyday struggles for improved and easy access to compensation benefits. The latter included provisions of adequate medical aid, compensation to all, less litigation, and a full salary against the practice of half the victim's salary being paid as compensation money. It increasingly helped workers mitigate their suffering and live fuller lives. Joseph Bhore, Chairman of the Committee for Health Survey and Development, noted that mineworkers were far from being compensated by the “earning difference” that they were awarded, since the challenges they faced included personal and collective grief, mutilated limbs, and loss of sight or hearing. They required adequate and sustained medical care and rehabilitation programmes, including the supply of artificial limbs and artificial eyes, and retraining for those afflicted to enable them to find alternative employment and lead a dignified life.Footnote ⁷⁴ His argument for a fuller rehabilitation agenda was more robust than the social insurance grounded in the economic utilitarian contents articulated by labour activists.Footnote ⁷⁵ Bhore's assessment for the costs of such a programme exceeded the “earning difference”.

These proposals fed into the labour welfarist perception of human losses and, in turn, the plebeian public's perception of them as well. By the mid-1940s, critiques anchored to the labour welfarist perception increasingly regarded mining/industrial casualties as “social”, “public” losses that were inhumane, man-made, and avoidable. This narrative was in contrast to the industrialists’ insistence on the individuality of occupational casualties, framing them as private losses, and their reluctance to admit to their gravity.

As claims for compensation filed by victims under the WCA increased from the late 1920s, mining companies partnered with insurance companies to pay whatever compensation claims they conceded to. Insurance rates were 3 to 4 annas (Rs. 0.2 to 0.25) per ton of coal in 1929–1930.Footnote ⁷⁶ To overcome their reluctance and contestation of nearly half of victims’ compensation claims, trade unions and official investigators repeatedly asked for a government-controlled universal insurance scheme for all workers.Footnote ⁷⁷ While such a scheme was introduced for large factories and other establishments in 1948, known as the Employee State Insurance Act (ESIA), mining companies remained outside its purview. Mineworkers pressed for compensation on a par with the ESIA benefits, medical facilities, and compulsory insurance for all workers from the early 1960s.Footnote ⁷⁸

The labour welfarist perception of occupational risk and human losses was grounded in a development principle that had three elements: industrialization was necessary, safety measures would mitigate risks, and compensation and restitution schemes would integrate contented, healthy, and experienced workers into the industry. Alongside sharing the new labour welfarist perception, mining communities began to concomitantly project a narrative that valorized the risks and sacrifices they made in the coalmines for industrial advancement. Muhammad Yakub, a loader employed at the Bera colliery, reflected on the interiorization of such a narrative: “Our working in the coalmines and going into a war by a Javan (the soldier) are similar activities. The demands for risk and fortitude characterise both the occupations.”Footnote ⁷⁹ This plebeian narrative of danger and masculine risk-taking differed from that of the industrialists only in its emphasis on safety and restitution measures. This narrative was wedded to the emergence and consolidation of a particular associational and public life in the colliery settlements.

The narrative of industrial sacrifice, encouraged by labour unions such as the Indian National Mine Workers Federation (INMWF), was influential. Labour unions in the Republic of India depicted casualties borne by coal workers as sacrifices made by the latter in the service of industrial progress. The coal industry was a strategic industry upon which the prospect of overall industrialization and national reconstruction was founded. Hence, the sacrifice of the mineworker represented a nationalist sacrifice and was a source of pride. For instance, labour unions of all shades committed to industrial peace and long work weeks in December 1962, when the national government called on them to contribute to the national war effort.Footnote ⁸⁰

The compelling narrative of risky life and industrial sacrifice in the coalmines even entered the corridors of power and policy design:

Public authorities shared the union's argument for gratuity as supplementary compensation to grieving families. However, employers were reluctant to implement it until a suitable revision in coal prices was done by the government.Footnote ⁸² Again, the smaraks (commemorative monuments: see Figure 5) built in the memory of workers who sacrificed their lives, for instance, in the Chasnala disaster exemplified the new ethics of the plebeian public.Footnote ⁸³ The latter received a fillip in the early phase of nationalization of most of the coalmines in 1971/1973.

Figure 5.

Smarak of the Chasnala disaster presenting the list of mineworkers who lost their lives in the service of the nation.

Source: Author's collection from a visit to the Chasnala colliery bastee, 3 April 2009.

The Chasnala disaster, which claimed 375 lives in the captive coalmine of ISCO Ltd. in December 1975, ended the trend of moderation of fatality figures. The investigation by the Court of Inquiry identified not just the immediate cause of the explosion and water inundation, but also the problem of the mining plan, lack of knowledge, and the management's culpability. The defendants of the accused managerial personnel described their acts as “carelessness” and “negligence out of the lack of knowledge”, whereas the agitating publicists classified their failure as “criminal negligence”.Footnote ⁸⁴ The grievous public outcry ensured that colliery workers’ “risky life” and “sacrifice” would receive due attention in the restitution measures and rescue operation.Footnote ⁸⁵

The valorization and hermeneutic deployment of the narrative of mineworkers’ risky lives and sacrifice for the nation became operational in a particular manner. Mining communities began to see work hazards resulting in “merely” a few fatalities or injuries as mundane affairs, in contrast to disasters that took a larger number of lives. They approached routine industrial battles as “inevitable” but detested disasters.Footnote ⁸⁶ The interiorization of this narrative mediated the fact that, from the late 1940s, mineworkers began to demand employment for a family member of the afflicted co-worker and alternative surface jobs for disabled colleagues. This became an agenda item of the Second Safety Conference, held in 1966.Footnote ⁸⁷

Over time, a twofold tendency developed in the mining world: the deification of collieries as the womb of the goddess Kali, and compensation struggles. The deification of belowground mines, and the propitiation of otherworldly spirits, known as the Khadan–Kali, served as “spiritual” assurance to mineworkers.Footnote ⁸⁸ Two points are worth noting here: (i) the belief in belowground spirits did not fully occlude concrete endeavours to prevent mishaps; (ii) it coexisted with miners’ knowledge of, and engagement with, the rules of the game of compensation and restitution.Footnote ⁸⁹ These economic–cultural practices served to normalize the industrial order, which continued to be rife with hazards and coal workers’ regular negotiation with a precarious existence. Its function was akin to the trope of “blood on the coal” – that is, miners working in dangerous and tough conditions – that commanded sympathy and respect among the general public up to the 1970s in Britain.Footnote ⁹⁰