CIL faces safety concerns in reviving abandoned mines

NEW DELHI: Leading coal miner Coal India Ltd (CIL) is facing safety concerns for miners in reviving its 18 abandoned underground coal mines. CIL has invited private participation to extract coal from these abandoned mines with an approximate reserve of 1.64 billion tonne.

As underground mining would be revived in abandoned mines of 3 subsidiaries of CIL ��� Eastern Coalfields, Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), and Central Coalfields ��� risk involved in mining deep-seated coal will be higher, pointed trade unions and activists.

CIL has invited private participation for extracting coal from Gaslitand mine, which claimed at least 65 lives in a major accident in 1995. Following such disasters, CIL had decided to close down high-risk mines with low production.
���If accident prone mines which were abandoned because of presence of poisonous gases are revived again, there will be intricate problems in assuring safety of miners,��� convenor of the NGO Mines, Minerals and People, and geologist R. Sridhar told ET. Accidents have been a frequent phenomenon in underground mines. Fatalities in mining accidents average 70 annually for CIL. Among the major hazards are roof falls in underground mines, and incidents of workers being run over by machinery in open cast mines.

Underground coal mining has also witnessed many accidents in China, with death of nearly 3,800 people in coal mine related mishaps last year. It has become a growing concern for workers��� lives in India as investments in this sector are expected to increase.

Sources in directorate general of mines safety (DGMS) said that since dynamite is used for coal-mining operations, sometimes the explosion leaves a big crack, and water from a nearby tank or river floods the mine. ���Pumping out ground water from abandoned mines will be a challenging task for the new entrant private players who don���t have institutional memory (history of mine accidents) of the mine,��� he said. He added that DGMS has not been provided with adequate funds and staff to implement the safety measures in past few years and violation of the Coal Mines Regulation Act is rampant.

���One of the objectives of nationalisation of coal mines in India was to bring about an improvement in the safety scenario. With this in view the safety policy of CIL will be implemented for private players and supervisors will be appointed by CIL,��� said NC Jha, the company���s technical director.

According to CIL, underground mines are quite small in terms of production but it is putting higher thrust in underground mining now. During the previous fiscal, coal production from underground mines was only about 11% of total production of 379 million tonne. This is despite around 2,50,000 persons comprising 57% of the aggregate workforce being deployed in underground mines.

CIL is aiming at an unprecedented increase in coal production to 520 million tonne by the end of eleventh five-year plan (2011-12) and then to 664 million tonne in the terminal year of 12th five-year plan (2016-17).