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By Anosh Malekar
A few thousand haggard men from the Chutu Palu Ghati survive by pushing bicycles laden with 300 kg of 'waste' coal up the Ranchi-Patna highway. It is backbreaking work, paying them a pittance, but it's the only form of livelihood available for three-quarters of the year when there's no farming to be done
On the surface, 30-year-old Muhammad Habib’s trade appears to be a lucrative one. On a typical day, he carries huge stacks of coal loaded onto a bicycle, which he sells in the local Ranchi market for a ‘princely’ sum of Rs 875, before heading back home. This is a handsome amount considering that people in Jharkhand struggle to survive for the 200-250 days when there’s no farming going on.
But things are not as they seem. The truth lies hidden in Chutu Palu Ghati (mountain pass).
Muhammad belongs to a tribe of a few thousand haggard men from the Ghati who can crudely be described as ‘beasts of burden’, completely ignored by any development scheme. Their survival strategy, in the absence of agriculture, is both ingenious and backbreaking. It involves pushing a bicycle laden with around 250-300 kg of coal, 40-60 km on the busy Ranchi-Patna highway that climbs steeply through dense forest. For this the men earn up to Rs 25 a day.
Muhammad cannot make the crushing trip more than twice a month. If he falls ill, he does it once a month or not at all. That means his wife and children will starve.
A smiling Muhammad does not seem to be able to grasp his situation fully. “I have a small piece of land which is fallow. Nothing grows on it,” he says, as if resigned to his life in Chitrapur, a nondescript village at the foothills of the Chutu Palu Ghati. “I have to make several such trips till my sons grow up,” he whispers to himself, wiping the sweat off his forehead.
I met Muhammad on one of his backbreaking uphill treks in the Ghati, on Gandhi Jayanti day (October 2). He was smiling even as he struggled to stop his heavily burdened bicycle from rolling backwards, by planting his right foot firmly on the tar surface and pressing his chin down on the handlebars. I made the usual lame excuse of being a journalist, as he made the huge effort of pulling his bicycle to the side of the busy highway. He was panting, but still smiling.
Before he could disengage his right hand to shake my hand, a row of struggling right feet had formed behind us. The half-a-dozen ‘koilawallahs’ seemed relieved to know that I was not one of the usual ‘hafta’ collectors who periodically stop them in the middle of the road. Typically, the koilawallahs move in a line of about 20, keeping each other company throughout the strenuous trip.
This highway is Jharkhand’s lifeline. It runs through the industrial towns of Ranchi, Hazaribagh, Jamshedpur and Dhanbad, connecting the state to its neighbours -- Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal.
If highways were the biographers of a landscape, gathering not just dust but the stories of the lands they traverse, then the tale of this highway would be one of epic, almost hallucinatory destitution.
Jharkhand, meaning ‘land of jhar (tree)’, is one of India’s biggest coal-producing states. The state-owned Central Coalfield Limited and private steel major Tata Iron and Steel Co Ltd, among others, mine the forests for coal. Hundreds of small villages and hamlets lie scattered in these forests. Most of the villagers are tribals. In fact, Jharkhand was carved out of the state of Bihar to meet the aspirations of its tribal population.
“I was born here,” says Muhammad. “I know the jungle like the back of my hand. This is my home.” His village has houses made from mud and hay, their walls plastered with cowdung and mud. The residents are both tribal and non-tribal. Most of them are scavengers who scour the waste dumps of the open cast mines nearby. They bring home low-grade coal from the mountains of waste created by the coal mining projects. “It is mostly women who go out to gather the coal,” say the koilawallahs. These women are regularly harassed by the security guards looking for bribes of Rs 10 to Rs 20.
The women and children carry the raw coal on their heads to the village every day. They burn it partially to ready it for use in households and industrial furnaces. The men transport the coal to markets in Ramgarh (a block headquarters in Hazaribaug district) and Ranchi. Ramgarh is nearer but coal rates are cheaper here than in Ranchi.
Officials call this trade “illegal”, despite the fact that if it were not for the scavengers this extremely cheap energy source would remain unutilised in the waste dumps. Likewise, senior officials feign ignorance of the fact that it is not the koilawallahs’ families that control the illegal mining trade but the powerful local coal mafia, aided by corrupt officials.
Muhammad and his fellow travellers are employed by a ‘contractor’ with whom they share half their earnings from every trip. A single trip stretches to three days. It starts with Muhammad tying the coal up in small packs of 8 kg each. He ties anywhere between 32 and 37 packs to his bicycle and begins pushing it towards Ranchi. If he gets a good customer on the way, he could sell a pack for about Rs 25 -- the price he expects to get in Ranchi market. “It is very hard. Pushing the bicycle up the mountain and coming down...Only we know how we do it,” say his companions. It takes them two days, with brief rest halts every now and then. All the while they look forward to reaching Irwa -- their main resting place. Here they open up their tiffin boxes containing bits of rice and stale vegetables.
Once they reach Ranchi, the desperate men begin to smell money. Half the money they earn, Rs 875 in Muhammad’s case, will be snatched away by the contractor. Around Rs 50 goes in bribes. The rest is tucked away safely into the men’s pockets as they prepare to board the bus back to their villages. This amount -- around Rs 350 -- has to last a fortnight before they gather up enough strength to make their next trip.
This inhuman practice began to flourish after the state government cancelled the licences of private coal dealers seven years ago, says a local NGO worker. Officials argued that the people of Jharkhand did not need coal, as the state had abundant reserves of kerosene and cooking gas. But the very existence of a huge illegal coal trade shows that most households still use coal as fuel. It is an irony of sorts that the people of Jharkhand, India’s largest coal producer, buy coal in black! Almost every day there are reports in the local newspapers about coal being smuggled out of the state. Villagers say those who don’t pay bribes get caught.
Muhammad and his companions are resigned to the work they do. “We have been living like this since birth. Our physical labour is our only capital,” they say. Their villages have no schools, no hospitals, no roads. Electricity is a privilege even in towns and cities in Jharkhand. The villagers collect water from natural ponds that are becoming more and more polluted due to the mining. Nobody visits the area to see how people like Muhammad live, except during elections. There are the Naxal outlaws whose favourite pastime is to paint graffiti on dilapidated government buildings slamming parliamentary democracy, privatisation and globalisation. Muhammad says he does not know who runs the ‘party’ (the local name for a Naxal outfit), “but they never trouble us”.
The real trouble for the koilawallahs starts when their bodies begin to give up. Men like Muhammad are prime candidates for tuberculosis, severe chest pain, torn muscles, respiratory ailments and a host of other illnesses. But the koilawallahs trudge on without any hope of a better future. This is their only survival strategy and they intend to stick to it until they die. “We cannot read or write. What else is there in our lives,” asks Muhammad, his friends echoing his words softly.
Then they smile and resume their exhausting journey towards Ranchi.
(Anosh Malekar is a Pune-based correspondent)
InfoChange News & Features, November 2005
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