The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
On New Year’s day, I would have gone to my son’s home: Father at cave-in site
rubble. Baleshwar ducks under the cordon tape and accompanies the officials to where his son lay. Minutes later, he comes out, saying the officials had told him that Kuleshwar’s body would be sent for postmortem after which he could take the body home.
With Kuleshwar’s body, rescue teams of the National Disaster Relief Force and the district administration reported that they had recovered 12 bodies so far and that a dozen miners are suspected to be still trapped inside.
As hope dipped with every passing hour, family members of those trapped seemed resigned to accept the inevitable most of them said there were here to “take back bodies”. Rescue workers said the operation could take another couple of days or even more.
Sunil Bhengra, 43, and Mikhail Surin, 35, drivers at the mine, are from the same village - Kisko in the state’s Lohardaga district.
“I had gone home for Christmas and would have returned only after the New Year celebrations,” said Mikhail. “But Sunil was not allowed leave - the officials told him there were very few drivers left and he can’t go. If only he had left with me,” says Mikhail, who rushed from Lohardaga to Godda last evening and identified his friend’s body on Saturday.
Bihari Pradhan, another dumper driver, says he was metres away from the point where the mud slid and saw his co-worker Bhengra getting buried. “Two alert had been sounded by then. So when I noticed the mud sliding once agin, I stopped my dumper but saw a sea of mud fall on Bhengra. I was barely 20-30 metres away,” he says.
Yugeshwar Gope, an elderly farmer from Nalanda, Bihar, sat with the others waiting to identify bodies of those trapped. His 30-year-old son Laddu Prasad was among those trapped. “Are you writing down these details to help me identify my son’s body?” he asks. He says his son had been working in the Lal Matia mines for the past five years as a poclain (a heavy earthmover) operator. Laddu, he says, lived in a rented house nearby with his wife and two children - a six-year-old and a fivemonth-old.
“Laddu last came some four or five months ago. He then said he would now come only in February because he was working on a dangerous stretch of the mine. Even then, I didn’t it would be this dangerous,” says Yugeshwar.
Durgesh Vishwakarma, from Seedhi district in Madhya Pradesh, is waiting for news on his colleagues - fellow-drivers Raj Kumar Goswami and Sanjeet Vishwakarma. “Their bodies haven’t been recovered, but we know they are dead. Someone told me one of the their two vehicles has been recovered. What can we do anyway? Only wait,” says Durgesh.
A number of drivers and operators complained of poor working conditions at the mine and alleged that they got no rest day.
Eastern Coalfields Limited (ECL) Chairman-cum-managing Director (Additional Charge), R R Mishra, however, denied that the company had set unrealistic production targets or that there was any “pressure” on workers to meet production targets in Lal Matia, which is part of the Rajmahal Group of coal mines.
“The annual target for Raj Mahal Group can’t cross 17 million tonnes since we don’t have forest clearance to exceed this limit. We had already reached a level from where usual excavation would have led us to the target by March. So, it is wrong to say that there was pressure on anybody to increase production,” Mishra said.
He, however, admitted that “there has been a lapse” and that the inquiries ordered - one by the Directorate General of Mines Safety and the other by the Coal India Limited — would find out what had gone wrong.
A top official of ECL said search and rescue operations would be done transparently. “We have to work as per guidelines of the Directorate General of Mines Safety. It may take some time; we can’t rush at the cost of risking lives of the rescuers and others,” he said.