Lalmatia: A tale of sudden success and tragedy

In 2016, the mine produced 17 million tonnes of coal - half of ECL's annual production

The mishap at Lalmatia mines is a follow through of its success. It is one of the most prolific mines of Eastern Coalfields Limited (ECL), supplying all of its coal to NTPC’s Farakka and Kahalgaon power plants.

The 17 million tonnes of coal it extracts makes up almost half of its owner company ECL annual production. In the financial year 2016-17, the one-time sick man of the Coal India Limited (CIL) group of companies has been its outstanding producer. Data furnished to the BSE by CIL on January 1, shows in the nine months of the previous year, ECL has logged a 9.5 per cent growth in production, putting into shade companies five times its size in the group, such as Mahanadi Coalfields and South Eastern Coalfields. Both these giants have produced at an anaemic rate of 1.5 per cent and 1.4 per cent in the same period. 

These numbers set the circumstances to figure out why Lalmatia became a mining disaster that has so far got 18 of its miners killed. The mine is part of the oldest set of mines of ECL, which itself is fairly ancient. In 1973, when the company was set up by nationalising more than 713 privately owned non-coking coal mines in erstwhile Bihar and West Bengal, the one distinctive feature of each of those mines was they had not been invested in for decades. (The rich coking coal mines went to Bharat Coking Coal Limited). Till today, ECL accounts for half of the work force of CIL family and produces less than eight per cent of the total coal from among the eight producing companies. 

The state-owned ECL realised pretty soon there was little chance to expand production from the mines taken over, and instead, began to scout for fresh mines. One of the richest it discovered was Lalmatia. The coal, like most of the freak geological phenomena in the Chota Nagpur belt, was pretty close to the surface. It became part of the Rajmahal group of mines of ECL — its workhorse. 

The mine has been expanded to become its largest open cast mine. But as the coal sector in India drew investors, in a paradox, investment reserves of CIL ran dry. For ECL, most of the trickle it got was exhausted to shore up safety in the huge number of fire-prone mines it ran the myriad towns of West Bengal to the north of the Damodar. The more those mines ran, the more risky they became, as more people came to those towns to eke out a living.

As a result, Lalmatia is an awesomely deep open cast mine, too deep in fact to remain one, safely. With the need to extract more production from there, the extractable coal reserves are now available about 100 meters deep into the ground — which means machines travel too deep into craters and over burden, the mound of sand and rock deposited on the lip of the mine have become massive and can slip down with enormous force. 

To make machines take away the riskier part of the work, the mine needs parcels of adjacent land to place them. Yet, as the company’s latest annual report shows “large areas of land” acquired by it has remained unused and people have moved back on them to demand fresh compensation. “On verification it has been revealed that large area of land (approximately 34 acres or more) within 72.07 acre in the Sarath Block has already been settled against various Rayati owners. So, there is a dispute if these lands can be acquired (again). The matter has been uploaded on PMG portal”. 

Where there is some space to deploy machines needed to make the process safe are either not there or utilisation rates lag. Data on heavy earth moving machinery shows their rate of utilisation has been pathetic. In fact, right since nationalisation, successive governments have formed committees to shore up their utilisation. Little has improved. Lalmatia has meanwhile soldiered on in a solitary corner. 

Incidentally, ECL did not have a director (technical) for a long time to oversee its mining operations. Its last incumbent Subrata Chakravarty got embroiled in a court battle as he had been shortlisted as chairman of the company by PESB but was locked in a vigilance case — a pretty common phenomena for CIL. Once he moved out from October, 2015, there has been merry go around with three officers taking on the role by turns. And all this while, the company has not had a chairman since May 2015.  Essentially production in the company is on an auto mode.