Members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have mounted protests that have paralysed production at one of India’s biggest coalfields following a deadly accident last week. <\/p>\n
The BJP workers have been staging sit-down protests and waving flags at state-run Coal India Ltd’s mines in Odisha, demanding a safety audit of all mines in the region. <\/p>\n
Rescue officials said they have recovered the bodies of three workers who were trapped inside the mine in Odisha’s Angul district after a landslide on Tuesday, and are trying to recover another body from inside the mine. <\/p>\n
Kalandi Samal, a local BJP leader who is leading the protests, said the demonstrations will continue until authorities ensure safety measures to prevent such tragedies and ensure adequate compensation to the victims. <\/p>\n
“We demand specific guidelines on safety audits of mines,” Samal said. <\/p>\n
Production at Odisha state’s Talcher coalfields, which account for at least an eighth of Coal India’s annual production, has not resumed after the accident, said Dikken Mehra, a spokesman for Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd, a unit of Coal India. <\/p>\n
State-run Coal India has a near monopoly on the coal industry in India, producing more than four-fifths of the country’s coal output. <\/p>\n
“The forced stoppage of all the mines at Talcher has resulted in a cumulative loss of 842,000 tonnes of coal production,” Mehra told Reuters, adding that the company has suffered a loss of about 856.8 million rupees ($12.43 million). <\/p>\n
Srinivas Khuntia, a senior leader at BJP-affiliated trade union Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, called the protests “unjustified, especially when its own government is in power”. <\/p>\n
“There is no justification why you would stop all the mining operations,” Khuntia told Reuters. <\/p>\n
Though deaths at coal mines in India have come down over time, it remains one of the most dangerous countries to be a coal miner, with one worker dying every seven days on average in state-run mines in 2018. <\/p>\n
In addition, thousands of workers, including children, have been killed in illegal rat-hole mines that are notorious for their poor safety record, with many accidents going unreported. <\/p>\n
“We are in talks with all the stakeholders to resolve the issues as soon as possible,” Mehra said, without divulging details on the timeframe for resumption of production. <\/p>\n
Coal India is trying to divert supplies from elsewhere to ensure coal availability at utilities and companies that normally rely on the Odisha coalfields. <\/p>\n
Those entities include state-owned NTPC Ltd, India’s biggest electricity generator, as well as the state-owned National Aluminium Company Ltd (NALCO). <\/p>\n
“Production will be affected if the mines remain shut for more days,” said Tapan Kumar Chand, chairman of NALCO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have mounted protests that have paralysed production at one of India’s biggest coalfields following a deadly accident last week. The BJP workers have been staging sit-down protests and waving flags at state-run Coal India Ltd’s mines in Odisha, demanding a safety audit of all mines in the region. Rescue officials said they have recovered the bodies of three workers who were trapped inside the mine in Odisha’s Angul district after a landslide on Tuesday, and are trying to recover another body from inside the mine. Kalandi Samal, a local BJP […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}