MiningTravails: My Unfolding Voyage 073

It was a sprawling bungalow in which I retired to bed one evening after a sumptuous dinner and then get up early morning, brushing my teeth and looking from the window in the big bathroom attached to room where I had slept, to enjoy the beautiful garden with peacocks roaming around. It was the guest house of the Easter Coalfield Ltd. in Sanctoria, an hour's drive from the Asansol Railway Station that I had reached after a five hour train journey from Kolkata (Howrah station). My visit to coal mines had just begun. Over the next few days I would visit a number of departments of the company from Planning to production control and personnel to finance and from engineering to workshops. As scheduled I had to walk down an incline to enter a coal mine and negotiate through slippery, muddy paths underground to reach the entry to a very thin coal seam where an operator was riding on a scrapper machine to scrape the seams to take coal out and then shovel the material on the belt that was evacuating the coal pieces and dust and hauling them to the surface bunkers. The manager of the colliery explained me various things throughout my voyage in and out of the dark tunnels deep under the ground. After the 150 minutes trip I was completely exhausted, even though excited by the ingenuity of engineers in devising the technique of scrapper mining. I went back to the Area General Manager's guest house, had a bath and then had a luncheon meeting with him and his engineering and finance colleagues.

During the visit to the incline mine, the colliery manager had asked me a question which I could not figure out and was haunting me. He had asked me, "Mr. Sen, what is carpet mining?" I had to admit that I had no idea and found the manager quite disappointed. It was during the lunch that I could figure out how this question arose. Some of the engineers assumed that I am a new specialist recruit engineer with knowledge of carpet mining technology: the confusion arose because I was coming from the Corporate Planning Department of the holding company and somewhere down the line pronunciation of corporate got distorted into carpet. If there could be scrapper mining, there could also be carpet mining of coal!

The next mine I vested was the Chinakuri Coal mine. We went deep underground, as usual with long boots, helmets and other accessories, through a shaft (lift/ escalator) that two quite a while before we reached the level we got of the shaft to enter the broad, illuminate channels leading to coal faces being mined. I was told that we were already underneath the bed of a river flowing over our heads. It was a sprawling mine, looked very modern and well developed and was cool with very little seepage of water or coal dust fines floating around. It was a rather comfortable journey. I do not remember now if the coal faces I had visited were mined under Board & Pillar system or the new long wall mining machinery was installed. This was a colliery that had seen devastation with many miners losing their lives in 1958.

My next trip would be to the Bharat Coking Coal Ltd. headquartered in Dhanbad. I think I had taken an early morning train, probably called the Black Diamond Express, from Kolkata (Howrah) Railway Station to Reach Dhanbad around mid- day, about 6 and half hours journey. Dhanbad was a tough terrain with little greenery and full of dust. But it had all the mines that had the reserves of coking coal required for making metallurgical coke - an important input for steel plant blast furnace operation. Here I vested an incline mine and a mine that had to be entered through shaft. The experience was similar to that of Easter Coalfield mines and offices, except that more people conversed in Hindi in Dhanbad while more people conversed in Bengali in Sanctoria. Bharat Coking Coal organised a day's visit to Dhanbad School of Mines and the Central Fuel Research Institute (now renamed as Central Institute of Mining & Fuel Research) Research Institute. It was interesting to find lot of research papers were being published but it did not appear that the coal industry was using such knowledge as one would have wished. The researchers I had met did not seem to show much vibrancy and enthusiasm.

After two weeks, I would visit Ranchi, an overnight train journey from Kolkata to Ranchi that headquartered both the Central Coalfields Ltd (CCL) and the Central Mine Planning and Development Institute (CMPDI). The seven-day program here was similar except that I spent two days at CMPDI’s various departments including two lovely long sessions with Dr. Guha, an Indian Economic Service officer who joined CMPDI on lien for a few years. At CCL I had the first exposure to really big open cast mines with dumpers, shovels and draglines operating all over the surface and excavating coal through blasting of coal seams near the surface. If the underground mines were a scare to people on the ground for the risk of the subsidence due to inadequate sand-filling of empty spaces created by extraction of coal, the open-cast mines were a sore to the eyes, besides being lost greenery and ecological imbalance unless restored properly after coal extraction. To round off my coal-belt visits, I traveled next to Nagpur, the headquarters of Western Coalfields Ltd (WCL) where I visited one each of opencast mine and underground mine. Not all managers of collieries were as careful as one would have wished: at one colliery, the manager ran out of vehicle resources to reach me back to Nagpur guest house of WCL and put me in an auto rickshaw that took about 200 minutes to reach me there.

The four weeks in the coalfields was indeed a brief but useful exposure to coal mining operations and its environment required for a corporate planner in a coal company. The discussions with various departments of subsidiaries and CMPDIL provided an overview of the organizational structure and dynamics, besides building a network of helpful colleagues. Equally important was to get a sense of the management styles and deficiencies at different subsidiaries that I had to report to the Chairman as unbiased observation of a fresher. I had, within this short period, gathered lot of anecdotes about the coal mining managers/ executives and their office politics at various levels. A good start to corporate planning exercise relating to internal environmental scanning!