The children of Jharkhand, when not collecting ‘dhibra’[i] with the elders, go to school, or play, at the foothills of the great mica mines of the east, where their parents work, and sometimes die. Deemed illegal in the year 1980 after the passing of the Forest Conservation Act, the mines, located in the districts of Giridih and Koderma, are now run by the notorious mica mafia – unlicensed middlemen – aided by the local police who receive fat bribes in exchange of their silence.
Initiated in the late 19th century by the British, mica production in Jharkhand became a burgeoning trade in the 1950s, with over 700 mines employing 24,000 people (Roy, 2020). India was one of the largest producers and exporters of the shiny mineral – a crucial component of the electronics, cosmetics, paint, and automobile industries – accounting for nearly 60% of the world’s mica (Lewis, 2021). The Forest Conservation Act of 1980 ceased to recognize mica as forest produce; consequently, its collection became a non-forest activity, impossible to carry out without prior permission from the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change (Das & Goel, 2021). This coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the major importers of Indian mica, and the development of synthetic alternatives which were relatively cheaper, undermining the value of mica on the international market. The growing Maoist insurgency in the region also led to the closure of some mines (Chattopadhyay, 2011). As the government and government-leased mining companies pulled out of the area, the trade was taken up by a consortium of businessmen, politicians, police, and forest guards who illegally employed thousands of people in the digging, picking, and sorting of scrap mica from the now-abandoned mines – an operation laced with danger, insecurity, and gross exploitation, executed with utter disregard for workers’ safety and labour laws.
Today, close to 3,00,000 people are dependent on the illegal mica trade in Jharkhand for subsistence (Terre des Hommes, 2023). Since the workers do not “officially” exist, they are completely at the mercy of their overlords – working 10-12 hours every day for meagre amounts of pay, without any protective gear, battling asthma, tuberculosis, silicosis, bronchitis, repeated injuries, cuts and abrasions, musculo-skeletal disorders, and no insurance or compensation in case the mines collapse on their heads and bury them alive, which they sometimes do. Fearing a government crackdown on the mines, the workers choose to let such accidents remain a secret.
For mica-dependent communities, there is no alternative; mining and quarrying are the sole means of livelihood available to them in the remote villages of northern Jharkhand, and the only way of life that they have ever known, having done this work for generations. Most families operate as a unit, with men digging inside the mines and women and children entrusted with the picking, sorting and processing of scrap mica. For the children, even those as young as three years old, there is no division between work and play; they sit at the edges of the deep pits where their parents work, sorting flakes of mica with their “nimble fingers”.
While the focus of major programmes in the area initiated by platforms like the Responsible Mica Initiative (RMI) and the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation has been to end child labour in the mines and get the children enrolled in schools, nothing has been done so far to alleviate the conditions which push these children into labouring in the mines in the first place. Attempts by Civil Society Organizations to create alternative sources of income for the villagers and provide them with at least a semblance of choice – something that has never been a concern of the state government – have been largely ineffectual since the state of agriculture in the heavily forested, rocky region with its lateritic soil remains extremely poor, owing to unavailability of sufficient land for cultivation, erratic rains, frequent droughts (sookhad) and the dismal state of irrigation facilities. According to the India State of Forest Report 2021, the net area sown in all of Jharkhand stood at only 18.12%, out of which roughly 20% had government-installed irrigation facilities (FSI, 2021). It is little wonder that in the remote mining areas of the state, the numbers only get worse. Adding on to this is the abysmal state of public services (schools, anganwadis and healthcare centres) and a staggering 72% gap in living income (RMI, 2023) for mica pickers which force them to take large loans from moneylenders to meet their basic expenses – a practice that ultimately turns them into bonded labourers, caught in endless cycles of debt that continue for generations.
Notwithstanding the many dangers, the people continue scavenging for mica, because hunger, ever present, obliterate worrisome thoughts of the future. They are paid very little – about 8 rupees for every kilo of mica scraps – that they cannot help but involve their children in the work that they do. Paradoxically, it is only if children work in the mines that they can also afford to go to school. In a 2022 video (Meena, 2022), taken during a protest staged by the Dhibra Scrap Mazdoor Sangh in response to the enforcement of the ban on mica mining by the Government of Jharkhand by raiding mines, seizing vehicles carrying mica, and arbitrarily arresting poor workers, Shamma Parveen, a class 6 student residing in the Domchanch block of Koderma district, went on record saying – “I suffer just the same as all labourers suffer. It is only by picking mica that we can eat, study, and go to school. Because of the ban on mica mining, we are not being able to eat, forget studying! Shall we ruin our future like this? The children of DCs (Deputy Commissioner) and SPs (Superintendent of Police) shall be educated and become officers, and what about us, the children of labourers? Don’t we have a right to education?”
In response to repeated protests by workers, and appeals and advocacy efforts by platforms such as RMI, the Government of Jharkhand adopted the Dhibra Policy in 2023, as a first step towards the legalization of artisanal mica mining in the state (Terre des Hommes, 2023). It was stated in the policy that the mica supply chain would be ‘cleaned up’ by ensuring safe working conditions, eradicating child labour, fixing a minimum standard price for mica, and forming workers’ cooperatives which would empower workers to carry out and supervise the process of mica collection in accordance with codified standards of labour welfare and internationally agreed-upon environmental laws. Although there have been no known developments regarding the implementation of this policy, the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) quickly declared in July 2024 that child labour has officially been eradicated from the mica production and supply chain in Jharkhand, with over 20,000 children being pulled out of the mines and enrolled in schools (Bisoee, 2024). However, since no information is available on the status of formalization of the mica supply chain or improvement of the workers’ living conditions till now, it is difficult to predict how far and for how long only official enrolment in schools can keep children away from the mines.
The crumbling mud houses of the mica pickers, cool from within, keeping babies and farm animals safe from the scorching heat, lie scattered around the dusty brown landscape. The community welfare programmes, designed by people who do not understand them, their histories, or the stories written in the lines of their faces, congratulate themselves on a job well done – while the hammers and chisels toil away all through the afternoon – their steady hum reminding one of the workers from (Satyajit Ray’s) Hirak Raja’s diamond mines, who when asked ‘Tomra je kaaj koro, koshto hoy na…? Kigo, Koshto hoy na?’ (The work that you do here – isn’t it onerous? Don’t you suffer?), only answer with a deafening silence. Yet the children of Jharkhand smile, their hair tangled and brown, and learn to solve math problems and say no to child labour and child marriage sitting in their brightly-painted NGO-run school buildings until it is time for them to join their parents on the ever-familiar road to the mines, the road that must be taken.
References:
Bisoee, A. (2024, July 6). Mica mines now child labour-free, kids in Jharkhand’s Koderma now go to school: NCPCR. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/mica-mines-now-child-labour-free-kids-in-jharkhands-koderma-district-now-go-to-school-ncpcr/cid/2031839
Chattopadhyay, M. (2011). Women Workers in the Mica Industry: A Case Study. Indian Journal of Gender Studies. 18(3): 341-364.
Das, A., & Goel, A. (2021). An Assessment of Illegal Mica Mining in Jharkhand. International Journal of Law Management & Humanities.4(6): 1344.
Forest Survey of India. (2021). India State of Forest Report 2021. https://fsi.nic.in/forest-report-2021-details
Lewis, C. (2021, May 5). Mining for Mica: Child Labour in India. The Borgen Project. https://borgenproject.org/mining-for-mica/#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20around%2060%25%20of%20the%20world%E2%80%99s%20mica%20comes%20from%20those%20two%20regions.
Meena, H. (2022, March 15). Listen to Shama Parveen, who lives in Koderma district of Jharkhand. [Tweet; attached video]. X. https://x.com/HansrajMeena/status/1503750004468744196 Accessed on 29.09.2024
Responsible Mica Initiative. (2023). Establishing Fair Mica Worker Incomes and Wages in India and the Negligible Impact on Costs to Consumers. https://lebasic.com/v2/content/uploads/2023/04/RMI_20230314_Mica-income-wage-and-cost-analysis_RMI-Overview.pdf
Roy, S. (2020, October 6). Illegal Mica Mining Continues Unabated in Jharkhand, Causing Deaths and Diseases. Mongabay. https://india.mongabay.com/2020/10/illegal-mica-mining-continues-unabated-in-jharkhand-causing-deaths-and-diseases/#:~:text=Mica%20mining%20in%20India%20dates%20back%20to%20the%20mid%20and%20late%2019th%20century%20when%20railway%20tracks%20were%20being%20laid%20down%20in%20the%20Bengal%2DNagpur%20zone.
Terre des Hommes. (2023, January 19). Breakthrough in Addressing Worst Forms of Child Labour of Mica Mines in Jharkhand, India. https://www.terredeshommes.nl/en/latest/breakthrough-in-addressing-worst-forms-of-child-labour-of-mica-mines-in-jharkhand#:~:text=Approximately%20300.000%20mica%20workers%20depend%20on%20mining%20mica%20scrap%20for%20their%20survival.
[i] Local term for mica scraps and flakes.
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Madhubanti Talukdar is a social science researcher with a postgraduate degree in Sociology from South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi.