Miners in Darra Adam Khel wash themselves | Photo by Aurangzaib Khan
For ventilation to be effective, air pressure in the tunnels is kept at 5,000 cubic feet per minute. Anything more than that causes spontaneous combustion because coal here is volatile. Anything less causes the highly inflammable methane gas to accumulate. The level of methane concentration in a mine needs to stay below one per cent — a level that can only be achieved through efficient ventilation. Any concentration between five to 15 per cent can be highly explosive.
Ventilation, therefore, is cardinal to the safety of a mine. “An explosion’s intensity increases by 50 per cent if a mine is not properly ventilated,” says Asmatullah Awan, a contractor at Habibullah Coal Mining Company in Sor Range.
Deadly gases like methane are naturally trapped inside coal seams. The thicker a coal seam, the more gases it will have. Mines in Quetta, with seams as thick as three feet, are gassier than those in Dukki, for example. Also, underground mines have more gases trapped inside than open-pit mines which, in Pakistan, are present only in Thar desert.
The other dangerous gas found inside coal mines is carbon monoxide. It is formed as a result of oxidation (spontaneous combustion) of coal in cold temperatures. It does exist inside mines at all times and can be removed only through active ventilation. There is one small consolation for miners exposed to it: their death is not painful. “You just fall asleep and die,” says Atif.
The average emission and prevalence of various dangerous gases in Pakistani coal mines, particularly in Balochistan, exceed the internationally permissible limits, says Dr Salahuddin Azad who teaches at the National University of Science and Technology, Islamabad. These gases, he writes in a paper titled Impacts of Coal Mining in Balochistan, “are the source of high death ratio” in the province’s mines.
Azad notes that the “concentrations of coal dust” in Balochistan’s mines too, exceeds the permissible thresholds. It “is not only a source of health problems like routine headache, irritation in throat, nose, and eyes, drowsiness, shortness of breath, nausea, pneumoconiosis, tuberculosis, chronic obstructive bronchitis, heart problems, respiratory irritation, [asthma] and even lung impairment and lung cancer…but is causing severe damage to the environment.”
As daunting as these odds are, the risk of accidents multiplies manifold when unskilled workers either do not know or violate safety protocols knowingly. Some of them, according to Atif, “die for having lit up a cigarette inside a mine”.
Digital multi-gas detectors attached to the waist belts of Atif and Mamoula Khan show zero readings for gases as the two go down a coal mine near Quetta. Like earliest versions of mobile phones, these detectors are chunky and have illuminated screens.
Imported from China, the United States, Germany and Japan, the detectors are expensive and require resetting every two years. They need to be sent back to manufacturers abroad for the purpose — a process that also requires money.
Mine owners and contractors do not want to pay for their purchase and resetting. Consequently, a tax of five rupees per tonne of coal a miner extracts is deducted from his salary and is deposited in a government account which is then used for purchasing and maintaining the detectors.
Money in the same account is also used for providing safety training which remains in short supply. Even when some training is offered by local or international labour support organisations, workers do not turn up unless training organisers offer them money as an incentive. They do not want to lose the day’s wages.
Labourers, mining union leaders and government officials all agree that the most effective way of ensuring that miners attend safety trainings is that these are organised by their own employers. But contractors such as Awan will not invest any of their money in them. “I have no way of knowing if a trained miner will stay with me,” is how he explains his unwillingness to spend money on this count.
Training is also expensive. It takes as much as 40,000 rupees to train a single miner in safety protocols, says Irfanullah, a director at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s labour department. Many mining operations are not large enough to afford that kind of money.
Most mines are so small that they operate informally — being unregistered with the government, and owned and operated by individuals, not companies. A single mining zone spread over, say, a four-square-kilometre area may have as many as 200 mines all owned and operated by different people, says Irfanullah. “It is not financially feasible for such small mine owners to fully implement occupational safety and health regulations,” he adds.
It is for the same financial reason that Pakistani mines do not have the latest mining equipment. It can increase work safety but is expensive. A hydraulic fixer – which prevents broken rocks from falling – costs about 1.8 million US dollars. Even a stone cutter costs about 200,000 US dollars. Mining companies do not invest in these gadgets lest their profit margins come down. Mining practices in Pakistan, therefore, remain undeveloped — even primitive.
Where a mine offers better working conditions, it provides less wages to workers because of having to invest money in safety measures. Workers themselves leave such a mine because they can earn more elsewhere. “Mines are poisoned with asbestos in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Hangu district. No mine driller can survive its poisonous effects. And still they go there to work because mining companies give an extra 50,000 rupees a month for drilling work,” says Awan. “The miners do not ask why a contractor who does not give them 1,000 rupees in loan is offering them 50,000 rupees extra each month,” he adds. “Everyone here is ready for suicide.”
Roshaan Wazir, a mining inspector working with the Fata Development Authority in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has something similar to say about the casual attitude that coal miners have towards their own safety. He has met mine workers who have all the safety gear they need but do not use it. “They say helmets make them sweat and masks interfere with their breathing.”
It is a Wednesday morning and Atif is on his way to Sor Range, a mining zone in Spin Karez. Some of the leading coal mining companies operating in Balochistan run their mines here. These are not rathole mines — the ones that dot Dukki in the east. Working conditions at mines in Spin Karez are relatively better than those at countless other informal mines.
Atif’s trip is not aimed at inspecting mines but to talk to managers at a PMDC colliery so as to convince them that they provide on-site residence to mine inspectors. Their presence in the field will ensure safety, he says. The coal depot near Spin Karez shows that mines do not just need to be secured from inside but also from the outside. An FC-managed truck weighing station is operating here even though there are no uniformed men in sight.
Depending on the size of a truck and the amount of coal it can carry, operators of the weighing station charge it a certain amount of money as security fee. This is in lieu of the protection FC provides to local coal mines against attack by Baloch separatist insurgents or from tribal clashes over mine ownership. A few years ago, there were no security personnel in most mining areas in Balochistan but then the Baloch Liberation Army, a separatist militia, abducted and killed seven miners and one doctor from Sor Range in July 2012. Similarly, Marri Balochs have been fighting Luni Pashtuns over the ownership of coal mines in Chamalang, a remote area in Balochistan’s Kohlu district, for years. These mines are known to have 500 million tonnes of coal worth 2,000 billion rupees but no mining could take place there due to tribal rivalries. It was only after the paramilitary personnel took over the security of mining fields in 2006 that excavation of coal started in Chamalang.
Dukki faced a similar situation.
Back in the 1980s, when the land was cheap here, members of the Nasar tribe bought much of it. A large number of local coal mines, therefore, fall in the lands owned by the tribe. Its members also built the local truck terminal to facilitate the transportation of coal. The advent of industrial coal mining since then has intensified the tribe’s pre-existing feuds with other local tribes. Dukki is now divided into nearly exclusive neighbourhoods controlled by Nasar, Tareen and Luni tribes. Clashes between them became so frequent and deadly over the past decade that the FC finally stepped in to restrain them.
Elsewhere in Pakistan, too, mines and miners are not always safe. In Darra Adam Khel, for instance, coal mines are guarded by the personnel of the FC against tribal feuds as well as attacks by militants associated with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). They charge a fee – 1,500 rupees – for each truck that passes through FC checkpoints to get out of Darra Adam Khel.
Local mine owners also have to maintain detailed records of their workers so that no anti-state elements get mixed among them. Miners, too, are kept away from local population to avoid conflicts between the two.
Bad things keep happening still. Law enforcement agencies had to conduct an operation in January this year for the release of 14 miners kidnapped after a dispute between mine owners and a local jirga in Darra Adam Khel.
And Abid Yaar, a member of a coal miners association in Shangla, carries with him a list of 11 missing miners. They were all working in mines in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s tribal districts along the Pak-Afghan border when they disappeared.
The presence of security forces has been a godsend for the mine inspector posted in Dukki. Since the district is a tribal area, with no formal police force and government-run courts, enforcement of official rules and regulations here has always been a big challenge. Mine owners would not allow the inspector to check mines let alone close one for violations of rules.
Now that FC is deployed in the district, mining officials take action without having to fear retaliation from powerful tribal chieftains. Their work, however, has made few improvements, if any at all. This is because there are too many mines in the province and too few inspectors, argues Iftikhar Ahmad, Balochistan’s chief inspector of mines. Dukki alone has 800 coal mines but it has only one mine inspector.
Ahmad and his subordinates are tasked with keeping 5,000 mines safe for nearly 80,000 workers in Balochistan’s five different mining zones: Quetta, Loralai, Shahrag, Machh and Kalat.
Each zone includes areas which are sometimes hundreds of kilometres apart from each other. Quetta zone, for instance, starts from the provincial capital and goes all the way to Taftan on Pak-Iran border in south-west. Loralai division includes Dukki, Chamalang and Muslim Bagh areas; Shahrag division comprises Shahrag, Khost and Harnai regions; Machh division is spread from Machh in central Balochistan to Naseerabad on Sindh-Balochistan border; and Kalat division includes Mastung in western Balochistan and Hub that is in the south-east of the province.
A single inspector oversees mining operations in each of these five divisions. Two sub-inspectors are supposed to be working under each inspector but most of these positions are lying vacant. (For the whole of Chakwal district in Punjab, similarly, there are only two inspectors. They are supposed to oversee as many as 1,200 mines.)
Inspectors are first responders and rescuers when accidents happen in mines, often facing the ire of miners’ families and questions from the news media. Their meagre number suggests that it is not possible for them to inspect each mine at regular intervals.
Given that distances between Quetta and other parts of the province are extremely long, a mine inspector can spend no more than three days a week in the field before returning to the provincial capital to report to his superiors. In those three days, he can inspect no more than three to four mines because often a single mine requires a whole day for inspection. Imagine how long it will take to inspect a 3,500 feet long mine which has 35 to 40 mining tunnels at different levels.