The day I walked into the minefields of Jharia, in Dhanbad town, of the state of Jharkhand, India, I changed.
I had gone to Dhanbad with an idea in mind to document the families of coal miners who lived above brittle ground with a century-old inferno just beneath the surface. I was stunned by what I saw, the conditions were much worse than I had expected… and the mines were filled with children, sent out to work in the mines as early as 5am every day.
Looking from afar like an army of tiny black ants on steaming crushed pepper, they cross-trek the black rocky terrain amidst cracks in the dry, burning ground through which poisonous methane gas flow freely, slowly killing the coal-pickers’ hamlet. Children, mostly girls, aged from 4 upwards fill and carry heavy loads of baskets of coal rocks many times their own bodyweight. They walk barefoot, accustomed to the searing ground beneath them. Likened to the biblical version of ‘Hell’ on Earth, the coalmines of Jharia aptly reinstate the state-of-affairs for people living in such extreme conditions.
As the raging fire creeps beneath the grounds of Bokapahari, a small village in Jharia, the thinned grounds beneath the coal-pickers’ settlement cause occasional ground cave-ins swallowing entire homes. Recently, the ground buckled under a young girl, incinerating her to ashes in seconds. Next to me, a child tosses a discarded CD into a fiery abyss. It melts into nothing mid-air. But, with nowhere else to go, and no alternative employment options, the villagers stay put and continue to gather coal for a pittance from the open-pit mines in their front yard.
After a week of struggling to break ice and photograph more of the working children, I was to leave the city for New Delhi. It was my last day. I felt unaccomplished... but as a crimson sun set beyond the smog, the coal girls surprisingly beckoned me to their village. A cup of coal-tainted chai (tea) is poured for me. They couldn’t afford milk. Sipping the coal tea, a sea of curious faces surrounds me - black faces so starkly contrasted with walls they so painstakingly kept white. These tiny soot-covered faces could only be further darkened by hard labour and poverty. There we shared pictures and a laugh, with their small sooty handprints leaving temporary souvenirs all over my face and arms.
As I left the village on that day, my mind is filled with images of these children who live in abject poverty. These children need to be protected, and their families supported so that they can dig themselves out of this spiraling, chronic poverty and send their kids to school instead of to the coalmines. I remember the way the handprints were so effortlessly washed off my face and hands as I felt a fiery determination to show these pictures to an audience who could help make their situation less hopeless and permanent than it seems.
Even as India is seeing an economic growth rate of 8.8 per cent, crushing poverty and malnutrition are harsh realities for millions of women and children. Many inequities are tied to the age-old Hindu caste system, vicious gender discriminations, and socio-economic class disproportions. I intend on continuing this work on child labour in the extensive and largely unmonitored mining industry of India.
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