No salary for three years, no jobs, no civic amenities ... UMA SHANKARI outlines the travails of miners in the Kolar Gold Fields of Karnataka.

DAVID, 45, has not been paid since 2001, when Bharat Gold Mines Ltd, a public sector undertaking in Kolar district of South Karnataka, shut down the mine where he worked as a rock drilling machine operator. In those difficult years, he, his wife, four sons, and mother have gone deeply into debt. His mother went to work as domestic labour and his son short-circuited his plans for higher education to take low-paying, temporary jobs to support the family.

Like David, 5,000 workers lost their jobs when Bharat Gold Mines Ltd. shut down operations in the Kolar Gold Fields. Their numbers have now dwindled to 3,500 because over 1,000 have migrated.

Recently, the South India Cell for Human Rights Education and Monitoring, a non-governmental human rights group, organised a public hearing by a panel headed by Justice H. Suresh, retired judge of the Bombay High Court, at Kolar Gold Fields to investigate the conditions in which the unemployed miners and their families have been living since the mine closed.

Since the closure of the mines, the civic amenities provided by BGML to the employees, like electricity and water to the miners' quarters, have been discontinued. People have to pay a rupee for a bucket of water.

Since the people cleaning the common public toilets outside the workers' homes have lost their jobs, the toilets, drains, and the pit are overflowing, heightening the risk of an epidemic. Though the workers cleaned the toilets themselves, they were unable to clean the drains and the pit, they said. The hospital run by the company remains closed; the workers, already affected by respiratory disorders caused by drilling rocks, can only go to the crowded government hospital in the town. The Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction, a board of experts under the Central Government's Finance Ministry that offers timely intervention and possible revival of sick industrial units, closed the BGML in March 2001 after it suffered losses close to Rs. 30 crore. The workers have not received any salary since 2001, as they refused to accept the compensation offered and filed a case last September in the Karnataka High Court challenging the closure of the mines. The Karnataka High court upheld the closure, but recommended that the Government extend the date for 3,500 employees to opt for the Voluntary Retirement Scheme. The employees have not yet responded to this.

The long wait of three years for an amicable settlement has demoralised the workforce. Workers say the township has no employment opportunities, no small-scale industries, no agricultural labour, as the land has been rendered uncultivable by the flood of silt from the 13 major tailing dumps accumulating about 60 million tonnes of mine waste occupying 15 per cent of the total land in the township.

Even the other public sector company in the town, Bharat Earth Movers Limited, has stopped recruiting people several years now, say the miners.

Several studies reveal the KGF miners are, perhaps, the lowest paid of any public sector unit. Yet they have helped extract at least 800 tonnes of gold worth Rs. 45,000 crores from these mines over the last 100 years. "It is the mismanagement at the top," said L. Subramanian, Secretary of the United Employees Association, who cited findings of the Geological Survey of India, which revealed that several mines under BGML like Bisanatham and Chigargunta mines in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh could be run profitably for another 100 years.

BGML formerly undertook mine construction, shaft sinking, manufacture of mining machinery, and other fabricated items for other clients for which it had set up a Mine Construction and Engineering Division. The workshops at the Nandidoorg mines and the Champion Reef mines once manufactured railway wagons and shipping cranes but now the infrastructure and equipments lie idle. The Karnataka High Court, in its judgement four months ago, recommended that the government "provide machinery and equipment to BGML Workers' Cooperative Society, if started, to take up project works".