Silica scars : On India’s silicosis problem
Mine workers need early diagnosis and treatment of silicosis
India’s growth aspirations have spurred the national mining industry to extract more minerals for use in construction. One such mineral is silicon dioxide, or silica, an important component of sand and stone. Mine workers exposed to silica dust for many years have a heightened risk of developing silicosis, wherein microscopic silica particles are lodged in lung tissue, hampering their normal function. The risk of silicosis is age-agnostic and determined by exposure, and is chronic after onset. Thus it threatens millions of workers, many of them young. In 1999, the Indian Council of Medical Research reported that more than eight million people in the country were highly exposed to silica dust; this population could only have increased since the national government has opened new mines and expanded old ones. On November 29, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) directed the Central Pollution Control Board to draft new guidelines vis-à-vis “granting permission for [silica] mining and washing plants”, and the Uttar Pradesh government and Pollution Control Board to set up health-care facilities in areas with silica mines. The NGT is well-intentioned but mine workers are desperate for action.
The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 requires mine workers’ employers to notify threats of bodily harm to workers and workers developing specific diseases, including silicosis. But operators often do not notify the Directorate General of Mines Safety, preventing the state from developing an actionable awareness of mine operators’ workplace practices; nor have States of their own initiative strived to collect this data. The potential for special hospitals to ameliorate this situation is also unclear: the Code obligates qualified medical practitioners to notify silicosis cases to the Chief Inspector-cum-Facilitator, yet it already required operators to provide free annual health check-ups, which have failed to reveal silicosis cases. Health-care providers have even been known to misrecord silicosis as tuberculosis. The NGT also noted that “concerned authorities” are not living up to the law. The state’s passivity is thus the principal roadblock to mine workers’ welfare, which guidelines are unlikely to surmount. The passivity also flies in the face of climate justice, an idea India has ironically wielded in multilateral fora to demand concessions on emissions and adaptation financing. The nation’s mineral resources are concentrated in ‘resource frontier’ States that have low literacy and health-care coverage, a disorganised labour force, and where mining provides crucial revenue. When the state diverts the concessions to suppliers of cheap silica, workers tolerate bad working conditions and delay seeking medical or legal recourse until the silicosis has become life-threatening.