A Study in Industrial Health: Coal Miners in Eastern India, 1890s-1952
by Sandip Chatterjee
Date of Examination:2017-06-12
Date of issue:2017-10-11
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Ravi Ahuja
Referee:Prof. Dr. Chitra Joshi
Referee:Prof. Dr. Dominic Sachsenmaier
Persistent Address:
http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-6505
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Abstract
English
Research Approach: My work fuses the major themes of the labour historiography of India as well as the history of health and technology. I propose to discuss the major themes of labour history like the nature of labour force, composition of the same, continued migration of the miners in the post-colonial period through the prism of health. For example, I will discuss whether an accident or pregnancy induced miners to get back to their villages. Thus the methodology of labour history as well as that of the history of health would form the backbone of my research. Objective: I venture into an under-researched boundary area of South Asian history — an area where labour history and the social history of medicine, both thriving historical subdisciplines, intersect with barely developed historical research on social policy in twentieth century India. While historians of South Asian labour have ventured occasionally into the field of medical history we do not have a single monograph as yet focusing explicitly on the history of industrial health in modern South Asia. I reconstruct the emergence of industrial health policies in post- colonial India. The study is based on a considerable range of materials – reports and records of various levels government and official committees, of the International Labour Organization, mining associations and trade unions, newspapers, vernacular sources and journals as well as some private papers. QuestionLocating Research Within the larger Discourse: My research lays bare the colonial aim for short term maximization of profit through minimum capital outlet, as was evident from inadequate safety and sanitary measures in mines. Questions of children and women in mines remained subservient to the colonial forms of extraction. I seek to unearth those forms by paying separate attention to children and women in two separate chapters. Question of productivity and its relation to mines safety will be explored. At the level of discourse, the tension between the health of the miners and health of the mineral remained unresolved. And industrial diseases were also recognized after the end of the colonial rule. Sickness insurance was regularized around the same point of time. All the above questions point to the colonial tendency of short term maximization of profit with minimum capital outlet i.e. cheap resources, cheap labour and primitive technology. A comparative study with other leading industries like jute and cotton would show how managements were unwilling to spend after new technology and training and continued to resort to old method of working.
Keywords: Indian Mines Act; Industrial health; Child miners; colonial childhood; mine accidents and workmen's compensation; Exclusion of women from underground mines; Indian Mines maternity benefits act; Occupational accidents and typologies of accidents in India; Training for miners, training for sirdars and training for engineers; Recruitment of engineers and engineers and mine safety; Occupational diseases: detection and recognition of mine diseases; Source of disease and miners' huts; Miner and migration: claustrophobia and agriculture
