Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1850495947

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-233603

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: His Majesty's Stationery Off.

Year of publication:: 1931

Scope:: xviii, 580 S.; graph. Darst., Kt.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter VIII. - Mines

Collection:: Economics Books

107 CHAPTER VIII.—MINES. We turn now to the question of labour in mines. The table printed on page 106 gives the number of mines and the average daily numbers employed for the principal minerals worked, with the distribu- tion by provinces. This table shows the predominant position occupied by the coal mining industry. In British India (excluding Burma) coal mining accounts for two-thirds of all the employees in mines and 88 per cent of those who work underground. Apart from stone quarrying, the only other mining industries which employ as many as 10,000 persons are Manganese and mica mining. In the first part of this chapter we refer briefly to what are officially known as metalliferous mines, that is to say, mines other than collieries. The second part is devoted to the collieries, and in the last part we discuss the operation of the Mines Act and other questions common to both classes. Manganese Mines. Manganese ore is obtained from a few large units and many small mines scattered over a number of rural areas. As used officially in India, the term “mine * includes quarries and in this industry nearly all the mines are open workings. Only about 4 per cent of the total labour force works underground. The mines lie mostly in a narrow strip of the Central Provinces running for 100 miles north-east of Nagpur, but others exist in Bihar and Orissa, Bombay and Madras. The smaller mines everywhere draw most of their labour from the immediate neigh- bourhood. The bigger concerns in the Central Provinces employ a num- ber of local people but the greater proportion come from the north and east of the Central Provinces and adjoining districts of the United Provinces. The workers tend to remain at the mine with occasional visits to their villages. Both recruitment and the extraction of ore are entrusted to contractors, who attract and apparently retain their workers by a sys- tem of advances. We found here traces of the defunct Workmen's Breach of Contract Act in the terms of engagement; we recommend that adequate steps be taken to apprise the workers of its repeal. In Madras also, a number of mines depend on contractors’ labour brought from a distance. The work is very similar to ordinary earthwork excava- tion and calls for no special comment. Wages are low and seem to be little above agricultural rates in the surrounding country. Hours in open quarries are subjected to little official checking, but do not appear to be unduly long, Mica Mines. While the mica mines resemble the manganese mines in being situated in rural surroundings, they differ in that there are no large units and that about two-thirds of the workers are employed underground. The Mines are principally in the Hazaribagh and Gaya districts of Bihar and the Nellore district of Madras. The Bihar mines are largely worked from shafts, one to each working place, none of them of any great depth and mostly with the simplest hand-worked winding gear. Many of them are buried in the jungle and by no means easy of access. Thev are

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