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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