Days after Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said the situation in crisis-hit Joshimath is “stable”, some residents of the holy town claimed new cracks have appeared in their houses and sought a fresh survey of their residences.
The residents also wrote a letter to sub-divisional magistrate Kumkum Joshi, on April 18, seeking the administration’s intervention in the matter.
“New cracks have appeared in our house. Earlier, there were only a few hairline cracks. Now, they have grown bigger and wider too,” Basanti Devi, a resident of Chhawani Bazar, said.
“We have come here to the tehsil to request the administration to carry out a fresh survey of our house. But nobody seems to be paying heed to our requests,” she added.
According to the Chamoli district administration, at least 296 families have been shifted to temporary relief camps so far after 868 residential buildings and other structures developed cracks since the first week of January. Meanwhile, 181 have been put in the unsafe zone.
On January 25, eight technical agencies, such as Central Building Research Institute and IIT Roorkee, who conducted studies on the sinking town, submitted their report to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). The report is yet to be made public.
Jharia Burns Due to Reckless Mining
Accidents and fatalities of this nature are not uncommon across the 110 square miles of land that make up the Jharia coalfields, the heartland of India’s coal industry. According to the ministry of coal’s annual report for 2017-18, BCCL reported 27 serious incidents and 15 fatalities between 2015 and 2017. Local activists believe the numbers could be much higher; the data doesn’t include accidents that took place outside the mines, or the deaths of those who weren’t employed by BCCL.
BCCL have been running the mines in Jharia since the government nationalised the coking coal industry in 1971. In a rush to curtail financial losses and meet the country’s staggering energy demands, BCCL began switching from underground mining to open cast mining (where coal is mined from the surface), an easier and more profitable method of extraction. Over time, vast expanses of land were stripped and blasted into 400ft-deep pits, which today produce more than 32m tonnes of coal a year.
But this unregulated expansion has been at the expense of the communities who once lived off the land. With few jobs available to those without a formal education, many of Jharia’s residents work as coal loaders for roughly 1,000 rupees (about £11) a week, or risk their lives scavenging coal to scrape a living.
Source: thegaurdian.com