Children - Terre des Hommes

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2,055 children enrolled in Santulan’s Panshan Shala –
schools in the mining areas. However, in the same year,
family. In Bellary district, Karnataka, landless families
are also migrating to different parts of the area for work,
which is resulting in children dropping out of school and
discontinuing their education.
A study carried out by CHILDLINE, in the limestone mines
out of school children who were interviewed cited migration
as the major reason for dropping out. Most of the children
were registered in their local village school, but could not
go to the school near the mines partially due to lack of
transport, but also because they could not get admission in
the local school without valid documentation.
As well as the migration cycle and consequent lack of
consistency, language barriers often prevent migrant
children from accessing education and healthcare in India.
When migrants cross a state border, they are often unable
to speak the local language — at least up to a sufficient level
to study in it. Currently, only a few states, such as Andhra
Pradesh and Orissa, have initiated bilingual or multilingual
education strategies.
Impacts on Health
Health impacts are manifested in the lives of mining children
in different ways. They are affected because their parents
working in the mines fall ill or because they themselves fall
ill working in mines or because they live in areas where the
entire environment has been affected by mining.
Children carry the burden of parents’
illness
Children suffer because they are children of miners.
According to the ILO, mining is one of the three most
dangerous occupations to work in along with agriculture
and construction. Mining has long been known to cause
serious health problems in its workers. Until the early 20th
century, coal miners in the United Kingdom and the United
States brought canaries into the mines as an early–warning
signal for toxic gases such as methane and carbon monoxide.
The birds, being more sensitive to these toxic gases, would
become sick before the miners, thus giving them a chance
to escape or to put on protective respirators. Although this
practice has been discontinued, mine workers still face serious
occupational health risks. There have been numerous media
and NGO reports documenting how exposure to harmful
dusts, gases and fumes causes respiratory diseases, and can
develop into tuberculosis (TB), silicosis, pulmonary fibrosis,
asbestosis and emphysema after some years of exposure.
The specific impacts of mining are diverse, depending
on the nature of the minerals extracted and the extent
of exploitation. Silica stone is known to cause silicosis
in workers exposed to this dust. This fatal lung disease
is difficult to diagnose; it is frequently misdiagnosed as
TB and is incurable. The symptoms are similar to TB
and mine workers often get TB treatment instead, which
fails to combat this disease. In Shankargarh block of
Allahabad district, Uttar Pradesh, around one in three of
the 25,000 quarry workers are suffering from what they
call “Shankargarh-wali TB” — many of these are probably
actually suffering from silicosis, though they have not heard
of the disease. The average life span for a mine worker in
The Haryana-based group Prasar has
campaigned extensively on silicosis amongst quarry workers
in the state. They estimate that at one site, Lal Kuan in
Uttaranchal, 3,000 quarry workers have already died of
“TB.” Although the national average risk of TB infection
is 1.5 per cent, in this area every second person is affected.
Surveys have revealed that a number of these TB cases are
indeed silicosis.
Hundreds of migrant adivasi workers from Madhya Pradesh
have reportedly died of silicosis whilst working in the
quartz crushing factories in central Gujarat. Studies by the
National Institute of Occupational Health and the Gujarat
72.
73.
Interview with Santulan, Maharashtra, September 2009.
Interviews with mineworkers, Bellary, Karnataka, June 2009.
74. CHILDLINE India Foundation, Living with Stones – Children of the mines, part of the Children at Risk report series, 2008.
75. ILO, Eliminating Child Labor in Mining and Quarrying: Background Document, 12 June 2005.
76. MLPC, Broken Hard, http://www.indianet.nl/steengroeven/factsheet/Brokenhard.pdf, uploaded: 11 February 2010.
77. Frontline, Annie Zaidi, Silent Victims of Silicosis, 4 November 2005, http://www.flonnet.com/fl2222/stories/20051104002009200.htm, uploaded: 19 October
2009.
78.
Ibid.
79. Economic and Political Weekly, Amita Baviskar, Contract Killings: Silicosis among Adivasi Migrant Workers, 21 June 2008.