(A Mining Engineer’s Diary revisited: written in 2010 while working as Sr Faculty in IICM)
I still can remind the date 18thAugust,1987. Its was a sultry morning , the sky just got too ill-temperate and conservative to usher fully , a humid , irritation doubled by torrid environment of the rugged terrain of Raniganj –Asansol belt . I along with another guy from ISM, Dhanbad Anil Kumar took shelter in a 8ftX8ft room ‘s confinement of a small hotel of Barakar for the next days programme to attend the ECL, HRD office. The food , the light and the untidiness just enough to shock anybody once he will enter the room. It was my second visit to Asansol belt till my college life is over. In-fact the first visit was to Ramnagar colliery, when I had done one project on underground coal mine and that too under one of very overgenerous college senior and his too affectionate wife. The result was more about getting pampered by the family and less exposure to anything , the place or the people and so also very little aquiantance to the mine also. So this was the second visit and the visit which went long way to shape the life I spent next twenty years before shifting to Ranchi with other assignment as I am doing recently.
The next day we got up early and got prepared earlier in more urge to leave the dingy hotel and less to join the organization called ECL. We reached the HRD office by 10 am and there we met MR Chakraborty , the lean and quite smiling officer who asked us to meet Mr Falguni Tiwary , the then EE in charge. Mr. Tiwary is no more there , but I hope a part of my life in ECL had been tagged in his file personally and professionally till his last days there in ECL. This gentleman a typical personnel officer with very confused approach typical to any problem of personnel they deal with(sometimes you just get misguided whether they are supporting and opposing you ,a generic stance patented with them) scribbled a two syllable words on my appointment letter clumsily , Khas Kajora,( the name which appeared to be much clumsier that time) and nothing else. Even I had not been told by anyone where the place is and how to proceed , in which direction. The only thing helped this twenty plus aged young guy who just passed out from the college is the imprint in the front cortex he picked up the previous day while coming by bus towards Asansol , where he saw one tilted small signboard amongst sand dunes near GT somewhere written with a blurring and broken sentence “ Kajora jaibar path….” in Bengali font which meant the way to Kajora. So with that little memory I along with another guy from BIT Sindri , Jitendra Mishra boarded a bus back from Asansol towards Durgapur and just got down the one place after narrowing down one place by the erstwhile conductor , a place called Kajora More. It was a the late afternoon , the dusk descends very fast on a smoggy surrounding of the GT road .The drizzle got started again and infront of us a muddy road looked filled with so many deceptive potholes towards an uncertain destination , Khas Kajora Colleiry. The uncertainty was not so physically but more so psychologically just being dropped by the organization we joined the same day , without single briefing , or at least two lines instruction what to do and where to go and where to report. The two guys still braving all these odds of non-communication boarded one Ricksaw , proceeded towards the colliery and reached the place after dragging of the Ricksaw puller on a sticky muddy road to discover there first place of posting in a typical plot of the great novel Germinal smeared by smoke and moist by just concluded drizzle. Its an evening , we will never forget , in the office they told us to get shifted to one place called Anjeerbaganwhere there was one vacant quarter . And while we just treaded towards more smog smoldering from intermittent domestic burning of earth-oven dotted all over the place , we reached our first floor quarter to get our anchor set for our first assignment of job.
Let’s just drag the cursor to the 2010 . A batch of 130 were supposed to join CIL, the communication was mailed to all the concerned office and the officials, the doctors for medical check up, the personnel from CIL to emerge in the defined place to check and clear all proceedings and IICM, a lush green campus, with serenity and divine surrounding like any ashram, had been assigned to train those guys for next two weeks, showcasing the whole organization in length and breadth. The design of thinking is to get them acquainted with broader and bigger picture of coal industry as a whole and CIL in particular. At first it’s the breadth, then gradually the depth, just drilling more to let them be introduced to their domain of working. So the guys in their mid twenty rushed towards the campus, a heaven still been maintained in Ranchi’s disappearing canvas of soothing greenery, pleasing climate and innocent inhabitants. The paper got scanned, paraphernalia attested in the cozy rooms of IICM corridor vibed with silent conditioner and tranquilizing music. The sumptuous food just added to the flavor of their dream they now started fanning for the next surprise while they got posted in different subsidiaries. Its care and concern shown by the usually very soft faculties in campus appeared to be sometime deceptive while imagining for the field people who always appear to emerge from the old Texas movie, rough, rugged managers rippled in the face with thousand of crisis trodden experiences. The medical test passed very nicely, the eye sights got checked, the pulse rate been measured, the guys just get in the organization called CIL. The true lies never got exaggerated , the first two weeks in the industry just made them enough aware of the facts and figures of coal companies , so briefing some knowledge about the functionalities thus gets enriched while get physically and psychologically prepared to take on the challenges ahead while getting posted in different places. Swinging like the pendulum between uncertainty and some broadly defined knowledge they just start putting brave face to cover up any shakiness inside and depart to swoop down over different field and areas of their posting. And here comes the second surprise which gets fast converted to shocks depending on the three things. How far you acclimatize in a fully adverse environment, especially against lot of odds where, monster machines, seasoned managers both keeps on challenging their grit, gumption, their so called sophistication. The second one is to understand how to engaging themselves , without any so called demand pull , or structured job planning , specially more for statutory , filling a huge vacuum created of non recruitment fro so long time rather than any specialized task they expected to crack with their technical savviness , just keep on devouring their energy , channeling it in wrong way. And thirdly how far they just get focused on the second career , and using the exiting chaos as a cool platform to prepare and shift to the next organization of their liking. So the recruits having any of three quality just pick up the survival kit in the industry.
Now narrating the both sagas of that time and this time , only part common in the whole scenario is the ambience , the culture of coalfields. Surprisingly this part got hardly changed , whatever the cause may be, the production target got multiplied , the machines upgraded , the compensation got skyrocketing , technology crept in gradually to outdate the conventional working process but the surrounding kept same , so the culture is so hard coded , it always appears anything got hardly changed within this two decades. And the result , same recluse , same isolation , killing silence of remotest place from the so called metro or township, the confounding environment with semi skilled or unskilled people without even workable sophistication and the narrowed ring of a handful f seasoned coal executives. The day in , day out in colliery just would have been kept back in the same status as we started our career two decades ago sans the availability of the technology , the communication and of course new life style gadgets and gizmos.
Thanks Mark Zukerbarg , Steve Job , or Larry page , the technology just do not let you be separated , isolated wherever you are whoever you are. These young guys may get disillusioned as the widening chasm between their expectation(instead of getting scaled down in induction) and realty just is too harrowing to be convincing . The competence , the skill , the quality gets eroded fast , so the knowledge level . There creeps in a tough seasoning and de-schooling and re-schooling part of their job life. The remoteness sometimes gets too unbearable as they spent in some of the top schools busy environment bustling with lot of activities. Away from their so called busy campus but still are so near to their peers , their batch mates, their childhood friends, courtesy the mobile broadband service Tata Photon or Airtel, the social networking center of FB , the all engulfing cobweb of internet and the sleek jazzy mobile stuffed with hundreds of features, the voicemail ,camera, the texting tool, the android operative system or the i-pad, the mobile book-selves , periodical stores. In fact some of the organization where inherently the working condition and the ambience is quite unfriendly and reclusive as our coal companies must be more grateful to these new system and communication gadgets which are the only life line to the existence of the fresher who otherwise got too shocked being located in the most isolated corner of the country straight from the campus to sustain the reclusive lifestyle for even couple of weeks. It can be expected to be an just understatement if we say these guys are just let them connected 24X7 hours in those mines ostracized from crowded planet , rather they are just extracting more out of it. The usually low work pressure in a monopoly environment where the major player’s performance are hardly been driven by completion in market , this new gen are just enjoying the enough of their recess and relaxation (from any high responsibility being considered too young) and may be lot of them got enough scope to keep preparing for their second career. Thanks to introduction of lot of broad band spectrums, liberalization of communication really helped our people who otherwise had to spend in full isolation like we spent in our time. Although the same isolation in other sense was the bliss in disguise for us personally me who loves to meet the people physically rather than virtually and keep on expanding the circle of familiarity beyond any group or particular community , the non or nil availability of communication at the early age of my career just helped me to find the trigger points amongst our innocent man and monster machines of mines and the surrounding and kept me engaged with the cause of them for last twenty years. Yes there were no photo sharing , but regular exchanging warmth , care and concern every time we meet those people in the mines and beyond which in most cases either densely vegetated or else sparsely located. Still I can remind how I could develop a deep bond with the two beautiful friends one was Begunia Forest (now a deforestatated Bengal Emta Mine) ans another was the Ajay River in Chrulia while moving with my racing Honda Sleek moving around in a zone of 30 km radius , enjoying the frequent open end theatre(or they say Jatrain Bengal) , took the member ship of the local village library thus became a very key person in lot of activities in those remote villages where the mines were located with a handful of executives. In fact I owe to my whatever attachment to these people who helped to shape my philosophy of life , my passion for these people which may have been possible because of a little bit non availability of any proper communication and complete absence of virtual life of online networking as we see today.