I think that it is very sad that women, men, and children in India must obtain this type of work in order to make a living. I wish that there were better jobs in India that anyone could get, regardless of education. However, it seems that this is one of those types of jobs, which while dangerous, does provide an income to families who desperately need it. Perhaps there is a way that they could do this same job but make it safer?
Perhaps if India allowed a little free market capitalism, this situation wouldn’t exist:In energy-hungry India, demand for coal has increased while production has remained fairly steady, causing coal prices to surge in recent years.
The lack of reform and rising demand have spawned a seedy underbelly of “coal mafia”, and a class of workers that illegally scavenge the mines for coal.
"The nationalization of India’s coal industry made it legal for just the central or state government to authorize coal mining.
That basically means coal can only be mined by government-owned companies or private companies that have been granted a lease by the government.
But there are many poor Indian’s that haven’t benefited from riches in the mining sector and that **choose **to dig the open-pit mines illegally.
These people are not **forced **to work in the open pit mines. They **choose **to do so. Why? Because there are insufficient opportunities available in the legal, nationalized, coal mines – so they are using entrepreneurship by wildcatting. This is likely more dangerous than it would need to be if they were operating in a legal mine, but opportunity is not available for them in a legal mine.
And then you have the caption on
picture #7: *But people from all over the country seek out such work
that reportedly pays $150 per week. **This is double the national average *
of about $75 per week.
$150 per week X 52 weeks = $7,800 per year.
This is compared to
i.imgur.com/c89MW.png
(source: CIA World Fact Book)
Compare this to #11: USA ($49k GDP per capita), #20 Canada ($41.1k GDP per capita), #23 Ireland ($40.1k per capita), #33 UK ($36.6k per capita), and #160 Philippines ($4.1k per capita). It’s no wonder why $7,800 sounds like a pittance to us in the US, Canada, Ireland, and the UK. How it sounds to us doesn’t really matter, though. How would $7,800 sound to the average Indian?
Maybe rather than bemoaning the fact that people have to take this type of work, perhaps we should focus on what can be done to get the Indian government to open up the industry to commercial competition…which would surely allow these people to work with better tools and, perhaps, in some safer conditions (even if the evil corporate leaders didn’t care about the employees, they’d want to protect the equipment)
