Occupational Health and safety in coal Mining Industry

In any democratic society, state or business, workers and community play a very important and distinctive role for the sustainable development of any industry. Their contribution becomes more important in the development process when it is going to affect all of them. The unplanned process of industrial development with the ultimate aim of profit maximization creates conflicts among the key stakeholders. The significance of industrialization cannot be denied, however, there is a need to rethink ‘the process’, which is involved. Every year hundreds of workers are injured or become victims of diseases due to unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. Their plight, however, is unreported in media and in government statistics. They attract short-lived media attention only when disaster strikes on a large scale. However, the reported figures seem unrealistic in the context of the existing unsafe and unhealthy conditions. It is under such compelling circumstances that in the present paper, the prevalence of occupational health problems in the workers of mining industry of India, in general and Jharkhand, in particular, has been reviewed