The scale of the silicosis crisis in India is staggering. A report by the Indian Council of Medical Research in 1999 estimated that, apart from 5.4 million construction workers, 3 million workers in other industries were at high risk of silica exposure. These figures are already over two decades old, but exact current estimates are near impossible to come by—there have been no national efforts to study the disease, and the onus of documenting it has fallen on activists, medical researchers or victims themselves. But estimates by researchers I spoke to suggest that the number of Indian workers exposed to silica dust and, therefore, at great risk of contracting silicosis, will touch 52 million by 2025… it is one of India’s most urgent public-health emergencies. But even more staggering than the scale of the crisis was how completely uncharted it is
MILAN PATRA was 22 years old when he moved to Jharkhand, in around 2016. He hailed from a poor family in the Rai Paria village of Jhargram district, in the Jangalmahal region in West Bengal. Patra had never received an education, and there were no opportunities for work around his village. Like many others in the area, he travelled several hundred kilometres away from home to work, as a daily-wage labourer at a ramming-mass factory in Jharkhand. Ramming mass is a type of powder compound used to line furnaces in steel factories. Patra’s job was to fill the powder into sacks and to load them into storage.
In less than a year, he fell seriously ill. He developed breathing troubles and a nasty, persistent, cough. He was always exhausted, finding it difficult to get through even a few hours of work. He began losing weight. Patra was scared—workers often discussed among themselves stories of colleagues who developed breathing troubles and left, never to return. Many, they had heard, died of their illness. Fearing for his life, he decided to leave his job and return to his village. There was no hospital nearby but he travelled to some health centres in the district, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and prescribed medicines for his condition.
The family’s circumstances were precarious. Patra was the only earning member, and his aged parents, as well as his wife and two-year-old son, depended on him. After he fell sick, they struggled to survive, unable to manage two meals a day. The tuberculosis treatment was not helping, and his condition only worsened. It soon became near impossible for him to talk without gasping for breath, let alone to walk or work. When he approached the health centres again, he was given some shocking news. They told Patra that he did not have tuberculosis. He had a condition called silicosis, a lung disease caused by inhaling particles of active silica dust, or silicon dioxide—a major component of ramming mass….
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In a Delhi heat ward, two workers fight a lonely battle for life
Too ill to work, too poor to get better: how debt traps families working at India’s kilns
Democracy and workers’ movements – stories from Jamshedpur
1938: the year Indian workers fought for themselves
Unworkable: Swapping Palestinian workers with Indians
After the truth-shower 