BADHGHYAR (DHAR, MP): Kailash’s wife is dead. His elder brother is dead. His two sisters are dead too. "Woh charon shaant ho gaye hain (they are all dead)," he says, rather impassively. In his mid-twenties, the resident of Badhghyar village in Kukshi block of Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh knows he is next.
Kailash is dying of the same disease as his family members — silicosis. It is incurable. He too worked with them in the Gujarat quartz crushing factories and breathed in silica dust that now covers the inside of his lungs, slowly choking him. He has watched most of his family die. He doesn’t require the doctors to tell him about his painful but short life ahead.
His body has already shrivelled up and his muscles have melted. A skeleton of his previous self, he finds it demeaning but lets his mother bathe him. His lungs blocked, breathless and short of oxygen for his blood, self-esteem is the last of his worries as his body refuses to build new cells while the older ones die. Eventually his system will collapse.
He is one of the hundreds of Bhil and Bhilala tribals in Jhabua and Dhar districts of Madhya Pradesh waiting to die. In a survey conducted in 2007 by a group of doctors in 21 villages of Jhabua, 158 people were found dead of silicosis. "266 others, who have been exposed to silica dust and are sick, will also eventually die," the doctors noted.
All of them had gone across the border to work in the quartz crushing units of Gujarat as unregistered daily wagers. In these factories, quartz stones are first broken by hammer into smaller ones, then crushed and powdered to be used to make glass. Large quantities of dust is generated in the process that the labourers inhale as they breathe deep due to the physically heavy workload involved.
"Initially, the crushing units hired tribals from Gujarat, but when deaths began to hit the tribal region there, the contractors came to Madhya Pradesh in early 2000. Young men and women, jobless in the summers, began to go across the border for what sounded an attractive proposition — Rs 50-60 as daily wages for three to four of the worst months of the year," says Magan, a member of the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangathan, a local NGO which helped the doctors carry out the extensive survey.
But when they returned from work, many died with similar symptoms. The Sangathan has filed a case in the Supreme Court. The local administration and the state government have been mostly unsympathetic to the villagers. The National Human Rights Commission is also hearing silicosis cases from across the country. "The disease may not be curable but it is preventable. The factories should be held responsible for exposing the labourers to silica dust," says Magan.
Munni, a Rordha resident in her mid-30s, has seen 13 members in her extended family die over two years. In all, 28 people have died of silicosis in her village. Those left take care of the orphans and the old. Unable to cope, they find novel ways of resigning to death all around.
"Greed is killing my daughter and others," says Anita’s mother, a resident of Badhghyar. Anita, in her teens, along with Kailash is one of the two surviving from the 14 that went together to work in Gujarat for that extra Rs 10 a day.
Source: THE TIMES OF INDIA
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