Thirty-six tormenting years have passed since criminal negligence of a bunch of colliery officials buried his father — and nearly 400 other miners — in a watery grave, but the recent verdict by a Dhanbad court in the Chasnala mine mishap has only rubbed more salt into Shiv Kumar Singh’s festering wounds.

The 1975 mine cave-in at the IISCO colliery in erstwhile Bihar may have been a tragedy that invited national opprobrium, but it also had a heart-rending ripple effect in several hundred homes that went largely unnoticed. Shiv Kumar’s was one of them.

Nand Kishore Singh, Shiv Kumar’s father, was a permanent worker at the Chasnala mine. On December 27 afternoon that year, a methane explosion triggered the mine to collapse (see box). Water from a nearby reservoir entered the pit at a force of seven million gallon per minute. Trapped in debris, 53-year-old Nand Kishore asphyxiated to death along with many others.

Shiv Kumar was eight years old then. Elder brother Pawan was 15 and their youngest sibling Mukesh only five. Their widowed mother Asha Devi returned with them to their native village of Sonpe in Jamui district (Bihar) in 1976. A patch of eight cottah land became their sole source of sustenance.

Pawan, who was in Class IX, managed to complete his matriculation with help from some relatives. Shiv Kumar studied till Class VII and Mukesh had to drop out in Class II.

“We did not receive a single penny as compensation from IISCO, forget employment. We grappled with the canker of poverty every second. Hunger became perennial and education took the back seat,” Shiv Kumar recalled.

A few years later, Pawan took up the onus of pursuing the case of his father with IISCO officials. “My elder brother also kept doing the rounds of colliery offices and different government establishments in the hope of landing a job on compassionate ground, but in vain,” the 44-year-old contract labourer said.

Frustrated, Pawan returned to Sonpe in 1999. Soon thereafter he contracted tuberculosis. In 2003, he died an untimely death at the age of 42. “We didn’t have enough money to eat two square meals a day, forget elaborate treatment and medicines for my ailing brother,” Shiv Kumar rued, blaming the Chasnala incident for pushing them into an eternal abyss of economic crisis.

After Pawan’s death, Shiv Kumar and Mukesh tried their best to earn a decent livelihood to make both ends meet. Their families had grown and there were more than a dozen mouths to feed at home. A deceased Pawan had left behind his wife and three sons. Shiv Kumar and his wife too had three children, while Mukesh and his wife had a son. Mother Asha Devi was no longer strong enough to help boost family income.

The two brothers rented a house at Chasnala and Mukesh worked as daily wage earner. “Our families stayed in Sonpe because we could not afford to keep them with us in Dhanbad,” Shiv Kumar said.

Mukesh, however, could not fight financial constraints for long. In 2005, he hanged himself from the ceiling fan of their rented house. He was only 34.

“I lost not just my father, but also my two brothers and all the people responsible for the Chasnala tragedy get is one-year imprisonment. Is this justice?” Shiv Kumar seethed.

On Friday (March 16), after a protracted legal battle for more than three decades, the court of first-class judicial magistrate of Dhanbad Yogesh Kumar Singh awarded one-year imprisonment to then IISCO (Chasnala) manager A.K. Bhattacharya, now 72 years old, and then agent planning and group safety officer Dipak Sarkar, now aged 80. Two other indicted colliery officials — J.N. Ohari and S.K. Banerjee — died during trial.

“We were conned by colliery officials for three decades. They turned us away every time on the pretext of lack of one document or the other. Recently, we were told that my father’s job was given to one of my uncles, Gopal Prasad Singh. This is a lie. My uncle still lives with his family at their native place and ekes out a living by farming,” Shiv Kumar said.

The bereaved son wants a probe into this job scam. “The government should find out who is enjoying the benefits we are entitled to,” Shiv Kumar said, pledging that he would take the matter to its logical end.

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