Grit and Gold

By Gayatri Chandrashekar

India is estimated to have 9% of the global gold reserves spread over 100 places across its land mass. Southern Indias Deccan region has indeed been identified as one of the areas with the richest deposits and this has been proved by the documented history of past mining here.
Mining activities can contribute greatly to the growth of the industrial sector, but India is yet to realise the mining fuelled growth. Mining contributes no more than 2.5% to the nations GDP and employment to just 700,000 people.
Australia has seen its gold production increase manifold in the 20 years from 1980, with the infusion of latest technology and high risk capital. On the other hand, procedural delays and varied and different license requirements for prospecting and mining, the lack of technology and sufficient venture funds have slowed down the growth of mining in India.
The ecological and social impact of mining can be devastating on forests and wild life and burden the weaker sections of society with loss of livelihood and way of life. However, unlike coal, iron or manganese which lie buried under precious forests in many parts of India, gold seems to occur in areas less vulnerable to damage.
While India mines many metals only to satisfy its own domestic needs, the consumption of gold is enormous at 880 tonnes or more per annum while production is only about 2 to 3.5 tonnes. Indeed the appetite for gold is insatiable and growing. The country barely produces 0.4 percent of its gold consumption.
It is a good time to look at how a British company ran a successful and profitable mining enterprise in India for 76 years and created standards and pioneering technologies for deep mining for the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Aug 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482855845

Gayatri Chandrashekar

Gayatri Chandrashekar worked as a print and TV journalist for a National news broadcaster in India for 25 years. She is an accomplished performing artiste in South Indian classical vocal music.

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Copyright © 2015 by Gayatri Chandrashekar.

ISBN:      Hardcover   978-1-4828-5585-2

                Softcover     978-1-4828-5586-9

                eBook          978-1-4828-5584-5

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CONTENTS

1 The tragedy of lost hope

2 Gold is where you find it

3 India, the bottomless pit for the world’s yellow metal

4 The history of Kolar before the British discovery of gold

5 Early Primitive Mining

6 Lavelle obtains a license to prospect

7 John Taylor & Sons: Patience Pays

8 Gold Fields of South India

9 Old rocks, New vigour, KGF’s sky and darkest recesses light up

10 Labouring for a wage

11 Each mine a different company; a separate profit centre

12 1921-1930; A decade of consolidation

13 Labour: Relations and vexations

14 Into the melange

15 1931-1940; Change and continuity

16 The price of gold, its value and worth

17 Focus and determination

18 Lifts and downs

19 Mademoiselle has muffins for tea

20 Gymkhana and other clubs for fitness and films

21 Security amid pilferage

22 Deep Mine; Hell on Earth. KGF- global gold standard for deep mining

23 Signalling Equipment: codes and symbols

24 A new and free India, the decade of 1941-1950

25 Improved drills and airlegs

26 Trade Union Movement in KGF

27 Refuge for the suffering: the KGF hospital

28 Miners’ lungs, the dust disease

29 Long Days, Longer Nights:

30 The tide changes, never ever to return

31 Can ugly dumps infuse a second wind?

32 Particle Physics in the mining town

33 Mine and minefields

34 Maintenance for optimum utilisation and no replacements

35 1951-1960: Mining Board recruits more Indians

36 1961-1970- A decade of wasted opportunities

37 1971 to 1980: years of decline

38 Labour productivity. Rises and shines

39 Workshops, not sweatshops

40 The emerging story: the quarter century from 1990

41 Entrepreneurs want a piece of the action

42 Who represents the worker?

43 Food for thought?

INTRODUCTION

India is estimated to have 9% of the global gold reserves spread over 100 places across its land mass. Southern India’s Deccan region has indeed been identified as one of the areas with the richest deposits and this has been proved by the documented history of past mining here.

Mining activities can contribute greatly to the growth of the industrial sector, but India is yet to realise the mining fuelled growth. Mining contributes no more than 2.5% to the nation’s GDP and employment to just 700,000 people.

Australia has seen its gold production increase manifold in the 20 years from 1980, with the infusion of latest technology and high risk capital. On the other hand, procedural delays and varied and different license requirements for prospecting and mining, the lack of technology and sufficient venture funds have slowed down the growth of mining in India.

The ecological and social impact of mining can be devastating on forests and wild life and burden the weaker sections of society with loss of livelihood and way of life. However, unlike coal, iron or manganese which lie buried under precious forests in many parts of India, gold seems to occur in areas less vulnerable to damage.

While India mines many metals only to satisfy its own domestic needs, the consumption of gold is enormous at 880 tonnes or more per annum while production is only about 2 to 3.5 tonnes. Indeed the appetite for gold is insatiable and growing. The country barely produces 0.4 percent of its gold consumption.

It is a good time to look at how a British company ran a successful and profitable mining enterprise in India for 76 years and created standards and pioneering technologies for deep mining for the world.

PREFACE

Kolar Gold Fields evokes contrary images in me. I cannot forget the disheartened but patient Japanese scientist in a pioneering study in Particle Physics in 1994, whom I met and interviewed 4,500 feet below the ground in an underground laboratory. The scientist was so saddened by the fact that his original lab at 7,000 feet depth below the ground had been allowed to be flooded and his second laboratory would soon go underwater as well. His patience in the underground labs was not to be rewarded with concrete data because the failing mine could not pay for the electricity to pump out the ingressing water.

Neither can I forget the collapsed KGF hospital in 2008, an uncared for pile of rubble, its walls wrecked by the elements, a place of healing in need of healing for itself. What a fall for an once proud institution!

On the positive side, a recent visit convinced me that people are getting on very well with living. Row houses and Bungalows have new coats of paint and sport new tile roofs. It is wonderful to see children in uniforms cheerfully trooping away to schools. Young men and women are thronging the many colleges in the Kolar Gold Fields eagerly and purposefully.

KGF has a great history quite at variance with other towns of India and that story is worth narrating. Hence, I felt impelled to write this book. It is a humble offering to those people who brave all odds and come up on top, regardless of circumstances.

My thanks are due to Mr. M.H.R. Rao for all the valuable suggestions he made; to my husband, Chandra Shekar who collected extremely valuable source material and edited the manuscript; to the many persons I met and talked with in KGF, some of who do not wish to be named and to my daughters, Kritika and Malavika who gave my manuscript a professional, detached and critical look over.

I wish to thank my publishers for bringing out this book. Their cooperation has strengthened my faith that there is a story near us all that the world wishes to hear.

Gayatri Chandrashekar

Bengaluru, India.

May 2015.

CHAPTER 1

The tragedy of lost hope

Our electricity connections have been cut, we stand in a queue to collect drinking water from one water pump, sanitation services have been withdrawn, we live among clogged drains and uncleared garbage. No longer can we afford to send our children to school, the new fees are too high. Any work, we are willing to do, even low paying work……. A former employee of Bharat Gold Mines Limited, after the suspension of work of the company

February 28, 2001, C.E.

Shock and disbelief!

"This can’t happen to me! Not to me oh God!

To me who has been disciplined and loyal, whose family has, for generations toiled, sweated and dedicated itself to break the unyielding stones, to trace out the miniscule glimmers of gold among back bending tonnes of hard rock that were hiding like the most shy among a cackle of thousands in a melee."

Bleak was the mood of the employee. This miner, who was still in his early forties, whose father, grandfather and great grandfather had all worked in these mines, whose job until then supported his parents, wife and children, was disappearing the following day.

The gold mines had supported him and others through generations, it was their livelihood, their succour in sickness and want; their joy in celebration, consolation in grief; their teacher in ignorance, hope of their future and guarantee of their children’s education and career. Rock hard was their belief that the mines would take care of their whole lives, as it had done in the past. To them the mines were for ever. The present and the future too belonged to the mines. They had no contact with anything outside of the mines, so insular were they in their mining town of Kolar Gold Fields, in the state of Karnataka, India. How was it possible to lose it all in so short time? Thousands of mine workers were clueless and distraught.

Not that there were not enough straws in the wind, enough clues to these bleak developments. The company that started as a British private company was nationalised in 1956 and became a Indian public sector undertaking in 1972, mining a narrow but deep body of ore and it had not been profitable for a long time. There were indications that the losses accrued by the company may prove to be too huge to be overcome. While reviewing the financial performance of loss making enterprises, the government had recommended the closure of the mines in the year 1985, sixteen years earlier. In 1992, the central government had come to the conclusion that the gold ore was close to being exhausted and the company could not be turned around as a viable operation. The officials in charge of decisions pointed out that throughout its history of existence of 29 years as a public sector company, Bharat Gold Mines Limited, had nearly always made nothing but losses, notwithstanding what happened when the mines were earlier run by a British firm that saw success for over seven decades.

Mines were wasting assets that have a period of prosperity followed by decline and death. In the last ten years of the mines, it was the dole, the subsidy that kept the management and the workers paid. The many suggestions for turning the company around were not heard or implemented as the central government at New Delhi had been convinced that the century old mine had in fact exhausted all its famed gold reserves. Therefore as any exhausted asset, the mine must necessarily close down.

However several committees, constituted by the same government had said that turning the mines to the path of progress and profit was indeed possible if the right interventions and investments of, say, Rs 200 crores could be made. The government was however set on its path of action and that action was to close down the mines, no matter what any committee report said. Offers were made to the employees to voluntarily retire from the company.

Dejected and fearful were thousands of families in the pioneering mining town, Kolar Gold Fields, South India. Many households did not light the kitchen fires on that last day of February. Now they could foresee nothing but a descent into poverty. Women stood in groups discussing their situation and the impending doom of joblessness of their husbands and sons. The management had no option but to follow the orders from the Ministry of Labour, New Delhi, to shut shop and turn off the tap on the livelihood of all employees. How to survive without a source of income was the question uppermost on thousands of minds. Where could they go? What could they do? They had been increasingly visiting temples and churches, seeking a way silently from the presiding deities and the priests, looking for hope from fortune tellers and palm readers; all to no avail. One could not postpone the inevitable, the dark shadow that lurked and plunged forward, like a stab from a cruel monster.

Operations in the mines had ceased in fact eleven months earlier although idle wages were until then being paid. In its long history of ownership, the mines had changed hands from British owned pounds sterling companies to the state government of Mysore, to be yet again taken over by the central government by its Finance Ministry and then handed over to the Ministry of Mines.

Many workers had already availed themselves of the ‘Voluntary Retirement Scheme’, VRS introduced nine years earlier. However, the amount that they received under the scheme was paltry in their reckoning, since the scheme was based on the wages that had not seen any revision over a long time.

Some were actively planning to move out of Kolar Gold Fields as soon as they landed jobs elsewhere. Where would their skills be welcome? Since there were no other major gold mine in India, the exact fit was hard to guess. The anxiety was rising like fumes of smoke, like compressed bile expanding from the pit of the stomach. Eventually most got jobs in the burgeoning city of Bengaluru,(earlier Bangalore) 100 kilometres away, not as proud miners in an organised industrial set up, but as masons, carpenters and head load carrying labourers in the informal sector, and as waiters in restaurants or pushing trolley loads of semi finished cloth in garment factories. What a descent for a once cohesive and highly skilled community! Those well educated children of miners got jobs in the Information Technology, (IT) and IT enabled services in that booming city.

Other workers had more sly things on their minds. After all, the town had been sitting on a gold mine. For years they had squirreled away gold ore and gold concentrate through the sieve of the steadily failing security system. On this last day of work as on the many days prior to closure, they were bent on surreptitiously taking out as much of the ore, concentrate and the chemicals to purify the concentrate, as possible. Every bit of stealth was justified under the strained circumstances. No one was looking anyway. No one cared. In their misery every person was alone, afraid and anxious. It was an inexorable march to dooms day in a matter of a few hours.

When the last hour ended, managers and accountants, chemists and surveyors, electricians and fitters, bank-men and drivers, ward boys and doctors, helpers and cleaners, bell men and sweepers, watch men and clerks and foremen and workers went out in a mood of despondency and silence. The past could not be revived. The future was an airless vacuum. Bharat Gold Mines Ltd had declared suspension of work, closed its gates once and for all, effective from the first of March 2001. Notices had been pasted to the gates and compound walls of all the shafts. The sense of failure was frightening. A new disposition would pay the wages only to the skeletal security at the gates.

The final day, their blackest, dawned: all gates closed, entry to shafts denied. The blaring sirens, the clatter of the cages running up and down the shafts and the pounding feet of men meeting the time schedules of work, all only a painful and distant memory.

The mines, in the process of dying over the last ten years started the rapid death march. Like a man’s heart which was slowly failing and whose lungs were filling up with fluids drowning him, the underground water had started rising when the giant pumps had been stopped years earlier in order to save on electricity bills.

In the last decade the subsidy from the government that sporadically came acted like a good doctor’s needle that drained out the lung’ fluids and allowed some oxygen for breathing. After a few short years of subsidy, the Bharat Gold Mines Ltd., began to gasp for breath. The financial pincers were tightening and the wages to officers and workers could be paid only with great difficulty.

The pumps at levels of 4000 feet had been installed decades earlier to keep the mines from flooding because many aquifers of the seasonal river Palar, drained their waters to the deep levels of the mines. Rain water too quickly filled the main shafts. In its full working condition not only does a mine need to be ventilated with breathable air but also be kept free of flooding waters. Down the decades, the aging pumps had been maintained with loving care, dusted and cleaned, periodically painted and spruced up and kept in perfect working condition.

The first to go into a watery grave were the very pumps that could have saved the mine from the flooding. The deepest levels were allowed to be claimed by the waters first, submerged to rust, to decay and fall apart by the relentless and increasing presence of water. Also drowned were the electrical distribution boards, haulage winches, control stations, lights and fans, even battery charging stations.

Still work was being carried out, away from the flooded areas. That was possible because most working arrangements were decentralised, each mine had, on an average 12 shafts. Several mechanical and electrical systems that were in place for mining were independent and autonomous. The main hoists were still working. The pumps at the higher working levels were still energised.

On 1st March 2001, everything shut down, to fall into a deathly silence. The water crept up steadily ever higher, not encountering any pumping action to counter it. The winches and the winzes went under, the hoists and bucket bandies drowned, the producing stopes, (the places from where the gold bearing ore were taken out), and the mined out blocks filled up, the compressor plant overwhelmed until all connections and contacts failed for ever. The main shafts met their nemesis in the relentless and ever rising flood. The water conquered all. The major mines and their many shafts were completely gone. If there was a payable ore still under the land, these mines could never ever be reopened to reach the ore. Even if other new mines were to be dug in the gold field, can one reach the gold that may still be present under the now drowned mines? Who was responsible for the death of the mines? Who can pinpoint?

Meanwhile the misery of the workers was moving them to seek justice through law courts. Those who had not availed of the Voluntary Retirement Scheme formed a collective, The Bharat Gold Mines All Employees Industrial Cooperative Society and took the government to Court, in 2002.

3100 employees were still with the company at the time of closure. They were not alone. Officers of the company joined them briefly to knock at the gates of the judiciary.

Joining the sixteen different labour unions were the powerful political parties, the grand old Congress party, the Communist Parties, and several regional parties in the long drawn out battle for reopening gold mining in Kolar.

CHAPTER 2

Gold is where you find it

They next separated the gold from the iron dust by inclining the board and with the hand passing water over the metallic sediment which adhered to it, a method which, from the superior specific gravity of the gold, drives the iron particles before it and leaves the heavier metal behind, just at the edge; where from the contrast with the dull colour of the iron, the gold dust appears perfectly distinct, (thus they recovered the gold) however small the quantity.….. Lieut John Warren of His Majesty’s 33rd Regiment of Foot.

It was a bracing day on the 17th of February 1802 C.E. Almost two centuries earlier.

Lieutenant John Warren of the British East India Company’s army was on an official mission. Like many of his colleagues, he was after personal fortune for self, in the land he and his country men would soon colonise through war and profit. He was marking the eastern boundary of the princely state of Mysore in South India. Specifically he was at the south side of the Yerrakonda hill about eight kilometres from the village of Marikuppam in Kolar district.

Mysore state had reverted back to the Wodeyar dynasty three years earlier, and the Wodeyar kings had an excellent and cordial relationship with the British. In 1799, there was a fortuitous turn for the Wodeyars who were until then overpowered and subdued. Tipu Sultan, a powerful ruler, hailed as ‘The Tiger of Mysore’ for his ferocious methods of war, who had a visceral hatred for the British and who waged four wars, the Anglo Mysore wars with them had been defeated and killed by the British troops in Srirangapatnam, his capital. The balance of power in peninsular south India had tilted in favour of the British to the detriment of the French at the end of the fourth Anglo Mysore war. The French were Tipu’s steadfast allies.

The curious lieutenant had other things on his mind as he was out on his private mission. He had heard a vague report of gold being found somewhere near Yerrakonda. Though he did not carry a prospector’s pick, his mind was on prospecting for the noblest of all metals, gold.

The landscape was treeless, sparse, stony and broken by hillocks. Some thorny shrubs grew here and there. The great system of irrigation tanks built by the ancient kings of the Chola dynasty with interconnected canals that made the best possible use of the sparse rain that fell in the district was falling into disrepair. For thousands of years, the huge mass of land, India had yielded interest for travellers and traders. It had attracted the spiritually inclined and the young adventurers. Its lofty mountains, primeval forests and waterfalls and the strong monsoonal winds and rain were sources of delight to gladden anyone. Along the coasts the monsoons drenched every square inch of land