The silent mines of Kolar Gold Fields

Robertsonpet Shigmani Devraj, 54, is overcome with emotion as he talks of the days he spends doing nothing. It's been nearly 11 months since he donned his miner's helmet, got on a creaky elevator and descended nearly a mile under the earth. This is all he did for 36 years. This is all he knows. ''We do not know what to do now,'' says Devraj wearily as he sits on a cardboard box that is the main seating in his ancestral ''house''-a zinc-roofed small room that's partitioned into two by a dirty, cotton curtain. This is where his father stayed. And his father.

Yet, he cannot call this shanty-official quarters for nearly 11,000 miners-home. Devraj's shoebox home, like almost everything in this mining town, is owned by the Bharat Gold Mines Ltd (BGMl). Once known as the home of Champion Reef, the deepest mine shaft in the world, the town is called Kolar Gold Fields (kgf). It's just 72 km east of Bangalore, but the distance to the new India from this dying outpost of a past industrial era seems unbridgeable.

Death Of A Company Town

FAILED: A desperate management tried, unsuccessfully, to manufacture railway wagons to stay afloat

EMPTY: The brass fittings, imported silver cutlery, and the people, have disappeared from Kolar Club

ENDGAME: His livelihood gone forever, former miner Muniswamy is teaching himself to run a petty shop

When KGF officially shut down on March 1, 2001, it didn't just end a legacy of three, sometimes four, generations and throw thousands of miners out of work. It sounded the death knell of a town of 1.5 lakh, an economy that grew around the gold fields, and a way of life that's flourished since a retired British army officer sunk the first mine shaft in 1875. ''The curse of the gold has befallen us,'' says a grim Antony Raj, 43. ''Our forefathers came to work these mines to escape poverty, but we are back to where they began-in abject poverty.'' Mostly semi-literate Tamilians and some Telugus, the miners numbered 32,000 during the Second World War.

As the town blossomed at the turn of the last century, it was a beacon for this part of the southern hinterland. ''A general rush was made for gold,'' notes the Gazetteer of 1905. In 1902, it was the first Indian town to get hydroelectricity. It was the first to get its own railway branch line. In what was a desolate wasteland, there arose a town with its own schools, gracious bungalows, a hospital, and a sprawling 110-year-old clubhouse-its roof now punctured, its halls silent. There's even a golf course, overrun by weeds. And the hospital is closed.

The golden era doesn't seem that distant. Until last year, more than Rs 40,000 crore worth of gold had been extracted from this celebrated lode. Today, with accumulated losses of Rs 560 crore, it's hard to imagine the mines once contributed one-third of the revenues to the erstwhile Mysore state. With KGF regarded as an insignificant Tamil corner of modern Karnataka, no politician really cares. KGF's fate was inevitable. The mines were never profitable after nationalisation in 1956-by then 90 per cent of its easily reachable gold had been removed. bgml made profits only for three years, from 1979 to 1981, and only because of a spurt in international gold prices. In 1992, it was referred to the Board of Industrial Finance and Reconstruction, which recommended closure. Two VRS schemes have cut its workforce to 90 officers and 3,410 miners. With court battles underway-18 obdurate unions either demand that the mines be revived or they be paid high compensations, while the management believes all options have been exhausted-no salaries have been paid for 11 months.

It's not like there's no gold left in KGF. It's just too deep and difficult to remove. The market price for 10 grams of gold is around Rs 4,500, but the cost of extracting the same amount of KGF gold is Rs 22,000. In the glory days, every tonne of ore yielded 45 grams of gold. Today, you might get two grams.

Life Comes A Full, Miserable, circle

The closure of KGF left thousands unprepared for a life without the mines. Their severance package was simple: 45 days of pay for every year of service. Miner Devraj admits much of it was used to repay old debts, marry daughters, or simply drunk away. The evening tipple was always a part of the miner's life, a fallout of the hot, hard hours underground.

''We have tried our utmost to help the workers,'' says S. Sampath Kumar, 45, Manager (Engineering services), in charge of BGML in the absence of CMD S.D. Prasad, who officiates from his office-in New Delhi. Kumar says some were deployed to coal mines as far afield as Bihar and Jharkhand, but every Indian mine is overstaffed. BGML even tried its hand at making railway wagons, but unsurprisingly, it didn't work.

The miners are slipping back to the subsistence economy of their forefathers. The subsidised canteen is gone. Their wives wash clothes on the roads since subsidised power and electricity has been discontinued to 11,000 homes. KGF's trees, lovingly planted by the town's founders, are being chopped up for firewood-the latest blow in a town ravaged by the downside of mining. Water bodies have silted up and coconut trees have withered under a thick blanket of dust. Mine waste occupies 15 per cent of the town's land.

Antony Raj, 51, says the dying town just doesn't have a job for old miners like him. ''All we know is physical labour; with the construction sector down, who will employ us?" At the local India Full Gospel Fellowship Church, the pastor, Rev. Monovah Nickelson, 46, spends most of his time with relief work. ''The financial aspect of the problem reflects just one perspective,'' says Rev Nickelson. ''It is the emotional trauma, a sense of being abandoned by the State that is causing the most damage.'' With dismay, he reports an increased in theft, prostitution, alcoholism and a rise in suicides in his old town.

Yet, there are a handful who are scratching together a new life. Some raise poultry, others run tailoring shops, saloons, and grocery stalls. But these are only holding operations. No entrepreneurship can bloom since the town's land is literally owned by BGML. To set up anything is to run a daunting bureaucratic gauntlet.

So miner Yesudasan, 47, morphed into an electrician. He earns Rs 200 daily and has got his son to ply an autorickshaw after getting a bank loan. ''I decided to take the VRS scheme,'' says Yesudasan. But there is little business for him in a dying town. He commutes to Bangalore to offer his services as an itinerant electrician. The mines, Yesudasan knows, will never open again.