Salt mining leaves bitter taste for Indian workers

By Rupam Jain Nair, in Little Rann of Kutch for AFP Published: 11:17AM GMT twenty-four February 2010

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A salt workman in the Khadaghoda zone of the Little Rann of Kutch. Photo: AFP/SAM PANTHAKY

In India"s salt-producing area thousands of family groups - together with immature kids as immature as 10 - grind in the dried utilizing a harvesting technique unvaried in centuries.

India is the world"s third greatest writer of salt after China and the US, supervision total suggest, and about 70 per cent of the nineteen to twenty million tons it produces annually comes from the horse opera state of Gujarat.

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In Little Rann of Kutch, a empty brownish-red dried and internal centre of internal salt production, an estimated 200,000 people work barefoot in impassioned hardship, unprotected to a relentless object and critical occupational dangers.

Pola Degama and his mom have been raking salt in Gujarat"s dried since they were children, digging wells to pull the sea groundwater to the aspect afterwards relying on evaporation to leave the white crystals.

Several block salt pans distortion subsequent to the shed where his family of 6 lives.

"Because we work in the saltpans, the feet turn putrid or toxic and they catch the salt. Nobody lives some-more than 50 or 60 years," he said.

Even after death, he says, saltpan workers humour an degrading fate: their hands and feet are formidable to bake during cremation since of the salt content.

Wages are low and suggest couple of chances for the immature kids of saltpan workers to shun a cycle of misery and bad health.

Most have the annual outing to Little Rann of Kutch each Oct to Jun from villages on the corner of the desert, where they outlay the monsoon season.

"What will happen? My incident is the same as my old man"s. And my kids" will sojourn the same as mine," Degama said.

Salt from Gujarat has a special place in Indian history, carrying played a consequential purpose in the country"s passing from one to another from British cluster to eccentric republic in 1947.

Mahatma Gandhi used a rarely without a friend British corner on the prolongation of salt to convene await for his autonomy movement.

He led a impetus to Dandi on the Gujarat seashore in 1930 and constructed salt by hot murky seawater, enlivening others to do the same, inspiring drawn out polite disobedience.

But decades later, hold up stays oppressive for the salt miners.

Local traders buy low-quality crystals for as small as 50 US cents for 100 kilograms (220 pounds). Higher peculiarity furnish can sell for 4 to 6 US dollars for the same weight.

"We furnish the infancy critical food ingredient, but we are never since importance. Poverty is the fate," complained Daya Ranto, a 48-year-old father of three.

Navigation is so formidable here in the featureless flatland that internal people have devised a information exchnage complement utilizing shards of counterpart to simulate light messages to each other.

Overland transport is especially by feet or on mutated single-cylinder Royal Enfield motorbikes that zip opposite sandy marks in the burst earth.

"We simulate the counterpart to vigilance each alternative at your convenience we get lost here," says Ranto. "Here, asking for directions is a fatuous practice as there are no pointer play or any turning point to guide," he added.

Sukh Dev, a human rights romantic who runs seventeen initial schools for immature kids in the desert, says a infancy of the workers in use in the industry are inexperienced and humour from critical work-related health problems.

"It is unpleasant to see how people grind and die. Children begin operative at a immature age. The salt and the object inflict measureless repairs on their health," he said.

A investigate conducted by The National Institute of Occupational Hazards in 2000 found that eye problems and blindness were caused by the heated thoughtfulness of the object from the H2O surface.

Exposure to salt additionally causes skin lesions between the workers.

The supervision provides cheap rubber boots and gloves to the salt workers, but they wear out fast and are occasionally replaced.

In the state collateral Ahmedabad, D.L. Meena, the emissary salt supervision official says that the authorities yield assistance for the labourers.

"Gujarat and the Indian supervision are you do a lot to good them. They have set up a healing van, and they embrace glasses and gloves."

The state additionally provides uninformed H2O to the workers once a week, but there are couple of healing comforts and no government-run schools or shops for uninformed vegetables, beef or dairy products

"Potato and roti (thin wheat bread) is all we eat for eight months. Children never get to splash milk," says Saku Degama, Pola Degama"s mom and mom of their 4 children.

Ambhu Patel, a amicable activist, has created 3 books on the lives of salt workers, most of whom contend they would gladly take alternative work but feel they have no choice.

Legally, they live in limbo. The area is a wildlife sanctuary, home to the world"s last race of Indian wild ass, a sort of donkey, creation them technically encroachers.

Patel says harvesting salt has been a abuse for generations.

"There is a observant here that if you"re a saltpan worker, you have 3 ways to die: initial gangrene, second TB (tuberculosis) or third blindness. In each house, people die this way."