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Coal is bid for in e-auction (spot or forward) by buyers (or traders) who bid from their offices, say in New Delhi. The bidding portals are www.mstc.com and www.coaljunction.com. Once the registration is done and after the payment of an initial fee, the buyer receives an e-signature, username and password for future transactions. The bidding takes place monthly whenever CIL makes coal available in a given colliery. Buyers need to select the CIL’s subsidiary and the specific colliery and decide the quantity s/he wants to purchase. Once the bid is accepted, CIL issues a delivery order (DO) upon submitting an earnest money deposit to the buyer. The buyer is then mandated to collect his rightfully owned coal from the colliery within 45 days, failing which his earnest money deposit is forfeited. The transportation and collection is the prerogative of the buyer.

69 _{It must be mentioned here that other than the extortion of money from private coal buyers, the mafia operates}

through a few more channels. Illegal mining is one of the visible acts amongst them and does not fall into my focus. Illegal or informal mining involves manual mining of coal from small, abandoned mines by poor families and loading them onto bicycles over long stretches to sell. Survey estimates suggest that in 2003-04, 2.5 million tons of coal was transported by cycles (Lahiri-Dutt, 2007, p. 57-58). This stealth of coal takes place under the mafia’s supervision (Daniel and Williams, 2013) and its sociological constructs have been the focus of some studies by Kuntala Lahiri- Dutt and her co-authors. See also, Lahiri-Dutt and Williams (2005).

70 _{25% of the e-auction äeme is dedicated to forward auction. See Narayan (2008).}

71 _{In contrast, under FSA, 85.39% of coal was sold to generate 75.5% of sales revenue (the remaining coal was used}

The collection of coal from colliery is exactly where the mafia comes into the picture. My fieldwork revealed that the process of collecting the coal also involves bribing many agents at each step of the process. A typical process then takes place as follows (a schematic diagram is found in Figure 2)72:

Step 1: The buyer/trader sends for his transporter and representative (usually the representative is an agent in Dhanbad who helps the process go – he is usually called agent, and agents serve many clients who could be buyer or traders) for collecting the designated coal. The agent may not travel with the truck/transporter, but signals his involvement to people in the chain through phone calls, so everyone knows the truck is associated with a given known agent.

Step 2: The truck arrives at the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) gate to collect an entry

slip.

Step 3: The truck goes to the weighbridge for measuring its empty-weight (later they measure the weight of the loaded truck and difference tells them amount of coal lifted from the colliery). The weighbridge is run by the government (BCCL). There, the driver submits the entry slip and collects a weight slip.

Step 4: The truck now arrives at the colliery, where the driver meets loading in charge. The latter takes the weight slip and issues a loading slip.

Step 5: Inside the colliery a mafia representative is stationed. He looks at the loading slip, which mentions the quantity of coal the buyer is entitled to. He collects a tax, called GT, which in the local language is the abbreviation of gunda tax, loosely translated as ‘goon tax’. It is often called

rangadari and the tax collectors – mafia – are called rangadars). It ranges from Rs.2000-3000 per

truck (as a matter of comparison, the State’s minimum wage for unskilled workers is approximately Rs. 180 daily, or for a 25 days month, Rs. 4500 monthly).73 Once the payment is

72 _{Except step 5, all other processes work under the ambit of the state. In other words, everyone else is a salaried}

employee of the BCCL and therefore payments made to them are simply illegal from the point of view of corruption. My focus here is on step 5.

73 _{The mafia’s influence is not limited to trucks alone. Collieries with proximity to railway lines are connected}

directly to rake-loading infrastructure (a goods train is called as rake). In these collieries as well, the procedure is almost the same. The value of GT for an entire rake varies between Rs. 200,000 and Rs. 300,000. The bribe by various BCCL officials also inflates in a rake transport, simply because the quantum of coal is much higher.

made in cash on the spot, the mafia’s representative instructs the laborers to load the truck with coal lying in heaps.

There is a very high degree of certainty of both the type of interaction and the value of bribes for a given buyer/trader. This is tied with each buyer’s repeated interaction. So even though the GT may vary from Rs.2000 to Rs.3000, for a given buyer/trader, it will be fixed in a given colliery.

Step 6: After the loading is complete, the driver collects the challan (receipt) from dispatch officer. The latter charges a bribe ranging from Rs 200-300 for each challan.

Step 7: The challan is then taken to the loading in charge, who approves the same, inspects the truck with coal, and charges a bribe ranging from Rs.50-100.

Step 8: There is an exit point of the colliery where CISF personnel monitor entry and exit. At the exit, the CISF personnel charges his bribe of Rs.10-20 for each truck that passes through.

Step 9: The truck returns to the weighbridge, where the loaded truck is weighted and load slip issued. The personnel at weighbridge then charges Rs.250-300 per truck as his bribe.

Step 10: The truck exits through the CISF check post, where a bribe of Rs.10-50 is paid. From here, the truck leaves the mining area for the buyer’s/trader’s factory.

What service does the mafia provide for the money that it extorts from the coal buyers? The colliery has enormous hills of coal lined up, with coal and other coal lookalike stones bundled up together. There is very little technological intervention. The process is laborious with men carrying heaps of coal from the gigantic coal heaps, and unloading them in the truck with pay-loaders (big trucks used for loading and unloading purposes) and also manually. Sometimes, they load it on the pay-loader which loads it into the truck. It is extremely important for the buyer to get only the coal and not stones. This sorting is manual and laborers’ efforts are crucial to do this. If the buyer doesn’t pay the GT, the mafia may either instruct the laborers not to load the truck, or have them load the truck indiscriminately, with both coal and stones. The GT therefore is the price the buyer pays for sorting and selecting good quality coal from a heap of coal and other stones.

The mafia operates through their labor cartel in these collieries. Laborers obey them scrupulously. This is possible because of the mafia’s union leadership connections. Most big mafias of the region are union leaders themselves. Their organization is run through their middle management, which

comes in the form of sardars, who supervise the labor, instruct them as agents of union leaders and maintain direct links with the laborers. The way they operate and extort money from coal buyers is not through violence, but by offering a service. They are able to provide this service because of their control over laborers of the region. They also share part of these rents with the laborers. And needless to mention, owing to the union’s presence, it is impossible for the individual buyer or even group of buyers to bring in their own laborers.74

Figure 2: Flowchart of Coal-trading in Dhanbad mafia-infested collieries. Source: Author’s fieldwork

74 _{While the abovementioned process is the predominant mode by which the mafia enters the regulatory space in the}

Dhanbad coal mines, there are other ways. For instance, in a few mines, the dominance of some mafia groups is sustained through different forms of coercion. In the Barora area, buyers/traders do not enter the mine. Only traders win the auction and they are coerced to sell their DOs to the mafia gang members at the trading point in Katras Mod, near Jharia, at a price higher than they paid for it. The mafia then sells the coal directly to interested buyer at any price they choose to do so, pocketing the difference.