Summary
Singareni Collieries Company Limited, the coal company jointly owned by Telangana and the Centre, now deploys women in explosives handling, mine rescue, heavy-vehicle training and underground supervision. The shift was enabled by a 2019 Labour Ministry notification that relaxed Section 46 of the Mines Act, 1952.
SCCL first sent women underground in December 2024. The numbers remain small: of 2,199 women employees, 112 work underground. The company also places its own limits on that work: a single daytime shift, groups of at least three women and some entry through dependent employment.
These raise the question of whether protection is still shaping and capping, women's place in core mining work.
WHY IT MATTERS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS
A ground report from SCCL's Khairagura opencast project and RK-7 underground mine shows women in blasting, mine rescue and supervisory roles. The company's own figures show how few women have yet reached underground work. The report revives a long-running UPSC theme: whether protective labour laws empower women or exclude them and how this links to India's low female participation in industrial jobs.
Standard News
The Gate Reopened at the Top, Not Where It Was Shut In February 1937, a
colonial notification ordered women out of the underground workings of India's coal mines. The workers it removed were not engineers. They were loaders, overwhelmingly adivasi and low-caste women from Bengal and Bihar, who carried the coal their husbands cut.
Historians estimate that the prohibition pushed about 40,000 women out of underground work. Six years later, the same state changed its mind. In 1943, with the war effort running short of coal, the ban was lifted in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and the Central Provinces, with conditions attached: equal wages for equal work and no women in galleries lower than six feet.
By 1945, more than 22,000 women were back below ground. In 1946, once the emergency had passed, the prohibition returned. The lesson of that decade is uncomfortable. The state let women underground when it needed their labour, attached conditions that sounded protective and withdrew permission once the need was gone.
Protection and exclusion turned out to be the same instrument.
2019: A
Second Opening, Again With Conditions This is not new. The 2019 notification under Section 46 of the Mines Act, 1952 reopened the gate in a familiar way. Women may now work underground in technical, supervisory and managerial roles between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m., but only with written consent, only in groups of at least three and only under SOPs based on DGMS guidelines.
Singareni Collieries Company Limited first sent women underground in December 2024, as Management Trainees serving as Under Managers. Its figures show how narrow the opening still is:
- Women hold 2,199 of 39,743 jobs, about 5.5 percent.
- Only 112 of those women work underground; 2,087 are in opencast mines.
Where the Parallel Breaks and What That Reveals
A parallel that holds perfectly is usually wrong and this one does not. The 1937 ban closed the bottom of the mine's hierarchy, the loaders. The 2019 opening came at the top: supervisors and engineers with degrees.
The women who lost their place nine decades ago and the women now returning come from different classes of work entirely. The conditions have also multiplied rather than eased. By its own account, SCCL deploys women only in the general shift, 7.30 a.m. to 3 p.m., which is narrower than the window the 2019 law allows.
Below ground, at least three women must work together. Some non-officer women enter through the dependent quota, after a father leaves service. Each rule is defensible on its own. Together, they make a woman's presence underground depend on headcount and hours rather than on the job she is trained to do.
A mine that cannot assemble three women for a shift cannot send one.
Quick Facts
Key numbers & takeaways — revise these first
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Section 46 of the Mines Act, 1952 barred women from below-ground work and restricted their above-ground hours.
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Notification S.O. 506(E) of 29 January 2019 allowed women underground in technical, supervisory and managerial roles between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. and in opencast mines at night.
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Conditions of the 2019 exemption include written consent, groups of at least three women and SOPs based on DGMS guidelines.
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SCCL is jointly owned by the Telangana government (51 percent) and the Government of India (49 percent).
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SCCL has 39,743 employees and runs 17 opencast and 22 underground mines across six Telangana districts.
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SCCL produced 69.01 million tonnes of coal in 2024-25.
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India ratified ILO Convention 45 (1935), which barred women from underground work, in 1938.
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The ILO abrogated the convention in 2024.
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India has not ratified ILO Convention 176 on Safety and Health in Mines (1995).
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Female Labour Force Participation Rate under PLFS 2023-24 was 41.7 percent.
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The Directorate General of Mines Safety functions under the Ministry of Labour and Employment.
Connect the dots for your UPSC preparation.
Standard news covers the event. Log in to read our comprehensive analysis and uncover the hidden constitutional, structural, and ethical dimensions of this topic:
How dependent-quota entry ties a woman's mining job to a male relative's exit and why that limits growth in core roles
Why SCCL's single-shift rule is narrower than the 2019 notification itself and what that costs women's careers
How Rio Tinto's change in job advertising drew women into haul-truck training, set against SCCL's dumper programme
A risk-based rather than gender-based safety framework, including the case for ratifying ILO Convention 176
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