Several women at CIL excel as heavy drill machine operators

Diamonds are but chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs, said Malcolm Forbes, the man who spawned an empire chronicling tales of grit and glory. Well, tell that to Damyanti Devi, a 29-year-old widow from one of India's poorest districts, whose daily job is to ensure that coal sticks to its job of being coal enough so that the rest of India can live in light.Damyanti is a woman who dared into a territory where until recently one had to be man enough to survive, let alone succeed. She is a coal driller operator, a daily chore that involves maneuvering a machine that's larger than two trucks combined and has multiple controls that drills into the coal seams making way for explosives to blast the fossil fuel.
The eight-standard pass lost her husband 10 years ago, but has managed to keep her kids in school - her eldest kid is in the 11th now - thanks to the income from her job at Kendla open cast project at Hazaribagh area under Central Coalfields.And taking a cue from the initiative shown by the likes of Damyanti, the 3.8 lakh-strong Coal India staff has started a project to identify women who have the interest and knack for operating complex machines that operate in mines or take up jobs in workshop.Hadoop on your PC: Cloudera's CDH4 virtual machine.As of now, there are just three more women in this field apart from Damyanti.
Damyanti Devi, however, did not go through any formal training for operating a drill. "I used to assist a shovel operator at one of the mines in Central Coalfields. I used to stand behind the operator and watch what he was doing. It took me about eight days to learn how to operate the vehicle. Later, a manager at the mine, Sanjay Kumar, asked me if I wanted to learn how to operate a drill machine. I was a little afraid at the time since it was a huge machine, but I gathered some courage and decided to learn," Damyanti told ET."Damyanti took about a month to learn operation of the complex machine. She is now an expert and is, in fact, teaching Sangeeta Devi (32), a woman who also lost her husband a couple of years ago," said Ashok Kumar, manager-personnel at Central Coalfields."In most cases employees recruited on compassionate ground against employees working in mines take up menial jobs of safai karmachari or peon as category 1 general mazdoor. It is only a few women like Damyanti Devi, Sangeeta Devi, Dharani Devi and Thotoiyaganjhu who have shown interest in taking up jobs that are generally the forte of guys in mines. Of course, mine managers have played a big role in encouraging them to take up the jobs," said Dr Kiran.