In this era, there is a ‘village of widows’ in India too
In Telangana’s there is a mining town at Elkatta, that has been known to be called as ‘village of widows’.
Elkatta is a dusty village, 5 km from Shadnagar, in Telangana’s Ranga Reddy district (earlier in Mahbubnagar district) where quartz mining used to occur in the 1970s. It also had a crushing factory where these stones were crushed to powder form. The fine powder dust exposed the employees working there to silica. Soon the workers started having problems that led to slow death leaving behind young widows.
Around the year 1500, in the Carpathian Mountains in Central and Eastern Europe, mining was very common. Agricola (born as Georg Bauer), a physician was appointed to the mining town of Jochimstral in the Swiss mountains.
Agricola, in his treatise De re mettalica goes on to say “Some mines are so dry that they are entirely devoid of water and this dryness causes the workmen even greater harm, for the dust, which is stirred and beaten up by digging, penetrates into the windpipe and lungs, and produces difficulty in breathing and the disease the Greeks call asthma. If the dust has corrosive qualities, it eats away the lungs and implants consumption in the body. In the Carpathian mountains women are found who have married seven husbands, all of whom this terrible consumption has carried off to a premature death.”
Read more: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/telanganas-villages-of-widows/article25914226.ece
The significance of Occupational Health is as important and noble as it was since human beings have existed, but is sadly least understood by law makers especially in developing countries!
