Memoirs of a Travel Fellow Chapter 4: A Landscape of Burning Coal – Jharkhand stories

Jharkhand was a brief—but unforgettable—stop on my fellowship journey. Jan Chetna Manch, Bokaro (JCMB)  is a small nonprofit focused on women’s health and empowerment, and it wasn’t even on my original itinerary. They urgently needed a doctor for a month; I arrived with a backpack and, admittedly, a lazy mood.

Within days, that mood evaporated. JCMB’s model of women‑centred maternity care contrasted starkly with the noisy, overcrowded, profit‑driven antenatal clinics and labour rooms I’d known in medical college. Here, community nurses—all of them from nearby villages—handled even complicated deliveries with calm expertise. Health workers cycled to pregnant women’s homes, offering education on nutrition, mental well‑being, birth preparedness, and postpartum support. Their training workshops examined each “medical” issue through social and political lenses: patriarchy, poverty, caste, and land rights were discussed as readily as haemoglobin levels.

After a month, one question still echoed in my mind ,’Where is the scientific middle ground between over‑pathologising pregnancy and romanticising “normal” childbirth?’ Too much intervention can be as harmful as too little; finding that balance is the real art of evidence‑based care.

Every woman at JCMB had a story-often stepping across patriarchal boundaries to claim autonomy. Listening to them was inspiring, but something else disturbed me even more than the usual “women’s issues.” It was the omnipresent coal.

Bokaro sits amid active and abandoned coalfields. At dawn, I watched endless bicycles wobble past, each loaded with bulging sacks of coal. Entire families—children included—collect coal from pits, haul it across the river, and sell it in town. On our field visits, nearly every kitchen burned that same coal for cooking, blackening walls and lungs alike. Respiratory illnesses were evident and our dietary advice that often felt futile when even meals were cooked over toxic fuel.

I kept reading news reports of workers dying in “illegal” pits—sometimes from sudden blasts, sometimes from slow asphyxiation. The contradictions were hard to ignore: coal kept burning  while slowly destroying the same bodies it fed.

Who forces ordinary people into ‘illegal’ mining?

Who turned these hills into pits?

Who displaced their ancestors?

Who dried up their fields?

And yet we call them illegal. Do we?

Those questions, scribbled in my diary ,still have no easy answers. But JCMB taught me that genuine public health isn’t just about medicines and metrics; it’s about power, land, labour, and whose lungs are allowed to breathe clean air.