With women making giant strides in empowering their lot, Tata Steel’s Noamundi Iron Mine in Jharkhand is set to witness an all-women team taking over the entire mining process from next year. It will be the first time that the entire process in a day will be handled by women.
As per the plans, the company has decided to deploy its women team for entire mining operations from drilling, dumper, and shovel operations in all shifts.
Tata Steel had earlier this year deployed the first batch of 22 women HEMM (Heavy Earth Moving Machinery) operators at its Noamundi Iron mine in all the shifts. Named ‘Tejaswini 2.0’, the programme has been designed to provide technical training to unskilled women workers and enable them to work in core jobs at mines.
Earlier, in September 2019, Tata Steel had become the first company in the country to deploy women in all shifts in mining operations after modifications in the law permitting women deployment in all three shifts.
While interacting with the media at Noamundi, Atul Kumar Bhatnagar, general manager, OMQ Division, Tata Steel, said: “ We are waiting for the day when the entire mining operations in a day will be carried out by our women team. We are hopeful that at the beginning of the New Year we will be able to achieve the target.”
He went on to inform that Tata Steel always strives to provide more opportunities to women. The objective behind the initiative is to enhance gender diversity in the workplace, particularly in a challenging sector like mining.
The general manager also added that Tata Steel started mining at Noamundi in 1925. Noamundi Iron Mine will be completing 100 years of mining in 2025. The current production of Noamundi Iron Mine is about 9 MnTPA. Total production of iron ore from Tata Steel`s captive mines is about 30 MnTPA (this includes Noamundi, Katamati, Joda and Khondbond). In the next five years, Tata Steel will focus on augmenting iron ore production capacity from 30 MnTPA to 45 MnTPA in line with the expansion in the steel making capacities in India. This will be achieved by increasing the capacity of existing iron ore mines at Noamundi, Katamati, Joda and Khondbobd in Jharkhand and Odisha.
Bhatnagar also informed that the present capacity is sufficient to meet the requirements of iron ore in our steel manufacturing locations at Jamshedpur and Kalinganagar.
He also informed that drones in mining are used for surveying and monitoring purposes such as stock measurement, quantitative survey of volumes excavated from mine, face surveying, dump yard monitoring, lease boundary monitoring, green belt monitoring, high resolution photography and videography.
