The women surviving in the shadow of Bangladesh's biggest coal project

The smell hits you before anything else. It is thick and metallic, shot through with something older and more organic — the particular stench of water that has carried the entrails of industry for two decades. The drainage channel that runs alongside the Barapukuria coal mine in Dinajpur does not appear on any map of economic activity in Bangladesh. 

It appears in no labour registry, no occupational health report, and no government survey of the region's workforce. Yet, on any given day of the week, more than 30 women stand knee-deep in it, their hands working beneath the dark surface, pulling coal sludge from the silt.

Morsheda Begum, 58, has been coming to this channel since her youngest child was just learning to walk. That child now has children of her own. Morsheda's hands, calloused and stained a permanent grey at the knuckles, move through the water with the muscle memory of someone who long ago stopped thinking about the motion. 

She collects, sifts, and deposits. Collects, sifts, deposits.

"People think this is shameful work," she says, not looking up. "Let them think so. I have never borrowed money from a neighbour. I have never sent my grandchildren to bed hungry. Can the people who feel shame about my work say the same thing?"

Each morning, the women arrive before 8am. They come in groups — eight groups in total, each with 25 to 30 members — and the rotation is strict.

The Barapukuria Coal Mining Company is a state-owned enterprise — one of Bangladesh's flagship energy projects, extracting coal from the country's only operating underground mine. It is, by any institutional measure, a development success story. Its surrounding villages, though, tell a different story.

Each morning, the women arrive before 8am. They come in groups — eight groups in total, each with 25 to 30 members — and the rotation is strict. Every group works one day a week. On that day, they work for 12 hours. There is no contract, no supervisor, and no safety equipment. There is only the understanding among themselves about who goes when, and the unspoken knowledge that the system must not collapse, because collapse here means hunger.

Rashida Khatun, 47, is one of the younger women in her group. She started a decade ago after her husband suffered a back injury that ended his work as a day labourer. She describes those early months with the matter-of-fact terseness of someone who has fully processed a crisis and moved on.

"I didn't know anything about this work at first. Another woman brought me. I watched how they did it, and then I did it myself. Within a few weeks, I was faster than some of the older ones." She laughs, a sound that does not quite fit the surroundings. "You learn quickly when you have no other choice."

What they are collecting is coal sludge: fine fragments of coal that are washed out of the mining process and carried through the drainage channel as waste. The mine has no use for it. For the women, it is a livelihood, and the operation, for all its informality, runs with a precision that any manager might recognise.

Within each group of 25 to 30 members, labour is divided and fixed. Some women climb down into the drain itself, holding nets against the current to trap the passing sludge. Others remain on the bank above, hauling out what accumulates in the nets. 

Some are assigned to guard and supervise the growing pile of collected coal; others keep watch on the surroundings, alert of anyone who might interfere. No member moves between roles, and no member moves between groups. The system is rigid because rigidity, here, is a form of fairness.

People think this is shameful work. Let them think so. I have never borrowed money from a neighbour. I have never sent my grandchildren to bed hungry. Can the people who feel shame about my work say the same thing?

Morsheda Begum, 58

By the end of a 12-hour day, a single team will have accumulated around 14 to 15 maunds — roughly 550 to 600 kilograms — of coal sludge piled beside the drain. Suppliers, most of them connected to nearby brick kilns, come to purchase it directly, paying Tk450 to Tk500 per maund. 

The coal, once transported to the kilns, is used as fuel for firing bricks. One team's daily haul is worth somewhere between Tk7,000 and Tk8,000. Across the month, with eight teams rotating through their assigned days, the total value of coal extracted from the channel and fed into the local economy exceeds Tk2 lakh.

The earnings are divided among team members with rough equality — regardless of role, each woman takes home Tk250 to Tk300 for the day. It is not much. But the equity of it matters to them.

By the end of a 12-hour day, a single team will have accumulated around 14 to 15 maunds — roughly 550 to 600 kilograms — of coal sludge piled beside the drain.

This informal economy did not emerge from nowhere. Locals say it began roughly 20 years ago, shortly after the mine expanded its operations and the volume of wastewater flowing through the channel increased significantly. 

Women — not men — organised it. They established the group system, the rotation, and the informal rules about conduct and territory. No one appointed them. No NGO facilitated it. No development programme funded it. It simply grew, from necessity, into something functional.

Rina Akhter, 52, has been part of that structure almost from the beginning. She remembers the early years, when the groups were smaller and less organised, and when disputes over working days sometimes turned bitter.

"We sorted it out ourselves," she says. "We had to. Nobody was going to sort it out for us. We made rules. We enforced them. Now, mostly, it works."

What she describes — with no particular pride, simply as fact — is a self-governed labour system. It is informal, unprotected, and entirely female. Ask why men are not involved, and the women offer different theories: that the work is considered beneath male dignity; that men have access to other informal labour markets, however marginal; and that the physical nature of the work, which involves standing in water for hours rather than lifting and hauling, somehow became coded as women's work. 

Whatever the origin, the result is a workforce entirely composed of women, ranging from their 40s to their late 60s, sustaining an economy that the formal world does not acknowledge.

The bitterest grievance is not the work itself. It is the locked gate 30 metres away.

The mine employs people for cleaning, sweeping, maintenance, and support functions. These are the lowest-paid jobs inside the facility — the jobs that, in any equitable economy, would logically go to the community immediately surrounding the mine. Instead, the women say, those positions are consistently filled by workers brought in from elsewhere.

Kulsum Banu, 61, has lived 200 metres from the mine entrance for her entire adult life. She raises her voice for the first time in our conversation when this subject comes up.

"We live next to this thing. We breathe its air. Our water tastes of it. Our children grew up with the sound of it. And they cannot even give us a sweeping job? A cleaning job? They bring someone from outside to clean their floors, and we stand in a sewage channel to survive. What kind of justice is that?"

A senior official of the Barapukuria Coal Mining Company, speaking on condition of anonymity, pushed back on the claim.

"Although I do not have the exact data with me, as far as I can recall, a total of 260 people work at the mine," he said. "Of them, 95% are local residents. Therefore, in my opinion, this claim is not accurate. Besides, we cannot recruit more workers than the mine actually requires. So, it is not possible for us to provide jobs to everyone."

The water the women work in is not simply dirty. The drainage channel carries industrial effluent from the mining operation, along with, by multiple accounts, human sewage. It is warm — unusually so, a by-product of the thermal processes underground — and the women have been standing in it long enough to have developed their own theories about what it does and does not do to the body.

Feroza Begum, 64, is among the oldest workers in her group. She has the slightly deliberate movements of someone who manages persistent pain without complaint, and she speaks with a knowing authority about the water's properties.

"People say the warm water keeps us from getting colds," she says. "And it's true — I haven't had a proper cold in years. The water keeps you warm in winter." She pauses. "But my skin. My legs. They are not what they were. There is itching that never fully stops. Sometimes, rashes. I don't talk about it much. What would talking change?"

The medical risks of prolonged exposure to contaminated water are well established: skin infections, fungal conditions, respiratory illnesses from inhaled particulates, and longer-term risks from heavy metals and other industrial compounds. None of the women have access to occupational health services. 

None has ever been examined in the context of her work. The belief that warm water is protective is not ignorance — it is the adaptive logic of people who have found one genuine comfort in a dangerous situation and allowed it to stand in for safety.

Amena Sultana, 55, is more blunt.

"My feet have not been right for five years. I have sores that come and go. I put medicine on them when I can afford it. When I cannot afford it, I put them back in the water and keep working."

The money the women earn disperses in quiet, essential directions: school fees, medicine, rice, and loan repayments. One woman is putting a grandson through secondary school. Another is caring for a bedridden husband. Several are the sole earners in households that include adult children who cannot find work. The income is meagre by any calculation, but in communities where formal employment is scarce and social safety nets are thin, it is the difference between managing and not.

Morsheda Begum, collecting again after a short break, puts it with characteristic directness: "If I stop coming here, my grandchildren will go hungry. It is that simple. I don't need anyone to feel sorry for me. I need someone to explain why the mine next door cannot give me a proper job."

As the afternoon light shifts and the water in the channel turns a dull bronze, the women work on. Their conversation is easy, punctuated by laughter, the occasional argument, and the comfortable rhythms of people who have spent years beside one another in difficult circumstances.

There is solidarity here — genuine, self-built, unromantic. Not the solidarity of a movement with demands and banners, but the quieter kind: the knowledge that the woman beside you understands exactly what this costs, and is here anyway.