Health / Reportage

Choking to Death

Silica dust from India’s industries is killing its workers

Ramdev Jatav, a resident of the Karauli area in Rajasthan, in April 2024. Jatav is in his forties, and hails from a Scheduled Caste community. He developed silicosis in his mid-thirties, owing to nearly two decades of consistent exposure to silica dust at a stone quarry where he worked. Sibtain Hyder for The Caravan
Ramdev Jatav, a resident of the Karauli area in Rajasthan, in April 2024. Jatav is in his forties, and hails from a Scheduled Caste community. He developed silicosis in his mid-thirties, owing to nearly two decades of consistent exposure to silica dust at a stone quarry where he worked. Sibtain Hyder for The Caravan
Akhilesh Pandey
01 September, 2024

The reporting for this piece was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.


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MILAN PATRA was 22 years old when he moved to Jharkhand, in around 2016. He hailed from a poor family in the Rai Paria village of Jhargram district, in the Jangalmahal region in West Bengal. Patra had never received an education, and there were no opportunities for work around his village. Like many others in the area, he travelled several hundred kilometres away from home to work, as a daily-wage labourer at a ramming-mass factory in Jharkhand. Ramming mass is a type of powder compound used to line furnaces in steel factories. Patra’s job was to fill the powder into sacks and to load them into storage.