The reporting for this piece was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
I
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.
In less than a year, he fell seriously ill. He developed breathing troubles and a nasty, persistent, cough. He was always exhausted, finding it difficult to get through even a few hours of work. He began losing weight. Patra was scared—workers often discussed among themselves stories of colleagues who developed breathing troubles and left, never to return. Many, they had heard, died of their illness. Fearing for his life, he decided to leave his job and return to his village. There was no hospital nearby but he travelled to some health centres in the district, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and prescribed medicines for his condition.