By Roli Srivastava
MUMBAI, Oct 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Born and raised in a coal mining area of eastern India, Devi Prasad Mishra’s career goal was set early in life: to become a mining engineer.
“My father was a police officer and he saw mining engineers get a lot of respect in our town. He wanted me to become one,” said Mishra, associate professor at the Dhanbad-based Indian Institute of Technology, formerly the Indian School of Mines, now known as IIT (ISM).
The institute – where Mishra did his master’s degree in mining, fulfilling his father’s dream – is now preparing students for careers beyond coal as jobs in the sector shrink.
Mishra said the course material for his mining engineer’s qualification had now become interdisciplinary, with the addition of new technology, data analytics and software.
“We need to prepare students for changing industry requirements and make them relevant for non-mining jobs,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The mining profession in India faces similar challenges as in the rest of the world: companies seeking skills to ramp up coal production amid shortages near term, but an overall loss of coal-sector employment and ambitious green goals that hold the promise of thousands of jobs in clean energy and related areas.
For engineering colleges, this means conventional mining learning must undergo a make-over to include mechanisation and software design of mines to maximise production today, even as it prepares students for a future in other industries.
To that end, India’s once coal-centred mining programmes have introduced subjects such as solar energy, robotics and even space mining on other mineral-rich planets.
“We anticipate more automation in mining and demand for more skilled jobs. Companies will need specialists,” said Rajiv Shekhar, director of the IIT (ISM).
The school has modified its curriculum so that students who have taken mining courses are equipped for jobs in other sectors like information technology or investment banking, he added.
NEW SKILLS
India, the world’s second biggest coal-producing country and its fifth largest for coal deposits, aims to install 450 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy capacity by 2030, after reaching 100GW this year.
A 2019 study by Indian researchers said India’s renewable energy sector could employ more than 3.2 million people by 2050 – up to five times more than its fossil fuel industry today.
The workforce of state-run Coal India Limited, which accounts for about 80% of India’s coal hires, has shrunk to 270,000 from 700,000 in the last four decades, owing to the use of more machinery and outsourcing of mining jobs.
The buzz in college corridors during placement seasons, when entire batches of mining graduates were recruited in one go, has faded as the trend began declining from around 2015.
“It was then we started telling students to explore other industry sectors such as data analytics or business management,” said professor Amit Verma, who handled mining placements at IIT (ISM) from 2014-2018 and now works at the IIT-Banaras Hindu University.
