Lachhu Lal Gond has spent past eight years visiting hospitals. The frail 45-year-old often vomits blood while eating or coughing and requires frequent hospitalisation. Between September and December 2024, he was admitted thrice to the government hospital in Panna district of Madhya Pradesh. Gond has already spent more than Rs 5 lakh on his treatment, including a loan of Rs 2.5 lakh that remains unpaid. “I do not have money now. I am trying to sell my land to arrange money for treatment,” he says.
Gond is a resident of Bador village that lies just outside the Panna Tiger Reserve, in the buffer zone between the forest and the city. He worked in sandstone mines near the reserve for 17 years before quitting in 2016. He used to carry out drilling operations to extract slabs of stones, unwittingly inhaling the dust spewed in the process. In 2016, when he started facing difficulty in breathing and walking, along with cough and fatigue, he went to a tuberculosis hospital in the neighbouring district Chhatarpur and started re-ceiving treatment. From 2016 to 2022, he took tuberculosis medicines given by hospitals in Chhatarpur, Rewa and Panna, but his health kept deteriorating. In 2022, he went to a private hospital in Jhansi, where he was diagnosed with silicosis.
Another test at a hospital in Jabalpur in 2024 said his ailment was silicotuberculosis—silicosis and tuberculosis.
Silicosis is an incurable chronic disease of the lungs that develops due to inhalation of fine particles of silica (SiO2)—a compound of the two most abundant elements in Earth’s crust, silicon and oxygen. It is caused by absorption of tiny silica particles (smaller than 10 microns) by macrophages—cells that protect the body from bacterial infections—in the lungs. Since macrophages cannot process silica, it kills them. These dead cells accumulate and form nodules of fibrous tissue that enlarge over time, reducing lung volume and gas exchange. People with silicosis are also at a higher risk of developing tuberculosis or lung cancer.
Workers employed in mining, construction, stone quarries, glass factories, manufacturing ramming mass (a heat insulator composed of fine silica dust particles), slate-pencil units, ceramics and pottery are vulnerable to the disease since these industries have high levels of silica dust. “There is no way to dislodge silica particles from the lungs. Hence silicosis is incurable and fatal ...
This was first published in the 1-15 April, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth