T he mining industry is considered to be a male-dominated field. However, that did not deter Chandrani Verma from Vidarbha from pursuing her dream. It has been a tough fight but she has stuck with it and won her battle. At 39, she is the first Indian woman to complete a PhD in mining, according to the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT), Nagpur.
Verma’s father worked as a mining engineer in Western Coalfields Limited, in Chandrapur, Maharashtra. He would always tell her stories about what happened in the mines and it held her in thrall. One incident she recalls was when a fire broke out in the mines and her father was forced to remain in office for two days. She was impressed at the way her father and his colleagues had handled the situation. This further strengthened her resolve to work in the same field as her father.
Striving to succeed
When she was in Std. X, she decided to pursue a career in mining. After finishing her schooling in 1992, Verma completed her diploma in Mining and Mine Surveying from Nagpur’s Government Polytechnic College. She wanted to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in mining, but no engineering college would admit her.
“When I went for counselling for my admission in engineering, the professors were shocked to know that I was opting for mining and had ‘wasted’ one year just to do so. They kept insisting that it would be useless because I would not get a job after the course,” said Verma, in an interview. But neither Verma nor her family gave up. With the help of her father, she filed a petition on gender discrimination in education. The proceedings took a year, and in 1996, she got admission in the mining engineering course as a ‘special case’. She completed her B. E (Mining Engineering) from Ramdeobaba Engineering College, Nagpur and came first with merit, in 1999. Despite topping her course, she was not recruited for any mining job because she was a girl.
She started working as a lecturer and at the same time, continued to study. In 2006, she completed her Master’s in Mining Engineering (M.Tech) from VNIT, Nagpur, and in 2015, she completed her PhD on Web Pillar Design in Highwall Mining under the guidance of Dr. N. R. Thote, Professor, Mining Dept., VNIT, and well known Numerical Modeling Expert, Dr. John Loui Porathur, Principal Scientist, CIMFR, Nagpur.
Verma was the only woman candidate who attended the interview at Central Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Central Institute of Mining and Fuel Research (CSIR-CIMFR). While most members of the interview panel were hesitant to recruit a woman as a researcher in mining, one of the interviewers, Dr. Achyuta Krishna Ghosh, insisted that they recruit her as he saw her passion and capability.
There has been no looking back since then, and Verma is currently working as a senior scientist at CSIR-CIMFR.
Regardless of the crusades she fought to get to where she is today, things have not changed much in that sector. She says, “Nagpur University still doesn’t allow girls. A woman is still prohibited from working underground, except for a visit of few minutes. I try to work underground as much as I can to gain practical experience...”
