Coal rush saga: the scandal that singed a king in Singareni
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More than a century ago coal in Singareni drew unscrupulous characters who made money while securing a concession to mine the coal, drawing attention of the British House of Commons, which even constituted a committee to inquire the matter
The Indian government is set to auction coal-bearing seams of Singareni coal mines, the reserves of which stretch 350 square kilometres in Telangana. While the current mining company is a joint venture between the government of India and Telangana State, the auction will create another stakeholder for the mining operations in the region.
A similar privatisation effort happened nearly 140 years ago when another entity gained the concession agreement. It was called Hyderabad (Deccan) Mining Company, Limited.
Beginning as a police officer in Kalyan in present day Karnataka, Abdul Haq later titled Diler Jung became the éminence grise when Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan was a young man in the later part of 1800s. He negotiated the deed for bringing Railways to Nizam’s Dominion, he crafted the concessionaire agreement to mine the coal of Singareni. Then everything fell apart as the rumour mills started churning.
The Singareni coal mines or as the locals remember Yellanadu coal seam was well known. Telangana was a centre for artisanal steel for centuries with craftspersons in Nirmal, Nizamabad creating batches of steel using coal, wood and iron ore. But it drew the colonial notice in 1871 when William King of the Geological Survey of India visited the Nizam’s Dominion and reached Singareni. “The present field is situated … near the villages of Rumpaid, Yellindallapad (Yellandu), Hooserakapully (Usirkayalapalli), and Ragabonagoodium (Ragaboinagudem), in the eastern part of the Kundyaconda talook. Its southern extremity is about four or five miles east of the large village of Singareny, and it may be as well to give this name to the field,” he wrote in March 30, 1872.
Within a few years this would be transformed into a coal rush.
The coal was there but it was the nature of the mining agreement and investors involved that became a hub of the scandal. The British who were building a railway line to Secunderabad from Wadi wanted to extend it to Singareni to transport the coal. Abdul Haq successfully negotiated the agreement for the railway line built with Nizam’s money but executed by the British. Then he played a different gambit. Abdul Haq and his associates created a company called Hyderabad (Deccan) Mining Company Limited. Haq secured a 99-year lease for Watson and Stewart on January 7, 1886, this had the sanction of Secretary of State, and was signed on July 27 of the same year. The capital of the Company was to be £1,000,000, in 100,000 shares of £10 each. Of these 85,000 were allotted to the concessionaires, Messrs. Watson and Stewart for their role in securing the concession.
A year later, staying at the upscale Alexandra Hotel in London, Abdul Haq wrote to W.C. Watson on June 2, 1887: “I am instructed by the Government of His Highness the Nizam to purchase 10,000 £10 shares of the Hyderabad (Deccan) Mining Company, Limited. As you are the agent of the Government here, I write to ask you to be so good as to arrange for the purchase of these shares at the lowest possible price, not exceeding £12 per share, the Government having decided to invest only £120,000 in these shares.” The sentence was prove very expensive for Abdul Haq’s career.
“Purchase these shares at the price you name is a most difficult and almost impossible operation, and will require the greatest skill and circumspection,” wrote Mr. Watson to Diler Jung. The Nizam’s man in London agreed to the proposal for a higher valuation and agreed to pay £131,250. The shares were duly delivered the same day by eight different firms of brokers. The shares were in two lots, one of 3750 and another 8750 but with all consecutive numbers.
The sequential numbering of shares set off alarm bells. The Hyderabad (Deccan) Mining Company Limited had a spent a grand sum of £6,411 and most of it was ‘establishment charges’. The British House of Commons set up an inquiry Committee. The Committee completed its report on August 6, 1888. It found: “that the concessionaires have used the concession for the purpose of realising great gains not intended to be conferred on them, and that this has been done to the injury of the State from which they received the concession with the assistance of their partner, Abdul Hakk.” It also found that the shares bought by Abdul Haq on behalf of the Nizam’s government actually belonged to him!
But there was no punishment or as much as a rap on the knuckles for Abdul Haq. An incensed young man Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about it and coined a word for Abdul Haq:
“Who shall restore us the leaves
That the Huqster hath eaten,
Or who shall arraign us the thieves
To be properly beaten?
Where is the grim guillotine—
The sawdust and platter—
For W–ts–n? Too long hath he been
A joy to his hatter!”
Abdul Haq died a very wealthy man with stakes in the Watson Hotel and other properties in colonial Bombay. After his death in London on May 21, 1896, his body was brought back to India.
“In the afternoon an immense crowd attended the procession from the Prince’s Dock through streets not far from the hotel to a mosque and then to the Victoria Terminus railway station,” recorded a newspaper. The body was brought back to Hyderabad where it is interred beside his mother’s tomb. While a great grand dome known as Saidanima’s tomb is on the banks of the Hussainsagar Lake, Abdul Haq Diler Jung is buried in a grave with a modest flat roof nearby.
The Singareni coal mines remain a significant asset, having yielded 1753.78 million tonnes of coal up to the year 2023-24. As Telangana’s coal-rich landscape faces another bout of privatisation, the echoes of the scandal serves as a reminder of the intricate dance between money, power, and resource grab.
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