KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) - Workers at a project of Central Coalfields Limited (CCL), in the central Indian province of Jharkhand, have been forced to stop work by ultra left wing extremists demanding extortion money.

While the company, which is a subsidiary of coal major Coal India Limited (CIL), did not comment on the incident, provincial police officials said that extremists entered the project site and ordered workers to stop work and not return to the site until their demand for money was met.

Workers at the Birsa coal mining project, employed by a contract project engineering firm engaged by CCL, were forced to divulge their contact details to extremists who threatened to return to collect the extortion amount, police officials said.

Company officials, on condition of anonymity, said that CIL was also losing about $100-million annually as extremists were also forcibly pilfering coal from mines located in central and eastern Indian provinces, which were extremist hotbeds.

CCL, with a large number of mines in Jharkhand, was estimated to be losing three-million tonnes of coal every year from pilfering and illegal and forcible extraction of coal from the company mines, the officials said.

The remote location of the mines across vast stretches of forested areas made large-scale policing very difficult, although in several areas the federal government had deployed paramilitary forces specialised in counter-insurgency operations, the officials said.

Coal pilfering and extortion from workers - mostly local villagers - were an easy source of money for the extremists to fund their arms and explosive acquisition, the officials added.

The menace of extremism was dominant across provinces, such as Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and West Bengal, where CIL subsidiaries like CCL, Eastern Coalfields, Mahanadi Coalfields and South Eastern Coalfields had operational mines.