Earn some extra money mining the white gold marble of Makrana
Fly to Delhi, and Agra, in Rajasthan, and proceed by truck to Makrana, the small city where the beautiful white marble that (amongst other things) makes up the Taj Mahal, is mined.
Everyone who goes to India sees the Taj Mahal. The lucky few see it by moonlight, when the ghostly white marble of its carved minarets and turrets give it a particularly ethereal feel. The rest of us can see it at our local take-out place, painted on the restaurant wall. Legend has it that the mogul emperor Shah Jahan wanted a temple built of a stone as pure as diamonds to commemorate his favorite wife, the beautiful Mumtaz Mahal. It took his architects twenty-two years to track down a source of stone of high enough purity. (Nowadays the marble finds its way into mundane buildings like banks and hotels, often abroad.)
But few people visit the mines nearby, where the “white gold” comes from. Here, the women and the men work side-by-side, many of the women in incongruous-looking (given the heavy work) saris and veils. But perhaps the veils help keep out the silica dust, for there are no masks. Which would be useful, as it is said that 97 percent of the miners develop some form of lung disease. Despite the progress in technology elsewhere, the miners here work entirely by hand, climbing up and down ropes to hack out slabs of stone, which are then laboriously hauled up from the mine shafts, about 330 feet (100 meters) deep.
No one seems to know how many people work in the mines, but it is at least 5,000. And there is, on average, one fatal accident every day. But even in death, the miners can help earn money. Bodies that fall to the bottom of the shafts may lie there rotting until the smell obliges the mines' owners to pay compensation to their families. The going rate? About 12,000 rupees ($1,000). A small fortune.
The rate of pay for the miners is ten dollars a week, the hours are generally twelve a day, sixty a week, with half-days every Wednesday and Saturday. Perfect for sightseeing!
Very dangerous. And the road to the mine is treacherous too.