‘Their bodies were trapped in rat holes’: 44-day search ends for missing miners in Assam

The first dead body had been recovered two days into the rescue operations while another three were found three days later. That was on January 11, and even though recovery operations had continued since then, none of the remaining bodies had been found till Wednesday.

The primary challenge was the volume of water that had entered the mine and continued to flow into it through the interconnected network of rat-hole mines located close to it despite efforts at dewatering the mine through pumps. The mine has a central put with a depth of 310-feet and multiple low and narrow tunnels – called rat-holes – branching out of it which is where the miners work and mine for coal.

“The bodies had been trapped in the rat-holes. Today, after the dewatering efforts, water had been cleared from the base of the mine and men could go down and look for the bodies. After the bodies were found by NDRF and Army teams, the operation was finally closed by around 5 pm,” said Riki Phukan, an officer with the district disaster management authority, adding that 5 lakh litres of water was being pumped out of the mine every hour.

“Today, the dewatering of the Umrangso mines was completed to a level where retrieval operations could be launched. The mortal remains of the remaining 5 miners have been recovered and brought up from the mine shaft. The process to identify the remains has been initiated,” Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced on X.

The nine victims are Ganga Bahadur Shresth (38), Hussain Ali (30), Jakir Hussain (38), Sarpa Barman (46), Mustafa Seikh (44), Khusi Mohan Rai (57), Sanjit Sarkar (35), Lijan Magar (26) and Sarat Goyary (37). While Shresth is from Nepal and Sarkar is from West Bengal, the rest are from different parts of Assam.

Following the incident, the state government had announced financial assistance of Rs. 10 lakh for the families of each of the victims, including those whose bodies had not been found yet. It had also constituted an SIT for the criminal investigation of the case and a One-Man Inquiry Commission headed by former Gauhati High Court judge Justice Anima Hazarika, tasked with fixing responsibility on concerned officers, individuals, mining companies and institutions.

The incident had also stirred a debate on the prevalence of illegal rat-hole mining in the state and had precipitated a crackdown on such mines not just in Dima Hasao but also in coal reserves in Eastern Assam’s Tinsukia district.