Inside Meghalaya’s rat-hole mines: 25 dead, a race against time, and a disaster long foretold

According to Anurag Kumar Singh, an inspector part of the NDRF team at the site, the mine has five central vertical pits, which is over around 100 feet deep. In each of these shafts, two to three narrow tunnels, or rat-holes, branch out of the central pit at its bottom. Miners enter these tunnels to extract coal and rescuers are conducting operations to try and find if there are more workers trapped inside these. Three of the bodies recovered on Friday afternoon were found around 350 feet horizontally into one of these tunnels.

“In the first shaft in which search operations were taking place, at a depth of approximately 50 feet, there was water dripping which is causing mud to fall downwards, creating the possibility of a landslide. At the base at the bottom of the pit, at a depth of 100 feet, there are three rat-holes. The rat-holes are only 2 feet high and 3 feet wide and the only way to move in them is by crawling. There is water inside one of these, which increases as you go in, which is why our team is not able to search further inside it so far. In the first two-three searches inside the other two tunnels in that shaft, we didn’t find anything and we had to stop after some rocks fell down from the dripping area,” he told The Indian Express.

Search and rescue operation underway at an illegal coal mining site in East Jaintia Hills district, Meghalaya, after at least 18 miners were killed and several feared trapped following an explosion on Friday (Photo: PTI).

He said that the teams then started on a second shaft and found the body of one worker at the bottom. In the afternoon, searches resumed in the first shaft again, during which three bodies were found close to each other, around 350 feet deep into one of the rat-holes.

According to Assam’s Cachar district administration, six of the deceased miners have been identified as being from the district, and another five injured persons have been admitted to Silchar Medical College & Hospital (SMCH) for medical treatment.

The location of the mine itself, in the Thangkso area of the district, is remote: a distance of 25 km from the district headquarters, which takes around three hours on road because of the lack of road connectivity there, a terrain only navigable by 4-wheel drive.

Following the incident, the East Jaintia Hills Police had registered a case FIR under charges that include culpable homicide, violation of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act and the Explosive Substances Act. On Friday, SP Vikash Kumar said that two people, both locals from the area, have been identified as owners of the illegally operating mine and have been arrested.

While search and rescue operations and the investigation into the incident, Justice (Retd) BP Katakey, who has been appointed by the Meghalaya High Court as a one-man committee to monitor illegal coal-mining in the state since 2022 following a suo-motu PIL taken up by the court on the issue, pointed out that widespread illegal mining in Meghalaya, particularly the East Jaintia Hills has been flagged repeatedly but that “no one in the state, except the high court, is taking it very seriously”.

On Thursday itself, during a hearing on the same PIL, the high court took cognizance of this incident and summoned the district Deputy Commissioner and the SP on February 9 with details of action taken and to “furnish reasons as to why the situation has been allowed to continue.”

The court noted that in the Justice Katakey committee’s report filed on January 17, the committee had flagged that East Jaintia Hills is the district most affected by illegal coal mining, where the activity continues to take place on a large scale. The committee had also flagged an incident that took place less than a month ago, on January 14 in the same Thangkso area in which a miner died while working in another illegal mine.

The numbers are staggering. Justice (Retd) Katakey, who had also been appointed by the NGT in 2019 to head a committee on the same issue, said that at that time, the committee had found more than 22,000 illegal coal mine openings in East Jaintia Hills alone. The total number across Meghalaya was more than 25,000.

“While this continues unabated, with a lack of serious action, this was an incident waiting to happen. While this is the most major such incident, there have been many smaller ones, and it is very likely that there have been many more which have gone unnoticed,” he said. On Friday, he was also on his way to the site to take stock of the situation.

Other such major illegal mining related incidents in the same district include the 2018 incident in Ksan in which 15 miners were trapped and killed in a rat-hole mine when it flooded, and a similar incident in Umpleng in which five miners died trapped in a flooded mine.