Opinion Express View on death of rat-hole miners: A recurring tragedy

Crawling through a narrow hole as the water gushed in, clinging to the box that lifts coal from the pit, Rajeev Barman found his way out of the coal mine in Assam’s Dima Hasao district on January 6. But nine of his coworkers, working as rat-hole miners, couldn’t make it. After six days of rescue operations, the team has recovered four bodies and is continuing its search for five missing workers. This is not the first time, however, that rat-hole mining has led to disaster and death. In 2018, 15 rat-hole miners died after being trapped for two weeks in a coal mine in Meghalaya. Rat-hole miners dying due to mudslides, leakage of poisonous gas, and rising water levels have often been reported from the northeastern states. And yet the political will required to prevent this recurring tragedy is still missing.

In 2014, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) banned rat-hole mining. However, the political establishment seemed unwilling to accept this order. On September 24, 2015, the Congress government of Meghalaya, led by the then CM Conrad Sangma, passed a resolution in the legislative assembly requesting the Centre to invoke paragraph 12 A (b) of the sixth schedule to exempt the state from the purview of central mining laws. According to Meghalaya police records, between April 2014 and November 2018, there were at least 477 violations of the NGT order. On March 16, 2022, responding to a question in Parliament on whether the government had taken cognisance of the rat-hole mining incident in the North Eastern Region (NER), the minister of mines, Pralhad Joshi, said, “As per the Section 23C of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957, the State Governments are empowered to make rules for preventing illegal mining, transportation and storage of minerals.”

Advertisement

Passing the buck to the state government may be a politically viable option to avoid responsibility, but it is not going to stop the dangerous practice. In the northeastern states, where the layers of coal are thin and rat-hole mining offers much higher wages than MGNREGA and other government-run schemes, this illegal activity gets a free run. This is especially so when the politician-bureaucracy nexus turns an unseeing eye. The implementation of the NGT order, in letter and spirit, needs an acknowledgement of the problem and the political will to address it. This must begin, before any more lives are lost, urgently.