‘No one will remember us’: India’s hero ‘rat hole miners’ who helped rescue 41

New Delhi
CNN
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Just a few pieces of debris stood between Munna Qureshi and dozens of laborers who his team had been tasked with rescuing from deep inside a Himalayan tunnel after all previous attempts to free them had failed.

“I could hear the laborers gasping on the other side with excitement,” the 29-year-old said. “My heart was racing as I removed the last rock between us.”

Qureshi is among 12 specialized workers who were called by Indian authorities to help with last month’s rescue of 41 construction workers trapped in the collapsed tunnel in northern Uttarakhand state.

For nearly three weeks the construction workers were cut off from the world, some 60 meters inside the mountain, receiving food and air through a thin tube and frequent updates from rescuers outside.

Engineers worked round the clock to drill a safe passage through the broken rock using a state of the art machine, while officials flew in experts to help with rescue efforts. But ultimately, after 17 days, it was Qureshi and his colleagues who succeeded in bringing the men to safety after the drill broke beyond repair just meters from the trapped workers.

Known locally as “rat hole miners”, they belong to a niche group of highly skilled, but poorly paid excavators who typically crawl through narrow tunnels to extract coal from deep within the ground.

It is a profession so dangerous it has been banned in some parts of the country. But it has been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks, and the men celebrated as heroes by many across the country.

“Rat hole mining may be illegal,” Lt General Syed Ata Hasnain, a retired official from India’s National Disaster Management Authority told reporters shortly after the rescue. “But a rat miner’s talent and experience is not.”

Workers employed in the dangerous profession are among the most vulnerable and marginalized in India, hence the unflattering local moniker. Mostly migrants from some of India’s poorest states, they are paid about $5 for a day’s work, according to local reports.

Slimly built and nimble, they are expected to enter tiny crevices in mines, often deprived of oxygen and at risk of being buried under loose soil.

Most coal mining in India takes place in northeastern Meghalaya state, home to some of the country’s largest coal deposits, amounting to more than 576 million metric tons.

Rat hole mining was banned in the state by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) in 2014 due to health and environmental risks, but it’s still carried out illegally in secluded pockets of the region.

According to Hasina Kharbhih, the founder of Impulse, a non-profit that advocates for the safety of these workers, an estimated 225 “rat hole miners” died between 2007 and 2014, before the practice was banned.

In 2018, four years after the ban was implemented, another 15 died after becoming trapped in an illegal coal mine for two weeks.

“This number however is the tip of the iceberg,” Kharbhih said. “I am sure if other regions where this happened were thoroughly researched, these numbers would go up.”

Most of the men called to rescue the laborers said they knew the risks when they joined the profession.

“I always thought this job would take my life someday,” one of the workers, Nasir Khan, said. “I never thought it would earn me respect.”

However, retired judge B.P. Katoki, who set up the tribunal that banned rat mining in Meghalaya, said India shouldn’t “normalize” such a dangerous profession.

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