Rajib Barman, 39, had heard that the job of a rat-hole miner was hazardous, however he selected to do it as a result of he had a debt of ₹60,000 to repay. A resident of Sitlabazar village in western Assam’s Kokrajhar district, Barman determined to work on the Kalamati mine within the Umrangso space of Dima Hasao district by way of a intermediary. He hoped to carry dwelling ₹90,000 by working within the mine for 2 months at about ₹1,500 per day — greater than thrice the same old wage within the rural elements of Assam. This translated into incomes ₹90-100 per kilogramme of coal extracted at a median of 15 cartloads of the fossil gas stripped off the mine.
On January 6, 2025, Barman descended into the darkish pit for the primary day of mining. “The sardar (supervisor of miners) had told us the previous night that we could start working as the water that had accumulated in the mine had been drained out,” Barman says. “We went down 250 feet below the ground at 4:30 a.m. and began working inside one of the tunnels.”
Barman’s physique ached as he was working in a clumsy place for the primary time. After greater than two hours, he determined to take a break and crawled again in direction of the mouth of the tunnel. Rat-holes are the labyrinthine passages that department out from 300-foot-deep pits.
Just a few ft from the opening, Barman heard screams and the sound of gushing water rising louder. “Seconds later, I was swept into the pit,” he recollects. “I managed to clamber up the chain of the crane (used to haul coal) and get out. But my three room-mates could not make it.”
Up to now, of the 9 miners trapped inside, solely 4 our bodies have been recovered. Search and rescue operations by the Indian Military, Navy, the Nationwide Catastrophe Response Drive, and the State Catastrophe Response Drive have been on for the others, however 5 days in the past, Navy divers have been withdrawn from the operations. Whereas dewatering of the mine continues, the federal government has assessed it might take as much as 60 days to empty out all of the water.
The rescue operation in progress on the coal mine catastrophe website in Kalamati village in Dima Hasoa district.| Photograph Credit score:Ritu Raj Konwar
On January 16, 2025, the Assam Cupboard authorized a judicial inquiry into the tragedy and determined to represent a Particular Investigation Crew to probe the incident, one of many deadliest in current occasions. It additionally determined to border an ordinary working process (SOP) to implement a blanket ban on rat-hole mining in Assam other than sealing some 220 pits surveyed to date.
Risks lurk beneath
For Raju Basumatary, 55, that is the second time a catastrophe like this has taken place. The primary time this occurred was at Ksan in Meghalaya’s coal-rich East Jaintia Hills district on December 13, 2018. Then too, he was about 200 metres from the pit that devoured a few of his fellow miners.
These, although, aren’t the one mishaps that Basumatary has encountered in 26 years as a rat-hole miner. He got here to Kalamati from the Khliehriat space of Meghalaya 4 years in the past.
“Khibakhibi hoiye thaakhe (Something or the other keeps happening),” he says, rattling off all the chances. “A miner slips to death in the pit, another is asphyxiated, somebody else dies after smelling toxic gas, the fourth drowns…”
Basumatary says miners put themselves in danger at midnight depths of the earth. All they’ve is a torch strapped to their head to information them. “Still, the money is good and it is guaranteed as long as you extract coal during the season,” he says.
The “season” he refers to is the mining interval between November and March. Through the first two months of this era, employees invariably drain the water that fills the mines, which are sometimes interlinked beneath the bottom, due to rainfall and seepage from April to October.
Then they crawl into the mines and utilizing pickaxes, extract coal from the partitions of an oblong tunnel that’s 2-3 metres excessive or shovel about 20 kg of coal lumps onto a cart. They drag this to the mouth of the tunnel. Massive steel troughs, operated with pulleys from a crane, haul a tonne or two of the coal to the floor.
Joseph Soren, 40, was answerable for loading the coal onto one of many troughs eased down from a crane when catastrophe struck on January 6. He was the final of the 23 miners who made it after serving to those that couldn’t swim escape first.
“I heard shouts of ‘water, water!’ and rumbling sounds. Before I could figure anything out, water carrying the miners shot out of the tunnels. We grabbed anything — the chains from the crane, the pipe of a water pump, ropes thrown down from people above — to save ourselves. The murky, stinging water made our eyes burn as we moved up. I struggled to keep my head above the water level,” he says.
Relations look ahead to our bodies to be introduced out on the catastrophe website.| Photograph Credit score:Ritu Raj Konwar
Soren, who’s from western Assam’s Chirang district, has labored in half a dozen mines within the Umrangso space, of which Kalamati is a component, over as many seasons, however he now has second ideas about persevering with mining. However then, the fee per season is nice sufficient for his household of 5 to final at the very least a 12 months.
The cash was adequate for Ganga Bahadur Shresth, 38, of Nepal’s Rampur village, to journey three days from his dwelling to a mine every season, says his spouse, Sushila Rai. His was the primary of the 4 our bodies retrieved by rescue employees from the Kalamati mine. “His income from mining made our lives quite comfortable but he never let us know how dangerous his work was. We found this out too late,” says Rai, a mom of three.
Shresth got here with greater than 20 employees from Nepal to work in Umrangso. Amongst them was Lijan Magar, 27, who additionally misplaced his life. His was the second physique to be retrieved. “We started living here after our wedding two years ago. I don’t know where to go with our two-month-old baby,” says Junu Pradhan, Magar’s spouse.
The opposite two our bodies retrieved have been of Khushi Mohan Roy, 57, from Kokrajhar district’s Fakiragram, who was one in all Barman’s room-mates; and of Sarat Goyari, 37, who hailed from Thailapara in north-central Assam’s Sonitpur district.
‘A huge scam’
For Assam’s landless or marginal farmers comparable to Mohammed Saifuddin Ahmed of Dalgaon in Darrang district, all roads result in the mines when household expenditure exceeds earnings. The final time the 55-year-old labored in a coal mine was in March 2012, three months earlier than 15 miners died in a flooded mine at Nongalbibra in Meghalaya’s South Garo Hills district. The mishap, and a petition filed by the All Dimasa College students’ Union of Assam, led to the Nationwide Inexperienced Tribunal (NGT) banning rat-hole coal mining in Meghalaya on April 17, 2014. Upheld by the Supreme Court docket later, the ban was prolonged to the opposite States within the Northeast. “But circumstances made me return to mining after all these years because, ban or not, no other job pays as much,” Ahmed says.
The Ksan incident in 2018 and Kalamati now make it evident that the ban has largely been on paper. In Meghalaya, the Justice (retired) B.P. Katakey-headed committee, which was appointed by the Excessive Court docket of Meghalaya in April 2022 to analyze ongoing unlawful coal mining and transportation, continues to obtain complaints. One of many new complaints the panel has acquired pertains to unlawful mining in Nongalbibra, the place the method of banning rat-hole mines started.
“The illegal tag has only increased the price of coal; it has not stopped mining,” says Shillong-based anti-mining activist Agnes Kharshiing, who survived a violent assault by coal mine homeowners in 2018. “Hundreds of trucks continue to transport coal on the highways feeding the coke units and cement plants. You can see mounds of freshly extracted coal on the roadside. The police, politicians, bureaucrats, landowners… almost all of them are involved.” In 2023, the Excessive Court docket of Meghalaya made an identical statement, saying the complicity of the State with the mafia working unlawful coal mines was “clear and obvious”.
The tribal land possession system in Meghalaya, a Sixth Schedule State, is commonly cited to justify the rampant mining because the Eighties. A provision of the Sixth Schedule requires tribal land and sources to be protected. One other empowers the District and Regional Councils to grant licenses or leases for the extraction of minerals inside their jurisdiction. Some council directors and landowners imagine that nobody can intrude of their operations inside their territory.
The Sixth Schedule applies to Dima Hasao, a district ruled by a Bharatiya Janata Get together (BJP)-led autonomous tribal council. Autonomy means restricted invovement of the BJP-led Assam authorities within the affairs of the council.
Rescue employees seek for the lacking miners.| Photograph Credit score:Ritu Raj Konwar
“That, however, does not mean that the heads of the two governments cannot collude to share the spoils of a high-yielding illegal operation,” says Jagadish Bhuyan, a former minister, who had filed Proper to Info requests searching for particulars about rat-hole mining in Assam. He’s additionally the final secretary of the Assam Jatiya Parishad, a political occasion borne out of the anti-Citizenship (Modification) Act motion in 2019.
“If a worker risks his life for ₹1,500-2,000 a day, imagine the stakes the mine owners and everyone else along the chain has, to keep the illegal operations going. It is naive to think that the Centre is unaware of the illegal coal trade in Assam and elsewhere in the Northeast,” he says.
Bhuyan continues, “Look at the chronology of events. Soon after the mishap, the Chief Minister tweeted that the mine appeared to be illegal. Then he said the mine was abandoned 12 years ago, but was under the Assam Mineral Development Corporation Limited (AMDCL). The Government of India, which owns fossil fuels and minerals under the earth, suspended the AMDCL’s operating license 12 years ago. So, the AMDCL has no right to extract coal and neither does it have the right to mine or trade OB coal.” OB refers back to the layers of soil, rock, and so forth. that should be eliminated to extract coal.
The Assam Congress president, Bhupen Kumar Borah, says unlawful coal mining in Umrangso, about 260 kilometres from Guwahati, was simply the tip of the ‘Syndicate Raj’ iceberg within the State. “Illegal syndicates are controlling everything. If Assam is really under the control of Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, he should be aware of the coal syndicate. That it has been allowed to operate for years explains the government’s silence on Debolal Gorlosa and his wife,” he says.
Politics of former rebels
Gorlosa is the chief govt member (CEM) of the North Cachar Hills Autonomous Council, which administers the Dima Hasao district. After the mine flooded, Opposition events fished out an bill that was issued to Kanika Hojai, Gorlosa’s spouse, for purchasing OB coal, or overburden coal, from the AMDCL.
Whereas Gorlosa is incommunicado, his aides imagine that he’s being focused. Gorlosa was the commander-in-chief of the Dima Halam Daogah, an armed group which was disbanded in 2013. “Once mauled by militancy, Dima Hasao district had three CEMs in as many years before Gorlosa. He ensured peace, stability, and development. Some failed leaders of the Dima Halam Daogah, who are desperate to be in power, are carrying out a smear campaign against him,” claims one in all his aides.
In the meantime, others imagine that Punish Nunisa, who was arrested for allegedly working the mine illegally, has been made the scapegoat to maintain the main focus off the “real culprits”.
Cash issues
Amid the blame recreation, the AMDCL has come beneath the scanner for allegedly doing what it isn’t authorised to do, which is mining coal or residue.
Within the line of fireplace, Anand Natarajan, the AMDCL’s Managing Director, insists that the Company has not set a foot improper. “I am being maligned for reviving the corporation that once struggled to pay salaries to its employees. Apart from helping increase the State’s revenue, we acquired a coal block in Jharkhand and won the bidding for two coal blocks in Assam – Garampani in Dima Hasao and Koilajan in the Karbi Anglong district – more than a year ago,” he says. Natarajan provides that the AMDCL was the primary to lodge an FIR regarding the Kalamati mine, which is 850 metres past the world beneath its Garampani block. The Indian Forest Service officer additionally says the dealing in OB coal was throughout the authorized ambit. “If we don’t use the OB coal lying in our depot for ages, our revenue will drop,” he says.
Miners Basumatary and Ahmed fear that their incomes will drop too due to the incident. “We won’t go hungry as long as there is demand for coal. Maybe, we should let the dust settle and wait for the next offer,” Basumatary says.
Printed – January 18, 2025 02:10 am IST
