It’s unfortunate that the year is ending with the most heart-wrenching of stories, of 15 dirt-poor labourers, doubling up as miners, being trapped in flooded ‘rat-hole’ coal pits in Meghalaya for more than two weeks. We rose with the international community to proclaim our concern and offer help when kids of a football team got trapped in a cave in Thailand, but it took us over two weeks to respond to a crisis at home.
The miners have been trapped in these illegal mines, in the vicinity of the Lytein river, in the east Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya, since December 13. It’s only now that the Indian Navy and Air Force are flying in a 15-member expert diver team from Vishakhapatnam and another team from the Odisha Fire Service. Powerful pumps have been airlifted from Guwahati by a Lockheed Martin Super Hercules plane.
All it took for an illegal mine to be inundated was a mistake by a miner, who breached the narrow wall that divides these mines and the river bed. Local hand-pumping was more than ineffectual: more water gushed in.
It may take a miracle and more for even the experts now. Meghalaya is one of India’s top ten states as far as coal reserves go, but the National Green Tribunal had banned this hazardous activity because of two similar accidents in the Garo Hills that claimed nearly two dozen lives in 2012 and 2014. Obviously, the ban was not stringently imposed.
Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma, citing the Comptroller and Auditor General’s recognition of the impossibility of a total cessation, is suggesting that mining be legalised under supervision. It’s difficult to adjudicate on this. Meghalaya has been particularly susceptible to primitive methods of mining, where legal frameworks like the Mines Rescue Rules, 1985, or the Mine Safety Circulation have little meaning. Human life, and sensitive ecology ... both are at stake.