GUWAHATI: Three coal miners were trapped and are feared dead after a landslide hit an illegal rat-hole mine in Assam’s Tinsukia district bordering Arunachal Pradesh.
The incident occurred past Saturday midnight at a mining site between Bargolai and Namdang in the Patkai hills.
“We received a report that three persons are missing. We are taking necessary action,” Tinsukia district magistrate Swapneel Paul told this newspaper.
The authorities pressed into service some agencies, including the police, to carry out a rescue operations. The operations were underway when reports last came in.
According to the reports, two of the missing persons are from Meghalaya, while one is identified as Dawa Sherpa from Nepal.
Altogether, four miners were at the site when the mishap occurred. While three were extracting coal from a narrow tunnel via rat-hole mining method, another was transporting the extracted coal. The three in the tunnel got trapped in the landslide.
A local told media that the incident had occurred right after Saturday midnight. He confirmed that three persons were trapped.
The Ledo-Margherita region of Tinsukia, bordering Arunachal’s Changlang district, is a coal belt. Illegal coal mining is said to have caused irreversible damages to wildlife in the area.
In January this year, six workers were charred to death and four others were injured at a coal mine in Nagaland’s Wokha district.
The National Green Tribunal had banned rat-hole mining in 2014. However, coal is still extracted by this dangerous method in the Northeast.