(This story was first published on 9 April 2019. It has been reposted from The Quint's archives in light of the Uttarakhand tunnel rescue)
Cameraperson: Tridip K Mandal
Video Editor: Puneet Bhatia
On 13 December 2018, 15 miners found themselves trapped in a rat-hole coal mine, deep inside the jungle in East Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya. The mining incident was unlike any other, since the miners were trapped in a flooded ‘illegal’ rat-hole mine in Ksan.
The accident exposed the coal mining racket in the East Jaintia Hills, despite a ban on rat-hole mining enforced by the National Green Tribunal in 2014.
The seam of coal in Meghalaya is between 2 to 4 metres in width. To reach that layer of coal under the earth’s surface, a vertical pit is dug up. A rat-hole mine has a depth of about 500 feet. The miners who extract the coal using pickaxe have to climb down 500 feet into the mine. Once at the bottom, they crawl horizontally for about 500 feet. It is very risky because the miners can hit another abandoned mine which can collapse, or a mine which is full of water, leading to flooding.
According to the 6th Schedule of the Constitution in Meghalaya, the community has ownership over its land and a say over the nature of its use.
But the National Green Tribunal in 2014 found the practice of coal mining extremely harmful for the ecology of the area, where the water bodies and rivers downstream were turning acidic. It was also unsafe for miners and a risk to human lives.
In 2014 when mining was banned in Meghalaya, coal production stood at about 6 million tonnes annually. For the stipulated 9 metric tonnes of coal transported by every truck, the state was earning about Rs 6,700 on a daily basis. Thousands of trucks were transporting coal daily. And each truck was loaded with almost 30 metric tonnes of coal, almost three times the stipulated amount. Revenue leakage resulted in huge profits and easy money.
With the ban imposed, the easy money stopped flowing in and most political parties wanted the ban lifted.
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