Inside Meghalaya’s rat-hole mines: 18 dead, a race against time, and a disaster long foretold

According to Anurag Kumar Singh, an inspector part of the NDRF team at the site, the mine has a central vertical pit, which is over 100 feet deep. Three narrow tunnels, or rat-holes, branch out of this central pit at its bottom. Miners enter these tunnels to extract coal, and rescuers are conducting operations to try and find if there are more workers trapped inside. The bodies of 18 workers were recovered on Thursday, and another worker with severe burn injuries is receiving medical treatment in the state capital, Shillong, after an explosion in the mine that morning.

“At a depth of approximately 50 feet, there is water dripping, which is causing mud to fall downwards. At the base at the bottom of the pit, at a depth of 100 feet, there are three rat-holes. There is water inside one of these, which increases as you go in, which is why our team is not able to search further inside it. We have gone into the two other rat-holes up to a distance of 25 feet, and no further bodies have been found there, but there are many rat-holes branching out in different directions from both of these tunnels. The rat-holes are only 2 feet high and 3 feet wide, and the only way to move in them is by crawling,” he told The Indian Express.

The location of the mine itself is remote: a distance of 25 km from the district headquarters, which takes around three hours on road because of the lack of road connectivity there, a terrain only navigable by 4-wheel drive.

Following the incident, the East Jaintia Hills Police had registered an FIR under charges that include culpable homicide, violation of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act and the Explosive Substances Act. On Friday, SP Vikash Kumar said that two people, both locals from the area, have been identified as owners of the illegally operating mine and have been arrested.

Red flags ignored

While search and rescue operations and the investigation into the incident, Justice (Retd) BP Katakey, who has been appointed by the Meghalaya High Court as a one-man committee to monitor illegal coal-mining in the state since 2022 following a suo-motu PIL taken up by the court on the issue, pointed out that widespread illegal mining in Meghalaya, particularly the East Jaintia Hills has been flagged repeatedly but that “no one in the state, except the high court, is taking it very seriously”.

On Thursday itself, during a hearing on the same PIL, the high court took cognisance of this incident and summoned the district Deputy Commissioner and the SP on February 9 with details of action taken and to “furnish reasons as to why the situation has been allowed to continue.”

The court noted that in the Justice Katakey committee’s report filed on January 17, the committee had flagged that East Jaintia Hills is the district most affected by illegal coal mining, where the activity continues to take place on a large scale. The committee had also flagged an incident that took place less than a month ago, on January 14, in the same Thangkso area in which a miner died while working in another illegal mine.

The numbers are staggering. Justice (Retd) Katakey, who had also been appointed by the NGT in 2019 to head a committee on the same issue, said that at that time, the committee had found more than 22,000 illegal coal mine openings in East Jaintia Hills alone. The total number across Meghalaya was more than 25,000.

“While this continues unabated, with a lack of serious action, this was an incident waiting to happen. While this is the most major such incident, there have been many smaller ones, and it is very likely that there have been many more which have gone unnoticed,” he said. On Friday, he was also on his way to the site to take stock of the situation.

Other such major illegal mining-related incidents in the same district include the 2018 incident in Ksan, in which 15 miners were trapped and killed in a rat-hole mine when it flooded, and a similar incident in Umpleng in which five miners died trapped in a flooded mine.