Meghalaya's coalgate scam: Coal barons, rat-hole mines & a complicit State

Labourers have been trapped deep inside a rathole coal mine for more than a month. The state has been caught in a resource curse for decades.

The Pnar and Khasi people of Meghalaya believe in the legend of “U Thlen”, a demon spirit in the form of a large serpent. The U Thlen brings immense wealth to anyone who nurtures it. In return, its keeper has to feed it regularly. But, it can only be fed the blood of Khasi and Pnar people who the keeper has to kill. The lesson is simple: Illegitimate and unreasonable wealth can come only at a huge cost to the entire community.
 
Ethical lessons, embedded in beliefs that ancestors hand down, are like signposts. People forget to read them as communities progress in time.
 
When coal mining was allowed, I could spend Rs 50 lakh on something without blinking an eye. Now I have to think twice before spending even Rs 3-4 lakh. We could send our children to study in Bangalore, Shillong and elsewhere. Not now,” says Philip J Bamon sitting in a rice and tea stall by National Highway 6 a few kilometres out of Khliehriat, the district headquarters of the East Jaintia Hills. He is a coal miner.
 
“Coal mining must restart. Everyone’s lives and livelihood in the East Jaintia Hills have been impacted so badly,” he adds.
 
A young friend of his joins in. He is a member of the Jaintia Hills Autonomous District Council. “Accidents happen during mining. It is unfortunate. But these NGO people demanding a ban on mining are hidden extortionists,” he says. “People are angry with them. That is why that Agnes lady got beaten up. It was bound to happen. It will happen to anyone who comes here with such ill intent for poor people.”
 
The reference is to Agnes Kharshiing, a social activist, who, along with her colleague, Amita Sangma, was attacked and grievously injured while documenting illegal mining in the district. A month later she is still bedridden with broken ribs. Sangma has injuries on her head and multiple broken fingers. A miner-cum-politician of the ruling party has been arrested in the case.
 

Pnar people set up temporary shops to sell biscuits, water, cigarettes and Kwai (areca nut, betel nut and lime) near the rescue site in the Ksan area of Lumthari village in the East Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya

In Ksan village, three hours or so from where I meet Bamon and his friend, the operation to find the 15 to 17 mine labourers who got buried when water flooded an illegal rathole mine is still on. So far, one decomposed body has been recovered from the 100-ft-deep shaft filled with water. The shaft reaches down to the coal seam, like in all mines. The workers were lowered to this point and then they pickaxed open rathole routes, crawled and crouched through to shovel coal out while inhaling coal dust and sulphurous fumes. A navy officer at the rescue site in Ksan says, “Hats off to the people who go into these rathole mines. It’s courageous and a risk to their lives, I can see.”

Most of those trapped, now presumed dead by the rescue teams, were migrant labourers from Assam and elsewhere. Three were poor Pnar people from Lumthari village in the East Jaintia Hills wanting to make some money before Christmas. Some contend that is the only reason news of the tragedy got out. People in Khliehriat acknowledge that others have died earlier in the rathole mines, mostly migrants whose lives were more expendable. This is how it has been for decades.
 

The rathole industry
 
Mining in the Meghalaya hills has taken place at least since the late 19th century. What began as small-scale, artisanal rathole coal mining by tribes on their land has over time transformed into a large-scale operation. Records show that the annual production of coal was 39,000 tonnes in 1979. It reached commercial scales in the early 1990s and peaked at 4-5 million tonnes by 2010-2014.
 
Several districts, home to Jaintia, Khasi and Garo people in Meghalaya, hold the coal reserves. But with connectivity to Assam and Bangladesh, the mining boom took off in the East Jaintia Hills, which till then had only subsistence agriculture, suffered from a lack of cash in the local economy but was well endowed with minerals. The business township of Lad Rymbai and the adjoining district headquarter township of Khliehriat turned into typical mining towns with thousands of rathole mines. Rathole mining required much lower investments and the returns were superlative. A few rich Pnar mining barons emerged. They, like other scheduled tribes in the state, were exempt from paying income tax. They soon took control of the political economy.
 
Migrants from neighbouring regions — men, women and children — filled the squalid labour camps as others — traders, shopkeepers, contractors and transporters — made a killing. Allied businesses bloomed. Plenty of money, a fear of violence and lawlessness coupled with a pliant administration kept it all going. The rivers got laden with chemicals, the fish in them died, the water turned undrinkable. Paddy fields and plantations took a hit. The coal-cash-injected political economy became the only way of life for the Pnar of the East Jaintia Hills.
 
Several government documents and reports, evidence presented in courts, consequent judicial orders, some scientific research and dozens of news articles in Meghalaya spread over years that Business Standard reviewed validate this picture. Miners speaking on record contest this depiction vehemently and unanimously. They agree that the environment did get damaged at times, that some rich people benefited more than others, but also say that almost everyone in the region earned from the business and that no “coal mafia” or fear exists. 
 
Yet, a code of silence prevails in Khliehriat and neighbouring villages, particularly after January 15. Few like to speak on record or be seen talking to the media and outsiders on the issue of mining ban. Almost everyone cautions against taking photographs in the area. Sometimes these warnings are laced with veiled threats.
 

The Meghalaya exception
 
There is a critical and unique element to Meghalaya’s coal story. Schedule VI of the Constitution provides a special administrative regime for Meghalaya to protect the traditional social, cultural and land rights of the tribal communities — the Pnar, the Khasi and the Garo. It was introduced to ensure a complex and multi-layered land tenure system, wherein large parcels held as commons are owned and governed through a relatively more egalitarian and bottom-up traditional leadership and not by the state as custodian.
 
Elected autonomous district councils for the three communities were set up to empower and help the traditional leadership. The state government was to be the third tier on top. This arrangement was meant to address the tribal communities’ strong desire to maintain their separate identity and way of life even as the Meghalaya kingdoms were subsumed into an independent India.
 
But, over time, the power dynamics and influence of each changed. The autonomous councils became politically and economically dominant along with the state government. The traditional leadership weakened.
 
Formal land records remained non-existent at best (people and politics resisted cadastral surveys) and fuzzy at worst as control over commons and private lands changed hands among the tribals. Questions periodically arose over a rising tribal elite discreetly amassing land, but these questions were not addressed.
 
Against this backdrop, mining grew as a private enterprise of tribals firmly in control of their lands. On paper, a notification from the President of India and amendments to the two mining laws were required allowing landowners to mine in their private lands in exception to the mining laws of the country. Elsewhere in the country only government entities such as Coal India could do so after nationalisation in 1973. The notification did not happen but private citizens continued mining their own lands regardless. Both the Centre and the state looked the other way as coal barons emerged and began mining on lands held by others as well. Miners claim they did so only by sharing revenues and profits with land owners. Some contend that part of it was done by coercion, threat of violence and usurpation of commons. Information, news reports and records exist to prove this anecdotally. Mine ownership and lease records or coal trade challan data were not made public for decades.
 
On paper all the coal mined privately after the nationalisation of the mineral was illegal. Yet, every year, the state charged a penalty on a part of the illegally mined coal and recorded it as “revenue from royalties”. Several audit reports of the state finances show that the revenue that the state government captured even as “penalty-royalty” was only a small part of what it should have. Hundreds of crores in penalty were evaded. The state ignored audit findings even though mining royalty constituted more than 70 per cent of the state’s revenues and it could have been more. The Centre too looked the other way, as it often has when administering frontier tribal states in the Northeast. It acknowledged the “royalty” and “coal production” from Meghalaya for decades with the fine print: “Coal mines in the State of Meghalaya operate under the Private Sector.”
 
Then came the National Green Tribunal (NGT) ban on mining in 2014.
 

One of the coal mines that was abandoned after the National Green Tribunal’s 2014 order to ban mining in the state. Those in the interior continued to illegally mine coal. Photo: Nitin Sethi

Enter the courts
 
The NGT allowed already mined coal to be sold under strict supervision and higher levies. That gave birth to a near-magical exercise where the miners and the state periodically pleaded before courts that they had found yet more coal, which had been mined before the 2014 order but was awaiting transportation. The tribunal and the Supreme Court relented, for years, up to January 2019 and sale of ever-increasing stocks of coal continued. The state made a record revenue from the revised levies on the transported coal. But illegal mining, like the one in Ksan where the tragedy happened, took off alongside.
 
The challans for transportation (of coal) became expensive. We were earlier paying Rs 15,000 per challan (including bribe) for nine tonnes of coal. We ended up paying up to Rs 90,000,” said a coal miner wanting to remain anonymous. For the record, the state did catch some illegal transportation during this period.
 
On January 15 this year, the Supreme Court halted all transport. It did so after the court took account of the two-volume “Citizens’ Report on Coal Mining in Meghalaya”. The report prepared by some leading journalists, including Patricia Mukhim, editor of Shillong Times, concerned citizens such as Tarun Bhartia and social activists such as Kharshiing and Angela Rangad, claimed that the NGT order had been flagrantly violated, that politicians, politician-miners and state government were all in it together. It listed names of politicians who had stakes in the coal business — they cut across party lines, some are ministers in the current government, some were in previous ones. It also includes a current member of Parliament from Meghalaya. Business Standard independently verified a sample of these names and their interests in the coal business from different official records.
 
In response to the apex court order, on January 15 itself the state chief secretary first ordered a complete ban on the transportation of coal. But within 24 hours the state reinterpreted the Supreme Court orders based on legal advice from central government counsel and allowed coal that had been loaded onto trucks or already in transit to continue being sold. It then filed a clarification petition with the apex court to post-facto justify its interpretation.
 
S

ome justified the state’s interpretation of the Supreme Court order. “This sudden halt to transportation was very wrong. What would have happened to coal that was already loaded on trucks and in transit from interiors of the state down to Assam?” asks Justine Dkhar, ex-MLA of Khliehriat, now with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
 
At the time of writing this report, tonnes of coal remained piled up in mounds along the metalled roads in adjoining villages such as Sutnga. If one were to go by the miners’ version, all of this coal was dug legally before the 2014 NGT order.
 
The way ahead
 
The NGT and Supreme Court orders are temporary in nature. The mining will take off again once private mining in the state is “legalised” and “regulated”. The state government has begun deliberations with the Centre and claims it is ready to restart mining with environmental regulations in place, but that the Centre should cede its veto power over who mines the coal and how much, and let the state alone manage it.
 
After the NGT ban, the previous Congress state government too engaged with the central government to achieve a similar resolution. But talks stalled with the BJP at the Centre. In February last year various BJP central leaders campaigned in Meghalaya during the Assembly elections promising to help restart mining within months of gaining power. It has been in power for a year now.
 
All miners and politicians Business Standard spoke to were unanimous that they would accept the state (and not central) regulations on mine leasing and some form of environmental safeguards to restart mining.
 
Kharshiing, the activist who was brutally attacked, is not convinced about the intentions of the miners and the state government. “First let them tell us who really owns these mines. The truth should come out about who really gains from this business that they carry on unfettered in the name of the poor,” she says. “With our political class so entrenched in the business, will it really let any so-called regulation be implemented? Let them present blueprints of all the mines they want to operate. People need to know.”
 
Kyrmen Shylla, MLA from Khliehriat and at 30 the youngest minister in the current government, counters: “I will not deny that some miners became very rich earlier, but it is these rich people who ensured many others got employment. What is wrong in that?” He adds, “Our people were not literate then. The earlier generation did not know how to spend that money; it just kept investing it in more coal mining. But it helped our generation get educated and if mining opens up now with proper regulations, people will do it more responsibly and also invest properly.” His father is a veteran politician and a miner. Several of his other relatives are in the coal business. And in politics.
 
The Jaintia Coal Miners and Dealers Association along with others have for long argued for the right to mine coal before the courts. Its president, Balios Swer, has defended the industry against claims of corruption, of the existence of a “coal mafia” or any nexus between miners and the political class. When he finally takes my phone call after repeated attempts to meet in person, he says, “Sorry, I do not have time. I am very busy with elections. The district council elections are going to take place soon.”
 
Around the time I get this brusque reply from Swer, and while many await the next hearing of the matter before the Supreme Court on January 29, back in the state capital Shillong, Lapdiang A Syiem, a young artiste, is performing. It is a theatrical improvised version of the legend of U Thlen — and how it has come back in the shape of coal to haunt the Pnar and Khasi people.