Of rat holes and claustrophobia

This week, a cold dark space in my heart, about the size of a rat hole, cast a pall on the New Year celebrations. For way back in 2012, a conversation with the family of an illegal rat hole miner in the hills of Cherrapunji in Meghalaya had left a deep impact. We’d encountered them while hiking to the limestone caves this area is peppered with. En route, the ground underfoot was dirty black because of surface deposits of coal. After a while we came across what looked slightly bigger than a rabbit hole. Next to it lay a pair of slippers. Ahead, a woman was cooking rice on an open fire while keeping a watchful eye on a young child who was scrabbling through the rocks and collecting bits of coal in a basket. The father must have gone into the rat hole, I surmised. But probably because this was a small, completely illegal set up, the woman angrily shooed us away when I tried to photograph it.

Later however, when we were on our way back, we ran into her husband, his arms and face blackened with coal. What he told us about the conditions inside the rat hole mine made me feel ashamed of the momentary claustrophobia I had experienced inside the limestone cave, when there was ground water pooling under my feet and little bits of rock and mud falling on my head from above.

There are two equally primitive ways in which rat holes operate, he told us. What he did was simply burrow a tunnel parallel to the ground until he reached a coal seam. Then he’d break off chunks of coal with a pickaxe, fill his rudimentary baskets and collect them in a heap outside the mine. At other sites where coal seams were deeper in the earth, miners would lower themselves into a vertical shaft and then burrow their way to a coal seam.

How did he do it, I asked, memories of my tunnel terror still fresh in the mind. “My family and I were starving in our village in Bihar,” he said. “This is hard work, but at least I earn enough to feed them. It was dangerous work,” he said. “These hills are full of such holes and since the land is owned by the tribes here, there is no way to regulate mining here!” He’d heard of many mishaps, he said. “My wife stays close; if I don’t emerge from the tunnel on time, she’ll raise the alarm. Other miners don’t have this luxury”. Our conversation came to an abrupt end when I asked who employed him to do this job. 

I left, wondering how the government and the civil society of Meghalaya could turn a blind eye to the hazards of rat hole mining. They all must be complicit, I feel, for years after that visit to Meghalaya, and years after the National Green Tribunal banned rat-hole mining in the state, the 15 miners trapped in the illegal shaft in the East Jaintia Hills sadly attest to the fact that little has changed on the ground. Perhaps this tragedy will compel the government to develop and, most importantly, implement, proper regulation on mining. Meanwhile, memories of my panicky claustrophobia in that cave make me even more anxious about the fate of the trapped miners.