Tunnel vision

A win for inter-agency coordination, but questions remain

National relief at the rescue of 41 construction workers from the collapsed Silkyara tunnel after 17 days has been bolstered by impressive inter-agency cooperation, a relatively rare achievement in Indian project management. The government certainly pulled out all the stops. Apart from the standard disaster response forces, nine government agencies, including defence organisations and public-sector firms were involved, pooling in expertise and equipment at the rescue site. One step above, the rescue operations were monitored by the Prime Minister’s Office, which requisitioned the services of the health, road transport & highways, and telecom ministries to chip in with resources and aid. International teams specialising in tunnelling technology and rescue were also flown in. All these agencies contributed their might to find rescue solutions through rapid trial and error and to keep the workers fed and in decent health — both physical and psychological — during their ordeal under 70 to 90 metres of debris. This largely indigenous effort contrasts with the rescue of 12 teenage boys of a football team and their coach in 2018 from a flooded cave in Thailand by a diving team led by international experts after 18 days.

The euphoria over the Silkyara rescue, feted as a prime example of India’s jugaad capabilities, must be tempered by sobering realities. Unlike the highly paid and trained British, Australian and Irish divers who played the lead role in the Thai cave rescue, the hazardous last-mile operation at Silkyara was carried out by the most marginalised and poorest workers in the Indian labour chain. Where high-tech machinery failed, these rat-hole coal miners removed the last layers of debris with gas cutters, pickaxes and their bare hands in impossibly small spaces. The fact that these miners’ unique, primitive expertise was still (in this case fortuitously) available more than nine years after the National Green Tribunal and Supreme Court banned the practice is noteworthy. It speaks volumes for the scanty employment opportunities in East and Northeast India, where this practice is rampant, as well as the state-industry nexus of exploitation that sustains it. The capabilities demonstrated by rat-hole miners at Silkyara make a case for their co-option into the standing institutions of state disaster management, given the scale of construction in the region.

In fact, the Silkyara disaster must refocus attention on the huge environmental risks that the Centre and state governments have been taking in indiscriminately building largely unneeded and poorly engineered infrastructure — roads, tunnels, railways, dams — in the fragile Himalayan ecology. Serial disasters, as recent as this summer, do not appear to have deterred the government’s zeal in this respect. One issue that urgently needs addressing is reconsideration of the 10-year-old notification waiving environmental impact assessments for projects of less than 100 km, which could be circumvented by breaking up bigger projects into smaller ones. Questions must also be asked as to why an escape tunnel, a standard operating requirement before a tunnel is bored into a mountain, had not been dug. If there is a lesson from Silkyara, it is that environmental and workers’ safety should be paramount in India’s mega-infrastructure push.