It has been more than three weeks since disaster struck a coal mine at Ksan in Meghalaya’s East Jaintia Hills district. On December 13, the miners struck an aquifer, resulting in water from the nearby Lytein river flooding the 370ft-deep mine and trapping at least 15 miners.
A dearth of equipment and specialists has been hampering rescue operations, even as hopes of the miners making it out alive fade with each passing moment. “I won’t say there is no chance of them coming back. But we can now only hope and pray to God,” Chief Minister Conrad Sangma told THE WEEK.
The mine at Ksan was a ‘rathole’ mine, where miners burrowed narrow tunnels (ratholes) to reach the seams and extract the coal manually. Rathole mining is highly profitable for the colliery owners—they bank on cheap labour, instead of investing in specialised equipment. It is also crude and dangerous. The absence of safety measures have resulted in dozens of deaths in the past few years, and the seepage from the mines pollutes water bodies and wreaks havoc on the ecology.
Citing these reasons, the National Green Tribunal had banned rathole mining in April 2014, but it continues unabated. Since such mines provide thousands of jobs and hundreds of crores of rupees in revenue, the government has not been keen on enforcing the ban.
It remains to be seen whether the Ksan tragedy would change the situation. The trapped miners have not attracted the kind of global attention that footballers who were trapped in a cave in Thailand had last year. Although the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the Navy are leading rescue efforts, the state and the Union governments have been criticised for having done too little, and for being too late.
“Our government was found sleeping,” said Vincent H. Pala, Congress MP from Shillong, who raised the issue in Parliament. “This is because the people trapped inside are poor, and are from a remote place in the northeast. The Union government talks about developing the northeast, but it did not bother to take action soon after the accident happened.”
Multiple agencies—from the Odisha Fire Service to a rescue unit of Coal India Ltd—are now involved in the operations. Kirloskar Brothers Ltd sent ten high-powered pumps to drain water from the mine, while the Air Force is airlifting sophisticated equipment for Navy divers.
NDRF commandant S.K. Singh said the divers reached the site 17 days after the accident, and that they dived 70ft. “But they were unable to reach the bottom,” he said. “The water is too deep and it is getting difficult day by day.”
State BJP president Shibun Lyngdoh said he believed that the miners were still alive. “The state government is working hard with other agencies to get them out. But we have to accept that the mine is 370ft deep,” he said.
Curiously, the tragedy has prompted both the BJP, which is a partner in the ruling coalition, and the opposition Congress to find ways to “regularise” mining in East Jaintia. Pala’s demand for an ordinance in this regard has now been taken up by the BJP.
“The coalition government has already decided to move the Supreme Court against the ban by the National Green Tribunal,” said Lyngdoh. “It is very unfortunate that the Congress, which ruled the state for long and enforced the mining ban, is playing dirty politics. The Congress is the sole reason for the plight of the poor in Meghalaya, who are jobless and have to resort to illegal mining.”