By Sanjib Kr Baruah
Claustrophobia is a non-issue. Rai's fears are whether the deep burrow will cave in to bury him alive or whether he will be able to gasp for breath when water fills the narrow tunnel. In vain are his dreams of going back home with enough money to his parents in Nepal.
Tales of frequent accidents and deaths due to cave-ins of mine walls, sudden floods, falls in the pits and suffocation abound in these death holes, as do stories of quiet burials.
"In my five years here, I have seen and heard about countless accidents which occur with alarming regularity. Deaths are commonplace. There is no one to keep track. Everything is given a quiet burial here," says Purno Lama, a 34-year-old mine manager from Lad Rymbai, about 19 km away from Jowai, the district HQ of Jaintia Hills. "Children are preferred because the rat holes are small in size and it is not easy for large-sized adults to enter these tunnels," he says.
While the local media have often reported such accidents, it is difficult to quantify these accidents. The reason: coal mining is an unregulated activity in Meghalaya because of Sixth Schedule laws that permit private ownership. There are no registration laws for the labour employed nor are antecedents of the miners verified. With no documenting authority and lack of health facilities, almost all deaths and accidents go unreported.
"Getting the exact figure of deaths or accidents is impossible as none of the mines are government-registered. Whatever we know has come out through interactions with child miners and managers working in the coal pits," says Hasina Kharbhih, team leader of the Shillong-based Impulse NGO Network that has been doing seminal work on the child miners.
"During my last visit to a coal mine near 8 Kilo in Jaintia Hills on April 22, it was a child miner who passed on the information that an accident in his mine had killed a teenager just three days prior to my visit," she says.
Meghalaya is estimated to contain about 600 million tonnes of coal reserves. There are approximately 5,000 rat-mines, most of them located in the coal-rich Jaintia Hills in places like Lad Rymbai, Lad Sutnga, Bapung, Lakadong and Khliehriat.
The mines are of various shapes and sizes. Some are just a small and crude opening of one-metre diameter where Rai works, some have big openings of about 36 sq metres and are equipped with creaky bamboo ladders to the bottom of the shaft which can be about 500 feet deep with four rat-hole tunnels leading away at the bottom. It is to these narrow burrows that child miners are made to crawl to chip away at a coal seam.
These primitive rat holes pockmark much of Jaintia Hills' undulating landscape which must have been a sight to behold before the mad rush for coal raped the lush green region of its natural beauty.
"The inhuman conditions in the mines have to be seen to be believed. No medical facilities exist and safety equipment for the child miners is something never heard of. There is no water supply, no sanitation facilities," says Kharbhih.
Robbed of their childhood, the child miners are a submissive lot here because of threats, beatings and corporal punishments like being locked away in mine shafts in the darkness for long periods of time. In many cases, these children have been sold by their own relatives for as little as Rs 5,000.
Mine-owners deny the use of children in the mines. "No children are employed in the mines. They are like our own children, why will we push them to the mines," asks Wonderful Shullai, an owner of five working mines. But he keeps mum on being asked if he can vouch the same for all the mines.
[ via Hindustan Times ]
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