Himalayan Wonder

THEY CALLED THEM RAT-HOLE MINERS’. BUT WHAT THE 12 HEROES LEFT AT SILKYARA, WITH A DRAMATIC RESCUE THAT EVEN ADVANCED MACHINERY COULDN’T PULL OFF, WAS A HUMAN-SIZED IMPRESSION

- Avishek G. Dastidar

FOR 17 DAYS IN NOVEMBER, ALL EYES IN INDIA REMAINED FIXED on TV screens. It was a nail-biting rescue operation that was grabbing all their attention. The government had deployed its full might all the ultramodern machinery and technologies it could lay its hands on to rescue 41 workers trapped inside a 4.5-km under-construction tunnel that had collapsed at Silkyara in Uttarakhand. In the end, however, it was a group of 12 "rat-hole miners" who with the help of their manual tools-burrowed through tonnes of debris and completed the last stretch of a rescue tunnel, something even an American drilling machine had struggled to do for days. They gained instant celebrity status. And rat-hole-mining-the antiquated, now-illegal practice where narrow holes are dug manually to extract caught everyone's imagination.