Inglorious Miners

The rat-hole miners involved in the Uttarakhand rescue operations are well aware that soon they will fade from people's memories and will have no option but to go back crawling inside dark tunnels

- Shreya Basak

MUNNA Qureshi feels dizzy in close, cramped spaces. The heat and fumes emanating from gas cutters reflect off the walls of the narrow, cramped tunnel. Tiny, dark spaces, like the one he often finds himself in, make him giddy. Even the shards of light from the flames spitting out of the gas cutters do not help. The flames run the risk of injury and the fumes make him gasp for air.

The risks that Munna, 33, and other rat-hole miners like him run when they descend—sometimes fifteen metres into the earth—using only a narrow three-four foot pipe as a flimsy portal into the subterrain are immense. It is a portal that for many rat-hole miners has also doubled up as a cramped coffin in the past.

Last month, when all efforts that money and might could muster, including the commissioning of an expensive Auger drill machine, failed, hopes were pinned on rat-hole miners like Munna to burrow out the last of the debris from the Silkyara-Barkot tunnel. The tunnel had collapsed on November 12, trapping 41 workers inside for 17 days. It took 12 rat-hole miners from Dalit and Muslim communities in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh to extract them, when all the wherewithal of the state had failed.

Clearing debris and sewage fifteen metres below the surface is dark, dangerous living. After spending most of their days cramped in the narrow, dark cavity, when the first ray of the sun hits their bodies after they surface, it feels as if a “heavy load has been taken off our backs,” says Munna, who was involved in the Silkyara-Barkot tunnel rescue operation. The surface, he says, is a safe place to live.