(Image via pbs.org)

Staff Writer: Maya Arruda

Email: marruda7@umassd.edu

On November 28th, 2023, the families and friends of forty-one men rejoiced. 

Two weeks earlier, these men left for work like they would any other day. They were construction workers, building a new highway tunnel in Uttaraharkhand’s Silkyara district within the Himalayan mountain region as part of the Char Dham Highway Project. 

Their job was to bore through the mountain. Nothing was supposed to go wrong.

On November 12th, 2023, something went very wrong with the construction project. A sudden landslide trapped forty-one workers within the bowels of the mountain. 

For seventeen days, rescuers tried and failed to rescue the workers with modern high-powered drills, only managing to drill a small pipe to deliver food, water, oxygen, and medication.

Instead, the twenty-four rat miners became heroes when they dug a three-foot-wide hole to rescue the workers. The rat miners were called in on November 27th after two weeks of failure, and they searched the entire night to save the construction workers.  

Every worker made it out alive.

Rat mining is an old technique once used in Meghalaya to mine coal. The miners would dig small pits, just like rat holes, for the miners to go into with either ropes or laters to get the coal.

Children were often used as coal fetchers due to their small size. The practice was first declared illegal in the 1970s and then criminalized again in an environmental court in 2014 because of the ecological damage done and the massive amount of human mortalities caused by the practice, an estimated 10,000-15,000 deaths within a seven-year time frame.

While the nation of India remains positively delighted at the safe return of the forty-one workers, it remains to be seen if the public will hold the government to account for the incident. 

There is criticism towards the Indian government that they had neglected to do proper environmental assessments of the area before the project began, which led to the forty-one men being trapped in the first place. The region is known to have a lot of avalanches, earthquakes, and floods, all of which could irreversibly harm the construction workers. 

The Char Dham Highway Project had bypassed mandatory environmental impact assessments by dancing through loopholes, causing the project to fail to meet ecological clearance requirements. 

Additionally, there are concerns that these environmental impact assessments would have made the construction site safer for the workers by giving them a disaster management plan and assessing the construction site’s safety before the construction even began. 

Earlier in the year, other construction sites for the Char Dham Project had similar environmental problems. In Joshimath, the construction project had caused residents’ houses to crack and for water to seep through after, once again, in-depth environmental assessments were not performed on the site. 

The Char Dham Highway Project started in 2016 when India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone at the Parade Grounds of Dehradun. This project’s official goal was to promote religious pilgrims’ safety by linking Himalayan Hindu shrines in Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri, and Yamunotri to major roads. 

Additionally, this project can link army bases at Dehradun and Meerut to the India-China border, which has no effect whatsoever on why the Indian government seems so gung-ho at completing this project despite the environmental impact and repeated environmentally-caused issues at the construction sites. 

Hopefully, in light of this most recent disaster that almost cost human lives, the Indian government will require more stringent environmental assessments from their construction projects in the future, especially in areas known to be riddled with earthquakes and floods. 

This tunnel collapse, which could have cost forty-one people their lives if not for the rat miners, was entirely preventable. 

If the construction project continues without adequately doing their environmental assessments, these incidents will continue, and next time, the poor workers may not be so lucky.