He may have only studied till Class 7, but it is 35-year-old Mohammed Rashid who best sums up the high-profile rescue of 41 low-wage contract workers trapped for over 400 hours in the collapsed Silkyara tunnel— a rescue completed not by imported machines, but by rat-hole miners like him, experts in a banned practice.
“Isme mazdoor bhaiyon ko unke mazdooro bhaiyon ne nikaala (The labourers were rescued by their brother labourers),” says the resident of Baghpat in western Uttar Pradesh, who worked for six hours inside the narrow pipe drilled 60 metres deep into the tunnel’s debris. Never before in his life has he got so much praise for doing his job, he says.
Over a 26-hour period, the team of 12 rat-hole miners, mostly hailing from U.P.’s Dalit and Muslim communities, manually bored through the last 18 metres of debris, working within an 800 mm pipe and using their chisels, shovels and gas cutters to remove the iron girders and hard rocks that had defeated the imported drilling machines. They used a small trolley to push the extracted soil out of the tunnel, tying wet towels over their noses to cope with breathlessness from the clouds of dust within the narrow pipe.
