Shillong/Khliehriat, Aug. 29: The coal mines in Meghalaya are death traps, feel many migrant labourers who are engaged in extracting the black gold by adopting unscientific rat-hole mining methods.

Because of the hazardous nature of work, the labourers continue to perish in the deep and dark tunnels while digging for coal. Their bodies are sometimes dumped and buried without any ritual and, at times, handed over to the relatives if they insist.

News about the deaths is suppressed in Jaintia Hills and neither police stations nor government departments keep any records of the fatalities.

The state government has not adopted any welfare measure for the uplift of the coal labourers.

Every coal mine in Meghalaya, especially those in Jaintia Hills, is abuzz with stories of labourers getting buried in the mines while digging for coal.

During a visit to a coal mine at Rymbai Road, the labourers told this correspondent that a worker had died while making the wooden ladder a few years ago.

The mine owner, who is also the sitting Rymbai legislator Nehlang Lyngdoh, however, said he was unaware of such incidents. “But I have heard about such incidents in some other areas, but not at Rymbai Road,” he said.

There is an 80-foot mine at Rymbai Road, besides an abandoned one, which poses a threat to the residents, as there is no protective wall around it.

Meghnath Basumatari, another employee at the Rymbai Road mine, who has been working in various mines for the past 20 years, said two labourers were crushed to death in the Moosiang coal mine area by a large quantity of coal, which fell on them after the crane carrying the load malfunctioned.

Work at the mines start as early as at 4am or 5am every day and the workers come out of the pits at noon for lunch. They go down again at 1pm and finally come up at 4pm.

Rymbai Road has an exclusive Bodo labour camp where families of Bodo coal labourers reside. The labourers, however, said they did not want their children to work in coal mines and suffer like them. They want them to have better education. “I have told my children to concentrate on their studies so that they can excel in life,” said Rupan Daimary, another labourer. Major Boro, who stays with his family in the labour camp, echoed his sentiment.

There are rich coal deposits in all the seven districts of Meghalaya, with Jaintia Hills topping the list. According to an official estimate, the coal reserve in the state is around 640 million tonnes.

The work is extremely arduous. The labourers have to crawl and extract coal from pits by using their hands and traditional tools and hence the name, rat-hole mining. Starting with a 1-metre hole, the underground workers crawl and reach depths of 100 metres. As the coal layers or seams are thin, ranging from 6 inches to 3 feet, the workers have to dig at least 25 metres to extract coal.

As there is darkness in the tunnels, a worker has to tie a torch on his forehead with rubber straps to extract coal using a traditional pickaxe. These, together with gumboots, have to be purchased by the workers themselves.

The extracted coal is filled in wooden barrows and then dumped into heavy containers, which are lifted by cranes and dumped into a heap.

Besides the underground workers — a majority of whom come from outside the state or even from Bangladesh and Nepal — many men, women and children work on the ground to load the coal into trucks, which ferry it to Assam and Bangladesh.

The deep and wide mines are uncovered at the top. The underground workers have to negotiate the narrow, slippery and fragile ladder made of wood to reach the pits located deep below. The thin handrails of the ladders are also made of tree branches. During the rains, more accidents take place, as the ladder becomes slippery.

Collapse of the heavy iron containers, full of extracted coal, which are pulled out of the pits by cranes using a rope, have also caused many deaths in the mines. There have been other accidents, too, leading to the death of women labourers working on the ground.

On June 17 this year, two women labourers, whose main work was to separate stones from coal, were electrocuted after the truck in which they were travelling came in touch with a high-tension wire at Rymbai Road under Lad Rymbai.

The workers are paid on a weekly basis. A coal labourer gets a minimum of Rs 3,000 a week and his boss, an assistant supervisor, gets around Rs 6,000 a week. The main supervisor takes home more than Rs 1 lakh. Ultimately, the maximum profit goes to the coal barons. “There is enough money but it is a highly risky job,” Dijen Boro, another coal labourer, said.

The owners of the coalfields do not lodge complaints about the deaths of workers with the police and at times pay just Rs 40,000 to Rs50,000 to the relatives as compensation through the supervisor.

On several occasions, neither the mine owners nor the relatives of labourers bother to pursue the deaths in the mines in Jaintia Hills.

Cases of deaths of labourers have also been reported from Garo hills.

In March 2009, eight workers from Goalpara went missing after they were trapped in a coal mine at Rongsa Awe near Jadi gittam in South Garo Hills district. The mine caved in, resulting in the tragedy. On March 27, 2003, seven labourers drowned when the mine they were working in collapsed at Nangalbibra in the district. In early 2002, 40 miners were killed in the district. Later that year, six more miners died in two mishaps.

As there is no police security in and around the mines, the coal pits have also turned out to be dumping grounds for bodies by criminals. In the early part of this year, Lad Rymbai police recovered the body of Skemmon Sungoh, 25, of Shangpung-Khliehrangnah village in Jaintia Hills from a coal mine at Muktieh Sohkymphor under Khliehriat. Investigations revealed that Sungoh was killed by Majam Rai for allegedly raping his wife who is a mother of three, after abducting her from the coal labour camp. Rai had stabbed Sungoh to death and thrown his body into the coal mine.

In January this year, the headman of Pamra Kmai Shnong, Archi Siangshai, lodged a complaint at Lad-Rymbai beat house that Soman Tamang and his associates had murdered Bhim Tamang and dumped his body in a coal pit at Rashun in Pamra Kmai Shnong.

Coal mining, which had begun on a very small scale in Wapung village of Jaintia Hills in the early seventies, has now become a large and highly commercial business but it still operates unscientifically and without protection.

The elders in Jantia Hills said when coal was discovered for the first time, the villagers used to extract it in small quantities and then covered the pits with vegetation before moving out to new areas. The situation is different in the present coal mines in Meghalaya where mining is reckless.

However, deputy chief minister Bindo Lanong, who is in charge of mining and is giving finishing touches to the state mining policy, said coal mining in Meghalaya was still carried out in a “small way”. He also indicated that the mining policy would exempt coal mining from its purview as coal mining was considered a “traditional practice”.

As far as accidental deaths in mines are concerned, Lanong said the aggrieved parties could take up the matter legally if they were not happy with the compensation.

Deputy chief minister Rowell Lyngdoh, who is in charge of labour, said the coal mine owners should ensure that the labourers lived in dignity and were provided adequate security.