The dangerous technique of rat-hole mining, outlawed in 2014, proved essential in the rescue of 41 workers who were trapped under a collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand’s Silkyara in November, 2023. The digging was done by hand by ‘rat-hole’ miners.
Rat-Hole Miners
They are rats
burrowing deep
to dig out life.
The India that pays bills
Lives in the holes.
Holes of various colours and shapes
Of slums
Of shanties
Of manholes of poisonous gases
Of roadside cement hume pipes.
And the India that enjoy the meals
Live in big houses.
But lights always peep in through the holes.
§
What Are Your Names?
What are your names?
Feroz, Munna Quereshi, Rashid, Irshad, Naseem,
Monu, Naseer, Ankur, Jatin, Saurabh, Wakeel Hassan, Devender.
And what are your titles?
We are miners, sir.
But what are your titles?
We don’t have any
We never had any
We are miners or labourers or farmers or mill workers
or the thousands who die unnamed
cleaning the nullahs and the sewages
We are bound by our sweat, oppression and precarity
This is our title in India, sir.
Moumita Alam is a poet from West Bengal. Her poetry collection, The Musings of the Dark, was published in 2020.