Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

Young girls, also coal traders, shy away from the camera. Local trade in coal proliferates along Jowai road. It is a nocturnal affair. Traders, most of whom are women, sit in wooden shacks behind the coal heaps to buy coal. Trucks from local mines travelling to Shillong offload a little coal at these roadside shacks, while drivers pocket the extra money. The coal bought is later sold to households in the nearby villages. Electricity and cooking gas top the list of energy requirements in the Northeast. And demand more than exceeds supply. Domestic needs are increasingly met by the ubiquitous coal (Photographs by Monali Zeya Hazra)

Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

A worker squats to pull out a fully laden tray of coal from a hole. When the coal within the pit exhausts, horizontal tunnels are dug through which workers burrow to find coal. Many workers narrated incidents of tunnel roofs collapsing and trapping the workers inside (Photographs by P Madhavan)

Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

5.78 million tonnes of coal produced by Meghalaya sits in heaps along Jowai road in Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya. The wooden crates sitting on each coal pile serve as the local unit of measurement. Traders buy coal not in kilos but by the number of wooden crates it fills. Local buying and selling of coal is common in Jaintia hills, a notified sixth schedule area governed by autonomous elected councils. These councils have the power to make laws to divert land other than reserve forests for non-agricultural purposes considered likely to promote the interests of the inhabitants (Photographs by Monali Zeya Hazra)

Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

Workers crouch low to break coal in a rat-hole mine. Ideally, they should have been wearing a safety gear but the privately run mines in this region consider adhering to safety and environmental precautions a nuisance. For the state government, it is uneconomical to regulate these mines, which except paying road tax for transport don’t contribute to the state’s economy (Photographs by P Madhavan)

Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

Heaps of black coal are in contrast to the green of the hills in the background at the collection point in Wapung. Built on community land, the collection point stockpiles coal from the mines in the region, which are inaccessible to trucks. Mining in Jaintia hills is a private enterprise, which is slowly growing into a small-scale industry. No regulations and an aloof government emboldened people to extract more coal (Photographs by Monali Zeya Hazra)

Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

Labourers load coal on to trucks at Wapung. The coal business in Jaintia Hills is slowly leading to a shift in the demographic status of the area. Most of the employed labourers are migrants from Bangladesh and Nepal. The employment policy of Meghalaya requires 60% of both managerial and non- managerial jobs to be reserved for local people. But the resident Khasis prefer the supervising jobs to menial labour (Photographs by Monali Zeya Hazra)

Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

A Khasi woman supervising work shouts instructions to Bangladeshi workers. She is a member of the family that owns the mine.The coal business in Jaintia Hills is rife with class divisions built over regional identities (Photographs by Monali Zeya Hazra)

Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

A thin stream of water leaches from a mound of coal excavated along the National Highway No. 44. A unique feature of the coal found in this region is that it is rich in sulphur. On contact with water, the sulphur in the coal reacts to form acids. With high rainfall, acid mine drainage is a serious problem in the state (Photographs by Monali Zeya Hazra)

Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

Pipes being used to pump out groundwater encountered while mining for coal. The pH values of both surface and groundwater tested in the region were in the range of 3 to 3.7, indicating that the run off from the mines is eventually seeping into water bodies. Though the mining business in this region is people-owned, it is unregulated and thereby run unscientifically (Photographs by Monali Zeya Hazra)

Rat-Hole Mining in Sutgna village, Jaintia Hills

Seen here is a Vikram, originally an army truck, modified to transport coal through the dusty town of Ladrymbai in Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya. The reporter could not tell the difference between this town and the other coal towns in Orissa or Jharkhand, the mining states of India (Photographs by Monali Zeya Hazra)