Thirteen-year-old Sanjay Chhetri has a recurring fear: that one day, the dark, dank mine where he works will cave in and bury him alive.
Like thousands of children in India’s remote northeast, Chhetri begins work in the middle of the night, ready to dig pits, squat through narrow tunnels and cut coal shards.
At 1.37m, the skinny teenager is the perfect fit for a job in the lucrative mining industry in Meghalaya state, whose crudely built rat-hole mines are too small for most adults to enter.
Photo: AFP
Each day Sanjay makes his way down a series of slippery ladders in the pitch-dark, carrying two pickaxes, with a tiny flashlight strapped to his head.
Seven months into the job, he still walks gingerly, taking care not to miss a step and fall 50m.
Once he reaches the bottom, he squats as low as he can and slips into the 60cm high rat-hole, pulling an empty wagon behind him.
That’s where his nightmares begin.
“It’s terrifying to imagine the roof falling on me when I am working,” he said.
Twelve hours later, he will have earned 200 rupees (US$4) for a day’s work, more than his parents make as laborers in the state capital Shillong.
The eldest boy in a family of 10, Sanjay left school two years ago when his family could no longer pay the bills.
“It’s very difficult work. I struggle to pull that wagon once I have filled it with coal,” he said.
As he shivers in coal-stained jeans and flip-flops — revealing wrinkled feet that look like they belong to a much older man — he says his parents constantly ask him to return home to work with them.
However, he is not ready to leave the mines yet.
“I need to save money so I can return to school. I miss my friends and I still remember school. I still have my old dreams,” he said.
Mine manager Kumar Subba says children like Sanjay turn up in droves outside Meghalaya’s coal mines, asking for work.
“New kids are always showing up here. And they lie about their age, telling you they are 20 years old when you can see from their faces that they are much, much younger,” he said.
Baby-faced Surya Limu is among the most recent recruits to join Subba’s team in Rymbai Village.
Limu, who claims he is 17, left his native Nepal for Meghalaya when his father died in a house fire, leaving behind a widow and two children. Unlike his more experienced colleagues, Limu moves slowly down the precarious mine steps, his delicate features straining with the effort.
“Of course I feel scared but what can I do? I need money, how else can I stay alive?” he said.
Child labor is officially illegal in India, with several state laws making the employment of anyone under 18 in a hazardous industry a non-bailable offense.
Furthermore, India’s 1952 Mines Act prohibits coal companies from hiring anyone under 18 to work inside a mine.
However, Meghalaya has traditionally been exempt due to its special status as a northeastern state with a significant tribal population.
This means that in certain sectors like mining, customary laws overrule national regulations. Any land owner can dig for coal in the state, and prevailing laws do not require them to put any safety measures in place.
Shillong-based non-profit Impulse NGO Network says about 70,000 children are currently employed in Meghalaya’s mines, with several thousand more working at coal depots.
“The mine owners find it cheaper to extract coal using these crude, unscientific methods and they find it cheaper to hire children. And the police take bribes to look the other way,” Impulse activitst Rosanna Lyngdoh said.
After decades of unregulated mining, the state is due to enforce its first-ever mining policy later this year. The draft legislation instructs mine owners not to employ children, but it does allow rat-hole mining to continue.
“As long as they allow rat-hole mining, children will always be employed in these mines, because they are small enough to crawl inside,” Lyngdoh said.
Accidents and quiet burials are commonplace, with years of uncontrolled drilling making the rat-holes unstable and liable to collapse at any moment.
Gopal Rai, who lives with seven other miners in a 2.5m by 3m tarpaulin-covered bamboo and metal shack, compensation is rarely, if ever, paid to injured children.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The New Taiwan dollar and Taiwanese stocks surged on signs that trade tensions between the world’s top two economies might start easing and as US tech earnings boosted the outlook of the nation’s semiconductor exports. The NT dollar strengthened as much as 3.8 percent versus the US dollar to 30.815, the biggest intraday gain since January 2011, closing at NT$31.064. The benchmark TAIEX jumped 2.73 percent to outperform the region’s equity gauges. Outlook for global trade improved after China said it is assessing possible trade talks with the US, providing a boost for the nation’s currency and shares. As the NT dollar
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS