Terror in the Coal Mines of North-East India
On the history and terror of mining in the Indian state of Meghalaya
This article is part of Jamhoor’s special issue Borders & Border-making in South Asia.
A worker looks up in a rat-hole coal mine near the Lad Rymbai area in the Jaintia Hills in Meghalaya. Image: Arun Sharma/HT via Scroll In
May 30, 2021: Five miners are trapped and feared dead after a dynamite blast flooded a mine in the East Jaintiah hills of Meghalaya. Rescue operations begin two weeks after the accident, and divers recover three lifeless bodies from the flooded depths of an illegal rat-hole mine.
January 21, 2021: 6 miners are killed as their crane collapses, and they fall 170 feet inside an illegal coal mine.
December 18, 2018: 17 miners (possibly more) are killed when the illegal mine where they work floods.
Terror shapes the mining industry in the Indian state of Meghalaya. This is not just the terror of death. It is an opaque and diffuse terror that runs through formal and informal relations between governments, traders, property owners, and labourers. The terror exists deep inside the mines that become narrow, suffocating graves of colliers, and it exists outside in polluted rivers, decaying forests, and crumbling hills. The terror pervades mansions of mining barons, rooms where deals are negotiated and contracts signed, and the lives of those who profit from the devastation. This essay is about the history of mining in the region, a story mired in contracts and laws that impact three intersecting sites of terror: the land, the environment, and the body.
Contracts and Mining in Colonial North-East
The commercial profitability of natural resource mining drove colonial ambitions in the frontier hills of Bengal from the eighteenth century. During that century, when colonial capitalist trade was transforming the globe, the English East India Company (EIC) was one of many trading interests in Sylhet, a district adjoining the Khasi and Jaintiah hills. The EIC agents negotiated legal agreements with heads of polities or chiefs (known as Syiems) in the Khasi hills to access the region’s resources: land, minerals, forests, animals, and labour. These early colonial contracts transformed land and its resources into property.
Contracts were also signed between private European traders and Syiems, even though by the late nineteenth century, the colonial government began to consolidate its own commercial profitability and imperial power by containing the monopolistic ambitions of European and other private traders. Both government and private contracts ultimately created the social relations of modern capitalism in the hills, integrating them into the global economy, but in specific modes that implicated customary relations. Whereas contracts between the Company and Syiems circumscribed the territorial and jurisdictional powers of the latter, the smaller individual contracts that leased mines, quarries, and forests changed the property configurations of land and natural resources.
Coal mine workers during Colonial British India India. Image: Libcom
Two types of property were in existence when the Company arrived in the hills: the Ri Raid and Ri Kynti lands. Ri raid lands were owned collectively by clan members, while Ri Kynti was a form of private ownership. Colonial judicial archives suggest that the new contractual relations established by the Company covered both categories of land. This meant that community owned land, as well as “waste land” or unused land, were converted into commodities that would yield revenue for the colonial administration. In negotiations with Syiems over the course of the nineteenth century, the colonial government emphasized that Khasi Syiems enjoyed no proprietary rights over land. By denying the Syiems’ property rights, and thus their contractual powers, the colonial administration also sought to contain the influence of private traders in the region and consolidate its own sovereignty.
“What emerged by the end of the nineteenth century was a system in which law and contract enabled the parcelization of land and environment into transactional commodities. ”
Through the Bengal Frontier Regulations Act of 1873, the colonial state restricted the ability of “outsiders” to enter and trade within designated frontier areas. An Inner Line Permit was issued for those allowed to enter. In 1875, just two years after the establishment of the Inner Line Permit, the colonial government initiated new agreements (sanads) that departed from earlier ones signed with Syiems. Unlike earlier agreements, which had clauses conferring different degrees of authority to Khasi Syiems over their polities, the new agreements established a singular template for all polities. These new sanads were based on the notion that Syiems were non-proprietary customary authorities. Further, the colonial state made deeper inroads in accessing land and resources in the so-called non-British, non-regulation territories of the frontier. What emerged by the end of the nineteenth century was a system in which law and contract enabled the parcelization of land and environment into transactional commodities.
The Indian state inherited the legal infrastructure of the colonial state in these hills. Erstwhile non-regulation colonial frontiers, where the law’s application was strategic, vague, and erratic, became areas where excessive numbers of laws operated in parallel, and often contradicted each other. In the history of mining and terror in the Meghalaya hills, laws form a gossamer-like blanket bellowing above ground.
Mining in the Nation-State
Laws that set in motion the spatial uniqueness of the frontier hills in the nineteenth century maintained some of its features in the 1935 Government of India Act, which furnished a template for governing the post-colonial Indian state. While Syiems of erstwhile non-regulation frontier areas signed Instruments of Accession between 1947-48 to join the Indian Union, they did not sign the Instrument of Merger. Although the differences between the two instruments are minor, the former allows a greater degree of local autonomy in terms of civil administration. The Accession agreement stated the following:
Do hereby declare that we accede to the Dominion of India with the intent that the Governor General of India, the Dominion Legislature, the Federal Court and any other Dominion Authority shall by Virtue of this our Instrument of Accession, but subject always to the terms thereof, and for purposes only of the Dominion, exercise in relation to the said Khasi States such functions as may be vested in them by or under the Government of India Act, 1935, as for the time being in force in the Dominion of India (which Act as so in force is hereinafter referred to as "the Act".)
“The Act” informed Constituent Assembly debates over the tribal land and autonomous territories of the north-east frontier. The Constituent Assembly’s special subcommittee on the north-east recognized the need to establish protective mechanisms for these areas. Based on the 1935 Act, constitutional protection of tribal land, natural resources, and cultural autonomy were incorporated into the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. To this effect, Autonomous District Councils (ADCs) were created to protect customary laws and the lands of tribal communities.
The Sixth Schedule was intended to provide special protections to tribal communities, who the government acknowledged were particularly vulnerable to land alienation and forcible resource extraction during the colonial period. Protective mechanisms and legal provisions accompanied sharpened debates about the nature of state-making in independent India. Administrators disagreed over whether to assimilate tribal communities through developmental policies or confer autonomy to them as a means of protecting minority cultures and customs.
“ A class of wealthy tribal landowners and coal barons has emerged in the region, who are closely aligned with the state and traditional authorities. ”
The Sixth Schedule shaped the formation of a separate state of Meghalaya in 1972. The state included the scheduled districts of Garo, Khasi and Jaintiah hills that were part of the province of Assam. ADCs sanctioned by the Sixth Schedule became significant institutions managing the land, including its sale and transfer, and issuing trading license and leases. Land sale to non-tribals was prohibited from 1971 onwards across the state, except for designated areas in Shillong and the West Garo hills. Even though the Sixth Schedule built a legal protective framework for tribes in Meghalaya, certain crucial caveats remained.
Specifically, the framework did not consider how certain tribal inhabitants are also private land-owners or shadow partners of non-tribal businessmen. This inattention to the intersections of tribe and class has produced a limited and flawed analysis of the economy and the impact of coal mining in Meghalaya. A class of wealthy tribal landowners and coal barons has emerged in the region, who are closely aligned with the state and traditional authorities. At the lower end of this sharpened class hierarchy are dispossessed tribal inhabitants and non-tribal workers, who are divided because of their ethnic identities and corresponding classifications as “indigenous” and “migrant” labour.
By protecting the private property of tribal land and mine owners, constitutional mechanisms upholding “indigeneity” endanger the environment, as well as the health of hill inhabitants, who are mostly small agriculturists and harvesters of the forest commons. Despite land transfer prohibitions, private land is also being sold to big landholders or to non-tribal owners for commercial use under shadow partnerships. Transfer of agricultural and forest land for coal mining has led to the dispossession of lower-class indigenous inhabitants.
“The state’s discourse on customary rights in Meghalaya and invocations of constitutional guarantees do not recognize the terror that pervades the lives of the mining area’s inhabitants, especially indigenous and migrant workers.”
The state’s discourse on customary rights in Meghalaya and invocations of constitutional guarantees do not recognize the terror that pervades the lives of the mining area’s inhabitants, especially indigenous and migrant workers. Farmers have been affected by pollution and environmental degradation, while labourers' (both local and migrants) livelihoods and lives remain vulnerable and unprotected. Further, the Constitution’s classificatory difference between tribal and non-tribal communities (which include undocumented migrant workers, Muslims, Dalits and other minority groups) exacerbates exploitative work conditions in the mining industry. Migrants who work and die in these mines are subsumed under the categories of “illegal” or “outsider”, lacking space in public or policy discussions to claim rights and justice.
Women carry coal from a mine in Bokapahari, a village in Jharkhand. Image: Kevin Frayer/AP Photo via Business Insider
Labour and Environment
The National Green Tribunal (NGT), a quasi-judicial body formed by a 2010 law, banned rat-hole mining in Meghalaya in 2014. Created to deliver speedy justice in legal cases involving environmental, climatic, and natural resources, the NGT was prompted into action after reports and petitions from academics, activists, and students drew attention to the detrimental impact of this form of mining.
Rat-hole mining is a method of extracting coal by creating a vertical shaft deep underground from which horizontal narrow tunnels are dug on either side. The tunnels are 2-4 feet wide, leading to pits that are up to 100 meters deep. Rat-hole mines also include horizontal tunnels dug directly from the ground to the coal seams.
The NGT highlighted several concerns with rate-hole mining, including erosion leading to landslides, polluted water beds and rivers, and the pollution of agricultural land by coal debris. Much of the debate and activism surrounding rate-hole mining centered on the environment, rightly identify this form of mining in Meghalaya as a major hazard. What often gets missed in this focus on the environment is the impact of conflicting laws and an extractive, market-oriented logic. As a consequence, migrant labourers working in these mines often get tangled-up in questions of their legality, rather than their rights.
The terror of coal mining becomes especially clear when we examine the interconnections between environmental degradation, informal and migrant labour, and the policies governing environment, land, and labour. As anthropologist Kuntala Lahiri Dutt (2007) has argued, the transformations of mining areas since India’s policy of liberalization in the 1990s has led to “the decay of social fabric, changes in power relations, erosion of traditional livelihoods, migration from surrounding regions, and rising levels of urbanization.” Environmental degradation is weaved into all of these aspects of social transformation. The impact of these changes affect people differently based on class, gender, and legal/illegal status.
The growth in Meghalaya’s coal economy since the 1980s, accelerated by the liberalization of the 1990s, has led to further class differentiations in the region. Until 1990, cross border coal trade between Bangladesh and India was not governed by any regulations. The legalization of this trade introduced new roles and new classifications. India’s Border Security Force (BSF) and the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) were deployed to oversee trade between the two neighbouring countries. Simultaneously, workers categorized as legal/illegal, migrant/indigenous, and formal/informal became visible in political and public discourse.
Unlike in the rest of the country, the mines in Meghalaya are not owned by the Indian state. This is due to the Sixth Schedule provisions and land transfer laws in Meghalaya. But the nationalized coal mining industry of India operates in Meghalaya through Coal India Limited (CIL). CIL is a state-owned mining conglomerate that was established in 1975 with the intent of combatting market fluctuations in the mineral sector. However, the nature of its operations since the 1990s has been unclear. The Coal Mines Nationalization (Amendment) Act of 1993 allows coal mining leases to central and state governments, and to anyone provided with a sub-lease by government bodies. CIL operates through its subsidiaries across India and internationally, but in India’s north-east, it engages directly in mining. CIL’s monopoly creates a unique situation in Meghalaya where private mine owners operate in a system of cronyism with a state owned company.
Further, the political economy of coal in Meghalaya is based entirely on informal labour. These labourers are largely migrants, most often without documentation. As Lahiri Dutt points out, illegal miners cannot lobby for recognition and do not have any laws to fall back on for safety. This makes them vulnerable to exploitative wages and unsafe working conditions. This exploitative and highly profitable system also, in turn, affects the wellbeing of local communities and the environment.
Among the most exploited sections of illegal labour are children, who are hired for their ability to traverse the narrow width of rat-hole mines. The Government of Meghalaya website provides documentation on the strict ban on child labour in mines. It is the only document in the labour section of the Government’s webpage on coal minings. While the government has detailed steps for protecting and rehabilitating children, on the assumption that children are coerced into this dangerous and exploitative work, adult workers are presumed to have consented to toiling in these dangerous mines through agreements with subcontractors. The “illegal” adult labourers are therefore considered participants in the illegal activity of rat-hole mining.
A 12-year old transporting coal at a coal depot in Meghalaya. Image: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images via Business Insider
The legalization of coal trade between Meghalaya and Bangladesh in the 1990s led to an influx of people in the bordering villages of Meghalaya. This included migrant workers of Bengali, Oriya, Bihari, and Nepali background. Business entrepreneurs of West Bengali, Marwari, and Assamese background partnered with Khasi and Garo landowners to trade in the hills. The false separation of informal and formal processes of coal mining further increases the vulnerability of migrant labour. Delwar Hussain, in his book on mining villages along the international boundary dividing West Khasi hills and Sylhet, writes:
Ethnicity and religion continue to play a crucial and active role in the extractive economies of Sylhet-Meghalaya borderlands. In pre-independence limestone industry that operated in the West Khasi Hills and even before the Chattak Cement factory was established, ethnicity was utilized to designate work. For example, limestone quarries were generally operated and worked on by Khasi labourers, whilst the boatmen and lime burners were local inhabitants of Sylhet. Such divisions reinforced structures of employment but also the idea that certain groups were better suited to particular jobs…
A year before the NGT ban on rat-hole coal mining, it was reported that there were an estimated 15000-35000 migrant workers in the coal mining areas of Meghalaya. Anthropologist Dolly Kikon and sociologist Duncan McDuie-Ra suggest that migrant numbers are difficult to determine because of undocumented migrants who arrive in Meghalaya from other Indian states, and from Nepal and Bangladesh. These include seasonal migrants who move into higher ground on the Indian side when their villages in Sylhet are flooded in the regular annual monsoon cycle. Many of these migrants have become displaced due to cyclonic devastation, and the loss of agricultural land to rising sea levels – an environmental issue most often forgotten in discussions of rat-hole mining.
In all the agreements signed between India and these countries, mostly on trade matters, protective laws on labour migration do not exist. For instance, the India-Nepal Peace Treaty of 1952 allows for a porous boundary, but informal migrant workers from Nepal have little legal protections and often face violence and terror. The ambience of terror facilitates the business operations of the mine owners, who are able to hire undocumented migrants at derisory wages, to do extremely unsafe work. Worried about antagonizing anti-migration organizations and ethno-nationalists, mine owners also occasionally hide the real number of migrants they employ.
According to Lahiri Dutt, in India’s centrally controlled mining areas, local community access to natural resources is crucial to combat illegal mining. Meghalaya presents a different situation. Cheap migrant labour and hazardous technology are key to the profit that local land owners and entrepreneurs earn. No attempt to undo the harm caused by rat-hole mining will get very far without taking into consideration the central pillar of the system: cheap, undocumented migrant labour.
Subcontractors are key players who facilitate this transit of cheap labour. During discussions of coal mining in Meghalaya, the only mention of subcontractors, locally called sirdars, is in newspaper reports when they are found absconding after mining accidents and workers’ deaths. Ranabir Sammadar states that it is important to address the exploitation that ensues from subcontracting, as well as the broader division of labour into categories of “formal and informal, organized and unorganized, rural and urban, industrial and artisanal, legal and illegal, male and female, and licit and illicit”. The profit generated from such divisions, in this context derived from the bodies of undocumented migrants and children, makes the unsafe work conditions of rat-hole mining (and these laborers’ eventual death) acceptable.
The Marxist concept of “primitive accumulation”, in which accumulation is accompanied by terror and violence, fittingly captures working life in Meghalaya. Terror is not only a correlate of capital accumulation here, it also subsumes labour, and silences voices that challenge this accumulation. This terror is manifest in the assaults, intimidation and occasional murder of social activists who have spoken the truth about mining in Meghalaya. Poipynhun Majaw was murdered in a mining hub in Jaintiah hills after exposing the collaboration between tribal councils and extractive companies. Another prominent activist, Agnes Kharshiing, along with Anita Sangma, were violently attacked and found unconscious in the Jaintiah hills after taking photographs of illegal mines in November 2018. Reports of ongoing rat-hole mining in Meghalaya compel us to rethink what the human and ecological cost of economic development in the state is and look more closely into the role of law and governance.
A worker in a rat hole mine crouching to get trough the narrow passage. Image: Times of India
A Blanket of Gossamer-like Laws
In 2012, the state government introduced the Meghalaya Minerals and Mines Policy, ostensibly to protect customary rights over natural resources and land, and to encourage traditional forms of mining. At the Central level, the Mines and Minerals Development and Regulation (MMDR) Act was amended in 2015 following the Samata Judgement in 1997 that voided mining leases of non-tribals in Andhra Pradesh’s tribal areas. Passed in 1957, the MMDR Act specified the Centre’s mines and minerals policy, including provisions on leasing and operating mines. The 2015 Amendment called for the creation of District Mineral Foundations in tribal areas affected by mining. The MMDR Act does not mention the role of the Sixth Schedule sanctioned Autonomous district councils (ADCs) in its plan. The Meghalaya government was quick to respond to this amendment, which it believed violated tribal autonomy. In March 2015, the government passed a resolution for exemption from the MMDR Act, stating that it conflicted with the state’s customary land and property laws. Read along with the 2012 policy, the exemption in 2015 strengthened the big land/mine owners in Meghalaya, and businesses profiting from rat-hole mining.
A Supreme Court judgment in 2019 rescinded the NGT 2014 mining ban, and directed the Meghalaya government to implement the central MMDR Act, among other laws. The consequent shrinking of the ADC’s income from mining royalties led to certain political actors highlighting once again the issue of the Sixth Schedule guarantees of customary law.
In 2020, high level officers from various state and central departments, scientists, and public health officers reviewed the changes that had taken place in Meghalaya’s mining sector after the NGT ban. The proceedings from one of their meetings shows that the police recorded “215 cases [of illegal rat hole mining]… under Section 21 of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957”. Of these, 56 had resulted in charge-sheets being filed, while 154 were under investigation and 5 had ended in a “Closure Report”. It recorded that action had “been taken under the law” resulting in the “seizure of materials, tools and equipment”. Policing is the government’s preferred mechanism to contain illegal mining across India. However, apprehending mine owners and subcontractors seems to have little impact on the system of terror.
Miners at a rat-hole coal mine in East Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya. Image: The Hindu
The meeting also pointed towards the importance of inter-state collaboration between Assam and Meghalaya to combat the harmful environmental consequences of illegal extractive industries, in which even legal industries are implicated. Indeed, the linkages between the formal economy and illegal mining activities are charted in the Eighth NGT report of 2020. Illegally mined coal is used in industries across the state. The National Green Tribunal submitted its eighth report in February 2021, pointing out that mining in Meghalaya should be carried out in a “scientific, environment friendly, and (the) least hazardous” manner.
However, the word “labour” is conspicuous by its absence in the 210 page report. This may seem a trivial omission in a report that is mainly dealing with environmental concerns. But a little reflection would show that labour issues cannot be separated from the wider issues of the environment.
In another report, activists in Shillong compiled evidence on the detrimental consequences of the privatization of communal lands and profit-driven extractive mining. The two-volume report was submitted to the Supreme Court after the attack on activists Kharshiing and Sagma in 2018. Alongside detailed accounts of coal mining in the state, the report analysed the question of tribal autonomy, livelihoods, and communally-owned lands in Meghalaya. In addition to clearly demonstrating the way class informs tribal identity, this report also points to the interface between law and custom. Custom has historically been a site of negotiation, allowing it to change in the process. It is imperative to critically evaluate how and to what end custom and customary rights are used in ensuring the safety of the environment, labour, and land. It is also important then to recognize that tribal rights in Meghalaya are undercut by class, not to mention gender. Public debates about tribal autonomy in land usage resurfaced in Meghalaya after the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, alongside renewed demands for an Inner Line Permit. Related discussions on outsiders buying land through benami transactions have informed customary laws on gender and women’s rights in the state. The issues of labour rights, environmental protection, gender equality, and indigenous rights are interrelated and must be recognized as such. To find a way out from within the system of terror will otherwise be impossible.
Reeju Ray teaches history at OP Jindal Global University. Ray’s forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, Placing the Frontier Hills, examines the movement of law and its interface with custom in the north east frontier of the British Empire in India. She is currently working from her hometown Shillong.