Rat-mining gets job done!

For 24 hours, Munna Qureshi kept digging away, metres deep inside a 2.6-feet-wide steel pipe. Hunched and weary, fatigue hit him in waves ever so often. But the 29-year-old from Delhi knew he couldn’t stop.

- Amit Bathla

Behind him lay several yards of darkness, but before him lay the fate of 41 workers trapped in a tunnel for more than 400 hours. At that time, excavator machines and sophisticated drills had failed to bore through the debris. The job eventually fell to 12 so-called “rat-hole miners” or “rat miners” such as Qureshi, who were tasked with chipping away at 12 metres of debris — at the end of it lay freedom for all those men and relief for all their families.

At 7.05pm on Tuesday, he pushed aside the last rock that stood between him and the survivors.

“I can’t describe my happiness,” Qureshi said, minutes after the first trapped worker was wheeled out around 7.45pm. “They hugged me, cheered in applause, and thanked me profusely.”

Feroz, another rat-hole miner, who helped dig through the last two metres of debris, left the tunnel in tears.

“I hugged one of the trapped workers and just wept,” he said.

A dozen men, largely from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh and employed with a Delhi-based firm, were set into action on Monday evening, as a sort of last resort to manually carve through the debris, with the group emerging victorious on Tuesday evening, as 41 men were pulled out from the tunnel, in a heroic effort that underlines the endurance of human spirit.