“We Did It for Our Brothers Who Were Trapped, It Could Have Been Us”
Munna Qureshi, Monu Kumar, Feroze Qureshi, Naseem Malik, Nasir Khan, Jatin, Devender Kumar, Saurabh, Wakeel Hassan, Irshad Ansari, Rashid Ansari, Ankur - they are the 12 rescue miners who provided a breath of fresh air to the 41 workers trapped for 17 days inside the collapsed Silkyara tunnel in Uttarkashi. After repeated failures by the auger machine to reach the trapped workers, the team of 12 workers was called in who after working tirelessly for 26 hours accomplished their successful operation.
CPIML organised a felicitation ceremony ‘Shramik Samman Samaroh’ of these rescue miners at party’s Central Office Charu Bhawan in Delhi on 15 December. CPIML General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya and other AICCTU-CPIML leaders felicitated the brave workers. Comrade Dipankar said, “Listening to the team of miners who rescued the 41 trapped workers last month from the Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand is listening to unsung heroes of the Indian working class - full of courage, compassion, determination and solidarity. The disastrous model named development model in India’s Himalayas are being carried on the soldiers of our workers. CPIML demands that the central government must ensure regularised government jobs for all the rescue miners and an official recognition of their bravery.
The rescue workers at the felicitation said that today when we are getting a chance to speak, we want to talk about the situation of workers in the country. Workers like us cannot afford to have a house of our own in our lifetime. It is indeed a matter of great shame that workers who build critical infrastructure in different parts of the country involving great risk of accidents and injury are paid such a paltry amount. They are denied legal rights such as ESI or PF. When they work in massive development projects sometimes the employer contributes to their PF. They have been involved in this work without any formal training and they had to start doing this job when they were as young as 16 years in order to support their families. They have known about several accidents that have either injured or killed workers engaged in manual gig pushing.
They mentioned about two accidents that took lives of workers involved in laying pipelines in Delhi’s Begumpura as well as UP’s Etah. Despite the risk involved in the job and the meagre level of wages, they continue with this job as no other avenues of employment are available.
Workers like the 41 trapped construction workers as well as the 12 rescue miners are the ones on whose soldiers the burden of the disastrous model of destruction of the fragile ecology and geology of the Himalayas, paraphrased as development, are being borne. This is the cost people are paying for the unabated construction in the fragile Himalayan geology.
The twelve rescue miners are from Delhi’s Khazuri and UP’s Bulandshahar and Kasganj. Just like the rest of the country, these workers were also watching the attempts to rescue the 41 trapped workers. Monu Kumar, one of them, told us that while watching the helplessness of fellow workers who were trapped, they were feeling restless for not being able to do anything as they were confident that if given the job, their team can successfully rescue the trapped workers. They feel extremely fortunate for been recruited for the job and being able to rescue the trapped workers. Nasir Khan, another team member of the rescue miners told us that they could feel the helplessness of the trapped workers as they themselves work in deep trenches and are aware that such accidents can happen to anyone of them anytime.
The workers told that while the media has termed them as rathole miners, they describe their jobs as manual gig pushing. Their job is to lay water or sewer pipelines at 15-35 feet depth from the ground. While the nature of their job appears similar to that of the rathole miners, their occupation does not fall under the banned category of work. While machines are involved in horizontal digging for laying pipelines, an extensive amount of manual work is also needed to back up the machines. The description of their job defines their work as hazardous work.
The workers who hail from Bulandshahar told us that most of those who are engaged in this kind of work come from landless or small farmer families. Agrarian crisis in countryside is forcing majority of the youth to move out from farming and adopt non-farm manual work. The rescue miners said they chose this difficult job as other construction workers get Rs 300-400 per day, while they earn Rs 500-600 a day. On an average they manage to earn around Rs 15,000 per month.
Munna Qureshi, another member of the team mentioned how difficult it is for them to ensure a secure future for their children despite working hard for 9 to 10 hours a day as every right of citizens from health to education is being handed over to private companies.
Nasir Khan raised a very important question as to why projects under the government are being handed over to private companies. Wakeel Hassan, the team leader of the rescue miners said that it is not religion or caste of the trapped workers that inspired them to go for the rescue work, but the suffering of fellow workers that led them to the work.
Till that day, the rescue workers were neither paid by the Navyug company that recruited them, nor given any honorary felicitation amount by either the central or Uttarakhand State Government.
The CPIML has demanded regularised government jobs for all 12 rescue miners, Rs 10 lakhs as recognition of their service to the nation and an official recognition of their bravery. The disastrous Chardham National Highway Project must be disbanded and a proper Environmental Impact Assessment of the area must be done before proceeding with any further construction. People of the country shall no more bear the cost of disastrous projects aimed at amassing profits for the greedy corporates.
Everyone present at the felicitation ceremony was inspired by the clear manifestation of working class consciousness by these rescue miners.
