RYMBAI, India: 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 four feet six inches, 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.
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 fifty meters (165 feet).
Once he reaches the bottom, he squats as low as he can and slips into the two-feet-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 says.
Twelve hours later, he will have earned 200 rupees ($ 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 ten, 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 tells AFP.
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.
But he isn’t 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 says.
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 tells AFP.
Baby-faced Surya Limu is among the most recent recruits to join Subba’s team in Rymbai village.
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 offence. Furthermore, India’s 1952 Mines Act prohibits coal companies from hiring anyone under 18 to work inside a mine.
Meghalaya, however, 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.
According to the Shillong-based non-profit, Impulse NGO Network, some 70,000 children are currently employed in Meghalaya’s mines, with several thousand more working at coal depots.
