New Delhi: With garlands of marigolds draped around his neck and a box of sweets in his hand, Naseem Malik returned to his one-room-kitchen house in north east Delhi’s Khajuri Khas to a hero’s welcome. A live band with drummers led him through the dark narrow streets of the labourers’ colony, celebrating his triumphant return from Uttarakhand. Malik and five other workers from Khajuri Khas were among the team of rat hole miners who dug their way through the collapsed Silkyara tunnel to rescue the 41 trapped labourers.
Since his return on 30 November, Malik and the other rat miners have been felicitated by BJP MP Manoj Tiwari, Karawal Nagar MLA Mohan Singh Bisht, the party’s Delhi president Virender Sachdeva as well as local political and community leaders. They’ve been called ‘rajas of rat miners’, and symbols of India’s jugaad. They are now the Dial 100 for Disasters. Everyone wants a piece of their heroism, but nobody is talking about the conditions they work in—the lack of safety gear, insurance, regular wages, and healthcare.
“We are always underground, so not many people know about us. At least with this rescue mission, we have been seen,” says Malik, who along with the other rat miners is from a lower Muslim caste. More often than not, labourers like him come from marginalised communities. The other rat hole miners from `Uttar Pradesh who were part of the team were Hindu Dalits.
“When we were at the tunnel, people started calling us rat miners.” It was the first time he had heard the term, which is given to mine workers who either dig 3-4 foot deep horizontal tunnels with pickaxes or burrow vertically through pits to extract coal. In Khajuri Khas, Malik and the others—who burrow through the earth with pick-axes, shovels, hoes and even their hands to lay underground pipelines—are called manual scavengers and ‘jack-pushing’ labourers.
We are always underground, so not many people know about us. At least with this rescue mission, we have been seen
– Naseem Malik
“We are not valued for anything more than our manual work,” says Malik, who has never worked in a coal mine before this.
Now, he and his neighbours are India’s heroes. Dressed in the best clothes he could find—a crisp cream shirt, black trousers and white shoes—he’s been giving interviews, meeting politicians and answering his phone which rings nonstop. His hair is slicked back with oil, and his eyes are rimmed with kohl ready for the cameras.
In the 15 years since he entered this profession, Malik has travelled to Mumbai, Rohtak, Lucknow, Ranchi and other parts of India, to help lay underground sewers and gas and water pipelines in places where machines cannot go. In the construction eco-system of engineers, supervisors and contractors, he’s at the bottom of the pyramid.
“But we too apply our mind and engineering knowledge when we are under the ground, digging one stage at a time. When we start digging a pit, we cannot shift or turn. Sometimes these pipelines run under a broad highway, a railway track, or a metro station. There is no room for error.”
For this, he earns Rs 600 a day—when he’s on the job.
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Once-in-a-lifetime fame
Naseem Malik has barely spoken to his wife in the last few days. He’s midway through his meal of chapati and dal when his phone rings again.
His wife Sameena wants to talk to him; his three sons want to play with him, but he answers his phone. There’s one more felicitation meeting.
But this is not the life Sameena wants for him. While he was digging his way to the trapped labourers, Sameena spent her days terrified that Malik would be trapped as well. The family can’t afford a TV, so she tracked the news on YouTube channels from her phone. Her husband’s rescue mission was being monitored by local, national and international media.
Recently, another young man from Bihar got electrocuted while welding the pipes underground. It is a part of the work
– Naseem Malik
“He almost died once. He got electrocuted while working on an underground pipeline in Rohtak,” she says. Malik, who had to cover his medical expenses from his daily wage salary, was in hospital for many days. Sameena didn’t know about it until he returned to Delhi.
“Recently, another young man from Bihar got electrocuted while welding the pipes underground. It is a part of the work,” says Malik calmly.
He leaves the marigold garland and box of mithai behind, steps out of the room and vanishes into the crowded lane. His wife and children watch him, savouring this once-in-a-lifetime moment of fame.
From bull carts to rat miners
Khajuri Khas is so densely populated that it’s hard to say where one house ends and another begins. From a few hundred houses in the 1990s, it’s blown up into a sprawl of lakhs of homes along the Delhi- Meerut Expressway. The narrow lanes are gloomy and shrouded in darkness even during the day.
It was one of the worst-affected areas during the Delhi riots in early 2020. The rat miners, unable to go to work, were among those who were guarding the neighbourhood from rioters.
Malik, his wife, sons (eight, 11 and 13 years), and four other extended family members, call the one-room kitchen unit in Khajuri Khas home.
He’s been trying to break away from daily wage work for years, but keeps getting drawn back into the tunnels. One time, he took out a loan to buy an auto, but the timing was wrong. Covid swept through their colony, work stopped, he ran out of money, and his auto was repossessed.
The family could no longer afford the monthly Rs 500 for their children’s private school fees.
“We sent them to private school for four years, before switching to government,” says Sameena, as she watches her sons—the older two had set their school bags down and were watching YouTube videos and the youngest was playing in the streets. She’s taken up a job stitching clothes in a garment factory to support the household as Naseem’s income is irregular.
So when her husband returned with Rs 25,000 in cash awarded by MP Manoj Tiwari, a Rs 500 garland, and a Rs 2,000 cheque after the mission, she hid them in her wardrobe.
Malik, a Teli Muslim, arrived in Delhi as a child when his father decided to leave their village, Barwala, in Muzaffarnagar to drive a bullock cart.
“There was a flood and I had to leave the village to support the family. At that time, this Khajuri Khas area was just agricultural fields with few houses under construction,” says his father Valedeen.
Malik dropped out of school after class nine. “We would collect sand from the Yamuna banks and deliver it to construction sites,” he says. In 2008, while transporting pipes on a bullock cart, he saw workers go down deep pits. He watched them dig their way through the soil to lay the water pipelines and decided to join them.
The labourers have no safety gear. They often die of electrocution
– Vakeel Hassan, co-founder Rockwell Enterprises
The job often requires him to dig a pit around 5-7 metres deep depending on the size of the pipeline. There is always the danger of the tunnel collapsing and low oxygen levels underground.
“The labourers have no safety gear. They often die of electrocution,” says Vakeel Hassan, who co-founded Rockwell Enterprises, the company that put together the crack team of rat hole miners for the tunnel rescue operation.
“Unfortunately, there is no consolidated data on how many people die every year laying down the water, sewage, and gas pipelines. That’s why the stories of underground labourers stay underground. This rescue operation has, for the first time, given them faces and identity,” says Hassan.
Sameena doesn’t know if Malik will ever be able to extricate himself from this life.
“My only wish is that my children don’t work like their father. They should find some good job,” she says.
By Sunday, the nation’s gaze moved to the assembly election results in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Telangana. Malik’s phone is finally silent. But now he’s waiting for it to ring with news of another job.
“[Before Uttarakhand] our last job was for the Delhi Jal Board. We were installing sewage pipelines in Burari, but work stopped on 11 November when the government prohibited construction work due to pollution,” says Malik. At the time, he had been contracted by Rockwell Enterprises which offers trenchless engineering services for clearing sewer, gas, and water lines.
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Rag collector to rat miner
Malik was asleep when his phone rang around midnight on 22 November. It was Munna Qureshi (33), another rat miner who lived in the same block on Gali number 3.
“Get ready to go to Uttarakhand, 41 workers are stuck inside [a tunnel]. We have to help them,” he was told. This was the first time he had been called to rescue people.
According to Malik, there are more than 50 labourers like him who specialise in digging underground in the Muslim-dominated Khajuri Khas colony. But Qureshi, who co-founded Rockwell, wanted to put together a crack team for this special mission, and Naseem was one of the best.
Qureshi was the first of the rescue team to see the trapped labourers in the tunnel.
He never had the chance to go to school. After his father died in 1998, he became a rag picker at nine to help his family. His childhood days were spent roaming the northeast Delhi streets and calling out “Kabadiwala”. Slowly, he moved up the waste ladder to become a scrap dealer.
“My wife was uncomfortable with this as she had more education than me. She had finished ninth grade. There is social exclusion and stigma if you are dealing with scrap,” he recalled. Like Malik, he tried to get out and used his savings of Rs 2 lakh to invest in a garment store. When it failed, he joined a group of small-scale contractors.
“I was arranging labourers for construction sites, but it did not work out. I left for Mumbai to work in a gypsum factory,” he says. By 2017, he was back in Khajuri Khas working as a manual scavenger when he teamed up with Vakeel Hassan to start Rockwell Enterprises. Then in 2021, during the second wave of the pandemic, his wife died. Today, his daughters, 8-year-old Mahira and 4-year-old Shanaya, are being raised by his in-laws who live in the same neighbourhood, while his son lives with him. When he’s away on work, his extended family steps in to raise the boy.
He was putting his nine-year-old son Faiz to sleep in their 10×8 foot one-room house when Hassan called him about the Uttarakhand job.
Also Read: Rat-hole miners all the buzz after Uttarkashi. It’s time India ensured their safety
Media gaze
The last few days have been surreal for Munna Qureshi—not the actual rescue operation but the media gaze after its success. As the first rat hole miner to reach the trapped labourers, he’s become the face of the operation. He’s been featured in international media from The Guardian to BBC, while Indian media outlets are calling him ‘Raja of Rat Mining’, and extolling ‘Indian jugaad’.
Whenever he can, Qureshi makes it a point to highlight their working conditions, the lack of proper pay, insurance or healthcare.
Apart from Malik and himself, the team he put together for the operation included his brother Feroze, Irshad Ansari, Rashid Ansari, and Qureshi—all lower-caste Muslims. “They were chosen as they were willing to put their lives on the line,” says Hassan who took point and led the team. They spent almost Rs 10,000 on tools—two shovels, four spades, 14 iron taslas (shallow bowls), and a four-wheel trolley from Loni Gol Chakkar market before travelling to the Silkyara tunnel by road.
They are like us, labourers from different parts of India. We had to save them
-Munna Qureshi
They arrived on 23 November. Hassan inspected the site, realised they needed more hands and called in seven rat hole miners from Bulandshahr in UP.
“We just sat there from 23 to 26 November, but got a chance to work from 27 November,” says Qureshi. The second drilling broke down, and the rat miners moved in. They used their spades and gas cutters, but for the final 12-metre stretch, Qureshi, Malik and the others clawed their way through the debris with their hands to reach the 41 workers who had been trapped since 12 November.
“This was the hardest part, but we trusted our skills. We never thought we would fail. We set a deadline of 36 hours but we finished the mission in just 26 hours,” said Qureshi, who was the first to see the 41 labourers.
“They are like us, labourers from different parts of India. We had to save them,” Qureshi says.
Among the many functions and felicitation ceremonies he attended, the one that made the biggest impression was at Little Flowers International School in Kardampuri.
“The principal called us heroes. She encouraged the thousands of students to learn from us,” says Qureshi. “I can only dream that one day my children will also study in a school like this.”
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)