Rat mining (more commonly called rat‑hole mining) is a manual, very narrow‑tunnel coal mining technique in which workers crawl into small burrows to extract coal, much like a rat moves through its hole.

What is rat mining technique?

In rat‑hole mining, miners dig small vertical or horizontal pits just big enough for one person to squeeze through, usually 2–4 feet wide. Inside these cramped tunnels, they manually cut coal with basic tools, load it into baskets, and pass it out through the same narrow passage.

Two main technical variants are often described:

  • Side‑cutting method : Miners enter from a hillside slope and follow a visible coal seam horizontally inside the hill.
  • Box‑cutting method : A relatively wider pit (around 5 m² at the surface) is dug vertically down and then narrow rat‑hole tunnels branch out at coal level.

Because the tunnels are so tight, only one worker at a time can usually move forward, dig, and then push debris or coal back towards the entrance, where others remove it.

Why is it controversial and often banned?

Rat‑hole mining became notorious in parts of North‑East India (especially Meghalaya) because it is:

  • Extremely unsafe (high risk of collapse, flooding, and suffocation).
  • Usually unmechanised and unscientific, with poor ventilation and almost no structural support.
  • Frequently associated with child labour and unregulated, informal mining.

Due to these hazards, India’s environmental and judicial bodies have declared the practice illegal in its typical coal‑mining context, though it still persists underground in some areas.

Why was it in the news recently?

Even though it is banned for regular coal extraction, the skills of experienced rat‑hole miners have been used in exceptional rescue situations. For example, after large drilling machines failed in the Silkyara tunnel collapse in Uttarakhand, small teams of these specialists manually crawled through a narrow pipe, drilling and clearing debris to reach 41 trapped workers. Their ability to operate in very tight, fragile spaces made them invaluable for this emergency, despite the general controversy around the technique.

TL;DR: Rat mining/rat‑hole mining is a banned, highly risky method of manually digging very small tunnels to reach thin coal seams, but the same close‑quarter digging skills have occasionally been repurposed in high‑stakes rescue operations.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.