Rat-hole mining
Manual coal extraction technique / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rat-hole mining or Rat mining[1] is a process of digging employed in North East India to extract coal, where a narrow hole is manually dug by extraction workers. The practice is banned by the National Green Tribunal;[2][3] however, the techniques are still employed by artisanal mining operations in several parts of India, especially in Meghalaya.[4]