Rat Hole Mining

 

Rat Hole Mining

·       Rat hole mining involves digging of very small tunnels, usually only 3-4 feet high, which workers (often children) enter and extract coal.

·       The National Green Tribunal (NGT) banned it in 2014, on grounds of it being unscientific and unsafe for workers. The state (Meghalayan) government has challenged the NGT ban in the Supreme Court.

Impact of Rat Hole Mining

·       The water sources of many rivers, especially in Jaintia Hills district, have turned acidic.

·       The water also has high concentration of sulphates, iron and toxic heavy metals, low dissolved oxygen (DO) and high BOD, showing its degraded quality.

·       The roadside dumping of coal is a major source of air, water and soil pollution.

·       Off road movement of trucks and other vehicles in the area for coal transportation also adds to the ecological and environmental damage of the area.

·       The practice has been declared as unsafe for workers by the NGT.

·       The mines branch into networks of horizontal channels, which are at constant risk of caving in or flooding.

How does it hamper the environment?

·       Water of rivers and streams in the mining area has become unfit for drinking and irrigation, and is also toxic to plants and animals.

·       A study by the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, suggests that the Kopili river has turned acidic due to the discharge of acidic water from mines and the leaching of heavy metals.

·       Layers of rock above the coal contain traces of iron, manganese and aluminium and this layer gets dissolved in the mining sites through the acid run-off or are washed into streams as sediment.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quantum Nonlocality

Image
  Quantum Nonlocality: §   While classical physics assumes locality, the principle of nonlocality is a feature of many interpretations of quantum mechanics. §   Nonlocality describes the apparent ability of objects to instantaneously know about each other’s state, even when separated by large distances (potentially even billions of light years), almost as if the universe at large instantaneously arranges its particles in anticipation of future events. §   This is in direct contravention of the "principle of locality" (or what Einstein called the "principle of local action"), the idea that distant objects cannot have direct influence on one another, and that an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings, an idea on which almost all of physics is predicated. §   Non locality occurs due to the phenomenon of entanglement, whereby particles that interact with each other become permanently correlated, or dependent on each other’s states a...
Read more

UPSC CSE 2025- Mains Results Declared

UPSC CSE 2025- Mains Results Declared The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) has declared the results of the UPSC Civil Services Examination (CSE) Mains 2024 on December 9, 2024. Candidates who appeared for the CSE Mains exam can check their results on the official website, upsc.gov.in.                                                   UPSC CSE 2025- Mains Results Declared
Read more

MISSION KARMAYOGI

Image
  MISSION KARMAYOGI Why in the news? §   Recently, Capacity Building Commission (CBC), launched in 2021, as part of National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB) - Mission Karmayogi has completed three years. Context §   Recently, Indian Institute of Public Administration assessed the impact by seeking inputs on trained staff and reported increased proficiency in data analytics and e-governance tools under Mission Karmayogi. Mission Karmayogi §   India’s ambitious vision of becoming a global manufacturing hub, a critical exporter of value-added services, and a mass supplier of human skills to an ageing developed world by 2047 hinges on efficient governance and competent civil services. §   Recognising this, the Prime Minister of India launched Mission Karmayogi, the National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building to transform India’s three million civil servants into citizen-centric, future-ready, and result-oriented ‘K...
Read more