One body recovered from flooded Indian mine as rescuers search for trapped men

By Tora Agarwala

GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) - The body of a miner was recovered from a flooded coal mine in a remote district of India's northeastern state of Assam on Wednesday, two days into the search for nine men trapped below ground.

The mine, which is 300 feet (91.44 m) deep and has multiple underground tunnels, is thought to have flooded on Monday morning after miners hit a water source, according to officials and a state minister.

The extent of the flooding hampered rescue work on Tuesday, but expert divers entered the mine again early on Wednesday and were able to retrieve a body, Himanta Biswa Sarma, the chief minister of Assam state, said on X.

Officials have said the mine is illegal.

"We didn’t see the body, it was completely dark inside, we felt a body using our hands, and that’s how we were able to rescue them," one of the divers told a local news channel after the body had been recovered.

The Army has deployed divers, helicopters and engineers to help the rescue efforts in Assam's hilly Dima Hasao district.

"It is difficult to say how long the operation will take, because we have been told there are rat holes in the mine," H P S Kandhari, a commandant in the National Disaster Relief Force, the federal agency that is responsible for such operations, told news agency ANI.

Rat hole mines, named because their tunnels are just big enough for workers to get through, were once used extensively in India's northeastern states. They were banned in 2014 because of the large number of fatalities and the damage caused to the environment.

In 2019, at least 15 miners were buried while working in an illegal rat-hole mine in the neighbouring state of Meghalaya after it was flooded by water from a nearby river.

Coal mining disasters in the remote northeastern part of India are not uncommon.

(Reporting Tora Agarwala in Guwahati; writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Kate Mayberry)