Uttarkashi tunnel rescue: Rat-hole miners won't encash their cheques; Here's why
Dehradun, Dec 23: The rat-hole miners who played a vital role in the evacuation of 41 workers trapped in the Silkyara tunnel have refused to encash the cheques of Rs 50,000 given to them recently by Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami.
The rat-hole miners said the chief minister's gesture was "not commensurate" with the role they had played.
"It was a desperate situation. We chipped in when the machines had failed to reach the trapped workers. We drilled manually through the debris risking our lives without putting any preconditions. We appreciate the gesture of the chief minister but are not satisfied with the amount that was given to us," Vakil Hassan, who headed the team of the rat-hole miners, told PTI.
"The role of rat-hole miners in the operation was heroic but what they got from the government was sadly not adequate," he said.
The 12 rat-hole miners honoured by the state government have collectively decided not to encash the cheques, he said.
"I conveyed our dissatisfaction to the chief minister the day the cheques were handed to us. We returned after being assured by the officials that some announcement regarding us will be made in a couple of days. However, if the promise is not kept, we will return the cheques," Hassan said.
Hassan said permanent jobs for the rat-hole miners who helped in the operation is what they expect from the state government.
Munna, a rat-hole miner who works for Rockwell Enterprises, a firm headed by Hassan, and was among the first to reach the trapped workers said, the amount given to them was not adequate considering the kind of effort they put in to rescue the trapped workers.
"We literally entered the jaws of death to rescue the trapped workers. We did not listen to our family members as human lives had to be saved," he said.
"Cheques of Rs 50,000 is too paltry a sum to acknowledge our role. It lowers our morale. A permanent job or a house to live in would have been more appropriate," Munna, who lives in an 8/10 room with his children, said.
Chief Minister Dhami on Thursday honoured 12 rat-hole miners with cheques of Rs 50,000 each.
The rat-hole miners had manually drilled the final stretch of about 15 metres through the debris in the collapsed part of the tunnel in claustrophobic conditions to prepare an escape passage made of MS steel pipes for the trapped workers.
Rat-hole mining was the last strategy adopted by the rescuers after several attempts to reach the workers with the help of auger machines failed to produce the desired results.
The workers had remained locked up in a part of the tunnel for seventeen days after its partial collapse on November 12.
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Over 17,000 people went missing in Delhi in 2024: NCRB
New Delhi (PTI): A total of 23,058 people, comprising 9,482 men and 13,576 women, were reported missing in Delhi in 2024, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
Of the total, 5,491 were children below the age of 18 — 1,571 boys, 3,920 girls.
The city recorded 17,567 fresh adult missing persons cases in 2024, comprising 7,911 men and 9,656 women.
According to the NCRB data, released on Wednesday, 14,637 men, 18,238 women and six transgender persons were still missing from previous years.
At the latest count, in 2024, Delhi had a total of 55,939 missing persons cases — 24,119 men, 31,814 women and six transgender persons.
In 2024, police traced or collected 28,392 missing persons, including 12,182 men, 16,208 women and two transgender persons.
Only half of the men and half of the women who went missing could be traced.
A total of 27,547 missing persons – 11,937 men, 15,606 women, four transgender persons — were yet to be untraced by the end of the year, the data showed.
The data also revealed that 5,352 children from previous years remained untraced at the beginning of 2024.
The number of still missing boys was 1,621, and the number of missing girls was 3,729. Two transgender children were yet to be found.
After adding the pending cases from previous years, the total number of missing children cases handled in 2024 rose to 10,843.
The police traced or recovered 6,762 missing children — 2,030 boys, 4,732 girls.
The recovery rate stood at 63.6 per cent for boys and 61.9 per cent for girls, while no transgender child was traced.
By the end of 2024, a total of 4,081 children remained untraced, 1,162 of them boys, 2,917 girls, and two transgender children.
