Munna Qureshi is not a rat-hole miner. “I’ve never been one,” he says. He explains that what he and his colleagues actually do is trenchless pipe laying: digging tunnels to lay pipes below and beyond obstacles. Gas pipes. Water pipes. Sewer pipes. “We dig a hole 14 to 15 feet into the earth,” he explains. “And then keep pushing the pipe through.” Using gascutters, electric drills, manual digging tools and trolleys for carrying away the debris, they use the rat-hole miner’s technique to push and cut through soil, rock and—as in the case of the rescue of 41 workers trapped after the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel collapsed in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi district—steel rods.

It may not be rat-hole mining, but it is still dangerous work with the pay (roughly R500 a day) never matching up to what the job demands. In 2018, Qureshi stopped doing jobs for others, instead opening his own company for such contracts—Rockwell Enterprises—with Vakeel Hasan. He would earn up to R30,000 a month, but, in 2021, during the pandemic, he had to go back to working for others. Then, on the night of November 21, Qureshi received a call from Hasan, saying that a client they had worked for in Uttarakhand was asking if a team for the rescue could be put together. They did.