Meghalaya produced around six million tonnes of coal annually before the National Green Tribunal banned mining in the state in 2014, specifically targeting the rat-hole technique. The method is exactly what the name suggests: vertical pits sunk into hillsides, leading to narrow horizontal burrows that follow the thin coal seams common in the Jaintia Hills. Miners work without ventilation systems, structural supports, or emergency exits. The coal is hauled out in baskets, often by laborers brought from other states who are paid by the load. Despite the tribunal ban, illegal mining continued across Meghalaya. In November 2018, just weeks before the Ksan disaster, two activists were attacked for documenting evidence of ongoing illegal extraction in the area. The coal was too valuable and the enforcement too thin for the ban to hold.

The response that followed was one of the longest mine rescue operations in Indian history. Within hours, over a hundred personnel from the National Disaster Response Force and the State Disaster Response Force arrived at the site. They pumped 1.2 million liters of water from the mine, but monsoon rain and the Lytein River kept refilling it faster than they could drain. Sonar systems and underwater cameras failed to locate the trapped miners. On December 28, the Indian Air Force airlifted high-capacity pumps to the remote site, a two-hundred-kilometer drive from the nearest landing strip. A day later, fifteen Navy divers joined the operation. The challenges were immense and compounding: no mine blueprints existed, the tunnels were unmapped, water continued flowing in from the river, and the remote location made logistics punishing. Media reports on December 27 noted a foul smell rising from the mine, though rescue officials insisted this could be stagnant water rather than evidence of death.

When the case reached the Supreme Court of India, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta informed the justices that rescue teams were operating blind, with no structural plans for a mine that had never been officially surveyed. The court expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of rescue efforts and declared that every second counted. But seconds had already stretched into weeks, and weeks into months. On March 2, 2019, nearly eighty days after the mine flooded, the Indian Army and Navy ceased operations. They had recovered two decomposed bodies. The remaining miners were never found. Their families, many of whom had traveled from distant states to wait at the pithead, received the remains of two men and the absence of eight others.

Chief Minister Conrad Sangma acknowledged what everyone already knew: illegal mining was happening across the state. Meghalaya Police arrested the mine owner on December 15, two days after the disaster. The Supreme Court demanded accountability. But the structural conditions that produced the tragedy remained largely intact. Rat-hole mining persists in Meghalaya because the coal seams are thin, making industrial-scale extraction uneconomical, while poverty makes even dangerous work preferable to no work at all. The miners trapped at Ksan were not local men. Like many rat-hole workers, they had migrated from other Indian states, drawn by daily wages in an industry that operates in the gaps between regulation and enforcement. The 2018 disaster forced a national reckoning with the human cost of India's informal mining economy, but the tunnels beneath the Jaintia Hills remain, and the coal remains in the ground, waiting.