In what’s known as 'rat hole' mining, the youngsters are sent deep underground in dangerous conditions to dig in spaces too small for adults to reach.
On tonight’s Dateline, Amos Roberts sees first-hand the appalling conditions they have to work in, while authorities seemingly turn a blind eye.
Among the children he meets are 12-year-old Bikash and his friend 14-year-old Lakpa, who spend hours at a time underground in a labyrinth of tunnels.
They have no training, no protective clothing and receive no compensation if they get injured. Lakpa saw his own father die in a mining accident.
“When he died, he had one eye missing, his tongue was cut, his skull was all cracked,” he tells Amos. “Along the path, there are all these holes and you never know when you might fall.”
They work in one of thousands of small privately owned mines in the north eastern state of Meghalaya.
Five years ago, the anti-human trafficking NGO Impulse estimated there were up to 70,000 children working there.
Employing children under the age of 14 is illegal, but the state government has seemingly done very little to stamp it out.
“These mines are owned by a lot of powerful people, people who are actually ruling the state,” says Hasina Karbhih from Impulse.
“So in such a situation there will always be negligence of taking any policy forward and they’ll never do it very often,” she tells Amos.
Impulse has taken photos of obviously underage children working in the mines, but the state government is still reluctant to admit that the laws about child labour are being widely disregarded.
“Mine owners and actual mine workers that we have interviewed say that these kids are actually not involved in mining,” says Labour Minister Ampareen Lyngdoh.
“I have my suspicions, but I need to verify that on facts,” she says when challenged by Amos.
A number of mine owners were approached by Dateline, but they declined to be interviewed.
But despite the official inaction, Impulse is doing what it can to rescue children and find them a better life… Bikash and his 10-year-old brother Bishal are among the lucky ones.
They live and work at the mine with their parents, who are among the desperately poor migrants from Nepal and Bangladesh attracted to earning some money at the mining camps.
But Hasina gets permission to return them to Nepal where they can get a proper education.
Amos travels with them to their new school as they finally have reason to look ahead to a brighter future.
“I want to be a doctor,” Bikash tells him, while Bishal says he wants to be a pilot.
See the full story of India’s coal mining children and the efforts to rescue them on Dateline tonight at 9.30pm on SBS.
