All 14 miners trapped 50 metres underground in Bengal coal mine rescued

All 14 workers who were trapped underground at a coal mine in Paschim Bardhaman district, West Bengal, have been rescued, an Eastern Coalfields Ltd. (ECL) official said on Tuesday (October 27, 2026).

The workers were stranded on Monday (October 26, 2026) following a technical fault in the pulley system at the Kumardihi A underground mine of ECL, a subsidiary of the State-run Coal India Ltd.

“All 14 workers have been rescued. There has been no casualty,” Satish Jha, ECL Chairman and Managing Director, said.

According to the company, the workers were stranded in two lifting cages at a depth of about 50 metres after a rope slipped out of the pulley drum, disrupting the mechanism used to transport miners into and out of the mine.

The rescue was completed a day after the incident. It was not immediately clear whether operations at the mine had been suspended, or what precisely caused the rope to slip out of the drum.

Kumardihi A is one of the underground mines operated by ECL in the Raniganj coalfield area of Paschim Bardhaman district. Raniganj is among the oldest coal-mining regions in the country, and ECL, headquartered at Sanctoria in the same district, is one of the subsidiaries through which Coal India Ltd. carries out mining operations across several States.

Underground mining involves the movement of workers to and from the coal face using winding and man-riding systems, which are subject to prescribed safety requirements. In India, such operations are governed by the Mines Act, 1952, and the Coal Mines Regulations, 2017, framed under it. The Directorate General of Mines Safety, under the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment, is the regulatory authority responsible for overseeing safety standards in mines.

Under the existing framework, mine managements are required to maintain emergency and rescue arrangements, and incidents involving the failure of equipment used for transporting workers are required to be recorded and examined. Such incidents are generally followed by an internal review by the company as well as scrutiny by the regulator.

Underground coal mines carry well-documented risks, including the failure of hoisting and winding equipment, roof collapse and the accumulation of gases. The entrapment of workers in lifting cages, as in Monday’s incident, is among the hazards that safety protocols are designed to prevent, which is why the functioning of pulley and winding systems is a focus of routine inspections.

Officials did not specify how long the workers remained underground before they could be brought to the surface, or whether any of them required medical attention. The company’s statement addressed the outcome of the operation — that all 14 were brought out and that no one had died — and did not give further details.

The rescue brings to a close an operation that had drawn attention to the conditions under which underground miners work in the country’s oldest coalfields. Coal India Ltd. accounts for the bulk of India’s domestic coal production, and its subsidiaries operate both open-cast and underground mines. Underground operations employ a smaller share of the workforce than open-cast mines but involve a higher degree of physical risk, and the safety of workers engaged in them has been a recurring subject of discussion among employee organisations and regulators.

Further details on the technical fault, and on any inquiry into it, are awaited.