Unhappy with their “paltry” reward of Rs 50,000, the rat-hole miners who helped rescue 41 trapped labourers from a blocked mountain tunnel in Uttarkashi have demanded the Uttarakhand government give them permanent employment, a house and a “respectable” cash prize.

“We have decided not to cash the cheques for Rs 50,000 that chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami handed to each of us at a function in Dehradun on Thursday,” Wakeel Hassan, proprietor of the Delhi-based agency that provided 12 rat-hole miners for the rescue, told reporters in Delhi on Saturday.

“I had reacted to him (Dhami) about the paltry sum given to us and he said he would think about it. We are awaiting his decision.”

Wakeel said he and 11 rat-hole miners his agency employs had risked their lives to work inside a treacherous tunnel for three days and rescue the trapped workers after heavy auger machines, skilled engineers and other experts had failed.

“The rat-hole miners had expressed their resentment to the officials present at the chief minister’s programme on Thursday,” Devendra Patwal, Uttarkashi district disaster management officer, confirmed to The Telegraph over the phone.

“The officers told them that Rs 50,000 was the only reward they would get. However, they (the miners) had accepted the cheques at the time. A final decision (about further rewards) can be taken only by state-level officers.”

Dhami had said after Thursday’s event: “No sum of money can be commensurate with the services provided by the 12 rat-hole miners who risked their lives and helped us rescue the trapped labourers. The sum of Rs 50,000 is only a symbolic gesture of respect.”

A source in the Uttarakhand government claimed that 18 rat-hole miners had participated in the rescue, six of them having arrived from a Delhi agency first, to be joined later by 12 from another Delhi agency.

“Initially, some rat-hole miners had said they were not interested in any monetary reward. We don’t know what happened to those six; the Uttarkashi administration gave us the names of only 12 miners,” the official said, requesting anonymity.

The mountain tunnel, part of an all-weather road being built under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet Char Dham pilgrimage project, collapsed on November 12 morning, apparently because of a landslide although the exact cause has yet to be established.

The 41 labourers working inside were trapped behind a 57m-thick barrier of debris that defeated all technology-based efforts to drill beyond 45m.

The rat-hole miners then worked with handheld tools, crouching for hours inside dark and narrow spaces, to burrow through the last 12m and effect a rescue by November 28 evening.