Beneath the hills of North East India, illegal coal mines called rat-hole pits run so shallow that children can crawl into seams too narrow for adults. Journalist Aidan Hartley travels through the region's mining belt to meet the boys and girls who work them, descending into the tunnels alongside miners who started the job as kids themselves and interviewing families for whom a day's coal is the difference between eating and not. The film sets that labor against the scale of the industry driving it: India's expanding coal economy has already pushed roughly half a million people off ancestral land to make way for new pits and infrastructure. Hartley talks to displaced villagers about what they lost, and to mine operators and local officials about why the work continues despite the injuries and lung disease it causes. The camera stays close to the physical reality of the mines, the narrow shafts, the makeshift tools, the child-sized bodies suited to the job, rather than treating the subject in the abstract. It is a portrait of an economy running on labor nobody is supposed to be doing.