Coal extraction, dispossession and the ‘classes of labour’ in coalfields of eastern India

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon long term fieldwork conducted in the coalfields of eastern India, the paper argues for the formation of multiple, fragmented and hierarchical ‘classes of labour’ in the ‘new public sector’ coal mines of India. Employing an intersectional lens, it shows that the organisation of ‘classes of labour’ is greatly dependent upon the differentiated negotiating powers for compensatory employments linked to pre-existing land and other social relations shaping up as ‘politics of incorporation’ in mining jobs. It demonstrates the exacerbation of socio-economic inequalities between dalits, women and dominant caste and class communities in the dispossession process of open-cast coal mining.

KEYWORDS:

• Dispossession
• coal mining
• classes of labour
• inequality
• livelihoods
• agrarian transformation

Acknowledgement

This article has immensely benefited from the comments received on the earlier draft of the paper presented during the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) 2nd Writeshop-Workshop in Critical Agrarian Studies and Scholar Activism 2020. I am especially grateful to Yukari Sekine, Deniz Pelek and Shapan Adnan for their critical comments during the JPS Writeshop-Workshop. I would also like to thank Jonathan Parry, Matilde Aducci, Itay Noy, K. N. Harilal and Vinoj Abraham for their valuable feedback on the earlier versions along with the anonymous reviewers for their critical engagement with my arguments and insightful suggestions. Special thanks are due to Mijo Luke for all the discussions and encouragement during the writing process. I am deeply indebted to the respondents for sharing their life experiences with me. Any remaining errors are solely mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The paper is based on two rounds of fieldwork between 2015 and 2020, which spanned for twenty-two months. Primary fieldwork involved a survey questionnaire and ethnographic interviews in a village, namely Manda (pseudonym) in Talcher, Odisha, and other secondary sources. The paper uses survey comprises 187 households and 854 individual samples, and 97 in-depth interviews. Representative sampling method was adopted where the list of households were prepared in consultation with the village committee comprising of members from different socio-economic groups. Several rounds of visits were made to different coal mines, offices, and interviews among the coal mines management, union leaders, and coal mines workers. Agricultural and homestead land is acquired through the Land Acquisition (LA) Act of 1894 and the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) (CBA) Act of 1957 in Talcher. Around 721 acres of agricultural land of Manda village was acquired in 1991–1992. Data on land ownership and livelihoods before land acquisition was provided during a survey conducted in 2015 based on memory recall and, in some cases, land documents.

2 All the names used in this paper are pseudonyms.

3 Laid down that all new undertakings in coal are to be in the public sector except where, in the national interest, the Government wishes to secure the cooperation of private enterprise (Planning Commission 2016).

4 The Coal Bearing Areas (CBA) Act, 1957 provides the power to the state to acquire any land which contains or likely to contain coal deposits or any matter connected therewith.

5 The Mines and Mineral (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 declares that ‘It is hereby declared that it is expedient in the public interest that the Union should take under its control the regulation of mines and the development of minerals to the extent hereinafter provided’.

6 The advantages of the opencast coal mining were the ‘possibility of full recovery of coal, the concentration of production and easy supervision, high output per man shift (OMS), no problem of roof control or ventilation, fewer hazards compared to underground mining, the possibility of maintaining better sanitary conditions, no need for light during the day, the possibility of large-scale mechanization and lower cost of production compared to underground mining’ (Ghosh 1990, 72).

7 A clear demarcation between Nehruvian developmentalism and neoliberal regime as in the notions of ‘regimes of dispossession’ (Levien 2018) may found to be blurred especially in extractive projects such as coal mining in the country and necessitates analysing regional political economies along with national state (Münster and Strümpell 2014).

8 Lahiri-Dutt discusses different coal economies in India based on the actors, values and norms guiding each of the coal economy in the country. National coal economy is mined by the public sector company Coal India Limited, however, there has been increasing informal economy within this through subcontracting since 1990s. Neoliberal coal is mined by private companies for captive purposes. Recently, both the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 and Mineral Concession Rules, 1960 have been amended by the Government of India in 2021, allowing the captive coal mines to sell their produced coal commercially in the open market. State craft coal is produced in the north-eastern state of Meghalaya under non-legal norms. Subsistence coal is produced by small scale village collieries and would include coal scavengers. Though Lahiri-Dutt’s paper emphasises the overlaps and intersections of these diverse coal economies, however, the present paper views ‘national coal economy’ deeply embedded in neoliberal policies and having strong ties with capitalists including the subcontractors in functioning of the coal economy.

9 Information collected from MCL office in Talcher from September–December 2018.

10 Historically, caste in India has been a system of domination, hierarchy, power and unequal social recognition (Mosse 2018). The village social structure has been divided into hierarchichal castes shaping the spatial (residential) and labour inequalities. Dalits and Adivasis are the bottommost of the hierarchy where as OBCs are a set of socially and economically backward classes who are positioned above dalits and adivasis but below the upper caste groups (Jaffrelot 2000).

11 Information collected from MCL office in Talcher in 2018.

12 Pseudonym, provided the sensitivity of the subject.

13 Information collected during the field survey, 2015.

14 Farming community.

15 Gudia, Kumbhara and Bhandari are historically caste-based service community such as sweet making, pottery making, barber.

16 Dalit communities namely Keuta – historically a fishermen community, Tanla – historically an agricultural labourer community, Dhobha – historically a washing clothes, agricultural labourer and other services community, Pan – historically a wage earning community and Haddi – historically sweeping, drum beating and other wage earning community. They are all former untouchable castes in the area.

17 Interview carried on 25.10.2015.

18 More recently, the land acquisition process for other villages has been well before the start of the coal mines expansion and opening of new coal mines in the area in order to get the land in cheaper price rates (Fieldwork, 2015–2020).

19 Regarding the base family scheme of employment, the information has been collected from the respondents of the surveyed villages during the interviews and the officials from the land acquisition office at Angul.

20 The quantity and quality of land possessed determines the category of compensation, that is, A, B, C, D, E as per 1989 policy. (For details, see Odisha’s Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy of 1989).

21 See Nayak (2020a) for more details.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suravee Nayak

Suravee Nayak is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Kerala. Her PhD thesis is entitled ‘Dispossession, Labour Process and Production of Space: A Study of Coal Mines in Talcher, Odisha'. Her research interest includes energy and labour, political economy of coal, extractive industries and dispossession, energy transitions and just transition.