From company town to company village: CSR and the management of rural aspirations in eastern India’s extractive economies

ABSTRACT

In India's contemporary model of extractive industry, the Company Town has been replaced by the ‘company village.' Private sector firms throughout India's mineral belt now occupy sectors that were, until recently, almost exclusively state-owned. Once the great hope for India's industrial modernization and developmentalist effort, extraction continues to cause immense social and environmental dislocation but now offer few avenues of employment. Operating in the resettlement colonies of those displaced by land acquisition and in peripheral villages, extractive companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs attempt to mediate and redirect rural aspirations away from plant gates and mine sites, though often with only limited success.

KEYWORDS:

• Land
• India
• CSR
• dispossession

Acknowledgments

For generous and incisive feedback, the author is grateful to Priti Ramamurthy, Radhika Govindrajan, Christian Lee Novetzke, Mircea Raianu, Mike Levien, Joel Andreas, the editors of JPS and two anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to colleagues at the University of Chicago, Duke University, the University of Washington, Xavier’s University-Bhubaneswar, Azim Premji University, annual meetings of the Association of Asian Studies, and the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, where portions of this essay were shared at colloquia and conferences. The research was partially supported by a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 This essay focuses on one purpose of CSR – to manage the expectations of those left out of contemporary industrialization in the countryside. I do not mean to suggest that this is the only aim of CSR; my research has suggested that placating government actors, projecting an inclusive image, and even serving as a eyes and ears of the firm in hostile landscapes are other utilities of CSR.

2 Cross (2014, 68) quotes one bureaucrat in charge of land acquisition in Andhra Pradesh as saying: ‘You can’t convince people to leave their land for payment only … The price of the land works to convince them 50 per cent and the hope of employment works to convince them 50 per cent.’ And as Levien (2018) points out, the dream of upward mobility through new avenues of non-farm employment works especially powerfully on higher caste / class families who had already invested in education for their children.

3 Among the antecedents of this legal codification are a 2007 speech on a ‘Partnership for Economic Growth’ given to the Confederation of Indian Industry by then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Ministry of Corporate Affair’s 2011 National Voluntary Guidelines on Social, Environmental, and Economic Responsibilities of Business.

4 Data last accessed on 3/28/19 at: http://www.mca.gov.in/MinistryV2/csrdatasummary.html.

5 As Simeon (1995, 21–22) notes, the lines between ‘unskilled’ and ‘skilled’ were often blurry, and could in some cases denote more about the social identity of the worker than the material content of labor. For example, an early Bihar Labour Enquiry Committee report suggested that on occasion, an adivasi performing ‘complex work would only be recorded as ‘semi-skilled’ and accordingly paid a lower wage than a foreigner doing the same work.’

6 The Indian Institutes of Technology were set up by the post colonial state to train Indian citizens in technology, and make the country moden and independent of foreign expertise. Its successful middle class alumni received highly subsidized state education and in recent years are giving back through charitable projects like PARFI.

7 Interview with Tata Steel Kalinganagar Head of Resettlement and Rehabilitation, 29 September 2016.

8 Interview in Bhubaneswar, July 2013.

9 Interview in Lanjigarh, July 2016.

10 I had several discussions with the NGO founder in 2016, both in-person in his Bhubaneswar offices, as well as by skype when he was back in his Delhi headquarters. This exchange took place in Bhubaneswar on 1 July 2016.

11 Although most of my research time was spent with company officials and CSR staff, I was able to have a few discussions like this one with community members, which will hopefully be expanded in subsequent phases of research.

12 Other aspects of my research has suggested that the local state has a greater effect on CSR efforts of public sector firms, but is less influential with private firms, who operate CSR according to their own agendas.

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Sunila S. Kale

Sunila S. Kale is Associate Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, where she also serves as Chair and Director of South Asia Studies. Her research and teaching focus on Indian and South Asian politics, energy studies, the political economy of development, and the history of capitalism. Her books include Electrifying India (Stanford 2014) and Mapping Power (OUP 2018). She is currently working on two book-length projects: one on corporate social responsibility and socio-economic change in the mining areas of eastern India, and a second on yoga in the world of politics (with Christian Lee Novetzke).