Abstract
Although coal is administered centrally in India by the Ministry of Coal, the
government does not maintain reliable and comprehensive data on displacement
caused by extraction of the resource. Most importantly, it is not possible to
retrieve gender-segregated data from the meager records available. Often,
mining displaced communities (DPs, also known as project-affected people or
PAPs) are treated as a homogeneous and unitary group, without attention to the
diversity within these communities. However, many new open-cut coal mining
projects exclude indigenous people, especially women, from the social and
economic benefits they produce, whether it is due to a lack of skills, to a lack
of formal education, or to a lack of ownership and control over land and water.
The social and gendered consequences of specific mining projects vary with
local circumstances, but the common features in India include pauperization: the
impoverishment of communities and the feminisation of that poverty. Physical
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Coal Nation: Histories, Ecologies and Politics of Coal in India |
Editors | Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt |
Place of Publication | Farnham, UK and Burlington, USA |
Publisher | Ashgate Publishing Ltd. |
Pages | 229-256 |
Edition | 1st |
ISBN (Print) | 9781472424709 |
Publication status | Published - 2016 |