ABSTRACT
In India, coal is much more than just a fossil fuel, a mere commodity in the nation’s power supply.1 I have previously argued that coal is seen as key to the country’s sovereignty as a nation-state; is equivalent to modernity; and is crucial for an energy secure future for India (Lahiri-Dutt 2014a). At the same time, mining was arguably the earliest (and possibly the key) agent of transformation of landscapes and social relations in the coal-bearing regions of the country. As it charts new pathways into lands that have so far been claimed by indigenous communities (Adivasis, the original inhabitants, or known officially as the Scheduled Tribes), coal continues to redefine lands and social relations, making new territories and new worlds. This raises the question: Is the meaning of coal the same for the nation and the people? And what shapes these meanings? If the meanings of coal are not the same, then would it be possible to imagine more than one economy of coal in India? In this chapter I argue that there are multiple coal economies, which are intricately interlinked with local and national politics of resources and identities, each drawing upon different notions of mining, morality, and the material values of coal, in turn defining these meanings and values through a logic that is unique to each of them. The different coal economies transform the landscapes and social relations of the coalproducing regions in dramatic ways in the quest for national energy security. I argue that the state-owned enterprise, Coal India Limited (CIL), represents the ‘national coal’ economy; the private entrepreneur-owned collieries producing coal that is captive to power plants represent the ‘neoliberal coal’ economy; the non-legal small-scale mines in India’s northeast produce ‘statecraft coal’; and last, but not the least, the innumerable poor, spread throughout India’s coal-bearing tracts, illegally produce ‘subsistence coal’. Each of these economies has different labour and resource regimes, and varying degrees of formal recognition that give rise to confusion over whether they are really four or five economies (or possibly even more ‘sub-economies’ hidden within the four identified so far). The production of four different coals from these diverse collieries, and the various actors, their interests and (sometimes conflicting) norms and values, make up the diverse worlds of coal in India. This chapter highlights the complex links between these economies, and the people who build them through their
work. By doing so, it brings to light the intricate and dynamic relationships between people and coal, and situates the various ways in which this form of resource extraction transforms landscapes and social relations within the context of India’s history and current economic growth trajectory. To help understand these multiple economies of coal in India, I argue that coal as a mineral resource is not only a material thing but is co-produced by its utilitarian values of meeting the perceived needs of Indian society at given points in time. A part of this utilitarian value is embodied in the regulatory framework around coal; the plethora of laws around coal protects the legal eminence of the material resource. For example, the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act 1957 (MMDR) classifies coal and lignite as ‘major minerals’ listed in Schedule A, which is reserved exclusively for the public sector. Through the legislation, the material commodity assumes wider social, cultural, and political meanings to associate itself with economic development, nationalism and nation-building, allowing the extraction of it by the state to represent a moral endeavour. The attachment of the resource to nation-building drives the state to attribute an iconic status to coal in India. Legal provisions such as the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act 1957 (CBAA) gives coal mining priority over all other uses of land as it takes precedence over other legislative measures. The CBAA was passed to: ‘Establish greater public control over the coal mining industry and its development, [and] provide for the acquisition by the state of unworked land containing coal deposits or of rights in or over such land’.2 By invoking CBAA, the state can overrule tribal or indigenous communities’ ownership of land, even though this ownership is supposed to be non-transferable or inalienable. In coal mining, the CBAA and the (now repealed) Land Acquisition Act 1894 (LAA) together give the state the ultimate power of usurping any property belonging to any citizen for the extraction of coal. This legislation remains in place in spite of liberalisation. In fact, these laws can nowadays be utilised for the acquisition of land in favour of private entrepreneurs to expand coal mining for thermal power production. The other law specific to coal is the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act 1973. Again, this 1973 Act reinforces the spirit of the MMDR because, by nationalising the mines, it has firmly consigned coal to the purview of the public sector. The Act categorically states that: ‘No person, other than the central government or a government company or a corporation owned, managed or controlled by the central government shall carry on coal mining operation in India, in any form’.3 Through these laws, coal and the nation become intimately associated, and assume the same meaning, allowing the state to adopt the high moral position. At the same time the legislation meant to protect the interests of poor indigenous communities and the environment assume a less important position to resource nationalism, implying that the need for coal for nation-building is superior to the need for the citizenry to claim rights over the land. Interestingly, the high moral position of the state on coal has developed significant fissures that allow other actors to adopt similar positions about their rights to extract
coal according to their own moral logic, creating serious confusion over who (or what action) is right and what is wrong, in turn diffusing the ways in which coal extraction actually operates. The chapter starts with a discussion on the material and symbolic values of coal. This theoretical discussion is followed by a look at the history of coal extraction in India, leading to a section that details the different worlds of coal and their respective forms of governance. The next two sections discuss, in turn, how coal transforms social relations and landscapes before connecting these transformations with the national quest for coal.
