Paper short abstract:

India's Adivasis, divided along lines of class and tribe, experience coal mining-led dispossessions in staggered ways over many years.This paper draws out the implications of land and labour inequalities on Adivasi emancipatory politics and the imaginations of a just coal-free future.

Paper long abstract:

Privatisation and deregulation of the coal sector, allowing for commercial profits through mining, have generated a rush for land and increased extractivism in the last two decades in mineral belts of India. This paper places Birampalli, a predominantly Adivasi village in coal belts of Central India inhabited by marginalised social groups, within a continuum of displacement and its impacts, contextualised within mining-instigated agrarian changes and rural industrialisation. Birampalli had lost parts of its cultivable land through a state-led acquisition in 2006, and now faces an impending complete displacement due to mine expansion by private capital. This paper will show how mining related dispossession might be experienced in stages, within the life cycle of a single or two generations but their political struggles may vary between these stages of land grabs. Regulatory and business complications also can lead to phases of mining inactivity when legal regulations promising employment to land losers are not implemented as well. The continuing loss of land and forest resources, precarity of jobs generated through rural industrialisation, and loss of employment from mining shut-downs have disproportionately impacted the poorer Adivasis. Both the collective memory of the past dispossession and ongoing precarity of labour work have created a broad based mobilisation against the impending displacement, but it remains rooted in agrarian inequalities that foreground interests of landed capital. The paper draws out the implications of land and labour-based inequalities among Adivasi communities on their emancipatory politics and the imaginations of a just coal-free future.