Engendering Mining Communities: Examining the Missing Gender Concerns in Coal Mining Displacement and Rehabilitation in India
Gender, Technology, Development, 10(3): 313-339 (2006)
28 Pages Posted: 3 Apr 2012
Date Written: February 4, 2006
Abstract
Post-development and activist research have in recent years posed powerful critiques of current modes of development through displacement and rehabilitation studies. Displacement by development projects is one of the critical interventions seriously affecting well-being of communities, revealing many and varied outcomes. Yet empirical literature on the gender aspects of displacement and rehabilitation has still remained scant, assuming women’s and men’s experiences are similar as they go through the displacement and rehabilitation processes. Consequently rehabilitation policy has largely remained gender-blind, insensitive to the differential impacts upon and diverse concerns of men and women affected by the development projects. This paper intends to fill that gap by bringing into focus how state controlled coal mining in India and displacement of adivasis (indigenous) and other local communities affects women in particular and in gender specific ways. Displacement from the original habitations does not only mean the physical relocation but also the loss of the means of livelihood, often based on the subsistence resources offered by the local environment. For women in these communities, the value of these resources cannot be overstated. The paper presents the results of a village-based survey of gender consequences of displacement in the mining regions of Jharkhand, in eastern India. It makes an effort to refocus the attention of displacement and rehabilitation policy debate towards gender concerns in one of the poorest areas in the country and engenders what is broadly seen by the mining industry as ‘the community’.
Keywords: Mining, displacement, resettlement, India, gender, women, collieries
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