Coal Sector Loans and Displacement of Indigenous Populations Lessons from Jharkhand

Abstract

The World Bank provides loans for the development and expansion of India’s coal mining sector, which is one of the major planks in the push for modernisation. Development of coalfields is essential in providing fuel for electricity generation and coke for steel making. The current emphasis is on the exploitation of shallow coal reserves using open-cast mining techniques, mostly in eastern India. Opencast mining removes soil and rock (overburden) from the top of the coal by blasting, followed by removal using large earth-moving equipment (draglines and dump trucks). The exposed coal is then broken by blasting and trucked away. The excavations form a pit typically a few hundred metres long, 50 m wide and up to 80 m deep, depending on the depth of the coal and the thickness of the seam. These pits are usually left as such by the mining company after the coal is exhausted. Open-cast mining has a large footprint. A mine producing 40 mn tonnes of coal in its lifetime (approximately 15 years) will leave a scar of about 25 sq km in area. Consequently, in a heavily populated country such as India, displacement of people is inevitable. When coal occurs in lands held traditionally by indigenous peoples, mining gives rise to questions of social justice that are difficult to put on the same platter as development messages such as ‘India shining’. Here we deal with the issue of displacement of adivasi and other local communities in the case of one particular mine, namely, Parej East in Jharkhand. Parej East mine is a World Bank-funded project and hence subject to ‘stringent’ guidelines and criteria against which project performance can be more openly assessed. These are set out in the World Bank’s ‘operational directives’ (ODs) that provide a framework within which its project implementation must take place. Mining activities in Parej East mine are carried out by Central Coalfields (CCL), a subsidiary of Coal India (CIL), a public sector company.