12 Gender in coal mining induced displacement and rehabilitation in Jharkhand

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