Energy Transitions Archives

Migrant Workers in the Coal Mines of India: Precarity, Resilience and the Pandemic

Abstract

This article analyses the lived experiences of migrant workers in India under different regimes of coal mining and engages with their contemporary precarious labouring conditions and resilience. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in the Talcher coalfields of Odisha, I argue that the labouring lives of migrant workers from marginalised communities have been invisiblised in a ‘shadow economy’ of coal extraction through subcontracting and labour recruitment by local contractors working with state-owned coal companies. The process of invisiblisation has taken place at three levels: first, at the workplace which includes recruitment patterns, contracting systems and precarious labouring conditions inflicted by the employer; second, through the exclusion of migrant workers in the land and labour politics of local dispossessed communities for coal mining jobs; and finally, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdowns, observed as ‘invisible’ essential workers under the Essential Services Maintenance Act of 1981.

Three interlinking factors that explain the coal crisis

Policy packages could transform India’s approach to the climate crisis

The surge of geopolitics in South Asia’s power trade

Introduction

India’s new trade rules are political and an irritant; instead, New Delhi should be planning a stable institutional model

Banking on coal? Drivers of demand for Chinese overseas investments in coal in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Vietnam

Rethinking India’s Energy Policy

Introduction

An energy supply approach is inadequate to India’s energy requirements at a time when multiple objectives need to be addressed. The state of play in energy supply and demand is examined, and the recovery of an older tradition of attention to energy demand patterns in addition to energy supply is argued for. The gains from an explicit attention to the fact that India has to address multiple and simultaneous objectives in shaping energy policymaking are laid out, and emerging methodologies to serve this goal are discussed. Shifts in governance patterns are a necessary part of transitioning to a broader, and more development-focused approach to energy policy.