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.

Rethinking ‘just transitions’ from coal: the dynamics of land and labour in anti-coal struggles

“…In these latter regions, affected households predominantly reproduce through a range of direct and indirect forms of wage employment in mining (Dsouza and Singhal 2021;Montrone, Ohlendorf, and Chandra 2021). However, processes of subcontracting and informalization of the workforce have been a widespread and persistent feature of the post-1990s liberalization of India's coal mining sector (Nayak 2022;Roy 2003). These have led to the proliferation of informal and highly precarious wage work within contemporary coal economies, similar to the experience in the study villages.…”