Public sector employment, class mobility, and differentiation in a tribal coal mining village in India

Abstract

India's adivasi, or tribal, communities have most often been depicted as homogeneous and egalitarian, at least compared to the entrenched social hierarchies that characterise rural caste society. This article draws on fieldwork in a mining-affected adivasi village in Jharkhand, eastern India, to consider how compensatory public sector employment for mining-induced land dispossession has contributed to new processes of stratification within adivasi society. On the one hand, compensatory employment allowed those who attained it to pursue increasingly common middle-class aspirations, and a considerable degree of class mobility. But on the other hand, it fostered new, enhanced forms of intra-adivasi differentiation -not only in terms of income but also consumption and lifestyle, education and children's life chances, and household and gender dynamics. New internal disparities, in turn, have acted to erode pre-existing elements of adivasi society that revolve around values of egalitarianism.

Extractive Regimes in the Coal Heartlands of India: Difficult Questions for a Just Energy Transition

“…Levien (2013) suggests that Adivasis in remote mineral-rich forested areas are far less willing to accept compensation than their urban and peri-urban counterparts in big metropolitan centres. However, this does not present the full picture, as other research has shown that compensation is perceived as attractive and is sought after; it even triggers new patterns of differentiation between those whose lands have been directly dispossessed, rendering them eligible for compensation, and those affected by other factors, like loss of access to commons resources, but do not qualify (Kale 2020;Noy 2020).…”

The politics of dispossession and compensation in the eastern Indian coal belt

“…The adoption of such practices and consumption patterns by employed Santals, enabled through their relatively substantial salaries, reflects middle-class aspirations as well as emulation of higher-caste norms and ways of life (see also Higham and Shah, 2013). This, as I discuss in more detail elsewhere (Noy, 2020), has created new class differentiation in Karampot, between the minority of employed households and all the rest. Compared to the visible class mobility of the former, the latter feel increasingly excluded and marginalized.…”

Unpicking Precarity: Informal Work in Eastern India's Coal Mining Tracts

“…According to a household survey conducted as part of fieldwork, 85 per cent of households in Karampot engage in this economic activity. As discussed elsewhere (Noy, 2020(Noy, , 2022, a minority of Adivasis in the village, originally from another hamlet, have been able to obtain formal employment in the colliery as compensation for having lost land for mining and for being displaced, as part of CIL's Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy. This group constitutes a local Adivasi labour aristocracy, and is distinguished from the majority of villagers, who depend on precarious work.…”