Coal ground

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the formation of coal energy infrastructure in Pakistan’s Thar Desert as part of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. This infrastructure comprises an open pit coal mine and thermal power plant that traverses indigenous lifeworlds. My analysis takes up the subterranean matter of Thar’s Desert – the coal, the sand, the water – and its related social and ecological contexts. I show that decades of technological processes of tests, drilling, chemical analyses, surveys, simulations, and maps of coal, water, and sand have yielded ‘coal data’ that mediates Thar’s ancient lifeworlds in a singular relation to its coal deposit. Coal data, the mediated representations of subterranean coal, forms the very basis upon which coal extraction is performed and global energy infrastructures are advanced. The Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC), a joint venture of Pakistani and Chinese actors financed by Chinese state-capital, repeatedly presents Thar’s land as coal data. Through the kinds of cultural authority granted to data as representations of technological objectivity, the SECMC is able to claim coal infrastructure as the foundation for a national energy future of Pakistan. Despite the SECMC’s efforts to overlay the land with mediated coal data, Thar’s indigenous villagers have enacted a historic protest and long march, including hunger strikes with unprecedented participation by women, and filed a case in the High Court in order to protest the poisoning of their agricultural farmlands and the eventual displacement from their homes. Through these mediated constructions of Thar’s land as coal data, and the indigenous movements against coal mining, the ground of the Thar Desert is being reconfigured and reproduced as – what I call – a coal ground.