Contextualizing the Emerging Issues and Dilemmas of Displaced Ecosystem People: A Case of Coal Mining Industry at Talcher, Odisha (India)

Abstract

The coal mining operations adversely affect the people, society and environment in the resource rich regions of the world. These are so complicated and nerve breaking issues for the land oustees at Talcher coalfield of Odisha that after losing everything including their ecosystems many of them especially, the “ecosystem people” involuntarily pushed out of their hearth and home by coal mining industries in late 1980s, have been surviving like refugees in their own localities. In the process of their transition from subsistence economy to market economy over the years, though many of them are found to have increased money incomes and increased consumerism, they have been increasingly getting trapped into the complex of their deterministic dilemmas/dualism in and around the coal mining industries. In the process of mining activities they have not just got affected, but also have remarkably changed themselves experiencing the decades of their postdisplacement trauma. In the changing circumstances, to what extent the land oustees can maintain their earlier status of “ecosystem people” is an important ecological question. In this paper, on the basis of primary and secondary data, we have attempted to understand the contextual issues/dilemmas of “displaced ecosystem people” at Talcher coalfield.