Waiting for displacement: Land, compensation, and spatiotemporal inequality in a mining-affected Indian village

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in eastern India’s coal-bearing tracts, this paper explores the different ways in which two groups of residents – local, landed households and migrant, landless ones – perceive and respond to the possibility of future mining-induced displacement. It contributes to a growing body of research that is concerned with the anticipatory phase of land dispossession, and the differential ways in which people prepare for, perceive, and respond to its expected future arrival. In particular, the paper illustrates how the prospect of displacement, in conjunction with an associated compensation policy operated by the coal company, gives rise to inequalities in time and space between the two groups, consisting of uneven degrees of uncertainty towards the future; distinct ways of experiencing the time until eviction; and spatial differentiation through labour migration. The paper thereby illuminates some of the more nuanced yet significant qualitative forms of inequality that can arise in contexts of not-yet-happening dispossession.