Opencast Coal Mining Induced Land Acquisition

The present study reveals that coal mining authorities have used deliberate, coercive and deceitful strategies for land acquisition and evacuation of people from their locality. Except a few mining employed people, almost all sample households did not have any appropriate means to rescue themselves from the difficulties they confronted during different processes of land acquisition, evacuation, compensation, resettlement and rehabilitation in Talcher coalfields, Odisha. As a result, a possibility of willing buyers and willing sellers with regard to land acquisition and a winwin possibility with regard to overall cost and benefit issues of rehabilitation and resettlement between projects and the land oustees did not materialize after displacement. Now the oustees have been struggling hard to come out from their state of helplessness and impoverishments in the colonies/ clusters without any visible support from state government and mining projects. Overall review of involuntary displacement and resettlement issues at international/national levels confirms that concerned authorities have measurably failed to solve the nagging problems of rehabilitation and resettlement everywhere.