Compensating extraction: Patronage, violence, and the governance of coal in India

How do institutions established to compensate communities displaced by fossil fuel extraction evolve into durable infrastructures of extractive governance? This article examines this question through the first detailed ethnographic account of Local Sale Committees in India's coalfields: institutions established by Coal India Limited to channel compensatory income to Project Affected Families through local coal transportation contracts. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Jharkhand between 2022 and 2023, the article traces the transformation of the committee at Urimari from its establishment in 1983, in the aftermath of a police shooting of unarmed protesters, to its contemporary functioning. It shows how union fragmentation, mechanisation, and caste-based patronage transformed a mechanism intended to redistribute the benefits of extraction into a site of accumulation, marked by hereditary succession, concentrated wealth, and retributive violence. The article further shows how the emergence of the Mine Developer and Operator model has introduced a parallel form of corporate governance, in which security and the management of local populations become layered onto the governance of the Sale Committee. Reading these formations through the energy justice framework, the article shows that the committee performs the distributional, recognition, and procedural functions of justice in systematically distorted form, at once redistributive and exclusionary, so that an institution created to compensate those affected by extraction becomes a means through which extractive relations are reproduced. For just transition planning, the implication is that the governance of coal's decline will be mediated through the same institutions that governed its expansion.