Published Paper Details:

Land based economic activities through new or extended projects often lead to displacement of the project affected people. Mining induced displacement is one such example. The growing awareness of Human Rights and the concomitant spread of Human Rights Groups across the nations have formulated resettlement and rehabilitation of the project affected and displaced persons. With the provision of welfare policies and laws by government, assessment for the status of rehabilitation of project affected people are the burning issues of environmental and human rights discourse. In this context Raniganj coal belt of West Bengal is very important, where large scale open cast mines are operational. One such project is the Sonpur Bazari Open Caste Project (OCP). Development project induced displacement and dispossession most often affects the marginalized rural sections of the population. The present study pertains to the status of utilization of the rehabilitation packages offered by Eastern Coalfield Limited (ECL) to the marginalized households of the 12 affected villages that fall within the ambit of Sonpur-Bazari OCP under ECL in Raniganj Coal belt. One of the principal objectives is to assess the viability of rehabilitation packages for alternative livelihood. For this purpose the target groups of population are the landless household and household with less than 6 bighas of land. In this purpose a cross section of the target households have been interviewed. A number of parameters have been taken into account and detail analyses have been done for the study. Different kind of scenario has been noticed in both tribal and non-tribal villages.