Entanglements of infrastructure, resources, and community politics in northeast India : a study of the Patkai Hills, Arunachal Pradesh

Abstract

Based on the ethnography of the Tangsas conducted from July 2022 to September 2023, this study examines the operations of the informal coal industry in the Patkai Hills region of Arunachal Pradesh, involving multiple actors, including the community, the state, and non-state actors such as armed groups and external private players. It explores the interplay between the extractive process of the coal industry and road infrastructure, focusing on how the community is impacted by this and their perceptions of development. The study reveals the specific political, infrastructural, and economic conditions under which a formal coal industry transitioned to informal coal operations. In doing so, it interrogates what constitutes the region’s politics of regulations and deregulations within the larger political economy of development. The study also highlights the evolving socioeconomic dynamics within the Tangsa community, particularly in relation to changing landholding practices, ecological implications, livelihood crises, and widening intra-community inequality, among other issues that have been shaped by this shift. The findings of this study further indicate how participation in the region’s informal coal economy is primarily determined by distinct social locations within the community, political positions, and economic circumstances. Rather than viewing all the involved actors as homogeneously complicit, the study illuminates the ground realities where the larger sections of the Tangsa community remain excluded from equitable benefits despite their involvement in the extractive process, while influential local elites secure disproportionate profits. The study situates this phenomenon within the region's broader context of development interventions and resource politics, demonstrating how informal coal mining manifests as extractivism, driven by the penetration of external capital and changing internal social dynamics among the Tangsas. Ultimately, it explores the relationships between an emerging ecological crisis and widening intra-community inequalities among the Tangsas stemming from the informal coal operations in the Kharsang area of the Patkai Hills region.