Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt

• PhD
• Professor at Australian National University

The growing popularity of intersectionality theory, the critiques levelled against it and its use in gender and development (GAD) warrant a critical reflection by feminists, especially those working with less affluent women. This article examines the stretching of intersectionality in GAD research, policymaking and practice, and shows how it has be...

This article asks what it is like for the rural poor to live with coal over time as mines expand and agriculture and forest-dependent ways of living inevitably become more restricted. Research on the expansion of open pit coal mining in India shows a widespread inability to appropriately compensate the rural poor for lost land and access to common...

Coal in India carries different values and meanings for different actors. Consequently, the politics of this resource is manifested in multiple forms at multiple levels. Whereas the extraction of coal is accomplished by a larger resource politics involving an energy crisis narrative and a need to ensure national resource security, people at the gra...

Energy transition for coal-producing countries of the Global South will involve the adoption of policies to phase out coal, and closure of coal-dependent industrial infrastructure will lead to fundamental changes in gender roles and relations as women and men lose their direct and indirect livelihoods from coal mines. This article aims to lay out p...

Until recently, river islands have been neglected in island studies and river/water scholarship. We address this research gap by focusing on the ‘fluidscape’ of the Lower Ganga Basin, West Bengal, India. Drawing empirical insights on chars (river islands) of the River Ganga, located upstream and downstream of the Farakka Barrage, we present lives a...

This paper is a feminist investigation into the beliefs and practices surrounding menstruation among traditional artisanal diamond mining women in the Muslim Banjar ethnic community in rural parts of South Kalimantan, Indonesia. Based on feminist ethnographic field methods, it investigates how these women interpret the religious and cultural restri...

Commercialization of agriculture in patriarchal rural Pakistan has transformed women’s critical roles in pulses production and has re-organised the gendered division of labour in what used to be widely known as a ‘women’s crop’. Pulses are grown in the marginal and arid lands by small-holder farming families where women care for the crops as an ext...

"Agriculture across India has been witnessing several fundamental shifts, of which the most important are the roles of women and men in agricultural tasks. Among smallholder farmer families, men are increasingly migrating out of agriculture in pursuit of non-farm income opportunities. Women who are left behind assume the roles of de facto ‘heads of...

The world is facing a rapid transition away from coal-based energy due to climate change. While many regions and countries are set to benefit economically and environmentally from the transition in the end, coal workers and their communities will experience immediate adverse outcomes economically such as job losses, socially such as disruption of c...

Reliance on coal is crucial to understand in energy transition, but different countries rely on coal in different ways. The reliance is not only on coal production that provides for employment and economic output, but also for export revenues and consumption. This paper presents the results of a research to develop a Coal Reliance Index (CRI) that...

The underground—for decades the invisible ‘other’ of landscape and terrain in geography—has emerged in political ecology literature as the source of ‘stuff’, or material things, resources and commodities that are not deemed intrinsically valuable until extracted. As a corrective, this paper offers a feminist political ecology perspective that bring...

Ushering in the next phase of agriculture in India requires a deeper understanding of the growth process across regions and socio-economic contexts with an emphasis on strengthening the role of women. This paper argues that it is critical to capture socio-cultural diversity across various agro-climatic zones to arrive at a more detailed understandi...

Since the year 2000, an unprecedented commodity boom has been accompanied by intense scholarly attention on the various challenges involving women and gender in extractive industries. However, instead of being a marginal “add-on” area, gender issues are now at the forefront of research mining, and the volume of research has turned the thematic area...

This paper outlines the debates surrounding the conflicts between large- and small-scale mining in Mongolia. It provides a historical overview of these conflicts, discusses the critical role of mining in Mongolia's international relations and foreign investment, and the chain of economic, social and environmental causes and effects at work in the t...

Many researchers have studied chars as physical and geomorphological entities and have categorized them into various ‘types’. This chapter asks: ‘Can chars be seen also as symbols?’ ‘What do the chars symbolize?’ We investigate these questions in this chapter, in light of recent social science research that has critiqued the inherent scientism on w...

This paper introduces a gender angle to the growing body of literature on the legacies of mining. It shows that gender-selective roles in informal artisanal and small-scale mining expose women's bodies to the worst health effects. These are then transmitted generationally to the biological function of child-bearing. Women's invisible—and often unpa...

Rio Tinto had been developing a diamond mining project in Madhya Pradesh for a decade when in 2017 it hastily abandoned the project. We analyse this counterintuitive exit through an ethnographic approach nested within a qualitative case study framework. We argue that the exit was caused by multi-scalar politics. Local protests over livelihood and l...

Drawing on the findings of an extensive questionnaire-based survey conducted in two Indian states of West Bengal and Gujarat, this paper investigates whether the concentration of women's labour contributions to agriculture has improved their autonomy in decision-making. It shows that women's labour burdens have increased without associated benefits...

The advance of renewable energy around the world has kindled hopes that coal-based energy is on the way out. Recent data, however, make it clear that growing coal consumption in India coupled with its continued use in China keeps coal-based energy at 40 percent of the world’s heat and power generation. To address the consolidation of coal-based pow...

McCarthy and Lahiri-Dutt illuminate the menstrual experiences of women living in informal settlements in India. Beginning with a critique of menstrual hygiene management (MHM) and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) framings of women’s menstrual practices, they argue that these approaches ignore important spatial, social, and moral meanings attac...

This paper examines the ways in which knowledge about water has conventionally been generated by modern water scientists and illuminates how this approach leaves out the diverse “ways of knowing” water and how scientism creates a trap of concrete evidential certainty. Through the example of a failed conversation, it questions the basic epistemologi...

Knowledges that claim to end oppression and marginalization frequently end up feeding the same hierarchies that produce those oppressions. In the academy and in the development industry, it is not uncommon for ‘local’ or ‘subaltern’ knowledges to be positioned as ‘raw data’ to be utilised by the formally certified intellectual or expert, and even p...

Building upon Lahiri-Dutt’s (2015 Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala. 2015. “Medicalising Menstruation: A Feminist Critique of the Political Economy of Menstrual Hygiene Management in South Asia.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 22 (8): 1158–1176. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2014.939156.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google...

A number of factors influence how people perceive environmental impacts of an industrial or a development project. This paper examines the role that rumours play in shaping public perceptions. It reports a study carried out in 2015 among residents living around a rare earth processing plant, the Lynas Advanced Material Plant (LAMP), in Kuantan, Mal...

This United Nations (UNEP) International Resource Panel Report provides a detailed insight into the global mineral resources industry, it sustainability performance and the many efforts undertaken to foster its sustainability. It advocates for mining activities to become subject to a sustainable development license to operate and provides policy-re...

Recent literature has seen a growing appreciation of livelihoods based on informal artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) that supplements women’s primary reproductive roles, leaving a gap in the parts women play at the trading end of the value chain of ASM. This paper fills that void by adding to the growing body of research on gendered trade in A...

Hirashasan is the term used for governance of diamond mining and trade-with a small bureaucracy and an exclusive set of rules and regulations-by the district administration of Panna in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. Diamond mining in Panna encompasses diverse extractive practices that range from fully mechanised large-scale mining operations...

This article explores a great contradiction in rural land debates in India: on the one hand, explosive political contestation that is often able to halt proposed land acquisition; on the other, an unprecedented urban‐industrial expansion that is appropriating rural land. The authors argue that land grabbing for mining proceeds in an incremental man...

Dans le présent article, l’auteure soutient que l’approche fondée sur les droits, telle qu’appliquée dans le contexte minier, s’appuie sur une interprétation limitée du concept des femmes. Les femmes sont généralement pensées comme étant en dehors du secteur minier et comme des victimes de l’oppression patriarcale. Une vision aussi incomplète du ge...

In the 19th century, public outrage over poor working conditions of children in underground coal mines in the UK led to the enactment of the Mines and Collieries Act 1842. It prohibited boys under the age of ten and all females from laboring in underground mines. This Act wiped out the long and impressive history of women's labor in the mining indu...

During the past decade, considerable research efforts have sought to explain India’s “calorie consumption paradox”, namely, the coexistence of a decline in average per capita calorie intake in rural India alongside increased material living standards. Evidence from the most recent (68th) round of the National Sample Survey (NSS), released in 2014,...

This article analyses how neoliberal economic policies decide what particular aspects of knowledge are valuable and what are not, and who might be the true holder of that knowledge within the tertiary education system. This assessment leads to some disciplines being seen as less valuable to the system. It argues that the more recent “academic wars”...

Indian companies - both state- and privately-owned enterprises - have gradually begun to invest in extractive industries beyond the boundaries of the country in recent decades. Yet, little is known about them. This article traces how domestic political-economic conditions shape the ways in which India's emerging multinational companies operate abro...

This paper explores the ongoing reconfiguration of peasant labour processes from agriculture to informal mineral extraction, outlining the motivations of the rural poor in adopting mining and quarrying, and discusses how social sciences can best account for this significant shift towards extractive livelihoods. It argues that the ‘extractive peasan...

From being “the cradle” of raw diamonds in the world in the eighteenth century, India has turned into an insignificant producer of rough diamonds today. Yet, even now, the indigenous Gonds mine diamonds artisanally in a remote location in central India, largely hidden away from public vision. This article presents an exposition of artisanal diamond...

The rising share of farm work in India undertaken by women – a phenomenon commonly referred to as the feminization of agriculture – raises questions about the changing character of rural India, particularly with regards to women's social and economic roles. Based on an analysis of four sets of occupational data drawn from the Indian Census (1981, 1...

This article uses practice theory to examine changes in middle class water tenure in Kolkata, India, at the household level from the 1960s to present. Surveys (n = 34) and focus group discussions (n = 4) reveal that the Kolkata urban middle class have transformed not only how they engage water, but their perceptions of water itself. Over the study...

This paper analyses the socio-legal and political spaces within which coal is mined in India and asks if it is possible to raise the ‘moral question’ when the state attributes an iconic status to coal. The empirical evidence comes from two indigenous-dominated states that practise community coal mining. If the coal mining communities in Jharkhand e...

The ethnically diverse high-altitude region of Gilgit-Baltistan, with its complex political history, remains relatively free from the controlling gaze of the central state apparatus of Pakistan. In these extraordinary terrain, where local communities rule the region as the “State by proxy”, informal gemstone mining provides an important supplement...

This paper makes a case for grounding the global in feminist, anti-racist, and post-colonial scholarship in order to foreground questions of race, colonialism, and history in critical geographies of development. I argue that the process of 'doing development' involves the imposition of power; hence, geographers' critical engagements with developmen...

An exploration of the complex development of gold mining in the Nilgiri-Wayanad region of southern India demonstrates how entwined histories disrupt simple taxonomic structures of "formality" and "informality." Drawing on the long history of gold mining in the region that dates back to the 1830s, this paper presents a counter-example to the convent...

The most recent data gathered by the National Sample Survey Office on work participation for women in India reveal a sharp decline, primarily due to the NSSO’s conventional measures not accounting for economic activities undertaken by women for the benefit of households. Alternative definitional approaches to the production boundary, such as the In...

This paper explores changing production relations in agriculture in context of increasingly widespread and longer-duration male outmigration, as against previous, short-duration and seasonal migration. It investigates how de facto women-heads of households (WHHs) are changing a resilient crop-sharing system in absence of adequate access to producti...

Change has been the leitmotif of Mongolia in recent years as the country rides on the back of a mining boom, but enormous upheavals tear apart Mongolian economic, political and social fabrics. Yet, Mongolian imagination continues to be imbued with the idea of nomadic herders, the quintessential pasture and rangeland dwellers of the steppes. The con...

This paper argues that feminisation is beginning to occur in the mining industry, a process associated with an expanded notion of mining as a livelihood in the radically changing political economy of extractive industries. It demonstrates that new gendered geographies are being created as grinding rural poverty pushes large numbers of women into in...

Presenting an exploratory approach by which quantitative data from the National Sample Survey can be analysed to throw light on the most marginal households whose primary occupation is recorded as mining and quarrying, this paper finds that a large portion of mining and quarrying is carried out informally by marginal households from disadvantaged s...

Part discussion, part handbook, this document aims to bridge the gap between the current understanding of the impact of mining on Mongolian herder communities, in particular the different impacts on women, men and their traditional livelihoods. It explores the interactions between herding and mining in Mongolia; the current and future socio-economi...

In recent years, international policy-making bodies, including UN agencies and major donors, have been vocal in demanding gender-disaggregated water-use data, a requirement that is also receiving attention in academic research. Although the data sought is presumably macro-scale official statistics of sectoral water consumption divided into male/fem...

Enormous social and economic inequalities notwithstanding, a colossal and ever-expanding middle-class has come to symbolise a new India. Because of the economic and social fluidity of this class, its members are prisoners of social and economic aspiration, negotiating and manoeuvring imagined and actual worlds, tradition and modernity. This middle-...

Intra-household water use and management from a gender perspective has remained a relatively under-researched theme in developed countries. Australia is no exception, with the lack of research particularly evident in the many rural and peri-urban communities. These communities have experienced significant water scarcity in recent years. In this con...

Women's use of water differs from men in essentially one aspect: in cleansing the body of menstrual blood. The pledge of the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector to place ‘women at the centre’ of development has in recent years, therefore, come to focus on menstruation. International development agencies have begun to push the agenda of mens...

As middle-class Indian women become economically more active, it is worth exploring who is doing the housework. Are gender roles shifting within the household across the board in urban India? This paper shifts research attention away from the metropolitan cities to a small mofussil town, a relatively conservative urban centre where gender roles hav...

This paper presents an analysis of 2001 Indian Census data at the state level on women workers in the mining and quarrying (M&Q) sector. In the absence of official data on informal M&Q, the paper uses the census category of ‘marginal workers’ as a rough indicator of informal employment within this industrial category. The paper has two stages of an...