This is the sixth displacement I face in the past six decades,” complains Bhagwan Prasad. “The first time I had to move was during the construction of Rihand dam in Uttar Pradesh’s Sonebhadra district in 1954. In 1962, I had to move again because they miscalculated the catchment area of the dam’s reservoir and our house faced threat of submergence. I then moved to the adjacent Singrauli district in Madhya Pradesh. In 1977, I was forced to move again, at a notice of just 15 days, when they planned the Singrauli Super Thermal Power Plant. This time, I moved to Khadia village in the same district. After that, I had to move two more times to make way for one developmental project or the other,” says 82-year-old Prasad, who used to be a farmer but became a labourer due to frequent displacements. “Now I am too weak to work and live with my grandson. We have been asked to move to allow expansion of Jayant coal mines. Where will we go,” he asks.
Prasad is now a resident of Kathas village in Singrauli. He is also one of an estimated 0.1 million people who have to vacate their houses in the country’s largest displacement exercise underway in Singrauli’s biggest town Morwa (which has a population of 0.1 million) and about 10 surrounding tribal villages (estimated population of 3,500), including Kathas.
Singrauli sits atop a coal-rich belt discovered by the British in the 1800s and now mined by Northern Coalfields Ltd (NCL), a subsidiary of government-owned Coal India Ltd. The Singrauli coal fields (from which the district gets its name) are spread over 2,202 sq km in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh and include two basins—the Moher sub-basin (312 sq km) and the Singrauli main basin (1,890 sq km). Till now, mining has been done only in the Moher sub-basin, but NCL plans to mine the entire fields which have 11 mine blocks, one of them being Jayant.
The Singrauli region is home to tribal populations, mostly Gonds. Since it is mineral-rich, it is also the site of multiple private and government-run power projects, mines, industries and dams. Apart from NCL, these include JP Power Ventures Ltd, Sasan Ultra Mega Power Project, Reliance Power Limited, Hindalco Industries Ltd, Mahan Aluminum Ltd, Lanco Power Ltd and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC). The construction of these projects has caused repeated and mass displacement of people over the years. An environmental assessment commissioned by the World Bank and NTPC in 1991 had said that 90 per cent of the local people had been displaced at least once, while 34 per cent had faced repeated displacement. In absolute terms, researchers estimate that some 0.3 million people have been displaced due to dams, mining and thermal power projects in the Singrauli region since 1960.
Take the case of Chintamani, a resident of Juaadi village in Singrauli, who has moved four times since...
This article was originally published in the October 1-15, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth