Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt
Biographic Data
| ID | 3635657 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kuntala |
| FAMILY NAME | Lahiri-Dutt |
| SIGNATURE | LAHIRI-DUTT K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 218 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Le congé menstruel: Un Regard Décolonial
Within the French wine industry, the Champagne region boasts the highest rate of female winegrowers. Based on a survey of 50 winegrowers (29 women and 21 men), the study shows that the gendered access to this profession has become less strict over the last few decades. However, winegrowing practices are still marked by gender effects, given the specific socialization that prepares one to enter this profession, but also due to the division of labo…
The micropolitics of coal in India: Understanding resource politics from the ground up through a materiality lens
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 grassroots level – workers, security forces, the displaced, administrators, mine planners, and a wide r…
What determines women's agricultural participation? A comparative study of landholding households in rural India
Explaining recent increases in calorie intake in rural India: The role of social policy strengthening
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, however, indicates increases in calorie intake, notably among poorer income quintiles. This paper ar…
Do Women Have a Right to Mine
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 genre va à l’encontre d’une perspective féministe qui est nécessairement holistique, tout comme elle e…
Extractive peasants: Reframing Informal Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Debates
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 peasants' best explain the contemporary changes in rural, mineral-rich tracts throughout the Global South,…
Imaginando los ríos
Human beings have often personified rivers. But the move from 'mother' nature to 'obedient daughter' river has been detrimental to human welfare. We need to see rivers as a content we live in and not as a resource we 'harness' and 'control
In the Realm of the Diamond King: Myth, Magic, and Modernity in the Diamond Tracts of Central India
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 mining in central India from the humanistic tradition in geography to illuminate the "realm" of the…
Women Miners in Developing Countries: Pit Women and Others
Contents: Introduction: Where life is in the pits (and elsewhere) and gendered, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Martha Macintyre. Reconstructing Gendered Histories of Mines: Women miners: here and there, now and then, Gill Burke Japanese coal mining: women discovered, Sachiko Sone Race, gender and the tin-mining industry in Malaya, 1900-1950, Amarjit Kaur Patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism: unearthing the history of Adivasi women miners of Chotanagpu…
Resources and the Politics of Sovereignty: The Moral and Immoral Economies of Coal Mining in India
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 exert a moral claim by mining illegally, those in Meghalaya exert a political claim by invoking the s…
Rethinking Displacement: Asia Pacific Perspectives
Contents: Part 1 Neoliberal Globalisation and Displacement: States Displacing the Poor and the Marginal: Dispossession, placelessness, home and belonging: an outline of a research agenda, Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt Neoliberal development, port reform and displacement: the case of Kolkata and Haldia, West Bengal, India, Douglas Hill and Timothy J. Scrase Youth on the neoliberal margins: ethnography of tourism-led displacement i…
The Coal Nation: Histories, Ecologies and Politics of Coal in India
Women as marginal workers in informal mining and quarrying, India: A preliminary analysis
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 analysis: first, it presents a state-by-state description of employment of women as main and marginal …
Informal Mining in Livelihood Diversification: Mineral Dependence and Rural Communities in Lao PDR
In the context of mineral extraction in South East Asia, the rural poor are generally portrayed as victims of large, invading corporatized mining enterprises. However, this paper argues that local villagers have also shown considerable agency in taking advantage of the mineral resource boom by diversifying their livelihoods to include informal mining. In South East Asia, the growth of informal mining has occurred within the overall process of agr…
Medicalising menstruation: A feminist critique of the political economy of menstrual hygiene management in South Asia
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 menstrual hygiene management (MHM), but their use of a medical approach requires critical rethinking. Th…
Women's ‘double day’ in middle-class homes in small-town India
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 have so far been more resistant to transformation than in metropolitan cities that are undergoing radic…
Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia
Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia
This book offers an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of 'hybrid environments.' Focusing on chars--the part-land, part-water, low-lying sandy masses that exist within the riverbeds in the floodplains of lower Bengal--the authors show how, both as real-life examples and as metaphors, chars straddle the conventional categories of land and water, and how people who live on them fluctuate between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The result, a s…
Reigning the river: Urban ecologies and political transformations in Kathmandu, by Anne M. Rademacher
Reigning the river: Urban ecologies and political transformations in Kathmandu, by Anne M. Rademacher. Foreword by Dianne Rochleau. New Ecologies for the 21st Century Series, Duke University Press
Gender (plays) in Tanjung Bara mining camp in Eastern Kalimantan, Indonesia
All mining settlements are heavily gendered, not only because of the masculinity that the industry cultivates and flaunts, but also as a result of the power of capital manifested in the gendered class stratification of labour and space. When global capital penetrates remote resource peripheries in poorer countries, it also ushers mining experts, who are usually expatriate men from older industrialised and/or richer nations, into these areas. The …
The Shifting Gender of Coal: Feminist Musings on Women's Work in Indian Collieries
This paper investigates the sharp fall in the number of women workers in Indian coal mines, and explores the specificity of women workers in their demands for gender equity. It examines four main factors responsible for the gradual decline in women's participation in Indian collieries: the laws surrounding women's rights to work; the gendered impacts of technology use; the neglect of women workers' needs and interests by the relevant trade unions…
Ensuring Water Security in Rural Areas of Bangladesh under Climate Change and Non-climatic Drivers of Change
Digging women: Towards a new agenda for feminist critiques of mining
This article addresses how a contemporary feminist perspective can problematise the ancient human endeavour of mining, and indicates which direction research on the interface between extractive industries and gender could usefully take. Feminist research has confronted masculinist discourses of mining by questioning the naturalisation of men as industrial workers, and by illustrating the gender-selective impacts of capitalist mining projects. The…
Conference Reports
Digging to Survive: Women's Livelihoods in South Asia's Small Mines and Quarries
The global trend of the informalisation of women's work is also evident in what is commonly known as artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) practices. Small mines and quarries are extremely diverse in nature, but comprise a repository of extremely poor people. This article focuses on the gender and livelihood issues and concerns in small mines and quarries of South Asia. In view of the lack of official quantitative data, the research presented he…
Digging women: Towards a new agenda for feminist critiques of mining
This article addresses how a contemporary feminist perspective can problematise the ancient human endeavour of mining, and indicates which direction research on the interface between extractive industries and gender could usefully take. Feminist research has confronted masculinist discourses of mining by questioning the naturalisation of men as industrial workers, and by illustrating the gender-selective impacts of capitalist mining projects. The…
Extractive peasants: Reframing Informal Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Debates
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 peasants' best explain the contemporary changes in rural, mineral-rich tracts throughout the Global South,…
Engendering Mining Communities: Examining the Missing Gender Concerns in Coal Mining Displacement and Rehabilitation in India
Forced displacement by development projects seriously affects the well-being of communities, revealing mixed and varied outcomes. Although scholars and policymakers have recognized the need for new forms of interventions, gender aspects of displacement and rehabilitation remain mostly unexamined in the empirical literature, which largely assumes that women’s and men’s experiences of displacement and rehabilitation processes are similar. Consequen…
Medicalising menstruation: A feminist critique of the political economy of menstrual hygiene management in South Asia
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 menstrual hygiene management (MHM), but their use of a medical approach requires critical rethinking. Th…
Women's ‘double day’ in middle-class homes in small-town India
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 have so far been more resistant to transformation than in metropolitan cities that are undergoing radic…
What determines women's agricultural participation? A comparative study of landholding households in rural India
In the Realm of the Diamond King: Myth, Magic, and Modernity in the Diamond Tracts of Central India
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 mining in central India from the humanistic tradition in geography to illuminate the "realm" of the…
Do Women Have a Right to Mine
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 genre va à l’encontre d’une perspective féministe qui est nécessairement holistique, tout comme elle e…
Gender (plays) in Tanjung Bara mining camp in Eastern Kalimantan, Indonesia
All mining settlements are heavily gendered, not only because of the masculinity that the industry cultivates and flaunts, but also as a result of the power of capital manifested in the gendered class stratification of labour and space. When global capital penetrates remote resource peripheries in poorer countries, it also ushers mining experts, who are usually expatriate men from older industrialised and/or richer nations, into these areas. The …
Roles and status of women in extractive industries in India: Making a place for a gender-sensitive mining development
In tracing women's roles and analysing their low status in the extractive industries in India, particularly coal mining, this paper highlights the need of sensitizing the Indian mining establishments ranging from educational, research and training institutions to the Ministries and Bureaus as well as the industrial organizations so as to provide equal work opportunities for women. It shows that mining is not a ‘non-traditional’ area of work for w…
The Shifting Gender of Coal: Feminist Musings on Women's Work in Indian Collieries
This paper investigates the sharp fall in the number of women workers in Indian coal mines, and explores the specificity of women workers in their demands for gender equity. It examines four main factors responsible for the gradual decline in women's participation in Indian collieries: the laws surrounding women's rights to work; the gendered impacts of technology use; the neglect of women workers' needs and interests by the relevant trade unions…
Like the Drifting Grains of Sand’: 1 Vulnerability, Security and Adjustment by Communities in the Char lands of the Damodar River, India
Charlands are islands formed in major river systems particularly in the flat deltaic plains such as those in the Bengal delta in eastern India and Bangladesh. The charlands in the lower reaches of the Damodar River in India are prone to frequent floods, shifting river channels and consequent riverbank erosion. In spite of these risks posed by the environment, migrant communities from Bihar and Bangladesh settle in the charlands because the soils …
Imaginando los ríos
Human beings have often personified rivers. But the move from 'mother' nature to 'obedient daughter' river has been detrimental to human welfare. We need to see rivers as a content we live in and not as a resource we 'harness' and 'control
Resources and the Politics of Sovereignty: The Moral and Immoral Economies of Coal Mining in India
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 exert a moral claim by mining illegally, those in Meghalaya exert a political claim by invoking the s…
Beyond the boundary: Middle-class women in income-generating activities in Burdwan, India
Work is a part of the life of women irrespective of their social and class locations. Women act as agents of social change and create new social spaces for themselves through income-generating but often informal occupations. This paper looks at the increasing involvement of middle-class Bengali women in various types of informal income-generating activities, and examines how their social space is changed through their work outside of home. Burdwa…
Fleeting Land, Fleeting People: Bangladeshi Women in a Char land Environment in Lower Bengal, India
Riverine islands ( chars in Bengali or diaras in middle Gangetic plain) are common in deltaic lower Bengal and have often provided ideal places for the settlement of unauthorized migrants. Many of these chars are shifting, temporary and flood-prone, but some get stabilized with time although their legal status as “land” still remains contested. This article is about the life experiences of some Bangladeshi women who have migrated from Bangladesh …
Informal Mining in Livelihood Diversification: Mineral Dependence and Rural Communities in Lao PDR
In the context of mineral extraction in South East Asia, the rural poor are generally portrayed as victims of large, invading corporatized mining enterprises. However, this paper argues that local villagers have also shown considerable agency in taking advantage of the mineral resource boom by diversifying their livelihoods to include informal mining. In South East Asia, the growth of informal mining has occurred within the overall process of agr…
Conference Reports
Act On Gender: A Peep Into Intra-Household Water Use In The Australian Capital Territory (Act) Region
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 context, this paper explores the potential of water use diaries to explore gender perspectives in Austr…
Period Problems' at the Coalface
Menstruation leave for women workers brings into the public domain of mining ongoing debates around protective legislation for women. It brings into focus the presumed tensions between gender equity and gender difference with regard to women's economic citizenship. Large-scale mining in East Kalimantan in Indonesia has offered some opportunities to poor and unskilled rural women to find formal jobs in the mines as truck and heavy equipment operat…
A New Bond: Coal in the Energy Sector in South Asia
Growth and Occupational Structures of Million Cities of India
The past few decades have witnessed a rapid mushrooming growth of million cities in India. They now reveal a wide spatial distribution over the country; the exception being the northeastern and hilly states, and the peripheral islands. However, differential growth rates for these cities have become noticeable, and may become more so in the future. The question that comes to mind is: are the rates of growth in any way related to the occupational p…
Beyond the boundary: Middle-class women in income-generating activities in Burdwan, India
Work is a part of the life of women irrespective of their social and class locations. Women act as agents of social change and create new social spaces for themselves through income-generating but often informal occupations. This paper looks at the increasing involvement of middle-class Bengali women in various types of informal income-generating activities, and examines how their social space is changed through their work outside of home. Burdwa…
Fleeting Land, Fleeting People: Bangladeshi Women in a Char land Environment in Lower Bengal, India
Riverine islands ( chars in Bengali or diaras in middle Gangetic plain) are common in deltaic lower Bengal and have often provided ideal places for the settlement of unauthorized migrants. Many of these chars are shifting, temporary and flood-prone, but some get stabilized with time although their legal status as “land” still remains contested. This article is about the life experiences of some Bangladeshi women who have migrated from Bangladesh …
Engendering Mining Communities: Examining the Missing Gender Concerns in Coal Mining Displacement and Rehabilitation in India
Forced displacement by development projects seriously affects the well-being of communities, revealing mixed and varied outcomes. Although scholars and policymakers have recognized the need for new forms of interventions, gender aspects of displacement and rehabilitation remain mostly unexamined in the empirical literature, which largely assumes that women’s and men’s experiences of displacement and rehabilitation processes are similar. Consequen…
Mainstreaming gender in the mines: Results from an Indonesian colliery
Like the Drifting Grains of Sand’: 1 Vulnerability, Security and Adjustment by Communities in the Char lands of the Damodar River, India
Charlands are islands formed in major river systems particularly in the flat deltaic plains such as those in the Bengal delta in eastern India and Bangladesh. The charlands in the lower reaches of the Damodar River in India are prone to frequent floods, shifting river channels and consequent riverbank erosion. In spite of these risks posed by the environment, migrant communities from Bihar and Bangladesh settle in the charlands because the soils …
Roles and status of women in extractive industries in India: Making a place for a gender-sensitive mining development
In tracing women's roles and analysing their low status in the extractive industries in India, particularly coal mining, this paper highlights the need of sensitizing the Indian mining establishments ranging from educational, research and training institutions to the Ministries and Bureaus as well as the industrial organizations so as to provide equal work opportunities for women. It shows that mining is not a ‘non-traditional’ area of work for w…
Digging to Survive: Women's Livelihoods in South Asia's Small Mines and Quarries
The global trend of the informalisation of women's work is also evident in what is commonly known as artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) practices. Small mines and quarries are extremely diverse in nature, but comprise a repository of extremely poor people. This article focuses on the gender and livelihood issues and concerns in small mines and quarries of South Asia. In view of the lack of official quantitative data, the research presented he…
Act On Gender: A Peep Into Intra-Household Water Use In The Australian Capital Territory (Act) Region
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 context, this paper explores the potential of water use diaries to explore gender perspectives in Austr…
Gender Dimensions in the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction
Period Problems' at the Coalface
Menstruation leave for women workers brings into the public domain of mining ongoing debates around protective legislation for women. It brings into focus the presumed tensions between gender equity and gender difference with regard to women's economic citizenship. Large-scale mining in East Kalimantan in Indonesia has offered some opportunities to poor and unskilled rural women to find formal jobs in the mines as truck and heavy equipment operat…
Conference Reports
Ensuring Water Security in Rural Areas of Bangladesh under Climate Change and Non-climatic Drivers of Change
Digging women: Towards a new agenda for feminist critiques of mining
This article addresses how a contemporary feminist perspective can problematise the ancient human endeavour of mining, and indicates which direction research on the interface between extractive industries and gender could usefully take. Feminist research has confronted masculinist discourses of mining by questioning the naturalisation of men as industrial workers, and by illustrating the gender-selective impacts of capitalist mining projects. The…
Gender (plays) in Tanjung Bara mining camp in Eastern Kalimantan, Indonesia
All mining settlements are heavily gendered, not only because of the masculinity that the industry cultivates and flaunts, but also as a result of the power of capital manifested in the gendered class stratification of labour and space. When global capital penetrates remote resource peripheries in poorer countries, it also ushers mining experts, who are usually expatriate men from older industrialised and/or richer nations, into these areas. The …
The Shifting Gender of Coal: Feminist Musings on Women's Work in Indian Collieries
This paper investigates the sharp fall in the number of women workers in Indian coal mines, and explores the specificity of women workers in their demands for gender equity. It examines four main factors responsible for the gradual decline in women's participation in Indian collieries: the laws surrounding women's rights to work; the gendered impacts of technology use; the neglect of women workers' needs and interests by the relevant trade unions…
Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia
Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia
This book offers an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of 'hybrid environments.' Focusing on chars--the part-land, part-water, low-lying sandy masses that exist within the riverbeds in the floodplains of lower Bengal--the authors show how, both as real-life examples and as metaphors, chars straddle the conventional categories of land and water, and how people who live on them fluctuate between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The result, a s…
Reigning the river: Urban ecologies and political transformations in Kathmandu, by Anne M. Rademacher
Reigning the river: Urban ecologies and political transformations in Kathmandu, by Anne M. Rademacher. Foreword by Dianne Rochleau. New Ecologies for the 21st Century Series, Duke University Press
Women as marginal workers in informal mining and quarrying, India: A preliminary analysis
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 analysis: first, it presents a state-by-state description of employment of women as main and marginal …
Informal Mining in Livelihood Diversification: Mineral Dependence and Rural Communities in Lao PDR
In the context of mineral extraction in South East Asia, the rural poor are generally portrayed as victims of large, invading corporatized mining enterprises. However, this paper argues that local villagers have also shown considerable agency in taking advantage of the mineral resource boom by diversifying their livelihoods to include informal mining. In South East Asia, the growth of informal mining has occurred within the overall process of agr…
Medicalising menstruation: A feminist critique of the political economy of menstrual hygiene management in South Asia
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 menstrual hygiene management (MHM), but their use of a medical approach requires critical rethinking. Th…
Women's ‘double day’ in middle-class homes in small-town India
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 have so far been more resistant to transformation than in metropolitan cities that are undergoing radic…
Rethinking Displacement: Asia Pacific Perspectives
Contents: Part 1 Neoliberal Globalisation and Displacement: States Displacing the Poor and the Marginal: Dispossession, placelessness, home and belonging: an outline of a research agenda, Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt Neoliberal development, port reform and displacement: the case of Kolkata and Haldia, West Bengal, India, Douglas Hill and Timothy J. Scrase Youth on the neoliberal margins: ethnography of tourism-led displacement i…
Political science (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Geography (21 works) · Economics (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Mining and Resource Management (13 works) · Economic growth (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact (9 works)