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Livelihoods of Marginal Mining and Quarrying Households in India
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 social groups. The majority of them are concentrated in stone and marble quarries, living on the edge of poverty, earning irregular incomes, and with poor access to services and utilities. Considering the likely numbers involved and their vulnerability, the paper suggests that mining and quarrying households should receive better policy attention.
We thank the Australian Research Council for funding the Discovery Project, of which this study is a part. We also thank Amitabh Kundu (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), Pundarik Mukhopadhaya (Macquarie University, Sydney) and David Williams (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Sydney) for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We also wish to convey our gratitude to Mohit Chaturvedi for his initial work on identifying the poorest mining and quarrying households from the National Sample Survey data.
