Introduction

“Earlier, not much care was taken about the local society. Now that awareness is there.” This claim was made in an interview with the managing director of a large-scale iron mine in eastern India in January 2015, when he reflected back on his long experience in the Indian mining industry. While the claim encapsulates a long-term corporate trend, in India corporate involvement in community-level matters remains an issue of constant debate, even suspicion. Can corporate and community interests be complementary, and if so, to what extent, especially in cases where the corporate activity has negatively affected the health and well-being of local people? Whose interests are actually at stake – who, locally, is ‘the’ company, who passes as ‘the’ local people, and whose interests do not count? How do the mining companies implement their community development programmes under corporate social responsibility (CSR), and how participatory are these programmes? Should social and community workers engage with corporations to get resources, such as funding and other assets for the actual work with people, and what kind of risks or compromises might that entail?

In this chapter, we discuss these dilemmas in the context of the mining area of the eastern Sundergarh District in the state of Odisha in eastern India. In spite of its context specificity, our case connects with universal themes regarding extractive industries, CSR, and community work and development. These include the deterioration of the local ecosystems and ecosystems-based livelihoods in regions of resource extraction, growing disparities and uneven power positions between those who benefit from extractive industries and those who do not, complexities of CSR in a multi-ethnic and hierarchical society, and the subordination of ‘extractive peripheries’ to broader political and economic structures and tendencies. Related to these issues, the particular, yet also globally commonplace feature of our case is that the resource extraction transforms an area that is home to Indigenous people.

This chapter is grounded in Odisha on the two most easterly of the 17 blocks comprising the Sundergarh District, Koida and Lahunipada, which alone have around 60 mines excavating mainly iron ore. The data for the chapter were gathered collaboratively for the purposes of Ranta-Tyrkkö's postdoctoral research, on the consequences of the mining industry for disadvantaged groups in Northern Finland and Northern Odisha (Academy of Finland, 2014–17) during two relatively short sets of fieldwork in 2015.