Do you think that forced displacement of labourers has caused their deprivation and resultant inequalities during the recent past years? Elaborate

Mechanisms

Michael Cernea’s impoverishment risks (landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, marginalisation, food insecurity, morbidity, social disarticulation) still fit Indian projects. Walter Fernandes documented undercounting of the displaced, especially Adivasis. Amita Baviskar showed how a dam or a city park can be an elite environmental good built on someone else’s eviction. Special economic zones and coastal tourism add a post-liberalisation chapter that the old Narmada literature already predicted: public purpose becomes private accumulation.

When a household is moved, cultivating rights become a contractor’s gang (Breman). Women lose forest and field income first. Children lose school continuity. Compensation, if paid, is often captured by men and brokers. RFCTLARR 2013 and Forest Rights consent are the legal counter; implementation lags, and many urban evictions use municipal law instead. Cash compensation without land-for-land is itself a class device: it looks fair and spends quickly.

Recent past

Mining and industrial corridors in Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh; smart city and riverside “beautification” evictions; highway and railway widening; Kashmir and North-East conflict displacement; climate floods and erosion in Assam and the Sundarbans; and COVID-19, which forced migrant labour to walk home—a displacement from the city without a project plaque. Each episode transfers security from labour to capital or to a cleaner skyline. SEZ and coastal regulation fights show the same class map with a blue-economy vocabulary.

Inequality rises because the already asset-poor (ST, SC, Muslims in some city clearances, women-headed households) lose the only capital they had—location and networks—while receivers of the project gain land value. Labour deprivation is the next scene: once disembedded, people accept lower wages, longer hours, and no union. That is why displacement is a stratification event, not a logistics event. Recent years did not invent this pattern of dispossession; they sped it up through industrial corridors, expanding cities and a pandemic that treated migrant labour as disposable mobility.