Town Today, Gone Tomorrow

Morwa town, built to serve mining companies, faces the ugly truth of its own displacement.

- Anupam Chakravartty

PERHAPS FOR the first time, an en-tire town will be brought down for mining development. The Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Amendment Act, 1957, is threatening to wipe Morwa—a town in Madhya Pradesh—off the map. The Act has become the focal point of all conversations among the people in the region, whether hoteliers and vegetable vendors or tribals living on the outskirts of the town. Northern Coalfields Limited (ncl), a subsidiary of Coal India Limited, is set to acquire the entire town and 10 adjoining villages under the Act, turning the area into a coal mine.

Morwa is situated at the heart of Singrauli district, which is home to abundant reserves of power grade coal and is known as India’s energy capital. The town was born in the 1950s when rapid infrastructure and industrial development in the region displaced people by the thousands (see ‘Displaced, again’). They flocked to the seven villages in Morwa, and gradually the area mushroomed into a bustling township of 11 municipal wards with a population of 50,000 residents.

Surrounded by 40-storey-high mounds of mining waste and a permanent haze of mining dust, Morwa today has five schools, three hospitals, a bus stand, a railway station and a part of National Highway 75E which runs through the town. Most people are employed in servicing nearby coal mines as workers or as transporters of mined coal and hotel owners who cater to visiting ncl officials. But the same mines that have sustained Morwa till now will soon expand to swallow it completely.

Acquisition process