Recognising care-centered economies for a just transition: Perspectives from the Global Majority (Part II)

Placing the excluded at the centre

Link for the first part of this discussion with Neha Saigal here>>

Gisela Ruiseco: Neha, in the first part of our conversation you have brought the discussion around the understanding of “work” and the re-centering of care to the concrete situation of necessity. This is important, as in our disturbing, devastating present we have to face the concrete: how to rebuild.

You have conveyed how it is precisely the time of transition and crisis which opens up questions and possibilities about the meaning of “work”. Particularly at these turning points, there is not only the chance to re-imagine, but also, to restore dignity to what is already there and has been invisibilized/ devalued, as you well say! Particularly, the reproductive work done by women, which sustains the extractivist system.

At many levels in the Global South, it is difficult to revalue these types of work, as they go against the grain of a still hegemonic “development”, in which subsistence and informal economies are only considered as something to be “solved” and done away with.

Question: Devaluation corrodes the possibilities of transformation. How can we start to dig deep enough in our concepts to start re-imagining, and re-valuing certain types of work, to form care-centered societies? How can we move towards “giving communities a choice” about how to work and live?

Neha Saigal: To imagine a different future for these regions, we first need to understand how the present came to be. The story of coal in central and eastern India begins not with independence, but with colonialism and it is a story of land taken, forests destroyed, and communities pushed to the margins of an energy economy that was never built for them.

The coal regions of central and eastern India have a history of extraction that goes back well before independence in the age of British imperial power. In the late nineteenth century, a coal boom transformed the upland plateau from a largely agrarian region into a key site of a growing global fossil fuel economy. Eastern Indian coal was shipped westward across the subcontinent and exported as far as Southeast Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. This expansion was built on dispossession. The East India Company had long granted regional landlords or zamindars control over land and its revenues. During the coal boom, this system was used to strip Adivasi and under-privileged caste and farming communities of their land, forests, and livelihoods. Colonial courts then gave this dispossession legal permanence, recognising landlord rights over what lay beneath the ground. Settlements were cleared, forests destroyed, and the commons that sustained Adivasi life were swallowed up by mines, railway lines, and company towns. The deep social and ecological crisis visible in these regions today has its roots in this colonial period.

This history matters for how we think about just transition now!

The communities that paid the heaviest price for coal’s expansion Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste groups, and especially women within these communities were never its beneficiaries. That exclusion did not end with colonialism; it has been repeated with each new wave of coal expansion in independent India.

Coal in India has a deeply gendered history, one that is inseparable from the country’s colonial past and its subsequent political economy. As Lahiri-Dutt (2020) notes, coal represented colonial modernity in India, and within this industrial formation, women were not absent; they were integral. In the early decades of the twentieth century, women worked alongside men in the collieries, their most common role being that of loader: carrying and stacking the coal cut by their male partners fathers, brothers, or husbands. This was physically demanding, essential labour, yet it remained largely unacknowledged as skilled work. Crucially, the women who performed it were predominantly from lower-caste, poorer-class, and indigenous communities, meaning that their eventual exclusion from the formal mining sector was not simply an economic or technological outcome, but one shaped by pre-existing social hierarchies of caste, class, and gender.

The post-nationalisation period marked a decisive turning point in women’s participation in Indian coal mining. The introduction of new technologies like draglines and shovels for open-cast mines, longwall systems for underground operations reorganised the labour process in ways that systematically displaced women. Since operating these machines was classified as “skilled” work, women were either encouraged to retire or simply not recruited. Those who remained in employment were typically assigned to tasks coded as unskilled and domestic in nature: sweeping floors, making tea, or guarding office gates. As Ghosh (1984, cited in Lahiri-Dutt 2020) argued, women did not simply disappear from the industry they were made redundant within it. The near-absence of any serious effort to train or upskill women workers meant that technological change became an instrument of exclusion rather than opportunity, entrenching their marginalisation within an industry they had helped build.

When one reflects on the deeply problematic history of fossil fuels in India, a just transition is not simply about switching from one fuel to another. It requires honestly confronting this history who bore its costs, who was displaced, whose land was taken and whose labour was made invisible and making a deliberate choice to put the voices, land rights, and livelihoods of the most excluded at its centre.

This confrontation necessarily brings us to the question of work itself: what it looks like, who performs it, and how it is valued. A just transition must grapple not only with what work people will move to, but with whether we are willing to fundamentally reimagine what counts as work in the first place. This includes care work, subsistence labour, and the vast ecosystem of informal and self-employed work that has long been the invisible engine of economic life. The ILO (2020) documents that between 55 and 88 percent of the workforce in low, middle, and upper-middle income countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America is informally employed or self-employed. This is not a marginal footnote. This is the economy. The so-called formal economy sits atop this foundation and could not function without it.

And yet, this foundation has been systematically devalued, treated as a problem to be solved, a stepping stone to be left behind, rather than a form of organising life and livelihood that carries its own dignity, knowledge, and logic. The binary of productive versus reproductive work, formal versus informal, has functioned less as a description of reality and more as a hierarchy. Informal work in India whether waste collection, farm labour, sanitation, food vending, or domestic work is the backbone of the economy. Any conception of just transition that allows this work to remain at the bottom of the pyramid has not actually troubled the existing order. It has simply reproduced it.

This is where listening becomes a form of political practice. In the specific context of Eastern India, where I have been engaging with women on the cusp of this transition, one of the most generative things one can do is to create the conditions for their imagination of work to be heard not as a courtesy, but as an epistemic resource. These women have situated knowledge: they know what the land can sustain, what local markets can absorb, what is ecologically feasible and socially viable. When top-down templates propose fish ponds in the shadow of closed mines, these women can tell you why that won’t work and that mushroom cultivation might be a more viable option. That is not a small detail. It is a reminder that transition planning without this knowledge will simply reproduce the paternalism of the extractive economy it claims to replace.

A just transition, then, is also a challenge to the hierarchy of who counts as a knowledge producer and whose knowledge of work, ecology, and livelihood counts as expertise. It is a moment to insist that all work is dignified not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a structural commitment and to refuse the reproduction of hierarchies among workers based on gender, caste, and class. If the transition does not disturb those hierarchies, it is not just.

It is here, at the intersection of these crises, that the question of paradigm becomes unavoidable. The failures we are living through ecological, economic, social are not isolated malfunctions of an otherwise sound system. They are the predictable outcomes of a system organised around extraction: of land, of labour, of care, of futures. A just transition cannot simply be a better-managed version of the same logic. It has to be a rupture.

Gisela: Neha, you are actually starting right now a new project, which relates intimately to the themes we have been discussing. Could you tell us about this project?

Neha: It was this recognition that the old systems have not merely failed but are incapable of the repair they promise that led my colleague and I to co-found Intertidal Lab and I am co-building the Climate & Care Collective with a friend in India. We were sitting with a set of questions that didn’t have institutional homes: What does it mean for genuinely new things to emerge as the old structures break down? What does it take to build not just alternatives, but a different paradigm altogether, one that moves from extraction to care, that holds the inner and outer dimensions of change together, and that builds resilient communities precisely at the fractures of collapse and emergence?

The intertidal zone, the space between tides, neither fully sea nor fully land is generative precisely because of its instability. It is one of the most biodiverse zones on earth, and it exists because of the dynamic tension it inhabits. That is the sensibility we are trying to work from. Rather than waiting for stability, we are learning to build in the in-between, understanding care as a way of being in relationship with other humans, with non-human life, with land, and with time. Care as political practice means attending to what is being harmed and by whom, and organising to change it. Care as economic reimagination means asking what it would look like to organise production and distribution around sustaining life rather than accumulating capital. Care as future-making means sitting with communities, particularly the women at the cusp of transition in eastern India, the waste workers, the sanitation workers, the farmers, and asking not “how do we manage your transition?” but “what world are you trying to build, and what do you need from us?”

The old paradigm is not simply failing; it is being actively unmade by the communities it has most harmed, in ways that rarely make it into transition plans or policy briefs. The work is to make that unmaking legible and visible, to resource it, and to refuse to let it be folded back into the logic of extraction under new names.

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Illustration: From the Intertidal website. Artist: Rama Aldakkak