Community’s Absorptive Capacity of The Proposed Phulbari

Coal Mining Project, Phulbari Dinajpur.

Sadik S1, Hassan N1 and Saha S K2, 2008
1 Institute of Water and Flood Management, 2 Department of Geology, Dhaka University

Abstract

Mining development brings both opportunity and cost to the community. Conflict
between the community and the mining authority is raised from uneven share of
the benefit. When community feels, they would be unfairly treated or
inadequately compensated, mining lead to social tension and sometimes to
violent conflict. The Phulbari Coal Mining Project is a good example of this, which
is one of the giant coal basin in Bangladesh proposed to mine by Asia Energy
Corporation, Bangladesh. This study has been performed to assess the social
absorptive capacity of the mining project that can be defined as the capacity of
the community to bear and accept the project and to reap the benefit which
depends on the social norms, values, culture, tradition, willingness and attitude of
the community to the project. The study has been conducted by the field survey
over the 10 villages under three municipalities i.e. Phulbari, Birampur and
Nawabganj with objective to examine the community attitude to the project,
identify the social constraints and find options or measures for improving the
absorptive capacity of the project. The absorptive capacity has been assessed
evaluating the people perception on the miscellaneous social issues and potential
social impact associated with the project through the checklist considering the
relative importance of the issues. The project has low social absorptive capacity
(weighted as -42.21). Social acceptance of the project is 0.40% where 98.20% of
the local people percept against the project. Among the miscellaneous issues,
visual environmental effect (relative importance 4.07), fear of loss of income
(relative importance 4.03) and loss of employment (relative importance 4.03)
have been given most priority to disallow the project by the local people. Also the
agreement and the national economic benefit have been given priority by
educated people of the community. Proper compensation, developing an
Economic Management Plan for the community with Environmental Management
Plan, improving awareness among the local people would improve the social
absorptive capacity of the Mining Project.