India’s drive to ramp up coal output to meet growing energy needs has resulted in members of the Adivasi tribe being displaced from their ancestral lands and forced to wait years to be resettled, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

The global human rights group said the Adivasis had suffered disproportionately from India’s push for coal. One in six of the 87,000 Indians who have been displaced over the past 40 years by state-owned Coal India Ltd (CIL) is Adivasi, Amnesty said.

Laws to protect indigenous groups are poorly implemented and regularly flouted, it said. “Adivasi communities, who traditionally have strong links to land and forests, have suffered disproportionately from development-induced displacement and environmental destruction in India,” Amnesty said in a report.

“The domestic Indian legal framework does not fully recognise the rights of indigenous peoples,” it said.

Coal accounts for more than 60 per cent of India’s electricity capacity, and the government plans to nearly double annual coal output by 2020, opening a new mine nearly every month.

Many of the coal reserves are located in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha, where more than a quarter of the Adivasi population lives.

“Coal is essential for our national security and we have to go where the coal is,” said N Das, a chief general manager at Coal India, the country’s top coal producer.

“We follow all the laws, work closely with the local communities, provide jobs, set up welfare initiatives and take steps to minimise the environmental impact of mining,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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