A story of official callousness

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The long-running struggle by poor villagers displaced by the multipurpose Narmada Valley project has entered a new phase with the arrest of renowned social activist Medha Patkar and a few others who have staked their lives to pressure the callous administration to fulfil the promise to rehabilitate them.

The project, under which 30 major dams, 135 medium ones and 3,000 small ones, were to be constructed on the 1312-kilometre-long river Narmada, was one of the largest of its kind. It was promoted as one that will irrigate two million hectares of farm land and provide drinking water to 30 million people, besides generating electricity to meet the needs of agriculture and industry.

The biggest of the dams, Sardar Sarovar, was to be in Gujarat, which was the project’s main beneficiary. Successive governments of that state exerted considerable pressure on the Centre for its implementation, arguing it was necessary to irrigate the parched lands of Kutch and Saurashtra regions.

The promoters of the project hid the fact that it would inundate 37,000 hectares of forest and agricultural land in Madhya Pradesh and deprive hundreds of thousands of people, most of them tribes living in the forests, of their homes and livelihood.

Medha Patkar visited the project area in MP in 1985 to gather material as a research scholar. Moved by the plight of the people threatened by the project, she gave up her PhD ambition and committed herself to their cause.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement) which she founded has been spearheading the campaign for their rehabilitation since then.

During the last three decades the NBA mounted many mass agitations, and Medha Patkar undertook two indefinite fasts, one of which lasted 22 days, and fought a long court battle. They could not stop the project but they chalked up many victories not only for themselves but also for people elsewhere in the world who were under the shadow of mega dams.

Acting on Medha Patkar’s petition, the Supreme Court ordered that the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam must be raised in stages and that work on a new stage should be taken up only after rehabilitation of those affected by the previous stage was completed. It is another matter that the authorities circumvented this restriction by submitting false reports stating that the rehabilitation work had been completed.

In 1985 the World Bank agreed to provide $450 million towards the Narmada project’s originally estimated cost of $6 billion. After the NBA drew attention to the enormous social and human costs involved, it set up an independent committee, headed by former UN Development Programme chief Bradford Morse to review the project.

The committee said the project was flawed, resettlement of the affected people was not possible under the prevailing conditions and environmental impacts had not been adequately addressed.

Following this, the World Bank withdrew its offer of funds.

The NBA’s heroic resistance inspired groups in several countries to take a fresh look at big dam projects. This prompted the World Bank and the International Union for Conservation of Nature to set up the World Commission on Dams with a mandate to draw up comprehensive guidelines on dam building. Medha Patkar was a member of the committee.

Many of the fears voiced by critics when the mammoth project was taken up have proved to be true. The water flowing into Gujarat is used mostly in the southern regions, which already had the benefit of irrigation, and very little was reaching Saurashtra and Kutch.

Available data suggests that the benefits accruing from the project are not commensurate with the huge investment.

Recently the Centre permitted Gujarat to close the gates of the Sardar Sarovar dam. This will raise the water level in Madhya Pradesh and submerge the homes of an estimated 40,000 families in four districts of the state. The current agitation is to press for their rehabilitation.

Instead of approaching the issue from a humanitarian point of view, the state government let loose a reign of terror on the protestors. The police attacked and arrested school children who had come from different parts of the country to show their solidarity with the affected villagers.

Medha Patkar and her associates had decided to hold a rally at Rajghat where there was a Gandhi statue and a memorial to the Father of the Nation before beginning their indefinite fast on July 27. The police removed the statue and the memorial the previous night.

The Madhya Pradesh government’s representatives have met Medha Patkar in an effort to persuade her to end the fast. But they have not made any meaningful proposal regarding the rehabilitation of the affected villagers.

The state must realise that it is playing with the lives of people.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah. August 8, 2017

Embroiled in land wars

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

India is caught up in land wars. Villagers opposing forcible acquisition of farm lands for industrial and infrastructure projects are posing problems to governments all over the country. Most protests are peaceful but there have been violent uprisings too.

The involvement of small but militant groups like the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in resistance movements in some areas, especially the tribal belt, adds a new dimension to the problem.

Last month violence erupted in the Noida area of Uttar Pradesh, adjoining the national capital, forcing the state government to put on hold acquisition of land for the Yamuna Expressway designed to provide quick movement between New Delhi and Agra, the most popular tourist destination. At least 15 persons have been killed in clashes between police and protesters in the state in the last four years.

More than six decades after the country gained freedom, authorities still invoke a law enacted by the British in 1894 when they want to acquire land. That law empowers the state to acquire land for any public purpose. Taking advantage of the vague definition of ‘public purpose’ in the law, governments have used it to take over private property and hand it over to businessmen to set up industrial projects.

The most fatal flaw of the law is the absence of provisions to ensure proper resettlement and rehabilitation of the people who are dispossessed. State governments often acquire land in excess of the actual need. The land war battlefields extend from Gujarat and Maharashtra in the west to Orissa and West Bengal in the east and from UP in the north to Karnataka and Kerala in the south.

The heroic struggle waged by social activist Medha Patkar for several decades on behalf of the tribal people affected by the massive Narmada dam has brought into sharp focus the issue of the state’s responsibility to ensure rehabilitation of persons displaced by development projects. Hers has been a peaceful struggle of the Gandhian kind.

Agitators at some other places have resorted to violence. The blame for this must be shared at least in part by rapacious businessmen and recalcitrant authorities who habitually ignore the agonised cries of the victims.

In many places farmers engaged in land war have received powerful support from civil society groups whose opposition to projects generally stems from environmental and health concerns.

The agitators have met with success in some places, overcoming the economic might of the corporate sector, sometimes with the help of enlightened official functionaries but more often in the face of ruthless repression.

The powerful Reliance group was able to get the Maharashtra government’s support for a proposal to set up a special economic zone spread over 100 square kilometres in the Raigarh district, but had to drop it because of stiff opposition from farmers.

The Union Environment Ministry recently stepped in to halt work on the Vedanta Resources’ $1.7 billion bauxite mine project in Orissa’s Niamgiri hills, considered sacred by the local tribes. Some time ago it had similarly stopped work on the South Korean industrial giant Posco’s $12-billion steel project in Jagatsinghpur district. However, under incessant pressure from the Orissa government, it later gave the company the go-ahead. The Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS), which has been leading the movement against the project, has threatened to intensify its agitation.

People’s power registered its most impressive win in West Bengal where agitating farmers, who received powerful support from Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress, beat back the Tata group, which wanted to set up a car project at Singur, and Indonesia’s Salim group, which planned to establish a petrochemical hub at Nandigram.

Armed cadres of the Communist Party of India-Marxist, which headed the state government, had joined policemen in the crackdown on the farmers. The party had to pay a heavy price for the misadventure. In the recent elections it was voted out after being in office continuously for more than three decades.

The new government has offered to return to farmers the land acquired for the Tata project. Clearly India needs to rethink its policies. It cannot afford to alienate farmers when ensuring food security is at the top of the national agenda. It has to replace the colonial land acquisition law with one that will protect the interests of the farming community and provide for resettlement and rehabilitation of all people dislocated by development projects. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 6, 2011.

Green Warrior on the retreat

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, who had earned the praise of activists by seeking strict enforcement of forest and environment laws, last week gave the go-ahead for two controversial projects, reversing his earlier decisions, apparently under pressure.

On May 2 he allowed Odisha (formerly Orissa) to make available 1,253 hectares of forest land to South Korea’s Pohang Iron and Steel Company (Posco), which is to set up a giant steel plant in the state. Land acquisition for the project had been stopped in August 2009 after he directed that there should be no diversion of forest land in violation of the Forest Rights Act.

On Friday he lifted the stop-work order issued to the Maheshwar Hydel Power Corporation Ltd last year as its promoters had not complied with the conditions of environmental clearance, especially those relating to relief and rehabilitation of persons affected by the project.

The Maheshwar dam is part of the massive Narmada Valley development project which provides for the construction of 30 large and 135 medium-sized dams. The project has been at the centre of a decades-long agitation by the displaced tribal population under the banner of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement).

Jairam Ramesh’s new order refers to many letters Madhya Pradesh’s Bharatiya Janata Party Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan and former Congress Chief Minister Digvijay Singh had written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urging continuance of the project. It also mentions a series of review meetings convened by the Prime Minister’s Office. This indicates that he has issued the order under relentless pressure.

Environmentalists have charged that the centre with clearing the two projects on the strength of false declarations made by the states about relief and rehabilitation.

The Posco plant will deprive about 50,000 farmers of Jagatsinghpur, Keonjhar and Sundargarh areas of their means of livelihood. One of the large dams under the Narmada project, the Maheshwar dam is expected to displace about 35,000 people.

The agitations against the two schemes have attracted international attention. Civil society groups in South Korea are among those who have extended support to the movement against the Posco project. The US power utility Ogden Energy Group, which was to have funded 49 per cent of the equity for the Maheshwar dam, had pulled out in 2000 in view of the widespread local opposition. It was the fourth investor group to withdraw from the project.

Campaign for Survival and Dignity, a civil society group backing Adivasi movements in the country, has pointed out that the new order relating to the Posco project is against the Supreme Court-appointed committee’s recommendation that, instead of making piecemeal allocation, the land required for the steel plant and for mining must be assessed and a decision taken on land diversion after considering the impact on ecology and the rehabilitation and resettlement plan.

India enacted a series of laws to protect its forests and the environment at the instance of prime minister Indira Gandhi immediately after the Stockholm summit of 1972, which she had attended. However, corporate promoters of projects found it easy to bribe their way out of their legal obligations. The state governments often ignored the agonised cries of forest-dwellers and environmental activists. Appeals to the judiciary, too, yielded only partial relief.

Jairam Ramesh, on becoming minister in charge of Environment and Forests in May 2009, initiated a series of steps which gave rise to hopes of strict implementation of laws. While environmentalists began to look upon him as one fighting on their side, the development-at-any-cost school dubbed him a “green fundamentalist.”

Ironically, the Green Warrior has beaten a retreat even as the government claims to be pushing for tight controls. Last week the central government said in future it would not give environmental clearance for mining and industrial projects needing more than 40 hectares of forest land unless the promoters first obtained a certificate from the forest department stating how much forest would be diverted.

India, striving to catch up with the advanced nations, needs to remember that it is working under different conditions. The United States has about 30 per cent area under forest, as against 21 per cent in India. Its population density is only 34 per square kilometre as against India’s 324 per sq km. China, with a population density of 140 per sq km, is trying to raise its forest cover of 18 per cent to 26 per cent by 2050. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, May 9, 2011.