A great betrayal
By Vidya Bhushan Rawat
The Jal Satyagrah at Omkareshwar in Narmada Valley may look unique but for people over there it is a fight to save their civilization and generations. It cannot be allowed to happen in the name of Development. India must fulfill minimum International Human Rights Standards before it starts any new projects.
Over 51 victims of mindless destruction in the Narmada valley are on a unique protest which they call as 'Jal Satyagraha' against increasing the height of Omkareshwar and Indira Sagar dam, being built on Narmada River in Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh. The Omkareshwar dam project will generate 520 Megawatt Power for Madhya Pradesh and was completed in 2007 by the National Hydro Development Corporation with a height of 189 meters. The villagers in Goghlegaon are asking the government to honor the Supreme Court verdict and not increase the height of the dam which they want to keep up to 193 meter. The fact is that with a total capacity of 196 meter height the government's intentions are clear that it want to threaten people with its dominating power and ignoring their struggle unless pushed to the corner.
Various studies on the dam site at Omkareshwar suggest that the people displaced out of this project should be over 50,000. No rehabilitation has taken place as there is no land available in the region even when Madhya Pradesh government's Industrial policy envisage huge acquisition of land for the growth of Industry. It is shameful that the same government does not make it a point to rehabilitate its own people after their land is seized for the project.
A study submitted to Ministry of Forest and Environment pointed out some glaring violation of environmental laws in the project yet it seems they kept quiet. According to the study, over 5829 hectare of forest would be submerged into the Narmada valley after the dam and out of this, nearly 5350 hectare forms the part of reserve forest. A question must be asked as where are our tiger lobbies and bird watchers when such a huge reserve forest goes to drain. The Madhya Pradesh government and the Narmada Valley Corporation promised 12,752 hectare of reforestation at the cost of over 22 Crore rupees but at a far distance Khargaon district of the state. The reason given is clear that in Khandwa district after the submergence there are no forest lands available to compensate the destruction of such important wild life zone which had about 130 species of birds. The agriculture land which is destroyed to this mindless and reckless development was considered to be very fertile. Question is why the Ministry of Forest and Environment kept quiet on this persistent destruction of not only environmental laws but human lives too.
It has to be understood how shameless has been the Madhya Pradesh government as Narmada's Sardar Sarovar Projects had displaced the maximum number of Madhya Pradesh and so far none has been rehabilitated. Even the Supreme Court has accepted right to rehabilitation of Narmada canal affected. In a fairly substantial and categorical order passed by a bench headed by Chief Justice K.G.Balakrishnan, the court directed the Government of Madhya Pradesh to:
1. Grant the right of land equivalent to the land lost to the canals for all hardship cases.
2. The land should be cultivable and allotted in the command area as far as possible and in the vicinity of the affected village.
3. The 60% and more lost by these hardship cases i.e. severely affected families should be valuated at the present market rate, in spite of the year in which those might have been acquired in the past.
4. If there is no land available in the command area or not acceptable to the canal-affected families, land from the Land Bank of Madhya Pradesh should be offered, but only after making it cultivable.
5. Grievances, if any shall be heard by the Grievance Redressal Authority for Narmada Basin Projects.
Unfortunately, the Madhya Pradesh government did not bother too much about this and never fulfilled the court order. It is a great challenge to the authority of our judicial system as how the power elite rarely implement their order when it affects their power. Narmada's beautiful valley is under destruction and it is being utilized to mint money in the name of development.
Several years back Madhya Pradesh government informed the Jabalpur High Court that there is no land available for the rehabilitation of the people affected from the dam. It is strange that the government can be so callous in declaring that. What does it mean? If the government does not have any land to rehabilitate the people from a project, does it has a right to dislocate or destroy them in the name of development. This is the basic question even for all shades of political leaders as why they want to touch those places and people who they cannot relocate and rehabilitate decently.
World over, there is a precedence which is called FPIC, which is simply called Free Prior Informed Consent. It is a code developed for all developmental project where the project affected people need to be informed about the project, its impact and need their consent. In India, no project has started with people's consent as most of the time the letter from district magistrate or authorities to those whose land falls under the proposed project areas are just 'informed'. Asking consent is not in the gene of a colonial bureaucracy which treats people in utter contempt. They can wait endlessly and take legal recourse to delay the projects but what about the common man and affected people whose generations are destroyed because of our developmental projects.
The most shocking part is that while not a single dislocated person has been rehabilitated in Madhya Pradesh, the chief minister Shiv Raj Singh Chauhan has asked the district collectors to arrange about 15000 hectare land by September 15th for the 'industrial' acquisition purposes. It shows how the Madhya Pradesh government continuously lied to the court that it does not have any land to rehabilitate the Narmada displaced people.
Madhya Pradesh is India's largest state with huge land mass. It is the state where the Sangh Parivar is also implementing its hate agenda and imposing religiosity on people. The state has developed special programme for the pilgrimage to religious places for elderly people. It's science minister abuses scientists and those who have been speaking against the dams on Ganga river for all religious purposes in Uttarakhand, have conspicuously quite on the Omkareshwar and Indira Sagar projects on Narmada. Strange that Uma Bharati and other Hindutva protagonists have kept quiet on the entire issue when people are dying for 'development' of India.
It is 17th day of the Jal Satyagrah. The conditions prevailing there are tense though the protesters have truly maintained their calm yet the Madhya Pradesh government dispatched its minister Mr Kailash Vijayavergia to negotiate with the protesters. It also shows as why the government sent a minister there whose credibility is almost nothing and who is known mascot of Hindutva. And that happened when Vijayavergia rather than promising to take any concrete action, asked the protesters to give up. Some of the political people are calling it 'blackmail' but it is shameful how disgusting it has become to fight for our rights in India. Those who know that state is ready to get you tired unless you lose your health and mental peace so that tomorrow such protests do not emerge. But all these tactics will not work as the oppression and destruction to the livelihood and life of the people will only add fuel to fire. States can think manipulating the situation as they have nothing to lose. They know that protesters are ready to die and if we have not learnt from protest movement world over that sentiment for land, water and natural resources is immense.
The fact is the authorities force initial compensation on people, promise them employment and their rehabilitation elsewhere. Everything is done in India on papers and without knowledge of the people. So, in these places also, an initial amount of Rs 30,000 might have gone to some villagers but can anyone reconstruct his life in this paltry sum. Can we allow such thing to happen? This is clear robbery of people's resources.
It is also time for our courts, international laws to understand that poor people do not do things according to 'law'. It is only the corrupt officials who are expert in finishing their task according to 'law' of the land. How will anybody agree to destroy his/her own habitat without getting rehabilitated? Will Shiv Raj Singh Chauhan agree to lose all his properties without given compensation for the same? In the name of consent from the people and information given to the people, the authorities use fictitious newspapers, weeklies and even dailies which are not circulated widely and just keep the clippings for their records in the name of dissemination of the information to public to justify their act of gross violation of human rights of the people. The authorities as well as legalities some time do their work on strict technicalities of the issue which only the officials know and therefore they succeed in getting the favorable verdicts from the courts most of the time as poor people who lose their everything do not have anything to prove, not even their existence. In a country where everything is based on the paper issued by the government or authorities, how do we expect that poor people who do not have a hut to live and that too is submerged in water, to keep track record of government documents with them. It is here, we find, the authorities play game. Your control over your land is only possible if you have papers in your hand. And this technicality has resulted in killing many of the people on the papers, who are still alive, because the local authorities in connivance with feudal people of the area do annex the land of the person who is dead on papers.
It is shocking that the national media did not give this much priority because there was not an Anna sitting here. In the Narmada Valley people have been using this for the past so many years but it does not have a melodrama of Anna's movement where you have TV cameras and urban corrupted people fighting against corruption. Here, it is the poor farmers, adivasis and Dalits, who will lose everything once the water level reach above 190 meters at the Onkareshwar and at Indira Sagar, the height will be about 250 meters. Already huge track of land is destroyed and now the rest too is being sacrificed for the 'growth' of the state.
India's developmental module has displaced over 60-65 million people, and mind you, this is a rough estimate by the UN Working Group on Human Rights on India, since independence and out of this, 40% victim of this destruction are tribal who have not been rehabilitated.
The other 40% victims are Dalits and other farming communities living on the periphery. It clearly means that we have slaughtered people, their culture and lives on the altar of our nationhood and so called growth. This module of development need to question and challenged. We know well that we all need development but the Aadivasis, Dalits and farmers too need it and our state cannot kill them or annihilate their whole existence for the growth of a tiny minority of people who control the levers of our power as well as economy of the country.
The Jal Satyagrah is a wakeup call that people are not in a position to fight with the mighty power of the government, rather they will self-sacrifice their lives for the cause of their land so that their children can have a safe future in this country.
Vidya Bhushan Rawat
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