Both agreements will lead to the pauperization and dispossession of people in the state. The NHPC boasts that the Narmada Sagar will eventually take care of the “power needs” of the state. It’s not a claim that stands up to scrutiny. The installed capacity of the Narmada Sagar dam is 1,000 megawatts (MW). Which means what it sounds like: that the power-generating machinery that has been installed is capable of producing 1,000 MW of electricity. What is produced—actual firm power—depends on actually available water flows. (A Ferrari may be able to do 300 km in an hour. But what would it do without fuel?)
The Detailed Project Report puts the actual firm power at 212 MW, coming down to 147 MW when the irrigation canals become operational. According to the NHCP’s own publicity, the cost of power at the bus bar (factory gate) is Rs 4.59 (nine cents) per unit. Which means at consumer point, it will cost about Rs 9 (eighteen cents). Who can afford that? It’s even more expensive than Enron’s electricity in Dabhol!
When (if) the project is fully built, the NHPC says it will generate an average of 1,950 million units of power. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that figure. Madhya Pradesh currently loses 44.2 percent of its electricity, 12,000 million units (the equivalent of six Narmada Sagar Projects) a year in transmission and distribution (T&D) losses. If the Madhya Pradesh government could work toward saving even half its current T&D losses, it could generate power equal to three Narmada Sagar projects, at a third of the cost, with none of the social and ecological devastation.
But instead, once again we have a Big Dam with questionable benefits and unquestionable, unviable, cruel costs. After the MOU for the Narmada Sagar was signed, the NHPC set to work with its customary callousness. The dam wall began to go up at an alarming pace. At a press conference on March 9, 2004 (after the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] won the assembly elections and Uma Bharati became Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh), Yogendra Prasad, chairman and managing director of the NHPC, boasted that the project was eight to ten months ahead of schedule. He said that because of better management the costs of the project would be substantially lower. Asked to comment on the objections being raised by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) about rehabilitation, he said the objections were irrelevant. “Better management,” it now turns out, is a euphemism for cheating thousands of poor people.
Yogendra Prasad, Digvijay Singh, and Uma Bharati are criminally culpable; in any society in which the powerful are accountable, they would find themselves in jail. They have willfully violated the terms of their own MOU, which legally binds them to comply with the principles of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award (NWDTA). The award specifies that in no event can submergence precede rehabilitation. (Which is about as self-evident as saying child abuse is a crime.) They have violated the government of Madhya Pradesh’s Rehabilitation Policy. They have violated the conditions of environmental and forest clearance. They have violated the terms of several international covenants that India has signed: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil Economic and Political Rights, and the International Labour Organization Convention. The Supreme Court says that any international treaty signed by India becomes part of our domestic and municipal law. Not a single family has been resettled according to the NWDTA or the Madhya Pradesh Rehabilitation policy. There is no excuse, no mitigating argument for the horror they have unleashed.
The road from Khandwa to Harsud is a toll road. A smooth, new private highway, littered with the carcasses of trucks, motorcycles, and cars whose speeding drivers were clearly unused to such luxury. On the outskirts of Harsud you pass row upon row of cruel, corrugated tin sheds. Tin roofs, tin walls, tin doors, tin windows. As blindingly bright on the outside as they are dark inside. A sign says, “Baad Raahat Kendra” (Flood Relief Center). It’s largely empty except for the bulldozers, jeeps, and the government officers and police who stroll around unhurried, full of the indolent arrogance that comes with power. The Flood Relief Center has been built on acquired land marked for submergence where only a few weeks ago the government college stood. If Bargi was possible, anything’s possible.
And then, under the lowering, thundery sky, Harsud … like a scene out of a Marquez novel.
The first to greet us was an old buffalo, blind, green-eyed with cataract. Even before we entered the town we heard the announcement repeated over and over again on loudspeakers attached to a roving matador van. Please tether your cattle and livestock. Please do not allow them to roam free. The government will make arrangements to transport them. (Where to?) People with nowhere to go are leaving. They have loosed their livestock onto Harsud’s ruined streets. And the government doesn’t want drowning cattle on its hands. Behind the blind buffalo, silhouetted against the sky, the bare bones of a broken town.
A town turned inside out, its privacy ravaged, its innards exposed. Personal belongings, beds, cupboards, clothes, photographs, pots and pans lie on the street. In several houses, caged parakeets hang from broken beams. An infant swaddled in a sari crib sways gently, fast asleep in a doorway leading from nowhere to nowhere in a free-standing wall. Live electric cables hang down like dangerous aerial roots. The insides of houses lie rudely exposed. It’s strange to see how a bleached, colorless town on the outside was vibrant on the inside, the walls every shade of turquoise, emerald, lavender, fuchsia. Perched on the concrete frames of wrecked buildings, men, like flightless birds, are hammering, sawing, smoking, talking. If you didn’t know what was happening, you could be forgiven for thinking that Harsud was being built, not broken. That it had been hit by an earthquake and its citizens were rebuilding it. But then, you notice that the trees are all still standing. And outside every house you see order in the chaos. The doorframes stacked together. Iron grills in a separate pile. Tin sheets in another. Broken bricks still flecked with colored plaster piled up in a heap. Tin boards, shop signs, leaning against lampposts. Ambika Jewelers, Lovely Beauty Parlor, Shantiniketan Dharamshala, Blood and Urine Tested Here.
On more than one house there are insanely optimistic signs: This house is for sale. Every house, every tree has a code number on it. Only the people are uncoded. The local cartoonist is exhibiting his work on a pile of stones. Every cartoon is about how the government cheated and deceived people. A group of spectators discuss the details of various ongoing rackets in town, from tenders for the tin sheets for the tin sheds, to the megaphones on the matador, to the bribes being demanded from parents for School Transfer Certificates to a nonexistent school in a nonexistent rehabilitation site. Parents are distraught and children are delighted because their school building has been torn down. Many children will lose a whole school year. The poorer ones will drop out.
The people of Harsud are razing their town to the ground. Themselves. The very young and the very old sit on heaps of broken brick. The able-bodied are frenetically busy. They’re tearing apart their homes, their lives, their past, their stories. They’re carting the debris away in trucks and tractors and bullock carts.
Harsud is hectic. Like a frontier town during the Gold Rush. The demise of a town is lucrative business.
People have arrived from nearby towns. Trucks, tractors, dealers in scrap-iron, timber, and old plastic throng the streets, beating down prices, driving hard bargains, mercilessly exploiting distress sales. Migrant workers camp in makeshift hovels on the edge of town. They are the poorest of the poor. They have come from Jhabua, and the villages around Omkareshwar, displaced by the other big dams on the Narmada, the Sardar Sarovar and the Omkareshwar. The better off in Harsud hire them as labor. A severely malnutritioned demolition squad.
And so the circle of relentless impoverishment closes in upon itself. In the midst of the rubble, life goes on. Private things are now public. People are cooking, bathing, chatting (and yes, crying) in their wall-less homes. Iridescent orange jalebis and gritty pakoras are being deep fried in stoves surrounded by mounds of debris. The barber has a broken mirror on a broken wall. (Perhaps the man he’s shaving has a broken heart
.) The man who is demolishing the mosque is trying to save the colored glass. Two men are trying to remove the Shiva lingam from a small shrine without chipping it. There is no method to the demolition. No safety precautions. Just a mad hammering. A house collapses on four laborers. When they are extricated one of them is unconscious and has a steel rod sticking into his temple. But they’re only Adivasis. They don’t matter. The show must go on.
There is an eerie, brittle numbness to the bustle. It masks the government’s ruthlessness and people’s despair. Everyone knows that nearby, in the Kali Machak tributary, the water has risen. The bridge on the road to Balkeshwar is under water. There are no proper estimates of how many villages will be submerged in the Narmada Sagar Reservoir, when (if) the monsoon comes to the Narmada Valley. The Narmada Control Authority website uses figures from the 1981 Census.
In newspaper reports government officials estimate it will submerge more than one hundred villages and Harsud town. Most estimates suggest that this year 30,000 families will be uprooted from their homes; 5,600 of these families (22,000 people) are from Harsud. (Remember, these are 1981 figures.) When the reservoir of the first dam on the Narmada—the Bargi dam—was filled in 1988, it submerged three times more land than government engineers said it would. One hundred and one villages were slated for submergence, but in the monsoon of 1988, when the sluice gates were closed and the reservoir was filled, 162 villages (including some of the government’s own resettlement sites) were submerged.
There was no rehabilitation. Tens of thousands of people slid into destitution and abject poverty. Today, fourteen years later, irrigation canals have still not been built. So the Bargi Dam irrigates less land than it submerged and only 6 percent of the land that its planners claimed it would irrigate. All indicators suggest that the Narmada Sagar could be an even bigger disaster. Farmers who usually pray for rain, now trapped between drought and drowning, have grown to dread the monsoon.
Oddly enough, after the 1989 rally, when the anti-dam movement was at its peak, the town of Harsud never became a major site of struggle. The people chose the option of conventional, mainstream politics, and divided themselves acrimoniously between the Congress and the BJP. Like most people, they believed that dams were not intrinsically bad, provided displaced people were resettled. So they didn’t oppose the dam, hoping their political mentors would see that they received just compensation. Villages in the submergence zone did try to organize resistance, but they were brutally and easily suppressed.
Time and again they appealed to the NBA (located further downstream, fighting against the Sardar Sarovar and Maheshwar Dams) for help. The NBA, absurdly overstretched and under-resourced, did make sporadic interventions but was not able to expand its zone of influence to the Narmada Sagar. In the absence of any organized resistance, and bolstered by the Supreme Court’s hostile judgments on the Sardar Sarovar and Tehri Dams, the Madhya Pradesh government and its partner in crime, the NHPC, have rampaged through the region with a callousness that would shock even a seasoned cynic. The lie of rehabilitation has been punctured once and for all. Planners who peddle it do so for the most cruel, opportunistic reasons. It gives them cover. It sounds so reasonable.
In the absence of an organized resistance movement, the media in Madhya Pradesh has done a magnificent job. Local journalists have doggedly exposed the outrage for what it is. Editors have given the story the space it deserves. Sahara Samay has its OB Van parked in Harsud. Newspapers and television channels carry horror stories every day, a normally anaesthetized, unblinking public has been roused to anger.
Every day groups of people arrive to see for themselves what is happening and to express their solidarity.
The state government and the NHPC remain unmoved. Perhaps a decision has been taken to exacerbate the tragedy and wait out the storm once and for all. Perhaps they’re gambling on the fickleness of public memory and the media’s need for a crisis turnover. But a crime of this proportion is not going to be forgotten so easily. If it goes unpunished, it cannot but damage India’s image as a benign destination for international finance: thousands of people, evicted from their homes with nowhere to go. And it’s not war. It’s policy.
Can it really be that twenty-two thousand people have nowhere to go? Ministers and government officials assure the press that a whole new township—New Harsud—has been built near Chhanera, 12 kilometers away. On July 12, in his budget presentation, Madhya Pradesh finance minister Shri Raghavji announced: “Rehabilitation of Harsud town which was pending for years has been completed in six months.”
Lies.
New Harsud is nothing but mile upon mile of stony, barren land in the middle of nowhere. A few hundred of the poorest families of Harsud have moved there and live under tarpaulin and tin sheets. (The rest have placed themselves at the mercy of relatives in nearby towns or are using up their meager compensation on rented accommodation. In and around Chhanera, rents have skyrocketed.)
In New Harsud there’s no water, no sewage system, no shelter, no school, no hospital. Plots have been marked out like cells in a prison, with mud roads that crisscross at right angles. They get water from a tanker. Sometimes they don’t. There are no toilets and there is not a tree or a bush in sight for them to piss or shit behind. When the wind rises it takes the tin sheets with it. When it rains, the scorpions come out of the wet earth.
Most important of all, there’s no work in New Harsud. No means of earning a livelihood. People can’t leave their possessions in the open and go off in search of work. So the little money they have been paid, dwindles. Cash compensation is only given to the Head of the Family, i.e., to men. What a travesty for the thousands of women who are hit hardest by the violence of displacement.
In Chhanera the booze shops are doing brisk business. When media attention trails away so will the water tankers. People will be left in a stony desert with no option but to flee.
Again.
And this is what is being done to people from a town.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to imagine what is happening to the villages. In circumstances such as these, how does a government get people to not just move, but to physically tear apart their own lives themselves? In Harsud so far, there has been no bulldozing, no police firing, no coercion. Only cold, brilliant strategy. The people of Harsud have known for years that their town lay in the submergence zone of the Narmada Sagar Dam. Like all “oustees” of all dams, they were promised compensation and rehabilitation. There was no sign of either. And now, while people’s lives are being devastated, Uma Bharati and Digvijay Singh accuse each other of criminal negligence.
Let’s look at some basic facts. In September 2003, just before the assembly elections, the Digvijay Singh government granted the NHPC permission to raise the dam wall to 245 meters. At ten o’clock in the morning on November 18, 2003, the sluice gates were closed and water began to be impounded in the reservoir. Downstream the river dried up, fish died, and for days the riverbed was exposed.
By mid-December, when Uma Bharati took over as the new cabinet minister for drinking water and sanitation, the height of the dam was already 238 meters. Eager to partake of some of the “credit” for the Narmada Sagar without bothering to check on how rehabilitation was progressing, she allowed the dam height to be increased from 238 to 245 meters. In January 2004 she congratulated the NHPC for its “achievements.” In April 2004, the NHPC began to install the radial crest gates, which will take the dam to its full height of 262 meters. Four of the twenty gates are in place.
The NHPC has announced that the project will be completed by December 2004. The responsibility of surveying the submergence zone for the purposes of compensation and rehabilitation had been transferred to the NHPC. The responsibility for actual Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation still rests with the government. The NHPC holds 51 percent of the equity in the project. Between the two “interested parties,” they’re in a hurry to get the job done and keep the costs down. The first, most deadly
sleight of hand involves the definition of who counts as Project Affected. The absolute poorest in the villages are sloughed off at this stage.
Essentially, those who are landless—fisher people, boat people, sand quarriers, daily wage workers, and those who are considered “encroachers”—do not qualify as project affected and are done away with. In some cases, whole villages have fallen prey to this process. For example, the 1982 Detailed Project Report says that 255 villages will be submerged by the reservoir. Somewhere along the way six of those villages were taken off the list. The Narmada Control Authority now says that only 211 villages will be eligible for compensation; 38 villages have been designated as “encroachers” and are not eligible for compensation.
The next lethal blow is when rates of compensation are fixed. The fortunate people who actually qualify as Project Affected asked, quite reasonably, to be compensated for their land according to the prevailing land prices in the villages in the command area of the dam. They received almost exactly half of that: Rs 40,000 ($600) for unirrigated land, Rs 60,000 ($900) for irrigated land. The market price for irrigated land is over Rs 100,000 ($1,500).
As a result, farmers who had ten acres of land will barely manage five. Small farmers with a couple of acres become landless laborers. Rich become poor. Poor become destitute. It’s called Better Management. And it gets worse. Patwaris and revenue inspectors descended on Harsud and the “notified” villages like a terminator virus. They held thousands of people’s futures in their grasping fists. Every single person we spoke to, every farmer, every laborer, every villager, every citizen of Harsud, rich and poor, man and woman, told the same story. The technique they described is as diabolical as it is simple. Basically the patwaris and revenue inspectors undervalued everything. Irrigated land was entered as unirrigated. Pucca houses were shown as kuccha. A five-acre farm became four acres.
And so on.
My Seditious Heart Page 34