Via patrick@irn etc. Subject: NARMADA-INDIA: Human Rights Team Sl /* Written 4:55 PM Aug 16, 1994 by tgray in igc:env.dams */ /* ---------- "NARMADA-INDIA: Human Rights Team Sl" ---------- */ /* Written 3:37 PM Aug 16, 1994 by newsdesk in igc:ips.english */ /* ---------- "NARMADA-INDIA: Human Rights Team Sl" ---------- */ Copyright 1994 InterPress Service, all rights reserved. Worldwide distribution via the APC networks. *** 13-Aug-94 *** Title: NARMADA-INDIA: Human Rights Team Slams Faulty Resettlement NEW DELHI, Aug 13 (IPS) - Thousands of villagers who were resettled to make way for India's Narmada dam are living in sub-human conditions even as large numbers are denied rehabilitation on flimsy grounds, says a human rights probe team following a recent visit to rehabilitation sites. The team, comprising a law researcher, a supreme court lawyer and a journalist, found that the mainly tribal residents of the hamlets to be submerged by the huge Sardar Sarovar Dam had been forcibly ousted from their homes. ''In no place were the oustees given land in a cultivable state, legal documents that establish the right to specified plots of land and proper infrastructure like drinking water, fodder and houses,'' said a press release issued Friday by the New Delhi-based Human Rights Campaign on Narmada. The human rights team said authorities had used an ''irrational and unjustifiable'' distinction between 'submergence' and 'temporary submergence' to deny resettlement to a large number of villagers who were classified under the latter category. All the three resettlement sites that the team visited in the western state of Gujarat were water-logged due to heavy monsoon rains. The team found people there living in tin sheds ''floating in mud and water''. Some of the children were in need of urgent medical attention but there were no health facilities at the resettlement areas. The team also noted that the 550 families thrown out from the submergence zone hamlet of Vadgam in Gujarat had been scattered over 27 sites, in violation of resettlement conditions stipulating that the displaced communities stay together. The team said work on the dam should be slowed down if rehabilitation cannot keep pace. ''This seems a basic requirement to humanise the process of dam construction,'' it said in its conclusions appended to the press note. The human rights team has asked for a reappraisal of the resettlement schemes before any more Narmada villagers are displaced. Located in Gujarat's Bharuch district, the three billion dollar dam is to be the first of about 3,000 big, medium and small dams planned across the Narmada River, which flows westward across central India. More than 200,000 villagers -- most of them indigenous people -- will be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar alone. Affected are 245 hamlets in the three dam beneficiary states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Critics of the mammoth project say it typifies the model of destructive development India has followed in the past four decades that has displaced millions of poor rural people from their ancestral homes, never to be properly compensated for the loss of their home, farms and forests. The Sardar Sarovar is supposed to have the best resettlement plans of all Indian development schemes so far. But last year, the World Bank cancelled the balance of a loan for the dam because project authorities could not meet bank standards on human and environment rehabilitation. A coalition of anti-dam groups have a petition in the Supreme Court disputing claims of benefits from the huge scheme. The petition has hauled up the central environment and welfare ministries for their failure to ensure proper environmental and human rehabilitation. The partly-built dam which is scheduled for completion in 1998 is submerging scores of hamlets in the valley as it impounds the Narmada, which has been swollen by the unusually heavy monsoon rains this year. (END/IPS/HR/MU/CB/94) Origin: Manila/NARMADA-INDIA/ ---- [c] 1994, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS) All rights reserved May not be reproduced, reprinted or posted to any system or service outside of the APC networks, without specific permission from IPS. This limitation includes distribution via Usenet News, bulletin board systems, mailing lists, print media and broadcast. For more information, send a message to ips-info@igc.apc.org -- Ontario Public Interest Research Group - Carleton, 326 Unicentre, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel by Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1S 5B6, (613) 788-2757. "The more I learn, the less I believe."