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dam-l LS: 2 IPS Narmada stories
Two Inter-Press Service stories from Website: http://www.ips.org/
DEVELOPMENT-INDIA:Families Cling To Villages Doomed By Narmada Dam
By Ann Ninan
JALSINDHI, India, Jul 19 (IPS) - A tight group of villagers around two
visiting officials bursts into laughter when the officials say Medha
Patkar, leader of a huge movement against a dam project in central India,
is a resident of this hamlet.
''You have no idea who all live in this village. How can you even begin
to resettle or compensate us?'' they mocked the government officials.
Just weeks before a controversial dam on the Narmada River drowns
Jalsindhi and 59 other tribal villages, the authorities have still to draw
up a list of affected people though it should have resettled them six
months before submergence.
Gulabiya, whose family has lived for generations in this village was the
only person in Jalsindhi to receive a notice for evacuation from the Madhya
Pradesh government earlier this month.
''You are informed that you should vacate your house ... You are
expected to inform all those whose houses are below yours that they will
also be affected'' by the rising Narmada waters, the letter in Hindi
stated.
Should you want help you should get in touch with the relief camp in
neighbouring Chakalda Village, the letter adds.
Jalsindhi, 74-km from the Sardar Sarovar Dam, will be the first Madhya
Pradesh village to submerge when the reservoir rises to 88 metres at the
dam wall.
''What assistance can they provide? Whether we live or die has never
been the concern of the government,'' say agitated villagers. Officials
argue the village, a nerve-centre for the anti-dam Narmada Bachao Andolan
(NBA), has never cooperated.
Early on in the struggle, some families in Jalsindhi did take the
compensation offered and move out. But all those who remain are active
members of the NBA, and have travelled with Patkar to Delhi, Bombay and
elsewhere, to urge officials to stop the dam.
Since June 20, the resistance movement has been centred in Jalsindhi and
Domkhedi, across the river from here. Villagers from all the dam affected
villages and others have been taking it in turns to sit on 'satyagraha', a
Gandhian-passive resistance.
Earlier this month, the agitation was intensified with a week- long
hunger strike by nine people, including Patkar who is camped in Domkhedi
Village, in Maharashtra state that ended July 11 with a public meeting
where men, women and children gathered there renewed a pledge to ''drown,
not move'' from their villages.
''The 'samarpit dal' (dedicated squad) is determined to face the
swirling backwaters of the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) as the water level
in Narmada increased sharply on Sunday (July 18) due to increasing rains,''
an NBA statement from Baroda says.
The NBA has challenged the project in India's Supreme Court.
The court stayed construction in May 1994 but chose to vacate it last
February with an order for extending the height of the dam by five metres,
with an additional three metres as humps.
Those who will be uprooted - an estimated half a million people in three
Indian states - by the dam and the 75,000-km network of irrigation canals
in Gujarat state can never be adequately compensated, is the NBA's
contention.
Mokhdi Village, in Gujarat state, at the foot of the dam, is a tribal
hamlet that did not oppose resettlement. But 10 years after the village was
relocated on paper, many have returned from their new homes saying they
were not satisfied, while some never went away.
''Here we had everything we ever wanted,'' a villager says gazing around
him at the gently, rolling hills around Mokhdi, most of which village has
vanished under the reservoir. ''Those who have returned tell us there is no
land like this.''
He however adds that ''if the government gives us land that we are
satisfied with, we will move''. Time has run out for Mokhdi.
Not one of the huts or young teak trees on the green and gentle hill-sides
will survive the monsoon this year.
What will happen to these people? Gujarat government officials are quick
to say the state has ''substantially complied'' with the resettlement plans
as confirmed by a one-man inquiry committee of retired judge, P.D. Desai.
Vinod Babbar, commissioner for rehabilitation of the Narmada Control
Authority, who says no Indian project has done as much, was unable to talk
on record since the issue of rehabilitation is up before the Supreme Court
and ''sub judice''.
But he shared the November 1998 report of the Rehabilitation
Committee, submitted to the court, which states the ''majority of
resettlement villages are economically better off than their original
villages and socio-culturally well placed and integrated.''
''The grievances are few compared to the massive tasks of R&R
(resettlement and rehabilitation) taken up by GOG (government of
Gujarat),'' it concludes.
Why then are families clinging to the doomed village of Mokhdi, and 24
families uprooted from Vadgam Village, and resettled in Malu in 1989, now
camped in Vasana, and refusing to go back to their resettlement site?
In transit for over a year on a treeless patch of no-man's land in
Vasana, in scorching, tin-sheds they have brought with them from Malu, they
are firm about trekking back to their submerged village, a distance of 90
km, after the monsoon.
''They resettled us in wasteland ... we're farmers, and know good land
from bad,'' Kamjibhai Dhanabhai Tadwi says with great dignity. Neither
could the villagers get used to the hostility of their neighbours in Malu.
''We complained every time that officials came ... When nothing
happened, we packed up and left.''
The villagers have been surviving by selling livestock, and even the
teak beams of their homes which they dismantled and carted away in trucks
when they left Vadgam on the Narmada River.
The adults - women and men - spend the day cooped up in their homes;
their children sometimes find daily work on neighbouring farms for an
exploitative 10 rupees (one fourth of a US dollar).
''We don't have food, we don't have water. We haven't known any sort of
happiness, just sorrow since we left our village,'' one villager said.
On paper, the Sardar Sarovar Project has ambitious R&R plans. Each
uprooted family with deeds to their land can claim up to five acres of
irrigated land. The Gujarat government has offered to resettle Madhya
Pradesh tribals in its state.
It does not however work this way since most tribal families do not have
legal proof of ownership of all the land they cultivate, and are
shortchanged in the process of land swap.
In the few cases where irrigated land has been given, the new tribal
owners have been left to deal with resentful locals from whom it was
forcibly taken. Uprootment has only spelt problems for the Narmada Valley
tribals.
Tribal villages along the river are self-sufficient and free, buying
only salt, clothes and iron farm implements from outside.
Everything they eat grows on the land, and the forests yields baskets,
cots, ploughs and hoes.
But the SSP dam which is only one of the 30 large and 3,000 small dams
planned on the Narmada River, has broken up and scattered families in the
process of rehabilitation. Vadgam's 750 families have been resettled in 33
places.
Jalsindhi's villagers have refused to move. In 1994 in an open letter to
the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, they wrote, ''We were born from the
belly of the Narmada, and we are not afraid to die in her lap ... We will
drown but we will not move.'' Jalsindhi will not be seeing another monsoon.
(END)
----------------------------------------------------
DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: Day of Reckoning Nears For Narmada Valley Tribals
By Ann Ninan
DOMKHEDI, India, Jul 8 (IPS) - For centuries tribal farmers in the Narmada
Valley have sown maize and pulses in the rich alluvial soil, but this year
they don't know if they will be able to reap the plentiful harvest along
the river in central India.
Hamlets like Domkhedi and Jalsindhi are likely to submerge in two months
when the rain-swollen Narmada River will rise to flow over the 88-metre
high wall of the controversial multi-purpose Sardar Sarovar Dam (SSP), 70
km downstream from here.
Now, though the monsoon has not arrived in its full fury over central
India, the turgid, brown river is swollen tight, stretched from bank to
bank at Jalsindhi, a nerve-centre of an anti-dam resistance movement.
Its tribal families like others in the submergence zone that is slated
to be a mammoth 214-km long reservoir for the dam, remain in their mud and
thatch homes, the land their forefathers tilled and the forests higher up
on the rolling hill sides.
''We'll drown, we won't move'' is a slogan that rings in these
dam-affected hamlets of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra states where
villagers are firmly behind the non-violent agitation led by the Narmada
Bachao Andolan (NBA - save the Narmada movement).
Last week, many people from the low hilly areas and the prosperous
flat-land of the Nimad region, in Madhya Pradesh, walked over the hills and
came by boat to remote Domkhedi where a 'satyagraha' or passive resistance
movement began on June 20.
On July 4, after a day-long, open-air meeting where everyone who wanted
to speak got a chance to, nine people including Medha Patkar, who received
the Right Livelihood Award or the Alternate Nobel prize on behalf of the
NBA in 1991, began a 7-day fast.
Patkar, who is variously called 'deedi' or 'jeeji', sister in many
Indian languages, has also begun a 'maun vrat' or period of silence during
the fast, which would end with another meeting on July 12 when she said an
important decision on the future of the 14-year people's movement would be
announced.
It is time to ''think'', she told a deeply attentive audience of young
and old, men, women and children, also from far-flung parts of the country
including Bengal and Kerala states who had converged on this remote village
to express their solidarity.
''We have to think ... how to keep alive our demand for right to life
... For 14 years we have protested, appealed to people, asked people's
help. Now we will stay here not go to Bombay or Delhi. We have to decide,''
she said in an emotional speech.
Earlier she told IPS that the struggle against the 475-million dollar
SSP dam had reached a ''decisive point''. ''There are landmarks in every
movement. We say this is a decisive point. This a a very critical moment.''
For generations the tribals have lived here, not on the mercy of the
government, but because of the jungle, river and land, she said.
Some 12,000 tribal persons will be affected this year by the February
1999 decision of India's Supreme Court to raise the dam height by 8 metres
after a stay in 1994 had frozen work on the 163-metre dam, that will be the
second largest in the world.
While the tribal village of Jalsindhi will go down as the first in
Madhya Pradesh that will submerge, Domkhedi, on the river Khad a tributary
of the Narmada, is in Maharashtra state.
Both villages can be reached only by motor boats that the NBA have
bought cheaply from the Alang ship-breaking yard with the Booker prize
money, worth about 34,000 dollars, that top novelist Arundhati Roy donated
to the NBA earlier this year.
Before construction on the dam began, the Narmada, the only major Indian
river that flows east to west, was easily forded even during the monsoons
in the traditional wooden boats that are dug out of a single tree trunk.
Now at Jalsindhi, the river flows backwards because of the force of the
impact on the dam wall. Villagers say the thick silt cover deposits on the
banks of the river traps and kills their cattle that goes to drink in the
river.
On July 7, the quick-sand like silt claimed the first human life. A
seven year old girl, Lata Vasave, from Domkhedi Village who had gone to
fetch water got caught in the silt, and drowned.
''Lata is a victim of the unmindful, profit-driven system which pushed
the dam ahead. The dam has already made the life of the people in the
valley miserable,'' a statement issued by Patkar and two others from
Domkhedi says.
To the tribals, their villages before the reservoir started
filling when the sluice gates shut in 1994, were a self- sufficient world.
''We never were in want of anything from outside. The only thing we
needed to buy was salt. And in turn we sold toovar (pulse), makkai (maize)
or a goat or chicken when we were in sudden need of money,'' says the
eloquent Bava Mahalia of Jalsindhi.
The river, he adds poetically was a ''sparkling blue. Our cattle drank
from it, our children played in it and we caught fish from its waters.''
Mahalia who swears he will stay in his hut when the water rises asks,
''How can we live without our land. This jungle, land and river are ours,
no one can take it away from us.'' Is anyone listening? (END)