ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Last Stand Of Tribals Displaced By Narmada Dam

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Dev Raj

NEW DELHI, Jun 8 1999 (IPS) - As the monsoon sets in over India, 25,000 tribal families displaced by a massive dam brace for a deluge that will drown them on their ancestral lands along the banks of the Narmada river.

Led by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) or Save the Narmada Movement, the tribals are making their last stand supported by thousands of people taking part in a Gandhian-style ‘satyagraha’ or passive resistance at the dam site.

But with the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam recently raised by eight metres by India’s Supreme Court, widening the dam reservoir, the three state governments involved apparently plan to stay passive and let the flood waters take care of the tribals and their supporters.

Says NBA leader Sripad Dharmadhikari, “The danger of submergence is very very real … there is no question at all but many houses and farms will be submerged.”

In all, the mega Naramada Valley Project will lead to the displacement of 33,000 families in central Madhya Pradesh and 3,100 and 4,600 families respectively in the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Through May, officials of the Maharashtra government have been trying to persuade villagers to leave without being able to show them alternate sites.

The Gujarat government claims that displaced people within the state have already been resettled ignoring the fact that hundreds of families have returned to their villages because of the unsuitability of resettlement sites.

As for Madhya Pradesh, where the bulk of the affected people are, the state government has not even troubled itself to ask the affected people to leave their villages for their own safety.

Dharmadhikari said the actual number of people who are going to be affected by the dam-induced flooding would depend upon the amount of rainfall in the current monsoons and the flood levels in the Narmada river.

“The tribals will drown because the three governments failed to provide them alternate lands for resettlement before allowing fresh construction since February which has raised the height of the dam to 88 metres,” he said.

Until February the tribals had put their faith in a four-year- old Supreme Court stay order which stopped work on increasing the height of the dam and the order of a special tribunal forbidding construction without satisfactory resettlement.

But the Supreme Court unexpectedly vacated the stay and contractors scrambled to raise the height of the dam before the arrival of the monsoons when construction is impossible. The orders of the tribunal were simply ignored.

Estimates by the NBA have shown that raising the dam by even five metres would have submerged 33 villages in the Nandurbar district of western Maharashtra state and 25 more villages in the Jhabua, Dhar and Badawani districts of Madhya Pradesh.

“On the other hand, the objectives of irrigation and electricity generation cannot be achieved until the dam is raised to 110 metres,” Dharmadhikari said.

Chances for tribals appear bleak given that since India’s Independence in 1947, dams and other development projects have displaced an estimated 50 million people mostly tribals with the bulk of them yet to be resettled.

The only hope left now is possible central government intervention as a result of growing support for the tribal cause by a large and influential group of prominent citizens and intellectuals.

In April these campaigners who included the Booker-prize winning author Arundhati Roy, the astronomer J.V. Narlikar, the musician Bhimsen Joshi and the photographer Raghu Rai petitioned Indian President Kocheril Raman Narayanan to intervene.

“We feel that this coming tragedy will be a body blow to the aspirations and status of the tribal population in democratic India coming so soon after the recent vicious attacks on tribal rights to religious and cultural self-determination,” the petitioners said.

The petitioners pointed out the clear violation of the directions of the special tribunal which said that “in no event” can submergence precede rehabilitation and offer of alternative lands a full year in advance.

According to the petition, the construction violated the “fundamental and inalienable right to life, livelihood and dignity of the tribal people guaranteed to them by the Indian Constitution.”

So far, the petition has produced little response. Neither has an essay on the Narmada and the havoc created by dams in post- independent India by Arundhati Roy published as cover stories by two prominent magazines, ‘Outlook,’ and ‘Frontline,’ in May.

Roy pointed out in her essay how the tribals and the NBA had forced the World Bank which sanctioned a 450 million loan for the Sardar Sarovar project in 1985 to pull out of it by 1993 because of unsatisfactory resettlement.

“The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. It’s a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world,” Roy wrote.

She graphically described the resettlement sites where “people have been dumped in rows of corrugated tin sheds which are furnaces in summer and fridges in winter.”

Some of the sites, she wrote, are on dry river beds which turn into fast flowing drifts during the monsoons. “When the waters recede they leave ruin. Malaria, diarrhoea, sick cattle stranded in the slush.”

Many of the resettled are people who have lived all their lives deep in the forest with virtually no contact with money and the modern world.

“Suddenly they find themselves left with the option of starving to death or walking several kilometers to the nearest town, sitting in the marketplace (both men and women) offering themselves as wage labour, like goods for sale,” Roy wrote.