Monday, October 12, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: Project-Displaced Camp in India’s Capital
Ann Ninan
- Through this week, a broad pavement on a leafy road in the Indian capital has served as venue for a spirited ‘parliament of people’ from across the country, come to protest a relentless globalisation drive that is stripping them of their land and livelihood.
Thousands of women and men, most of them dirt-poor and marginalised from India’s villages, have sat day after day, their emaciated children in tow, listening to each other’s stories of loss and protest, deprivation and abuse.
Policies of economic globalisation and markets pursued single-mindedly by the government have hit India’s small farmers and unorganised workers the hardest. Everywhere, small groups have mobilised into campaigns to resist the sweeping changes being introduced recklessly in a despairing countryside.
Nearly 200 such groups that were represented at the ‘Jan Sansad’ (people’s parliament) participated Friday in a march that was stopped by police barricades a km short of the tightly-guarded Parliament House but close to the offices of the Planning Commission.
The previous evening, on World Water Day, police had arrested the activist Medha Patkar and 62 others from outside the Planning Commission where they had gone to non-violently protest the government’s continued indifference to the plight of millions of villagers who are due to be displaced by a series of big and small dams have been planned in western India’s Narmada river valley.
On Friday, intensifying the crackdown, the police charged the activists under the Indian Penal Code and remanded them to judicial custody for 15 days.
Patkar, whose NBA or save the Narmada movement stalled the biggest of the dams, the Sardar Sarovar, for nearly two decades, has been fighting a losing battle since 1999 when dam authorities with the sanction of the judiciary and government began raising the height of the dam wall without bothering to resettle or compensate villagers in the submergence area.
“The state is provoking more Nandigrams,” fumed a frustrated activist, referring to the tragic massacre by the police in West Bengal state, Mar. 14, of peasants who were resisting the forcible acquisition of 22,000 acres of land to be handed over to an Indonesian conglomerate for development into a Special Economic Zone (SEZ).
The gruesome killing by the state’s communist party-led government was repeatedly condemned in the ‘people’s parliament’ this week. Slogans remembering the dead as ‘martyrs’ punctuated the proceedings daily, while activists resisting more than 200 proposed SEZs spread over nearly every Indian state shared their experiences.
Twenty-four SEZs have been approved in the western coastal state of Maharashtra alone. According to Ulka Mahajan, 11,000 hectares of land belonging to 42 villages in Raigad district have been earmarked as an SEZ for Reliance, a powerful Indian business group.
“Does this ‘jan sansad’ accept a policy that will take away livelihoods of farmers, salt workers, and fisherfolk?” Mahajan asked the vast assembly, squatting calmly under the shade of giant ‘neem’ trees. “No,” they thundered back, raising clenched fists in defiance of the government.
A publication on SEZs for the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) quotes another activist Ganesh Thakur from Raigad saying that while half the land proposed for the SEZ is irrigated by the Hetavane dam, large tracts belong to the salt pans or are wetlands, essential for the sustainability of the area.
“The government will evict farmers at their peril,” warned Vijay Jawandhia, a farmers’ leader from Nagpur in Maharashtra state. “The government has obligations to poor people, not the corporate sector,” appealed an activist from Tamil Nadu.
SEZs, which offer huge tax breaks and privileged treatment to promoters and exporters at the expense of the public exchequer, are being opposed through campaigns and the judiciary. A group of small farmers have joined hands to file a public interest litigation against another Reliance-owned SEZ proposed near Delhi which will abut on the Sultanpur bird sanctuary, a critical halt for migrating winter birds from Siberia and Europe.
Over the week, the Delhi gathering called ‘Action 2007′ has addressed issues from tribal rights over forests to displacement, development and right to natural resources and right to information. While every issue has been picked threadbare by experts and activists, government ministers who were invited to participate have stayed away.
On Friday afternoon, sovereignty issues concerning the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and international financial institutions were the subject of discussion. Invitations were sent to Indian commerce minister Kamal Nath and his deputy, Jairam Ramesh, finance minister P. Chidambaram, and Mani Shankar Aiyar, also a cabinet colleague.
Not one of them turned up. “The people’s representatives are scared to come before the parliament of the people,” said Shaila Thakur of the National Alliance of People’s Action Committee, among the organisers, from Mumbai.
What are the people’s demands? A random sample reveals an interesting variety. Villagers demanding a permanent bridge over the Kosi river in eastern Bihar state. All India Hand Embroidery and Cooly Traders Union of southern Tamil Nadu state seeking labour rights. Security for traditional fisherfolk from trawlers. A ban on sand mining in river beds.
A right wing, business-friendly Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, which ran the slogan of a ‘Shining India’ but did little for the masses was voted out of office in 1994 in favour of a left-of-centre coalition led by the Congress party which took office vowing to give a ‘human face’ to the processes of globalisation and liberalisation.
But this ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, while chalking up respectable 9.5 percent growth rates, stands accused of presiding over an unprecedented crisis facing the poor in India’s villages and cities.
Print
|
