ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Dam Turns into Election Issue

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Suman Chakrabarty

AGARTALA, India, Feb 13 2003 (IPS) - The decommissioning of north-eastern Tripura’s only hydroelectric power project, the Dambur Dam, has become a major election issue in this insurgency-affected and communist-ruled Indian state.

The state’s leading tribal party, the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura (INPT), has made the scrapping of the dam its main plank and is finding support from mainstream parties like Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules India’s central government.

”Tripura has enough natural gas reserves which can be used to generate power,” argues Jahar Saha, a senior Congress leader.

"So if the dam goes and the entire tribal landless population , the main recruiting base for the insurgent groups, can be gainfully resettled , it will help bring down the ethnic unrest and pave the way for stable peace in the troubled state," he says.

Surrounded on three sides by Bangladesh, this state of 10,039 square kilometres has a history of violent conflict between ethnic Bengali settlers and indigenous people. This has given rise to one of the many insurgencies in India’s north-east.

At present, three-quarters of the state’s three million population are Bengali-speaking settlers whose families mostly arrived in the state after the partition of India in 1947.

In a recent statement, Indian minister for north-eastern states Tapan Sikdar said: "If the Dambur dam is decommissioned, it will free up to 46.34 sq km of prime agrarian zone that has been under water for thirty years now."

"The entire tribal landless population of the state can be gainfully resettled there, if the dam is decommissioned," Sikdar told IPS.

A 30-metre high gravity dam was constructed across the river Gumti about 3.5 km upstream of Tirthamukh in south Tripura district for generating 8.60 megawatts of power from an installed capacity of 10 megawatts.

The dam submerged a valley area of 46.34 sq km, which was one of the most fertile valley regions in an otherwise hilly state, where arable flatlands suitable for wet rice agriculture makes up a mere 28 percent of its total land area.

Official records suggest 2,558 tribal families were ousted from the Gumti project area, but these were families who could produce land deeds and were officially owners of the land they possessed.

By unofficial estimates, between 8,000 to 10,000 families or about 60,000 to 70,000 tribespeople were displaced by the project. In the tribal societies of the north-east, ownership of land is rarely personal and the system of recording land deeds against individual names is a recent phenomenon.

The outlawed National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) and the All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) have periodically attacked Bengali settlers to evict them from the state to restore the demographic majority of the state’s indigenous tribals, and say they want independence for tribal areas of the state, which exist in all of Tripura’s four districts.

Hundreds have died in the rebel attacks since the tribal insurgency first surfaced in 1992.

It is estimated that half of Tripura’s 200,000 tribal community are Christian and support the NLFT. It is unclear where the loyalties of non-Christian tribals lie, partly because it has been alleged that they have been coerced into supporting the NLFT.

The NLFT has warned members of the tribal community that they may be attacked if they do not accept its Christian agenda. But the ruling Communists, though not opposing the idea directly, appear to be lukewarm about it because they possibly fear the loss of votes among the Bengali fishing community thriving around Dambur.

"It’s a big project. We simply cannot scrap it in one day. We will have to set up a committee to look into it," Chief Minister Manik Sarkar said during a recent visit to Calcutta.

The state government says that by investing (12 million U.S. dollars), it has been able to restore the output to the dam’s original installed capacity of 10 megawatts. While the running cost of the project is around 600,000 dollars a year, it rakes in nearly 4.2 million dollars through the sale of electricity.

But experts say that the Gumti hydroelectric project is producing less than seven megawatts of power even in the peak season when the reservoir is full during monsoon, and the "power output from this project will progressively diminish”.

Also, with huge natural gas reserves now discovered in Tripura and major gas thermal power projects in the pipeline, it is a waste of funds to invest in the Gumti hydroelectric project, says Sikdar.

"If the state can produce three times more electricity than it now uses, there is a strong case for decommissioning the dam that will free huge fertile tracts of flatland for farming and resettlement of the landless tribal peasantry of the state," says the INPT leader .

"The fertility of this land is likely to increase after so many years under water. At least 30,000 tribal families, perhaps the whole of its landless population, can be gainfully resettled in this fertile tract. Tripura’s food deficit can also be solved if this area is turned into a modern agrarian zone," says Tripura’s leading economist, Malabika Dasgupta.

Steady encroachments on their land by Bengali settlers was further exacerbated by the submergence of a huge swathe of arable lands owned by the tribals in the Raima valley as a result of the commissioning of the Dambur project in south Tripura on Gumti River.

This project not only disturbed the fragile ecology of the Raima valley in the south district of Tripura , but also left a permanent sense of loss in the tribal psyche. All tribal groups, including the Communist-backed Gana Mukti Parishad, fiercely protested the commissioning of the Dambur hydroelectric project in 1976.

But the Congress government, determined to augment Tripura’s deficit power supply, ended up increasing the catchment area and dispossessing thousands of tribals of their land.

"Most of those ousted by the Dumbur failed to get any rehabilitation grant and were forced to settle in the hills around the project , returning to slash and burn agriculture called ‘jhum’. The dam destroyed the once-surplus tribal peasant economy of the state," says INPT president Bijoy Kumar Hrangkhawl, a former insurgent.