RIGHTS-INDIA: Human Rights Watch Assails World Bank Project

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 21 1998 (IPS) - A major U.S. human rights group is urging the World Bank to condition future loans for a major power project in India on ending abuses directed primarily against people displaced by the project.

Human Rights Watch/Asia also wants the Bank’s Inspection Panel – which last December accused management of ignoring its own environmental and resettlement policies in approving a 430-million- dollar loan for the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) – become more involved in monitoring the project.

“Continued involvement of the Inspection Panel is critical to ensuring that a fair resolution of the problems affecting the displaced communities in the Singrauli project area is achieved,” the New York-based organization wrote in a memorandum to World Bank President James Wolfensohn.

The Bank’s executive directors, who last year rejected the panel’s request to conduct an on-site investigation of the Singrauli power project, are due to meet in May to review the project. This will includes an update on an “action plan” devised by the Bank last year to address what the Inspection Panel called “serious violations” of the Bank’s own policies.

The dispute over the project, approved in 1993, pits rural villagers against the powerful NTPC – the Bank’s single biggest client in the developing world.

The Bank has loaned some four billion dollars to the state agency. NTPC operates three major thermal power plants in the Singrauli region, which lies roughly 700 kms southeast of New Delhi. Coal reserves in the area are estimated to be sufficient to generate 20,000 megawatts of power – or about one-third of India’s current annual electricity consumption – for the next 130 years, according to Bank documents.

The project has been plagued with problems since its launching in 1994. Under the Bank’s own guidelines, project borrowers must be able to meet certain environmental standards and any people who must be resettled as a result of the project should be adequately compensated.

According to the Iinspection Panel’s report, which was completed last December, the Singrauli project has fallen far short on both counts. It found, for example, that most of the displaced people have not received promised benefits. In addition, the project’s designers had not seriously considered alternatives to ash- disposal plants which were contaminating surrounding land and crops. It also found that local people had not been adequately consulted.

These violations of Bank policy have spurred protests by local people and activist groups, protests which have, in some cases, been violently repressed by the local authorities. Reports of that repression prompted Human Rights Watch to conduct its own on-site investigation March 2-7.

The group found that the police, members of the Central Industrial Security Force, civilian authorities, and NTPC officials, “often acting in concern, have engaged in a pattern of clear human rights violations, including arbitrary detention, degrading treatment in custody, and indiscriminate use of force” against people displaced by the power project and that these violation were continuing in 1998.

It found further that many of the people who had been subjected to such abuses “felt they had not been adequately consulted about problems related to displacement or environmental destruction, contrary to current Bank policies.” In many cases, abuses were carried out by private “goon squads” hired by NTPC officials, according to the 11-page memorandum.

The memorandum expressed special concern about the use of violence against women protestors, and noted that displaced women were discriminated against in the compensation scheme adopted by the NTPC. “Women rarely were offered jobs or monetary compensation despite the crucial role they have traditionally played in farming and supporting their families,” Human Rights Watch said.

The memorandum also assailed the attitude of government officials to the abuses, noting that even the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has failed to take the situation seriously. The NHRC’s own 1996 investigation into the matter “was criticised by many villagers who claimed they had not sufficiently consulted the affected populations and had spent too much time in the Singrauli area with NTPC officials,” according to the report.

Human Rights Watch nonetheless praised the work of the Independent Monitoring Panel (IMP), established late last year as a joint initiative of the Bank and the NTPC to monitor the project and receive complaints, and urged that its mandate be extended beyond the current one-year term. It also suggested that the IMP model be applied to other countries in which the Bank works.

Working with the non-governmental Xavier Institute of Development Action and Studies (XIDAS), which has monitored the social and environmental problems created by the project the IMP has been active in the field, according to sources here, and its report will serve as the basis for the update on the action plan that the executive board will take up next month.

“The question is how will the Bank and the NTPC deal with its findings?” noted Dana Clark of the Centre for International Environmental Law (CIEL) here. “We don’t know yet.”

But neither the IMP nor XIDAS should be seen as a “substitute for direct Bank supervision of the project” nor for the Bank’s quasi-independent IP “without whose report the IMP might not have been established,” according to the memorandum, which also called on the Bank to make public all reports, including relevant internal ones.

A Bank spokeswoman said its New Delhi office, which is supervising the project, has been sent a copy of the memorandum and is preparing a reply.