Themes > Current Issues

14.06.2006

The Sardar Sarovar Dam: The Legacy of an Indifferent State

Jayati Ghosh

Qui custodiet custodiens? goes the Latin saying, or ''who will guard the guardians''? In today's India, what does it take to make a government obey the law? In the case of the Madhya Pradesh government and the Narmada Control Authority, defining and restating the law and getting very clear orders from the Supreme Court is clearly not enough.

The pleas of those who have been unjustly displaced and provided no compensation are obviously of no interest. Nor is peaceful mass protest by thousands of ordinary people of the region of any use in changing unlawful decisions, apparently. Even knocking at the gates of the powerful in Delhi, or going on indefinite hunger strike in protest at blatantly illegal actions does not seem to be enough.

Yet all that is being asked, from the government, is that the laws of the land be upheld and the Supreme Court's orders be respected. Even this appears to become something to be extracted as a huge concession after endless requests and ever increasing social pressure.

Consider the recent facts relating to the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. This controversial project has been under question for more than ten years, as all of its intended benefits have been questioned at different levels. It is the hugest such project in recent years, involving thousands of hectares of land and displacing well over three lakh families. From the original chosen height of 80 metres, it has gradually been raised to 120 metres, and each increase has involved ever more extensive displacement.

Not only are the supposed gains for the farmers in dry areas of Saurashtra and Kacch still unclear, but the huge human and ecological costs of submergence and displacement have been inadequately measured and certainly not compensated for. There have also been scathing reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General's office on the financial practices of the project.

Yet the recent furore relates not to the project per se, but to specific measures which blatantly go against both administrative and judicial norms. The evidence is overwhelming of completely inadequate rehabilitation, in contravention of previous promises, declared procedures and court strictures. And what is even more alarming is that on 8 March this year, the Narmada Control Authority unilaterally took the decision to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam from its present height of 110.64 metres to 121.92 metres.

This decision was taken even though the Supreme Court in a 2005 judgement had expressly said that raising of the dam's height would not be permitted unless the rehabilitation programme, which was found to be lacking, had been carried out in full. In fact, almost all reports, even from official sources, confirm that the rehabilitation process thus far has been a disaster.

The core rehabilitation principle in the Sardar Sarovar Project is land for land, rather than cash compensation. The onus has been placed upon the state to ''acquire and allot'' cultivable land to all eligible affected families. According to the Narmada Tribunal Award, rehabilitation sites should have been developed and ready for occupation one year before the date of submergence, and notices for shifting to the developed sites must be issued to each and every project affected family.

Yet in fact, in Madhya Pradesh, hardly any families have been resettled with cultivable land. Instead, some families have been offered or sent off to occupy lands which are already encroached upon by others, or of such poor quality as to be uncultivable, or simply non-existent. Other sites have no house plots and the areas themselves have no amenities. For many thousands of other affected families, there is even no stated site that has been decided upon. And this, according to the government's own affidavits filed before the Supreme Court!

Instead, the state government created a new (and illegal) Special Rehabilitation Package, under which a cash package is given to project affected families instead of land. Usually the amount given is so small that there is no question of purchasing new cultivable land with that money, so that the people are rendered not only homeless but also without livelihood. Even in Maharashtra and Gujarat, many affected families are still to be either compensated or rehabilitated. The Grievance Redressal Authorities are barely functioning, in any of the three affected states.

The situation with respect to rehabilitation is so evidently dire that even the Union Minister for Water Resources, Prof. Saifuddin Soz, issued a statement on 10 March indicating his lack of confidence in the rehabilitation process thus far. He conceded that in this context the decision of the Narmada Control Authority to raise the height of the dam was premature, and said he would convene a meeting of the Review Committee for Narmada Control Authority to consider the case.

It might be expected that after such an admission, there would be no question of continuing the work of raising the height of the dam. Yet this is apparently too naïve an expectation, since even as late as the first week of April, nearly a month after the statement was issued, no such meeting has yet been convened and work at the dam site continues apace in complete disregard of all protestation.

All this forced the most recent protest in Delhi, where Medha Patkar and some other activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan went on hunger strike. This did indeed get some publicity, certainly far more than the months of continuous protests within the region by the affected people, but at the time of writing it was still not enough to force the government to stop immediately all work on what is a completely illegal exercise at the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Instead, the government only promised to ''examine the matter'' through a field visit!

We have in place a central government that thus far has viewed a significant aspect of development as necessarily involving the sale of land - to agribusinesses, to urban land developers, to big projects in general. On the day of writing this, the same government that would not stop the height of the dam from being illegally raised signed a huge deal selling off land to a consortium of private companies for developing Delhi and Mumbai airports in what is an extremely dubious and murky privatisation deal, in the process breaking their promises to airport workers that they would be heard before a final decision. Despite coming into power on an anti-communal and pro-poor platform, it has stubbornly refused to exercise the most elementary discipline on rogue state government like that in Gujarat, even in this matter of respecting the basic rights of its citizens, especially the weak and assetless.

It should be noted that most of the displaced families are adivasis, and were already among the poorest and most vulnerable communities in India. Dispossession from their meagre resources leaves them no alternative existence. At the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi where many of the activists and affected people had gathered along with local supporters, there was a stark question. We are thrown out of our land and not welcome in cities or villages, so where do we go? How do we continue to exist?

Nearly 150 years after the first war of Indian independence, it seems that it is not only freedom which is of concern. Our state not only cannot ensure for many of its citizens their right to exist, its market-obsessed economic priorities seem even to have deprived it of the basic political sense that a democratic state should at least be seen to be caring for those at the receiving end.