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dam-l Report on Maheshwar Site visit (1/2)



THE MAHESHWAR DAM IN INDIA

A Report by

Heffa Schücking
Urgewald e.V.
Von-Galen-Strasse 4
D-48336 Sassenberg
Germany
Tel: +49 (0)2583 1031
Fax: +49 (0)2583 4220
Email: urgewald@koeln.netsurf.de

March 1999
*********************************************************

I. BACKGROUND

>From November 30 through December 17, 1998 Heffa Schücking of the German
non-governmental organization Urgewald investigated the Maheshwar dam
project on the Narmada River in the State of Madhya Pradesh. Urgewald is an
environment and development NGO that monitors German involvement in
large-scale projects with significant social or environmental impacts in
developing countries.

1. Project history

The Maheshwar Dam is part of the controversial Narmada Valley Development
Project that entails the construction of 30 large and 135 medium-sized dams
in the Narmada Valley. Maheshwar is one of the planned large dams and is
slated to provide 400 Megawatts in energy. The project has been planned
since 1978 and was originally under the auspices of the Narmada Valley
Development Authority. In 1989 the responsibility for Maheshwar was
conferred on the Madhya Pradesh Electricity Board (MPEB), a parastatal
company. Subsequently in 1993, the concession for the Maheshwar Project was
awarded to the S. Kumars company.

In 1994, the project received a conditional environmental clearance from
the Central Ministry of Environment and forests (MoEF). In 1998,
preliminary contracts were signed with the German power utilities
Bayernwerk AG and Vereinigte Elektrizitätswerke Westfalen (VEW) for
participation in the Shree Maheshwar Hydro Power Corporation. Maheshwar is
the first privately financed hydroelectric dam in India.

2. German Involvement in Maheshwar

66% of the capital for the Maheshwar Project is slated to come from
Germany. The German utilities Bayernwerk and VEW plan to each acquire 24.5%
equity in the Shree Maheshwar Hydro Power Corporation (SMHPC). On a
short-term basis, the German company Siemens will contribute an additional
17% of the equity in return for the contract to provide turbines and
generators for the project. Siemens is a non-voting shareholder; its shares
will be administered by the S. Kumars company, which controls 51% of the
voting rights in the SMHPC. The total project costs equal US $ 530 million
of which US $ 257 million will be provided by the German Bayerische
Vereinsbank (now called HypoVereinsbank) in form of an export loan.

In order to protect their long-term investment, the utilities Bayernwerk
and VEW have applied to the German Government for an investment guarantee.
Siemens has applied to the German Government for an export credit guarantee
(Hermes guarantee). In 1997 the German Government made an in-principle
decision to approve a Hermes guarantee for Maheshwar, but subsequently the
final decision on the export credit guarantee as well as the investment
guarantee has been put on hold due to the problems surrounding the project.

3. The Project Area

Maheshwar is to be built in the Nimad region of Madhya Pradesh, two
kilometers upstream from the town of Mandleshwar. According to official
data, 61 villages will be affected by the project. 21 of these villages
would be totally or partially submerged, while in the remaining 40 villages
only agricultural land would be submerged.

The agricultural soils here are extremely fertile and irrigated agriculture
forms the mainstay of the economy in the project region. As the farmer,
Badrilal, from village Jalud says: "Whatever can grow in the world, can
grow on our soils". Some 90% of the agricultural lands are irrigated,
mostly through lift irrigation from the river. Thus, farmers from the
region are able to grow 3 crops a year, including different sorts of grain,
soya, pulses, peanuts, chilies, spices, bananas, guavas, citrus fruits,
sugar cane, cotton and many different vegetables. In addition, villages in
the area possess large herds of buffalo, cattle and goats.

For rural India, the project area is extremely prosperous. Aside from
meeting the villagers own needs, agricultural production from this area
supplies regional markets with grain, rice, sorghum, melons, buffalo milk
and many other goods. The region exports cotton to international markets
including Switzerland and Germany. Its agriculture sustains  not only a
large part of the population in the 61 villages, but is also an important
employer for wage labourers living outside of the project area.
The villages alongside the Narmada show a highly differentiated social
structure that has evolved around different economic usages of the river.
Alongside small farmers, one finds a diversity of occupational groups such
as the Kahars (Fisherfolk) and Kevats (Boatsmen), people living from
sand-mining and draw-down agriculture (seasonal agriculture on the river
banks) whose livelihoods all depend on the river.

In addition, there are many occupations in the craft and service sector
such as carpenters, smiths, tailors, shopkeepers, drivers etc. whose
livelihoods depend on the overall prosperity of the villages. The village
Mardana shows a typical occupational distribution for the area. 70% of its
inhabitants are farmers, 10 % are landless labourers, 10 % fisherpeople and
10% are divided among various craft and service professions.

The Narmada River is the centerpiece of the economy of these villages.
Accordingly the villagers show her reverence as "Mother" and "Nourisher".
Their way of life is both economically and ecologically sustainable and has
brought a high degree of prosperity to their communities. The villages have
access to electricity. Many families own telephon and television; some even
have tractors, motorcycles and other vehicles. In addition, there is a
relatively highly developed infrastructure (schools, health station,
community halls etc.). As a consequence, there is almost no migration to
urban areas from the project region.

II. THE INVESTIGATION

1. Travel Stations

All in all, I visited 10 villages in the submergence zone of the dam. In
seven of these villages (Jalud, Sulgaon, Pathrad, Lepa, Amlatha, Bhattyan
and Mardana) individual and group interviews were conducted and taped.
Between 20 and 200 people participated in the group interviews in each
village. Special care was taken to interview representatives of the main
social groupings, as well as men and women of different age groups from the
above villages.

Furthermore, meetings took place with representatives of S. Kumars, MPEB,
Bayernwerk, the German Embassy, non-governmental organizations, independent
experts and the advisor to the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. Most of
these meetings were also taped.

2. Terms of the Investigation

The main focus of the investigation were the social impacts of the project
and the plans for resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) of the affected
people. The following criteria were employed, which in our experience are
necessary prerequisites for successful R&R:

*       The existence of a comprehensive and accurate information base
regarding the number of people affected, their income structure,
livelihoods and resource utilization.
*       The availability of land in suitable quality and area to resettle
village communities as intact social entities.
*       Full information and participation of project-affected people in
planning, design and implementation from project inception to completion.

Furthermore, resettlement measures have to be assessed in regard to the
provisions laid out in relevant state or national policies. In this case,
the measuring stick was the 1989 Resettlement Policy of Madhya Pradesh for
the Narmada Projects. Major provisions of this policy are:

*       Every land-owning family that will lose more than 25% of its land
is entitled to land-for-land compensation, with a minimum of 5 and a
maximum of 20 acres to be provided.
*       Long-term encroachers will be treated on par with land-owners.
*       Villages should be resettled as communities.
*       Each person whose land is being acquired for purposes of the
project is considered a project-affected person.

III. MAIN FINDINGS OF THE INVESTIGATION

1. Underestimation of Submergence

In each and every village I visited, people conveyed doubts regarding the
official submergence data. They showed me relatively high-lying areas in
their village that are marked for submergence and much lower-lying areas
that - according to the authorities - will not be submerged. In two
communities, villagers had even invited engineers from Delhi to assess the
situation. Their contour measurements showed that the extent of submergence
will be much greater than is officially acknowledged.

As the experiences with other large dams in Madhya Pradesh show, these
doubts must be taken very seriously. In the case of the Bargi dam which was
finished in 1987, the official planning documents concluded that 101
villages would be flooded. When the dam's floodgates closed, however, 162
villages and 26 of the resettlement sites were submerged.

2. Underestimation of the Number of Affected People

In their publications, the project developers claim that 2264 families will
be affected. But even the official resettlement plan (if one bothers to add
up the numbers) comes to the conclusion that some 4000 families would be
affected. However, even this estimate is not based on reliable and recent
census data. S. Kumars had provided me with a chart listing the number of
houses in each of the affected villages. Upon visiting the villages, it
quickly became clear that this data diverges strongly from the ground
reality. For the full-submergence village Sulgaon for example, the document
lists 196 houses. During my visit in Sulgaon I was able to ascertain that
the village in fact has more than 400 houses.

In addition, the resettlement plan only considers landed families. Many
other occupational groups, who will also lose their livelihoods if the dam
is built, are not considered. For example, the approximately 5000 workers
in the sand-mining industry find no mention in any of the resettlement
planning documents. They have organized themselves in cooperatives that pay
dues to the Government for the right to dredge sand along this stretch of
the river. As the sand banks will be submerged, these people will clearly
be deprived of their livelihood.

The information provided by the fisherpeople, that many of the fish species
that they regularly catch will be negatively impacted by the dam, was
confirmed by Dr. Tyson Roberts of the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute. Dr. Roberts is one of the world's foremost experts on Asian
fisheries and happened to be traveling through the project area during my
stay. In an interview, he explained that many of the local fish species
need shallow, rocky river bank areas to lay their eggs. If these areas are
submerged then the species cannot reproduce and will disappear from this
stretch of the river.

Small industries have also been left out of the resettlement package. In
almost all of the villages I visited, there was at least one jaggery
factory. A typical jaggery factory employs 80 workers for three months of
the year during the sugar-cane harvest. Shop-owners, carpenters and other
trade occupations also find no mention in the resettlement plan.

3. Underestimation of  Resources and Infrastructure

In spite of the fact that almost all of the agricultural lands in the
villages alongside the Narmada are irrigated, the resettlement documents
lists these as "unirrigated lands". Both the cost-benefit analysis for the
project and the resettlement plan systematically undervalue the richness of
the resources and the developed infrastructure that characterize the
villages in the submergence zone.

To name only two examples: Annex 6 of the resettlement plan concludes that
there are in total only 176 fruit trees and 38 pakka-wells in all of the
affected 61 villages. As surveys initiated by the villagers themselves
show, this is a truly gross underestimate. In just one village, Pathrad
(where I was based during my investigation and thus had the chance to
ascertain the findings of the villagers survey), there are 40 pakka (brick)
wells and some 4000 fruit trees.

Pathrad is an extremely interesting case, because it is one of the first
villages in all of India that has insured itself. The entire village
including land and infrastructure is worth some 420 Million Rupees. Pathrad
has seven temples, three schools, a large Panchayat Bhavan, a police
station, a post office, a health station, two Dharamshalas and a ration
shop. Pathrad's income from agriculture alone amounts to about 25 Million
Rupees annually.

If a realistic cost assessment were done, it would with all due likelihood
show that the Maheshwar Project would not be viable if the property,
resources and infrastructure of the affected villages were compensated at
market costs.

4. No Information, No Participation

The village communities have received almost no information regarding the
project. Until the date of my visit,  S. Kumars and MPEB had organized a
public meeting on the project in only one village (Jalud).

As S. Kumars readily supplied me with submergence maps and many other
docu-ments detailing Resettlement & Rehabilitation planning, I was very
surprised to find that none of these documents had been made available to
the people directly affected by the project. Instead there seems to have
been a systematic policy of misinformation or withholding of information
towards local people. One of the standard questions in my interviews was
"When and how did you find out about the Maheshwar project and that you are
affected?". The following answer was typical of responses I received in
several villages:

"Surveyors came into our village for the first time in 1987/88. When we
asked them what the stone markers were being laid for, we were told that a
railway line was going to be built along here. Years later when the
cofferdam was built and blasting was taking place at the site, we finally
realized that a dam was going to be built. In April 1997 we then went to
the Subdistrict Officer in Mandleshwar and asked for information. He
actually told us that not a single village is submerging for the dam. Up
until today no one from the project authorities has ever come and properly
informed us about the dam and the resettlement." (Radhubhai from Pathrad)

Although the Maheshwar dam has been planned since 1978(!), the first
villages were not informed until January 1998 after enraged villagers
occupied the dam site for more than three weeks. Only then did MPEB
distribute a short booklet containing vague promises but no specific
information regarding who will be affected and where they will be resettled.

If MPEB and S. Kumars had gone to the trouble of disclosing relevant
documents to the villagers and consulted them, it would have quickly become
apparent just how deficient and removed from reality these documents are.

5. Availability of Land

One of the preconditions for the environmental clearance awarded to the
project in 1994 by the Ministry of Environment and Forests was
documentation that land-for-land compensation for the affected villages
would be possible. The basis for the clearance was a document entitled
"Status of Land Requirement and Availability" which was signed by the
District Collector in Khargone.
In the meantime it has come to light that this document contains falsified
data. In Spring of 1998 the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India's most
renowned sociological research institute, undertook research in the
Maheshwar area and carefully examined all available Government documents
pertaining to resettlement planning as well as visiting all 61 affected
villages.  Its study came to the conclusion that the majority of the
resettlement areas outlined in this document lie in the submergence zone of
the future dam!

Subsequently, four further land availability documents have been presented.
However, close examination reveals them all to be seriously deficient. The
second and third document were also assessed by the Tata Institute, which
arrived at a similarly devastating appraisal. The fifth land availability
document is dated June 1998 and was presented to me by S. Kumars. A first
analysis of this document shows that it lists lands as available for
resettlement that will fall into the submergence zone of either the
downstream Sardar-Sarovar dam or Maheshwar itself.

It seems an almost obvious conclusion that there is simply not sufficient
land available for the resettlement of those affected by the Maheshwar
Project. This conclusion is borne out by the fact that none of the 50
families that have lost their land to the project to date have received
land-for-land compensation.

The soils of the region are not of uniform quality. In the villages along
the river, the very industrious agricultural communities of Gujars,
Patidars and other groups with small- and medium-sized landholdings,
prosper through farming the rich alluvial soils along the river banks. The
further one goes from the river, however, increasingly red murum wastelands
begin to turn up, that are unsuitable for agriculture. There are no large
plots of unoccupied arable land available in the region. In fact the
availability of land is a problem in the whole state of Madhya Pradesh, as
the Government of Madhya Pradesh itself stated in its affidavit to the
Supreme Court regarding the Sardar-Sarovar Project.

6. The Problem of "Secondary Displacement" or Displacement for Provision of
Resettlement Sites

Unsurprisingly, very few concrete resettlement sites have been identified
to date.  The most advanced resettlement planning has taken place for Jalud
(the first village behind the dam). The resettlement site for Jalud is at a
location called "Samraj" and the visit there was among the most depressing
interludes in my investigation.

The overall impression in Samraj is not heartening: one finds stony ground
with little vegetation and red murum soils unsuitable for agriculture.
Having been there, it is easy to understand why the people of Jalud have
refused this site in a Gram Sabha (village assembly).

However, I was most shocked to find out that even this low-quality land is
already being utilized by a community of Adivasis and Harijans. They live
in great poverty; many of the children show signs of undernourishment. For
this community, daily survival is clearly an enormous struggle.

They explained to me, that while they were never well off, their situation
has become desperate since April 1998. At this time, representatives of
MPEB and S. Kumars entered the village with a police force and forcibly
annexed and bulldozed the land of 34 families as well as the entire pasture
land of the hamlet.  Although all of these families have either land titles
(which I was shown) or the status of long-term encroachers (and the
receipts to back this claim), there was no due process of land acquisition
or even written notices served. Instead, from one day to the next, their
land was bulldozed and taken from them. When some individuals attempted to
peacefully intervene and explained that they own title to this land, the
police responded by manhandling these people and the representative of MPEB
threatened to have the entire hamlet thrown into jail.

The consequences of these events for the Harijan/Adivasi community are
catastrophic. Since they have lost their entire pasture lands they were
forced to sell almost all of their cattle and buffaloes - some 400 animals.
On the private and encroached lands that were taken, they had been growing
subsistence crops such as sorghum. Anokibai, a Bhiladivasi asked "If the
land has gone, then we are also gone. If we don't have the land, will we
then eat stones or pebbles? How will we live and how will we eat?"

MPEB has used the land it took away from the people of Samraj to cultivate
a "demonstration crop" in order to convince the people of Jalud that
agricultural cultivation is possible at this site. For this purpose, they
put down a layer of silt taken from a nearby tank onto the red murum.
During my visit, MPEB provided me with documentation on the results of this
experiment. In spite of the above described treatment, the yield equaled
only 1/5 of the yield that farmers in Jalud are able to achieve on an area
of the same size.  In fact, on 1/4 of the planted area in Samraj the seeds
did not germinate at all, as the silt was washed away during the first
monsoon. It is highly probable that the following monsoons will wash away