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dam-l LS: German press on Maheshwar/Narmada
Translated from newspaper "Die Zeit" 29.4.99
TURN-AROUND IN INDIA
Bayernwerk and VEW Withdraw from a Problematic Dam Project
by Wolfgang Hoffmann
A campaign shows results. Urgewald, one of 120 German non-governmental
organisations, working for the protection of human-rights, the environment
and socially acceptable development in the third world, achieved a
commendable victory. Two German companies, the utilities VEW and
Bayernwerk, cancelled their involvement in a controversial hydro-electric
dam in the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh. Joachim Adams, the speaker of
VEW's Board stated "We are no longer involved in the project and are also
not planning to become involved in the future."
Heffa Schücking, who visited the project area for Urgewald at the end of
last year and fears a social fiasco for the region, welcomed this decision.
However she calls it "a scandal" that Siemens and the HypoVereinsbank are
still involved in the project although they have been informed of its
massive problems. Siemens however denies knowledge of these problems and
therefore declined to comment. Both Siemens and HypoVereinsbank retain
their interest in the project. They claim they will however only
participate if the environmental and resettlement problems can be
satisfactorily solved. A speaker of the Bank: It goes without saying that
we feel committed to the environmental standards of the World Bank."
The 400 megawatt power plant in Madhya Pradesh is part of a programme
entailing the construction of 30 large, 135 medium-sized and 3000 small
dams. 66 per cent of the privately financed Maheshwar project capital are
supposed to come from Germany. VEW and Bayernwerk aimed to each acquire
24.5 per cent of the equity; Siemens to acquire 17 per cent on a short-term
basis in return for the contract to supply turbines and generators. 257
million dollars of the total project costs estimated at 530 million
dollars, are to be financed through an export credit of the
HypoVereinsbank. Bonn was expected to provide official export (Hermes) and
investment guarantees. An in-principle decision approval was granted by the
former German Government in 1997.
Whether this decision will be renewed is questionable. The red-green
coalition has stated its intent to orientate the support of German exports
to include ecological and social aspects. Development Minister, Heide-Marie
Wieczorek-Zeul, was so impressed by the Urgewald report on social erosion
threatening the local population through resettlement, that she promised
for her department "an appropriate consideration of ecological, social and
developmental concerns". Economics Minister Werner Müller gave a similar
response, but also had his Ministry write that the involved companies are
of the opinion that the resettlement problem "is not unsolvable".
According to Heffa Schücking's research, providing proof of this should be
difficult. She found that at a minimum 20,000 people, who for Indian
conditions are relatively prosperous, are to be ousted from their fertile
lands which provide three harvests annually. Due to its prosperity there is
practically no migration from this infrastructurally well-equipped region
to the cities.
As the resettlement plan only makes allowances for those families, who farm
land all-year round, the roughly 5000 people from other occupational
groups will lose their livelihoods without any substitute. Schücking also
questions wether there is sufficient land and land of comparable quality
available for the Indian resettlement plan. "We were shocked", she reports,
"that many of the lands listed for resettlement lie in the submergence zone
of the dam." She sees her scepticism confirmed, through the fact that none
of the 50 families who have been disappropriated to date have received
land-for-land compensation. If compensation were based on the true value of
the land, it is doubtful that the project would still be economically
viable. It is therefore more important than ever that Bonn definitively
withdraws from export subsidies for this project. Schücking: "This would
also be an international signal."
********************************************
Translated from newspaper "die tageszeitung" 29.4.99:
DAM WITHOUT GERMANS
Utilities withdraw from Narmada Dam in India
Berlin - The first privately financed hydroelectric plant in India will
very likely not be built. The two energy companies VEW and Bayernwerk, that
were planning to acquire 49 per cent of the equity in the controversial
project, are dropping out. "We are no longer involved in the project and do
not plan becoming involved in the future" said Joachim Adams, the speaker
of VEW's board short and concisely. The press office of Bayernwerk confirms
that the contracts for the project with the Indian Project Company have run
out and would only be renewed if the resettlement of people from the flood
zone of the dam on new lands could be guaranteed.
The German environment organisation Urgewald had made public the completely
unresolved problems regarding the resettlement of 20,000 people. After her
visit to the State of Madhya Pradesh, Heffa Schücking, director of
Urgewald, stated for example, that lands slated for resettlement lie in the
submergence zone of the dam.
In India protests are amassing, also against the German companies - next
to the utilities also Siemens and the HypoVereinsbank, without whom the
project could probably not be financed. The withdrawal of VEW and
Bayernwerk came during a hunger strike of seven dam opponents in India, who
today are entering the 18th day of their fast. Last weekend police arrested
five of the hunger strikers, who are now being force fed via infusion. For
the decision of the German utilities, the decisive factor was however
probably not so much the protests as the fact that they could not count on
Hermes guarantees from the new German Government. The red-green coalition
agreement envisages social and ecological criteria for guarantees.
Now Urgewald is fighting for a withdrawal of Siemens and the
HypoVereinsbank from the project. This effort is receiving support from the
USA. An ethical investment fund has acquired shares of the Bank and is also
creating pressure.
Nicola Liebert
>
>
>Translated from Frankfurter Allgemeine 29.4.99:
>
>"THEN WE WILL DROWN"
>
>In India More and More People Protest New Dams and Power Plants / Hunger
>Strike in Bhopal / by Erhard Haubold
>
>New Delhi April 28.
>
>Now at the onstart of India's summer, the mid-day temperatures go over
>forty degrees centigrade. But this doesn't detract the women at the
>Roshanpura Square, who began a hunger strike seventeen days ago, just as
>they were not detracted by the effort of the police to arrest and bring
>them to the hospital for forced feeding through infusions. Bhopal is the
>capital of the State Of Madhya Pradesh and appeared in international
>headlines more than ten years ago through the poisonous gas catastrophe
>caused by Union Carbide. Many people died and many of those who fell sick
>have still not received their due compensation - through the neglect of the
>Central Government. But the women, who are sitting in the polluted air in
>the midst of traffic and under canvas canopies, have a different reason
>for being here. They are protesting against one of the largest dam
>programmes in the world on the Narmada River, where 30 large, 135
>medium-sized and 3000 small dams are to be built. Six are under
>construction and four large dams have been completed.
>
>The women are demanding that the entire programme in which seven billion DM
>have been invested, must be reconsidered and put up for discussion. It has
>long ago become evident, that many of the projects have unjustifiable
>social and environmental impacts; that many more villages are being
>submerged - and therefore many more people losing their homes and lands -
>than is officially acknowledged; and that by far and large necessary
>provisions have not been taken to provide for the compensation of hundreds
>of thousand oustees with money and land of equal quality.
>
>Once in a while Medha Patkar looks by, the tough and motivating force
>behind the fourteen year old movement to save the Narmada (Narmada Bachao
>Andolan). The NBA has not only brought the work on the Sardar-Sarovar dam
>to a halt, but has also stopped or drawn out the work on other dam projects
>that are in violation of human-rights through using strikes, demonstrations
>and even proceedings in the Supreme Court in New Delhi. A remarkable
>achievement for a non-governmental organisation which depends on donations
>and is struggling not only against powerful State Governments but also
>influential vested interests: against the suppliers of generators and
>turbines, and against agro-industries with their cash crops, that are
>slated to profit much more from irrigation than the small farmers; so that
>often one cannot even remotely label this equitable development.
>
>At the beginning of this month, the NBA organised - a since the times of
>Mahatma Gandhi popular - "Yatra", a foot march over six hundred kilometres
>from the villages of the Narmada to the seat of all administrative wisdom
>in Delhi, where the farmers are calling: "We want bread and not atomic
>bombs" and "None of us will move, the dam will not be built" - and are
>treated in the most uncourteous way by the Minister for Social Justice,
>Maneka Gandhi (she was formerly Environment Minister and married to a son
>of Indira Gandhi) - and afterwards they are herded together by the police
>and brought to jail. They are protesting against a decision of the Supreme
>Court that allows the re-commencement of work on Sardar-Sarovar and the
>heightening of the dam wall. They characterise this project, which was
>abandoned by the World Bank six years ago as "destructive development":
>Some 250 villages in the States of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra
>are to be flooded and more than 200,000 people, most of them indigenous or
>members of the lower castes, to be displaced.
>
>The 85 year old, in all of India renowned social worker, Baba Amte, who can
>no longer walk, has also had his bed transported to the Roshanpura Square.
>For the last nine years he has been living in Kasrawad village on the
>Narmada, where he plans to drown, if the Sardar-Sarovar dam should actually
>be completed. Initially he accepted the invitation of Digvijay Singh, the
>Chief Minister, but then left the Government Guest House under protest,
>when he saw how brutally Singh's policemen treated the fasting women, tore
>their saris to shreds and even stole their gold chains.
>
>Then suddenly very good news arrives: Heffa Schücking of the German
>non-governmental organisation "Urgewald" phones in that the German
>utilities Bayernwerk and Vereinigte Elektrizitätswerke Westfalen (VEW) have
>lost interest in the Maheshwar-Project, which was to become India's first
>privately financed hydroelectric dam. Only the equipment supplier Siemens
>and the institution financing its contract, the HypoVereinsbank, says
>Schücking, are still holding on to the project, whose total costs equal 530
>million US-Dollars, but their involvement is likely to fail due to the
>Hermes-guarantee issue. "Urgewald" doubts that the red-green Government of
>Germany will grant a guarantee for Maheshwar. "The project in no case
>fulfils the environmental. social and developmental criteria which the
>coalition contract foresees for Hermes".
>
>Heffa Schücking interviewed farmers in ten villages to be affected by the
>Maheshwar dam. The most important result: Many of the areas, that are
>slated as available for resettlement lie in the submergence zone of the
>Maheshwar dam. More than 20,000 people would be displaced without ever
>being resettled or rehabilitated. Up to now, six dams have been built in
>Madhya Pradesh. Hardly any of the 100,000 oustees have been successfully
>resettled. The majority has been waiting for their rehabilitation for ten
>years. Lastly, this is why the NBA has become one of the most powerful
>grassroots organisations on the subcontinent, or even in Asia. Sardar
>Sarovar, which is being built in Gujarat, would require the resettlement of
>200,000 people, the largest of the planned projects, Narmada Sagar,
>requires the resettlement of 500,000 people. "We are of the opinion that
>the resettlement and rehabilitation of all oustees is impossible under the
>current conditions, that the environmental impacts were not properly
>assessed and that the human costs have not even been remotely accounted"
>wrote the American expert Bradford Morse seven years ago in a report which
>led the World Bank to retreat from the Narmada Valley. Now the Indian
>Authorities are lacking money, especially foreign currency, but they are
>nonetheless continuing the program, albeight slower but with catastrophic
>results for the people of the villages, whose whole life planning for the
>next ten, twenty years has become insecure.
>
>They do not know if and when they will be flooded out. Dam walls are being
>constructed and forests cut down, but new schools, roads and other public
>works are no longer being built. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime
>Minister after Independence wanted to build "modern temples", steel
>factories, dams and power plants to help the poor of his country achieve
>better harvests, better jobs and clean drinking water. The projects on the
>Narmada, the fifth longest river of the subcontinent, are supposed to
>benefit an especially poor and drought-prone area in the Western part of
>India.
>
>In the meantime, however, it has become obvious as a delegation of German
>Parliamentarians noted in 1992, that such mega-projects in the third world
>should no longer be approved. Their impacts on the local communities, on
>the people to be resettled and the environment can often not be calculated.
>In India poor analphabet villagers are confronted with cunning land
>speculators and corrupt, arrogant bureaucrats. For the Maheshwar project,
>Heffa Schücking found that farmers had received only ten per cent of the
>assured sales price of their land and that S. Kumars, the partner of the
>German companies for the large hydroelectric plant, is actually only "a
>relatively small textile company with no experience whatsoever regarding
>energy projects".
>
>Small farmers are being cheated out of their rights with shady methods, are
>not being honestly informed and do not have means to resist when S. Kumars
>comes with police to take away their agricultural and pasture lands, in
>spite of the fact that they own titles to the land. The consequences for
>the community of Adivasis and Harijans is, that they have lost almost their
>entire stock of cattle and buffaloes, which they had to sell because they
>could no longer feed them. A just compensation according to the principle
>"land for land" often already fails due to the fact that there simply is
>not sufficient available fertile land. How can one justly compensate the
>farmers in the area of the Maheshwar Project, considering that they live in
>one of India's most fertile agricultural regions with rich black soils that
>provide three harvests a year; a region where the idea of migrating to
>urban areas does not even cross people's minds? And how to compensate their
>neighbours living on stony red wastelands? Or those fishers, boats people
>and workers in the sand-mining industry, who all depend on the river for
>their livelihood?
>
>"Dams do not only destroy the environment (sedimentation of the rivers,
>salinisation of drinking water, new breeding-grounds for mosquitoes), but
>also the lives of the people, who are bearing the cost of their
>construction" writes the journalist, human-rights advocate and former
>diplomat Kuldip Nayar. For an Adivasi, even if he would be justly
>compensated, resettlement means leaving the burying grounds of his
>ancestors and the source of his inspiration. The Narmada River is revered
>as a goddess and receives the ashes of the dead and washes away the sins of
>the living. Here, a dam must therefore seem a sacrilege, especially as
>every one knows that the existing dams turned prosperous farmers into
>paupers and migrant labourers. That is why one continuously hears the
>people along the Narmada say that they would rather drown than leave their
>traditional lands. Also in other places in Asia such as Malaysia and
>Thailand, the protests against the ambitious "modern temples" of the third
>world are growing. After long debates and much criticism, the World Bank
>and the German Bank for Reconstruction pulled out of the "Arun" dam in
>Nepal four years ago. In other countries such as Vietnam and Laos, the Asia
>crisis has led to a pause, a chance for thinking, and has set back the
>mega-projects planned for the Mekong-Delta. But the threat to the 4,200
>kilometre long river and its thousands of endangered plant and animal
>species still exists - a river which with its tributaries nurtures millions
>of people from China in the North through Burma, Thailand, Laos and
>Cambodia right up to the large Delta in South Vietnam, which has made
>Vietnam the second largest rice-exporter of the world.
>
>___________________URGEWALD_________________________________
>
>Urgewald e.V.
>Von-Galen-Strasse 4
>D-48336 Sassenberg
>Germany
> Fon: +49 (0)2583 1031
> Fax: +49 (0)2583 4220
> Email: urgewald@koeln.netsurf.de
>
>___________________URGEWALD_________________________________