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dam-l LS: Arundhati Roy, 'For the Greater Common Good' (pt 3)
Earlier in the week I sent out an article by Arundhati Roy (author of the
Booker Prize-winning 'The God of Small Things') taken from the web site of
the Indian magazine Outlook. Unfortunately only part of the article was
posted on www.outlookindia.com at that time. The remainder of the article
has now been posted and is forwarded below. The article has also been
published as the (26 page!!) cover story of the June 4 issue of another
Indian magazine, Frontline. The Frontline version contains some additional
material but has not yet been posted on their web site frontlineonline.com.
Patrick McCully
PS This is quite probably the best thing you're ever going to read about
about dams.
-------------------------------------------------------------
It's a skilful circus and the acrobats know each other well. Occasionally
they'll swap
parts-a bureaucrat will join the Bank, a Banker will surface as a Project
Consultant.
At the end of play, a huge percentage of what's called 'Development Aid' is
re-channelled back to the countries it came from, masquerading as
equipment cost or
consultants' fees or salaries to the agencies' own staff. Often 'Aid' is
openly 'tied'.
(As in the case of the Japanese loan for the Sardar Sarovar Dam, tied to
a contract for
purchasing turbines from Sumitomo Corporation.) Sometimes the connections are
more sleazy. In 1993 Britain financed the Pergau Dam in Malaysia with a
subsidised
loan of £234 million, despite an Overseas Development Administration
report that
said that the dam would be a 'bad buy' for Malaysia. It later emerged
that the loan
was offered to 'encourage' Malaysia to sign a £1.3 billion contract to
buy British
Arms.
In 1994, UK consultants earned $2.5 billion on overseas contracts. The second
biggest sector of the market after Project Management was writing what
are called
eias (Environmental Impact Assessments). In the Development racket, the
rules are
pretty simple. If you get invited by a government to write an eia for a
big dam project
and you point out a problem (say, for instance, you quibble about the
amount of
water available in a river, or, God forbid, you suggest that perhaps the
human costs
are too high) then you're history. You're an oowc. An Out Of Work
Consultant. And
Oops! There goes your Range Rover. There goes your holiday in Tuscany. There
goes your children's private boarding school. There's good money in
poverty. Plus
Perks.
In keeping with Big Dam tradition, concurrent with the construction of
the 138.68
metre high Sardar Sarovar dam, began the elaborate government pantomime of
conducting studies to estimate the actual project costs and the impact it
would have on
people and the environment. The World Bank participated whole-heartedly in the
charade-occasionally they knitted their brows and raised feeble requests
for more
information on issues like the resettlement and rehabilitation of what
they call
paps-Project Affected Persons. (They help, these acronyms, they manage to
mutate
muscle and blood into cold statistics. paps soon cease to be people.)
The merest crumbs of information satisfied The Bank and they proceeded
with the
project.
The implicit, unwritten but fairly obvious understanding between the concerned
agencies was that whatever the costs-economic, environmental or human-the
project would go ahead. They would justify it as they went along. They
knew full
well that eventually, in a courtroom or to a committee, no argument works
as well as
a Fait Accompli. (Mi' lord, the country is losing two crores a day due to
the delay).
The government refers to the Sardar Sarovar Projects as the 'Most Studied
Project in
India', yet the game goes something like this:
When the Tribunal first announced its award, and the Gujarat government
announced
its plan of how it was going to use its share of water, there was no
mention of
drinking water for villages in Kutch and Saurashtra, the arid areas of
Gujarat. When
the project ran into political trouble, the government suddenly
discovered the emotive
power of Thirst. Suddenly, quenching the thirst of parched throats in
Kutch and
Saurashtra became the whole point of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Never
mind that
water from two rivers-the Sabarmati and the Mahi, both of which are miles
closer
to Kutch and Saurashtra than the Narmada, have been dammed and diverted to
Ahmedabad, Mehsana and Kheda. Neither Kutch nor Saurashtra have seen a drop of
it.) Officially the number of people who will be provided drinking water
by the
Sardar Sarovar Canal fluctuates from 28 million (1983) to 32.5 million
(1989)-nice
touch, the decimal point!-to 40 million (1992) and down to 25 million (1993).
The number of villages that would receive drinking water was zero in
1979, 4,719 in
the early '80s, 7,234 in 1990 and 8,215 in '91. When challenged, the
government
admitted that the figures for 1991 included 236 uninhabited villages!
Every aspect of the project is approached in this almost cavalier manner,
as if it's a
family board game. Even when it concerns the lives and futures of vast
numbers of
people.
In 1979 the number of families that would be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar
reservoir was estimated to be a little over 6,000. In 1987 it grew to
12,000. In 1991
it surged to 27,000. In 1992 the government declared that 40,000 families
would be
affected. Today, it hovers between 40,000 and 41,500. (Of course even
this is an
absurd figure, because the reservoir isn't the only thing that displaces
people.
According to the nba the actual figure is 85,000 families-about half a million
people.)
The estimated cost of the project bounced up from Rs 6,000 crore to Rs
20,000 crore
(officially). The nba says it will cost Rs 40,000 crore. (Half the entire
irrigation
budget of the whole country over the last fifty years.)
The government claims the Sardar Sarovar Projects will produce 1,450 Mega
Watts
of power. The thing about multi-purpose dams like the Sardar Sarovar is
that their
'purposes' (irrigation, power production and flood-control) conflict with
each other.
Irrigation uses up the water you need to produce power. Flood control
requires you
to keep the reservoir empty during the monsoon months to deal with an
anticipated
surfeit of water. And if there's no surfeit, you're left with an empty
dam. And this
defeats the purpose of irrigation, which is to store the monsoon water.
It's like the
riddle of trying to ford a river with a fox, a chicken and a bag of
grain. The result of
these mutually conflicting aims, studies say, is that when the Sardar
Sarovar Projects
are completed, and the scheme is fully functional, it will end up
producing only 3 per
cent of the power that its planners say it will. 50 Mega Watts.
In an old war, everybody has an axe to grind. So how do you pick your way
through
these claims and counter-claims? How do you decide whose estimate is more
reliable? One way is to take a look at the track record of Indian dams.
The Bargi Dam near Jabalpur was the first dam on the Narmada to be completed
(1990). It cost 10 times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more
land than the engineers said it would. About 70,000 people from 101
villages were
supposed to be displaced, but when they filled the reservoir (without warning
anybody), 162 villages were submerged. Some of the resettlement sites
built by the
government were submerged as well. People were flushed out like rats from
the land
they had lived on for centuries. They salvaged what they could, and
watched their
houses being washed away. 114,000 people were displaced. There was no
rehabilitation policy. Some were given meagre cash compensations. Many got
absolutely nothing. A few were moved to government rehabilitation sites.
The site at
Gorakhpur is, according to government publicity, an 'ideal village'.
Between 1990
and 1992, five people died of starvation there. The rest either returned
to live illegally
in the forests near the reservoir, or moved to slums in Jabalpur. The
Bargi Dam
irrigates only as much land as it submerged in the first place-and only 5
per cent of
the area that its planners claimed it would irrigate. Even that is
water-logged.
Time and again, it's the same story-the Andhra Pradesh Irrigation II scheme
claimed it would displace 63,000 people. When completed, it displaced 150,000
people. The Gujarat Medium Irrigation II scheme displaced 140,000 people
instead
of 63,600. The revised estimate of the number of people to be displaced by the
Upper Krishna irrigation project in Karnataka is 240,000 against its
initial claims of
displacing only 20,000.
These are World Bank figures. Not the nba's. Imagine what this does to our
conservative estimate of 33 million.
Construction work on the Sardar Sarovar dam site, which had continued
sporadically
since 1961, began in earnest in 1988. At the time, nobody, not the
government, nor
the World Bank were aware that a woman called Medha Patkar had been wandering
through the villages slated to be submerged, asking people whether they
had any idea
of the plans the government had in store for them. When she arrived in
the valley all
those years ago, opposing the construction of the dam was the furthest
thing from
her mind. Her chief concern was that displaced villagers should be
resettled in an
equitable, humane way. It gradually became clear to her that the government's
intentions towards them were far from honourable. By 1986 word had spread and
each state had a peoples' organisation that questioned the promises about
resettlement
and rehabilitation that were being bandied about by government officials.
It was only
some years later that the full extent of the horror-the impact that the
dams would
have, both on the people who were to be displaced and the people who were
supposed to benefit-began to surface. The Narmada Valley Development Project
came to be known as India's Greatest Planned Environmental Disaster. The
various
peoples' organisations massed into a single organisation and the Narmada
Bachao
Andolan-the extraordinary nba-was born.
In 1988 the nba formally called for all work on the Narmada Valley Development
Projects to be stopped. People declared that they would drown if they had
to, but
would not move from their homes. Within two years, the struggle had burgeoned
and had support from other resistance movements. In September 1989, some
50,000
people gathered in the Valley at Harsud from all over India to pledge to fight
Destructive Development. The Dam site and its adjacent areas, already
under the
Indian Official Secrets Act, was clamped under Section 144 which prohibits the
gathering of groups of more than five people. The whole area was turned into a
police camp. Despite the barricades, one year later, on September 28, 1990,
thousands of villagers made their way on foot and by boat to a little
town called
Badwani, in Madhya Pradesh, to reiterate their pledge to drown rather
than agree to
move from their homes. News of the peoples' opposition to the Projects
spread to
other countries. The Japanese arm of Friends of the Earth mounted a
campaign in
Japan that succeeded in getting the Government of Japan to withdraw its
27 billion
yen loan to finance the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (The contract for the
turbines still
holds.) Once the Japanese withdrew, international pressure from various
Environmental Activist groups who supported the struggle began to mount on the
World Bank.
This of course led to an escalation of repression in the valley.
Government policy,
described by a particularly articulate minister, was to 'flood the valley
with khaki'.
On Christmas Day in 1990, about 6,000 men and women walked over a hundred
kilometres, carrying their provisions and their bedding, accompanying a
seven-member sacrificial squad who had resolved to lay down their lives
for the
river. They were stopped at Ferkuwa on the Gujarat border by battalions
of armed
police and crowds of people from the city of Baroda, many of whom were hired,
some of whom perhaps genuinely believed that the Sardar Sarovar was 'Gujarat's
life-line'. It was an interesting confrontation. Middle Class Urban India
versus a
Rural, predominantly Tribal Army. The marching people demanded they be allowed
to cross the border and walk to the dam-site. The police refused them
passage. To
stress their commitment to non-violence, each villager had his or her
hands bound
together. One by one, they defied the battalions of police. They were
beaten, arrested
and dragged into waiting trucks in which they were driven off and dumped some
miles away, in the wilderness. They just walked back and began all over again.
The confrontation continued for almost two weeks. Finally, on January 7,
1991, the
seven members of the sacrificial squad announced they were going on an
indefinite
hunger strike. Tension rose to dangerous levels. The Indian and
International Press,
TV camera crews and documentary film-makers were present in force. Reports
appeared in the papers almost every day. Environmental Activists stepped
up the
pressure in Washington. Eventually, acutely embarrassed by the glare of
unfavourable media coverage, the World Bank announced that it would
institute an
Independent Review of the Sardar Sarovar Projects-unprecedented in the
history of
Bank Behaviour.
When the news reached the valley, it was received with distrust and
uncertainty. The
people had no reason to trust the World Bank. But still, it was a victory
of sorts. The
villagers, understandably upset by the frightening deterioration in the
condition of
their comrades who had not eaten for 22 days, pleaded with them to call
off the fast.
On January 28, the fast at Ferkuwa was called off, and the brave, ragged army
returned to their homes shouting "Hamare Gaon Mein Hamara Raj!" (Our Rule in
Our Villages).
There has been no army quite like this one, anywhere else in the world.
In other
countries-China (Chairman Mao got a Big Dam for his 77th birthday), Brazil,
Malaysia, Guatemala, Paraguay-every sign of revolt has been snuffed out almost
before it began. Here in India, it goes on and on. Of course, the State
would like to
take credit for this too. It would like us to be grateful to it for not
crushing the
movement completely, for allowing it to exist. After all what is all
this, if not a sign
of a healthy functioning democracy in which the State has to intervene
when its
people have differences of opinion?
I suppose that's one way of looking at it. (Is this my cue to cringe and say
'Thankyou, thankyou, for allowing me to write the things I write?')
We don't need to be grateful to the State for permitting us to protest.
We can thank
ourselves for that. It is we who have insisted on these rights. It is we
who have
refused to surrender them. If we have anything to be truly proud of as a
people, it is
this.
The struggle in the Narmada valley lives, despite the State.
The Indian State makes war in devious ways. Apart from its apparent benevolence,
its other big weapon is its ability to wait. To roll with the punches. To
wear out the
opposition. The State never tires, never ages, never needs a rest. It
runs an endless
relay.
But fighting people tire. They fall ill, they grow old. Even the young age
prematurely. For 20 years now, since the Tribunal's award, the ragged
army in the
valley has lived with the fear of eviction. For 20 years, in most areas
there has been
no sign of 'development'-no roads, no schools, no wells, no medical help.
For 20
years, it has borne the stigma 'slated for submergence'-so it's isolated
from the rest
of society (no marriage proposals, no land transactions). They're a bit
like the
Hibakushas in Japan (the victims of the bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and
their descendants). The 'fruits of modern development', when they finally
came,
brought only horror. Roads brought surveyors. Surveyors brought trucks. Trucks
brought policemen. Policemen brought bullets and beatings and rape and
arrest and,
in one case, murder. The only genuine 'fruit' of modern development that
reached
them, reached them inadvertently-the right to raise their voices, the
right to be
heard. But they have fought for 20 years now. How much longer will they last?
The struggle in the valley is tiring. It's no longer as fashionable as it
used to be. The
international camera crews and the radical reporters have moved (like the
World
Bank) to newer pastures. The documentary films have been screened and
appreciated. Everybody's sympathy is all used up. But the dam goes on.
It's getting
higher and higher...
Now, more than ever before, the ragged army needs reinforcements. If we
let it die,
if we allow the struggle to be crushed, if we allow the people to be
punished, we will
lose the most precious thing we have: Our spirit, or what's left of it.
"India will go on," they'll tell you, the sage philosophers who don't
want to be
troubled by piddling Current Affairs. As though 'India' is somehow more
valuable
than her people.
Old Nazis probably soothe themselves in similar ways.
The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a
remote rural
war or even an exclusively Indian war. It's a war for the rivers and the
mountains
and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the
world, anyone
who wishes to enlist, will be honoured and welcomed. Every kind of
warrior will be
needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen,
painters, actors, singers, lovers.... The borders are open, folks! Come on in.
Anyway, back to the story.
In June 1991, The World Bank appointed Bradford Morse, a former head of the
United Nations Development Program, as Chairman of the Independent Review. His
brief was to make a thorough assessment of Sardar Sarovar Projects. He was
guaranteed free access to all secret Bank documents relating to the Projects.
In September 1991, Bradford Morse and his team arrived in India. The nba,
convinced that this was yet another set-up, at first refused to meet
them. The Gujarat
government welcomed the team with a red carpet (and a nod and a wink) as
covert
allies.
A year later, in June 1992, the historic Independent Review (known also as the
Morse Report) was published.
It unpeels the project delicately, layer by layer, like an onion. Nothing
was too big,
and nothing too small for them to enquire into. They met ministers and
bureaucrats,
they met ngos working in the area, went from village to village, from
resettlement
site to resettlement site. They visited the good ones. The bad ones. The
temporary
ones, the permanent ones. They spoke to hundreds of people. They travelled
extensively in the submergence area and the command area. They went to
Kutch and
other drought-hit areas in Gujarat. They commissioned their own studies. They
examined every aspect of the project: hydrology and water management, the
upstream environment, sedimentation, catchment area treatment, the downstream
environment, the anticipation of likely problems in the command
area-water-logging, salinity, drainage, health, the impact on wildlife.
What the Morse Report reveals, in temperate, measured tones (which I
admire, but
cannot achieve) is scandalous. It is the most balanced, unbiased, yet damning
indictment of the relationship between the Indian State and the World
Bank. Without
appearing to, perhaps even without intending to, the report cuts through
to the cosy
core, to the space where they live together and love each other
(somewhere between
what they say and what they do).
The core recommendation of the 357-page Independent Review was unequivocal and
wholly unexpected:
"We think the Sardar Sarovar Projects as they stand are flawed, that
resettlement and
rehabilitation of all those displaced by the Projects is not possible
under prevailing
circumstances, and that environmental impacts of the Projects have not
been properly
considered or adequately addressed. Moreover we believe that the Bank shares
responsibility with the borrower for the situation that has developed....
It seems clear
that engineering and economic imperatives have driven the Projects to the
exclusion
of human and environmental concerns.... India and the states
involved...have spent a
great deal of money. No one wants to see this money wasted. But we
caution that it
may be more wasteful to proceed without full knowledge of the human and
environmental costs. We have decided that it would be irresponsible for
us to patch
together a series of recommendations on implementation when the flaws in the
Projects are as obvious as they seem to us. As a result, we think that
the wisest
course would be for the Bank to step back from the Projects and consider them
afresh. The failure of the Bank's incremental strategy should be
acknowledged."
Four committed, knowledgeable, truly independent men-they do a lot to make up
for faith eroded by hundreds of other venal ones who are paid to do
similar jobs.
The Bank, however, was still not prepared to give up. It continued to fund the
project. Two months after the Independent Review, it sent out the Pamela Cox
Committee which did exactly what the Morse Review had cautioned the Bank
against. It suggested a sort of patchwork remedy to try and salvage the
operation. In
October 1992, on the recommendation of the Pamela Cox Committee, the Bank
asked the Indian Government to meet some minimum, primary conditions within a
period of six months. Even that much, the government couldn't do. Finally, on
March 30, 1993, the World Bank pulled out of the Sardar Sarovar Projects.
(Actually, technically, on March 29, one day before the deadline they'd
been given,
the Indian Government asked the World Bank to withdraw). Details. Details.
No one has ever managed to make the World Bank step back from a project
before.
Least of all a rag-tag army of the poorest people in one of the world's
poorest
countries. A group of people whom Lewis Preston, then President of the Bank,
never managed to fit into his busy schedule when he visited India.
Sacking The Bank
was and is a huge moral victory for the people in the valley.
The euphoria didn't last. The government of Gujarat announced that it was
going to
raise the $200 million shortfall on its own and continue with the
project. During the
period of the Review, and after it was published, confrontation between
people and
the Authorities continued unabated in the valley-humiliation, arrests,
lathicharges.
Indefinite fasts terminated by temporary promises and permanent
betrayals. People
who had agreed to leave the valley and be resettled had begun returning
to their
villages from their resettlement sites. In Manibeli, a village in
Maharashtra and one of
the nerve-centres of the resistance, hundreds of villagers participated
in a Monsoon
Satyagraha. In 1993, families in Manibeli remained in their homes as the
waters rose.
They clung to wooden posts with their children in their arms and refused
to move.
Eventually policemen prised them loose and dragged them away. The nba declared
that if the government did not agree to review the project, on August 6,
1993, a band
of activists would drown themselves in the rising waters of the
reservoir. On August
5, the Union Government constituted yet another committee called the Five
Member
Group (fmg) to review the Sardar Sarovar Projects.
The government of Gujarat refused them entry into Gujarat. The fmg report
(a "desk
report") was submitted the following year. It tacitly endorsed the grave
concerns of
the Independent Review. But it made no difference. Nothing changed. This is
another of the State's tested strategies. It kills you with committees.
In February 1994, the government of Gujarat ordered the permanent closure
of the
sluice-gates of the dam.
In May 1994, the nba filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court
questioning the
whole basis of the Sardar Sarovar Dam and seeking a stay on the construction.
That monsoon, when the water level in the reservoir rose and smashed down
on the
other side of the dam, 65,000 cubic metres of concrete and 35,000 cubic
metres of
rock were torn out of a stilling basin, leaving a 65-metre crater. The
riverbed
powerhouse was flooded. The damage was kept secret for months. Reports started
appearing about it in the press only in January 1995.
In early 1995, on the grounds that the rehabilitation of displaced people
had not been
adequate, the Supreme Court ordered work on the dam to be suspended until
further
notice. The height of the dam was 80 metres above Mean Sea Level.
Meanwhile, work had begun on two more dams in Madhya Pradesh: the Narmada
Sagar (without which the Sardar Sarovar loses 17 to 30 per cent of its
efficiency) and
the Maheshwar Dam. The Maheshwar Dam is next in line, upstream from the Sardar
Sarovar. The government of Madhya Pradesh has signed a Power Purchase contract
with a private company-S. Kumars, one of India's leading textile magnates.
Tension in the Sardar Sarovar area abated temporarily and the battle
moved upstream
to Maheshwar, in the fertile plains of Nimad.
The case pending in the Supreme Court led to a palpable easing of
repression in the
valley. Construction work had stopped on the dam, but the rehabilitation
charade
continued. Forests (slated for submergence) continued to be cut and
carted away in
trucks, forcing people who depended on them for a livelihood to move out.
Even though the dam is nowhere near its eventual, projected height, its
impact on the
environment and the people living along the river is already severe.
Around the dam site and the nearby villages, the number of cases of
malaria has
increased six-fold.
Several kilometres upstream from the Sardar Sarovar dam, huge deposits of
silt,
hip-deep and over two hundred metres wide, has cut off access to the
river. Women
carrying water pots, now have to walk miles, literally miles, to find a
negotiable
entry point. Cows and goats get stranded in it and die. The little
single-log boats that
tribal people use have become unsafe on the irrational circular currents
caused by the
barricade downstream.
Further upstream, where the silt deposits have not yet become a problem,
there's
another problem. Landless people, (predominantly tribals and Dalits) have
traditionally cultivated rice, fruit and vegetables on the rich, shallow
silt banks the
river leaves when it recedes in the dry months. Every now and then, the
engineers
manning the Bargi Dam (way upstream, near Jabalpur) release water from the
reservoir without warning. Downstream, the water level in the river
suddenly rises.
Hundreds of families have had their crops washed away several times,
leaving them
with no livelihood.
Suddenly they can't trust their river anymore. It's like a loved one who has
developed symptoms of psychosis. Anyone who has loved a river can tell
you that
the loss of a river is a terrible, aching thing. But I'll be rapped on
the knuckles if I
continue in this vein. When we're discussing the Greater Common Good
there's no
place for sentiment. One must stick to facts. Forgive me for letting my
heart wander.
The governments of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra continue to be completely
cavalier in their dealings with displaced people. The government of
Gujarat has a
rehabilitation policy (on paper) that makes the other two states look
medieval. It
boasts of being the best rehabilitation package in the world. It offers
land for land to
displaced people from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and recognises the
claims of
'encroachers' (usually tribal people with no papers). The deception,
however, lies in
its definition of who qualifies as 'Project Affected'.
In point of fact, the government of Gujarat hasn't even managed to
rehabilitate people
from its own 19 villages slated for submergence, let alone the rest of
the 226 in the
other two states. The inhabitants of these 19 villages have been
scattered to 175
separate rehabilitation sites. Social links have been smashed,
communities broken
up.
In practice, the resettlement story (with a few 'ideal village'
exceptions) continues to
be one of callousness and broken promises. Some people have been given land,
others haven't. Some have land that is stony and uncultivable. Some have
land that is
irredeemably water-logged. Some have been driven out by landowners who sold
land to the government but haven't been paid yet.
Some who were resettled on the peripheries of other villages have been robbed,
beaten and chased away by their host villagers. There have been occasions when
displaced people from two different dam projects have been allotted contiguous
lands. In one case, displaced people from three dams-the Ukai Dam, the Sardar
Sarovar Dam and the Karjan Dam-were resettled in the same area. In addition to
fighting amongst themselves for resources-water, grazing land, jobs-they
had to
fight a group of landless labourers who had been sharecropping the land
for absentee
landlords who had subsequently sold it to the government.
There's another category of displaced people-people whose lands have been
acquired by the government for Resettlement Sites. There's a pecking
order even
amongst the wretched-Sardar Sarovar 'oustees' are more glamorous than other
'oustees' because they're occasionally in the news and have an ongoing case in
court. (In other development projects, where there's no press, no nba, no
court case,
there are no records. The displaced leave no trail at all.)
In several resettlement sites, people have been dumped in rows of corrugated tin
sheds which are furnaces in summer and fridges in winter. Some of them
are located
in dry river beds which, during the monsoon, turn into fast-flowing
drifts. I've been
to some of these 'sites'. I've seen film footage of others: shivering
children, perched
like birds on the edges of charpais, while swirling waters enter their
tin homes.
Frightened, fevered eyes watch pots and pans carried through the doorway
by the
current, floating out into the flooded fields, thin fathers swimming
after them to
retrieve what they can.
When the waters recede they leave ruin. Malaria, diarrhoea, sick cattle
stranded in the
slush. The ancient teak beams dismantled from their previous homes, carefully
stacked away like postponed dreams, now spongy, rotten and unusable.
Forty households were moved from Manibeli to a resettlement site in
Maharashtra. In
the first year, 38 children died.
In today's papers (Indian Express, April 26, '99) there's a report about
nine deaths
in a single rehabilitation site in Gujarat. In the course of a week.
That's 1.2875 paps
a day, if you're counting.
Many of those who have been resettled are people who have lived all their
lives deep
in the forest with virtually no contact with money and the modern world.
Suddenly
they find themselves left with the option of starving to death or walking
several
kilometres to the nearest town, sitting in the marketplace (both men and
women),
offering themselves as wage labour, like goods on sale.
From being self-sufficient and free, to being impoverished and yoked to
the whims
of a world you know nothing, nothing about-what d'you suppose it must
feel like?
Would you like to trade your beach house in Goa for a hovel in Paharganj?
No? Not
even for the sake of the Nation?