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DAM-L LS: S. China Morning Post on SSP & 3 Gorges (fwd)
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 10:47:29 -0800 (PST)
subject: LS: S. China Morning Post on SSP & 3 Gorges
Sender: owner-irn-narmada@netvista.net
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 2000-12-05
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River exodus
JANAKI KREMMER
India's equivalent of the Three Gorges Dam project. Like its Chinese
counterpart, plans to build a huge dam across the Narmada River are mired in
controversy with opponents claiming it could lead to the resettlement of
close to a million people.
And there are numerous parallels between the two projects, from the way
both governments have turned a deaf ear to protests, to complaints about the
mistreatment of villagers forced to leave their homes.
''India and China have displaced and are displacing more people than
any other nation,'' says dam expert Patrick McCully in his book Silenced
Rivers.
Biju Bhai, a 60-year-old farmer in western India, knows nothing of the
Three Gorges project and has barely even heard of China. But his own
experience makes him sympathetic to the predicament of the more than a
million mainland people who will be displaced by the Yangtze River project
that is linked to the largest dam in the world at a height of 185 metres.
''Officials in both our countries seem to do as they please,'' says Mr
Bhai, who was recently displaced from his farm to make way for the Sardar
Sarovar Dam. The dam is one of 30 being built across the Narmada India's
fifth-largest river as part of the country's biggest hydro-electric
projects.
''The Government promised us land equal to what they took away, but
here we have no water to drink and the soil is too stony to cultivate
anything useful,'' he says as his cattle search for shade near his new
makeshift home provided by the authorities a corrugated iron shed which
burns from the heat of the sun.
Like the tens of thousands of other farmers who depended on the
waters of the river that flows through deep forests and fertile plains
westward to the Arabian Sea, Mr Bhai is a bitter man.
''This place is not fit for man or beast the Government showed us
one piece of land which was much better, but then when we were ready to move
they brought us here.''
Mr Bhai, who currently lives at a resettlement camp at Vassna in
Gujarat state, is disturbed by stories that people have died of malnutrition
at the camps.
Such complaints echo those voiced by families resettled as part of the
Three Gorges project. The Post reported on Sunday that peasants from Yunyang
county, downstream of Chongqing, have petitioned Beijing, complaining that
they were cheated and misled by official promises of better conditions in
return for agreeing to move. Some even claim to have been assaulted in their
own homes by officials.
For those who refuse to move in both countries, the situation is often
even worse. In India, the nation's Supreme Court recently dismissed a case
brought by villagers and anti-dam activists and ordered that the Narmada Dam
be raised from its current level of 88 metres to a full height of 138
metres. Although the judgment instructs the states involved in the project
to implement proper rehabilitation for the people displaced, the country's
anti-dam leader, Medha Patkar, views it as a ''virtual surrender to the
pressures of power holders''.
''Every metre counts as it just means more uprooting and more
destruction the verdict by the Supreme Court is like a red rag to the
movement. The people are furious,'' says Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy
who has donated her winnings of about US$40,000 (about HK$312,000) to the
cause.
But the court decision which brought to an end litigation that had
stalled construction of the dam for six years was widely welcomed by
supporters of the project, who say it will not only provide water for
irrigation but a vital source of electricity in a power-starved country.
Keshubhai Patel, Chief Minister of Gujarat state, even declared a half-day
holiday for government employees in celebration of the judgment.
In China and India, protests against the dam projects have failed to
make headway. A book by outspoken Chinese journalist Dai Qing was banned on
the mainland because it criticised the Three Gorges project, and she claims
large numbers of Public Security Bureau officers were deployed to suppress
demonstrations by displaced peasants.
Protests are also having little effect in India. Last year a young
girl died when she became stuck in the silt flowing from the construction
wall that spreads more than a kilometre across the Narmada.
Environmentalists and historians say medieval temples will be submerged and
endangered crocodile species drowned.
Anti-dam publications plead that it is not too late to review the
project. They claim that families which have lived side by side for
generations are being scattered in various resettlement colonies destroying
the fabric of tribal society. ''The Narmada Dam has become a fish bowl of
big dams you can see what happens to societies that live by its shores,''
says Roy.
India is signatory to an International Labour Organisation convention
that states that tribal people displaced in the cause of development shall
be provided with lands of at least equal quality to that which they
previously occupied.
''But there are cases, hundreds of them, where people displaced 30
years ago ... [at the start of the project] have yet to be resettled, let
alone finding land as good as they lost,'' says Mankuzhy Sukumar of the
Narmada Bachao Andolan, who gave up his law studies to work for the anti-dam
movement.
Similarly, negotiated agreements between the developers and displaced
people are also officially required by the Chinese Government before any
resettlement can take place for the Three Gorges project. But the petitions
sent to Beijing complain that some villagers were forced to sign
resettlement contracts.
Corruption has been a persistent problem on the Three Gorges project.
Mainland auditors reported in January that 473 million yuan (about HK$444
million) in resettlement funds was missing, although this was subsequently
denied by officials involved in the project.
Anti-dam activists claim such graft also exists in India. ''In India
too, corruption is rampant, but we know we can do little about that we care
more about the damage done to the people involved,'' says one New Delhi
activist.
Cash compensation has been rejected by many Indian farmers because the
river for them is more than life itself. ''The river is our mother she
gives us fish to eat, water to drink, provides a playground for our children
and helps to cultivate the land,'' says one farmer. Hindus believe that to
merely look at the Narmada will give them salvation.
The Government claims that 200,000 people will be displaced by the
Narmada Dam when it reaches its full height, but unofficial estimates put
the figure closer to a million people. ''The Government has not included the
200,000 people whose homes have been destroyed by the massive 460km main
canal running through the countryside, or the thousands of people who had to
move out to provide homes for the hundreds of workers and officials and the
massive storage space for materials connected with the dam,'' says Mr
Sukumar.
In western Maharashtra state, 33 villages covering about 20,000
hectares will be affected by the new approved height, but they have been
given only 4,200 hectares for resettlement.
Using Chinese government figures, the World Bank has estimated that
10.2 million people were displaced by hundreds of dam projects in China in
the 40 years that followed the revolution. But dam critic Dai Qing puts the
figure at between 40 million and 60 million people.
Since 1947 more than 33 million people, most of them tribal, have been
displaced by dams in India. ''India and China are still building dams,
largely because both have powerful and mostly unaccountable water
bureaucracies which are filled with engineers and which need to keep
building dams to survive,'' says Patrick McCully.
At Jalsindhi, a village slated for submergence nestled in the hillside
on the banks of the Narmada in central Madhya Pradesh state, farmers refuse
to follow others who, in desperation, work as labourers in the cities. ''We
will sit on our farms if the water comes in, we are ready to die if we have
to, but we are not leaving this land of our ancestors,'' says 40-year-old
Gulabia Shankar, whose family has farmed the land for eight generations.
The government of central Madhya Pradesh state admits that it lacks
suitable land to resettle the farmers. Yet it was partly on the basis of
assurance of rehabilitation from the states involved that the Supreme Court
passed its historic verdict.
The World Bank, which stated in 1987 that it was difficult ''to
conceive of ascenario in which India can afford to let the waters of a major
river such as the Narmada run wasted to the sea'', pulled out of the project
seven years ago.
Horrendous conditions in the resettlement camps are forcing some
villagers to return to their original homes, although much of their land may
be submerged. Domkhedi village in western Maharashtra state, survives only
because of a bad monsoon this year.
''We have faith,'' says one village elder. ''We are not afraid of the
river, instead we believe one day that the Narmada will break the dam.''
Janaki Kremmer is a New Delhi-based journalist.
Copyright (c) 2000. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights
reserved.