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DAM-L LS: Dilip D'Souza: Up On The Dam: Man/Maheshwar (fwd)
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Subject: LS: Dilip D'Souza: Up On The Dam: Man/Maheshwar
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Rediff News, March 27, 2001
http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/mar/27dilip.htm
Dilip D'Souza
Up On The Dam
By all rights, I should have been dead to the world.
We had spent four hours, till midnight, being flung
about in the back of a truck designed to magnify every
bump on the road into an aspiring Mount Everest.
Another hour after that was in the back of a jeep
where the bumps were slightly less felt, but whose
driver must have been deaf, going by the volume at
which he played a series of screeching out-of-tune
songs. I was exhausted when we reached this village,
Khedi-Balwadi, and flopped onto a too-small but
welcome string-cot to grab some sleep.
I should have slept like a log. But no. There was too
much going on. Somewhere around four in the
morning, I finally gave up trying and lay there awake,
listening to the sounds around me, the dozens of
voices. The barely suppressed air of excitement. These
people were about to make a statement, and the thrill
was evident.
People were gathering in the little village from
various surrounding hamlets. I
myself had come with a group from the village of
Pathrad, over a hundred
kilometres away via some truly atrocious roads. By the
time the night sky
began fading, hundreds of men, women and kids were
pressed into the
spaces between the huts, chattering and laughing and
waving little blue flags.
I got up, washed my face, checked that I had film in my
camera, and we
were off.
Singing songs and raising slogans, charged with
high-spirited enthusiasm,
our procession fairly raced through fields, over low
rises, over the rocks of
a dry stream bed, took a couple more rises in our
stride -- and suddenly we
were at our destination. A large stone and earthen wall
with a tall crane
hanging over it, a concrete spillway, and another tall
wall on the other side
of the spillway. This is the dam being built on the Man
river, a tributary of
the Narmada, in the south-western corner of Madhya
Pradesh. The dam
that threatens the existence of Khedi-Balwadi and 15
nearby villages.
Without so much as a pause, slogans still ringing in
the clear morning air, our
procession swarmed up two bamboo ramps and onto the
spillway. Within
15 minutes, flags and banners were up all around the
dam. To much
cheering, one young man climbed the crane, taking care
to avoid a large
beehive halfway up, and unfurled a large blue flag on
top. From the time we
set off from Khedi-Balwadi, it had been no more than 30
or 45 minutes.
These few hundred villagers had done what they came
here to do: "capture"
the Man dam as a protest against the destruction it
promises to bring to their
lives.
Today, March 21, there would be no work on this dam
site.
A couple of hours later, there was an exclamation point
on that last
sentiment. Two orange dump trucks rumbled down the
steep slope below
the dam. They were filled with construction material,
and were headed for
an open area to dump it. Without prompting, a group of
50 or so women
poured off the dam and raced after the trucks. The rest
of us watched,
spellbound, from atop the dam. "Nari shakti, Narmada
shakti", ("Woman
power, Narmada power") we could hear them shouting.
They caught up
with the trucks just as they were about to unload their
material. A short
confrontation followed, and suddenly the two trucks
turned around and
sped back the way they came. Only, they could not get
back up the slope
with their loads. One finally deposited half its
material at a turn in the road
and then was able to wheeze slowly up the hill; the
other waited for an
excavator that arrived and pushed it up.
From on top of the dam, from the women far below, a
joyful cheer went up.
Yes sir: no work on the dam today.
Much later, a police team turned up, rounded up many
protestors -- 52
kids among them -- and took them to jail in Dhar. As is
now routine at such
times, the police managed in the process to rough up
several of the villagers.
As I write this, 213 remain in jail -- five days now.
The police claim the villagers threw stones while being
arrested. More
impressive, they have charged the villagers with -- get
ready -- atrocities
against tribals. This last, as near as anybody can
tell, because a few of the
arresting constables were tribals. I suppose that while
they were being
bundled into vans and carted off to jail, these women
and kids and men
took time out to find and then beat the living
daylights out of the tribal cops.
Right. And wake me when we are back on Planet Earth,
OK?
Now it's not as if the protestors did not expect to be
arrested. Or to be
accused of all manner of things. They did. I am not
trying to draw your
attention to the injustice of the arrests, nor the
strange charges against these
people. In some ways, those things are mere details,
just the sideshow.
What I found myself thinking about up on that Man dam,
and which is why I
write this, are a few random questions.
Like: what drives several hundred people, including
children and women
nursing babies, to race pell-mell onto a dam early one
morning and sit there,
knowing full well they are going to be arrested? What
makes a young man
climb up a crane? What sends a few dozen of the women
running after two
dump trucks? Really, what motivates ordinary rural
folks to object to all
those conventional notions of "progress" and
"development", to confront the
might of the state in doing so? Would you do the same?
Actually, I have some idea of the answers to those
questions. Over the few
days before March 21, I had wandered through some
villages -- like
Pathrad -- just upstream of the Maheshwar dam that's
under construction
on the Narmada. If that dam is completed, these
villages will be submerged.
Through those few days, and this morning in
Khedi-Balwadi, I spoke to
many people about these two dam projects. The Narmada
Bachao
Andolan is active in this area, and in fact organized
the protest to the Man
dam. But very deliberately, so I could also meet people
who might disagree
with the NBA, I had chosen to be alone in my
wanderings.
Sure enough, there were people I spoke to who believed
the dams would
be built. There were even some who thought they would
bring good: the
"progress" of the nation and all that, right? But from
them as well as from the
rest, I kept hearing one thing that simply amazed me.
These are dams that have been under construction,
therefore threatening to
push people from their homes, for several years. Yet
everyone I spoke to
said that not a single person from the government had
ever come to tell
them what the dam would do to their homes, about any
rehabilitation
programme. Never. In fact, the first they heard about
the dam, apart from
watching the construction begin, was from NBA activists
who came to their
villages. It was only then that they realized the dam
plans included drowning
them out of their land and homes.
Let me put this in some perspective. I live in the
Bombay suburb of Bandra.
One day, I look out of my window and see construction
beginning on a dam
half a mile away. For some years, I watch the dam rise.
I know that such a
huge project can only have been conceived by the
government. But in all
those years, nobody from the government comes to me, or
to any of my
neighbours, to tell us what the consequences of
building this dam will be for
our homes. When I find out that one of those
consequences just happens to
be that I will end up underwater, how do you think I
might react? How
would my neighbours, my fellow city-dwellers, react?
How would you react?
Maybe you have an aversion to the NBA and what it
stands for. But put
that aside for just a moment and answer this: how would
you react? Do you
think you might swarm that dam?
I have in front of me a copy of a letter from the
government of Madhya
Pradesh's Narmada Valley Development Department to the
vice-chairman
of the Narmada Valley Development Authority in Bhopal.
It is dated May
2, 1999. It lays out seven different "orders" about the
implementation of
various dam projects in the Narmada Valley. One of
those orders reads:
"After reviewing the current situation in the Man and
Jobat [another
Narmada tributary] projects, it has been decided that
... a Rehabilitation
Planning Committee will be constituted. ... The
Committee will keep in mind
[that] the rehabilitation and resettlement of families
living in the areas likely
to be submerged due to the construction work up to 15th
June of any year,
should be completed by the 31st of December of the
preceding year as per
policy."
I had in front of me that morning on the Man dam about
400 people "living
in the areas likely to be submerged due to the
construction work up to 15th
June of" 2001. They were 400 out of some 5000 people --
993 families in
16 villages -- who are likely to be so submerged in
2001. "As per policy",
their rehabilitation and resettlement "should" have
been "completed by the
31st of December of" the year 2000.
Except, it wasn't. Not only has it not been
"completed", they are yet to even
meet a single official involved with implementing this
"policy." That's their
very personal experience of "progress" and
"development."
That, and being charged with atrocities against
tribals.
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