Villages die by night. Quietly. Towns die by day, shrieking as they go. Since independence Big Dams have displaced more than 35-million people in India alone. What is it about our understanding of nationhood that allows governments and “national interest”, that allows — applauds — the violation of peoples’ rights on a scale so vast that it takes on the texture of everyday life and is rendered virtually invisible?
But every now and then something happens to make the invisible visible, the incomprehensible comprehensible. Harsud is that something. It is literature. Theatre. History.
Harsud is a 700-year-old town in Madhya Pradesh, slated to be submerged by the reservoir of the Narmada Sagar dam, sometimes called the Indira Sagar.
The 92-metre high Narmada Sagar is the second-highest dam of the many large dams on the Narmada. The reservoir of the Narmada Sagar is designed to be the largest in India. To irrigate 123 000ha of land it will submerge 91 000ha. This includes 41 000ha of prime dry deciduous forest, 249 villages and the town of Harsud.
Odd math wouldn’t you say? Those who have studied the Narmada Sagar project have warned us for years that of all the high dams on the Narmada, the Narmada Sagar would be the most destructive.
Construction of the dam began in 1985. For the first few years it proceeded slowly. It ran into trouble with finance and land acquisition. In 1999, after a fast by activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, work was suspended altogether.
On May 16 2000, in keeping with the central government’s push to privatise the power sector and open it to global finance, the government of Madhya Pradesh signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of India to “affirm the joint commitment of the two parties to the reform of the power sector in Madhya Pradesh”.
These agreements will inevitably lead to the pauperisation and dispossession of people in the state.
The National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) boasts that the dam will eventually take care of the “power needs” of the state. That’s not a claim that stands up to scrutiny.
Madhya Pradesh currently loses 44,2% of its electricity — 12 000-million units a year in “transmission and distribution” losses. That is the equivalent of six Narmada Sagars. If the Madhya Pradesh government could work towards saving even half its current transmission and distribution losses, it could generate power equal to three Narmada Sagar projects, at a third of the cost, with none of the social and ecological devastation.
But instead, once again, we have a big dam with questionable benefits and unquestionably cruel, unviable costs.
After the memorandum for the Narmada Sagar was signed, the NHPC set to work with its customary callousness. The dam wall began to go up at an alarming pace. At a press conference on March 9 2004 Yogendra Prasad, chairperson and managing director of the NHPC, boasted that the project was eight to 10 months ahead of schedule.
He said that because of better management the costs of the project would be substantially lower. Asked to comment on the objections being raised by the Narmada Bachao Andolan about rehabilitation, he said the objections were irrelevant.
“Better management”, it now turns out, is a euphemism for cheating thousands of poor people.
On the outskirts of Harsud you pass row upon row of cruel, corrugated tin sheds. Tin roofs, tin walls, tin doors, tin windows. As blindingly bright on the outside as they are blind dark inside. A sign says Baad Raahat Kendra (Flood Relief Centre.) It is largely empty except for the bulldozers, jeeps, government officers and police, who stroll around, full of the indolent arrogance that comes with power. The centre is where, only a few weeks ago, the government college stood.
And then, under the lowering, thundery sky, Harsud … like a scene out of a Gabriel Garcia Márquez novel.
The first to greet us was an old buffalo, blind, green-eyed with cataract. Even before we entered the town we heard the announcement repeated over and over again on loudspeakers attached to a roving matador van. “Please tether your cattle and livestock. Please do not allow them to roam free. The government will make arrangements to transport them.”
Where to? People with nowhere to go are leaving. They have loosed their livestock on to Harsuds’ ruined streets. And the government doesn’t want drowning cattle on its hands.
Behind the blind buffalo, silhouetted against the sky, the bare bones of a broken town. A town turned inside out, its privacy ravaged, its innards exposed. Personal belongings, beds, cupboards, clothes, photographs, pots and pans lie on the street. In several houses caged parakeets hang from broken beams. An infant swaddled in a sari‒crib sways gently, fast asleep in a doorway in a free-standing wall.
Perched on the concrete frames of wrecked buildings, men, like flightless birds, are hammering, sawing, smoking, talking.
The people of Harsud are razing their town to the ground. Themselves. The very young and the very old sit on heaps of broken brick. The able-bodied are frenetically busy. They’re tearing apart their homes, their lives, their past, their stories. They’re carting the debris away in trucks and tractors and bullock carts. Harsud is hectic. Like a frontier town during a gold rush. The demise of a town is lucrative business. People have arrived from nearby towns. Trucks, tractors, dealers in scrap-iron, timber and old plastic, throng the streets, beating down prices, driving hard bargains, mercilessly exploiting distress sales.
Migrant workers camp in makeshift hovels on the edge of town. They are the poorest of the poor. They have come from Jhabua, and the villages around Omkareshwar, displaced by the other big dams on the Narmada. The better off in Harsud hire them as labour. A severely malnourished demolition squad. And so the circle of relentless impoverishment closes in on itself.
In the midst of the rubble, life goes on. Private things are now public. People are cooking, bathing, chatting, (and yes, crying) in their wall-less homes. The man who is demolishing the mosque is trying to save the coloured glass. Two men are trying to remove the Shiv Ling from a small shrine without chipping it. There is no method to the demolition. No safety precautions. Just a mad hammering. A house collapses on four labourers. When they are extricated one of them is unconscious and has a steel rod sticking into his temple. But they’re only adivasis. They don’t matter.
There is an eerie, brittle numbness to the bustle. It masks the government’s ruthlessness and peoples’ despair. Everyone knows that nearby, in the Kali Machak tributary, the water has risen. The bridge on the road to Badkeshwar is already under water.
There are no proper estimates of how many villages will be submerged in the Narmada Sagar reservoir, when and if the monsoon comes to the Narmada Valley.
When the reservoir of the first dam on the Narmada — the Bargi dam — was filled in 1989, it submerged three times more land than government engineers said it would.
One-hundred-and-one villages were slated for submergence, but in the monsoon of 1989, when the sluice gates were finally closed and the reservoir was filled, 162 villages (including some of the government’s own resettlement sites) were submerged. There was no rehabilitation. Tens of thousands of people slid into destitution.
Today, 15-years later, irrigation canals have still not been built. So the Bargi dam irrigates less land than it submerged and only 6% of the land that its planners claimed it would irrigate. All indicators suggest that the Narmada Sagar could be an even bigger disaster.
Farmers who usually pray for rain, now trapped between drought and drowning, have grown to dread the monsoon.
The media in Madhya Pradesh have done a magnificent job. Local journalists have doggedly exposed the outrage for what it is. A normally anaesthetised, unblinking public has been roused to anger.
Can it really be that 30 000 families have nowhere to go? Can it really be that a whole town has nowhere to go? Ministers and government officials assure the press that a whole new township — New Harsud — has been built near Chhanera, 12km away. On July 12, in his budget presentation, Madhya Pradesh Minister of Finance Shri Raghavji announced: “Rehabilitation of Harsud town, which was pending for years, has been completed in six months.”
Lies.
New Harsud is nothing but mile upon mile of stony, barren land in the middle of nowhere. A few hundred of the poorest families of Harsud have moved there and live under tarpaulin and tin sheets. In New Harsud there is no water, no sewage system, no school, no hospital. Plots have been marked out like cells in a prison, with mud roads that criss-cross at right angles.
They get water from a tanker. Sometimes they don’t. There are no toilets and there is not a tree or a bush in sight for them to piss or shit behind. When the wind rises it takes the tin sheets with it. Most important of all, there is no work in New Harsud.
When media attention trails away so will the water tankers. People will be left in a stony desert with no option but to flee. Again.
And this is what is being done to people from a town. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to imagine what is happening to the villages.
The responsibility of surveying the submergence zone for the purposes of compensation and rehabilitation had been transferred to the NHPC. The responsibility for actual “land acquisition and rehabilitation” still rests with the government. The NHPC holds 51% of the equity in the project. Between the two “interested parties”, they are in a hurry to get the job done and keep the costs down.
The first, most deadly, sleight of hand involves the definition of who counts as “project affected”. The absolute poorest in the villages are sloughed off at this stage.
Essentially those who are landless — fisher people, boat people, sand quarriers, daily-wage workers and those who are considered “encroachers” do not qualify.
In some cases whole villages have fallen prey to this process.
The next lethal blow is when rates of compensation are fixed. The fortunate people who actually qualify as “project affected”, asked, quite reasonably, to be compensated for their land according to the prevailing land prices in the villages in the command area of the dam. They received almost exactly half of that. As a result, farmers who had 10 acres of land will barely manage five. Small farmers with a couple of acres, become landless labourers. Rich become poor. Poor become destitute. It’s called “better management”.
And it gets worse.
Patwaris and revenue inspectors descended on Harsud and the “notified” villages like a terminator virus. They held thousands of peoples’ futures in their grasping fists. Every person we spoke to told the same story.
The technique they described is as diabolical as it is simple. Basically the patwaris and inspectors undervalued everything. Irrigated land was entered as unirrigated. A five-acre farm became four acres. And so on. The way out was to bribe the patwaris and inspectors. The poor simply did not have the liquid cash to pay the going rate — “Hum feelgood nahin kar paaye”. Those who managed to make the patwaris “feelgood”, managed to get even their cattle sheds entered as palatial homes. Of course, much of this made its way back to the officials as more “feelgood”.
Even this unfair, absurd compensation that was promised has not been fully disbursed. So in the villages and in Harsud, thousands of people continued to cling to their homes.
The state government knew that if it could break Harsud, the despair and resignation would spread to the villages. To break Harsud once and for all, to ensure that people never came back even if the monsoon failed and the town was not fully submerged, meant demolishing the town physically. In order to create panic they simulated a flood, by releasing water from the Bargi reservoir upstream. On June 23 the water in the Kalimachak tributary rose by a metre and a half. Still people didn’t move. On June 27 more than 300 police and paramilitary forces staged a march through the terrified town. Companies of mounted police, the Rapid Action Force, the paramilitary and armed constabulary paraded through the streets.
On June 29 the High Court issued a tepid, cautious interim order. Morale in Harsud sank. Still the deadline of June 30 passed without event. On the morning of July 1 loudspeakers mounted on vehicles criss-crossed the town announcing that the 25 000 rupees (about R3 350) grant would only be given to those who demolished their homes that very night.
Harsud broke.
All night people smashed away at their own homes with crowbars, hammers, iron rods … By morning it looked like a suburb of modern day Baghdad.
The panic spread to the villages. Away from the gaze of the media, in place of the lure of 25 000 rupees, the government resorted to good old-fashioned repression. In fact repression in the villages had begun a while ago. In village after village people told us in precise, heartbreaking detail how they had been cheated. People described how a posse of policemen would arrive in a village, dismantle hand pumps and cut electricity connections. Those who dared to resist were beaten. In each of the villages we visited, the schools had either been demolished or occupied by the police.
We left Harsud at dusk. On the way we stopped at the Baad Raahat Kendra. There were very few people around, although a couple of families had moved into the tin sheds. It was hard to make out the man sitting on the floor in the dark. He said his name was Kallu Driver. I’m glad I met him. He used to be a driver, but 15-years ago he lost his leg in an accident. He lived alone in Harsud. He had been given a cheque for 25 000 rupees in exchange for demolishing his mud hut.
He had been to Chhanera three times to try and cash his cheque. He ran out of money for bus fare. The fourth time he walked. The bank sent him away and asked him to come back after three days. He showed us how his wooden leg had chipped and splintered. He said every night officials threatened him and tried to make him move to New Harsud. They said that the Baad Raahat Kendra was for emergencies only.
Kallu was incoherent with rage “What will I do in that desert?” he said. “How will I live? There’s nothing there.” A crowd gathered at the door. His anger fuelled theirs.
The World Bank, however, disagrees with Driver. It has singled the NHPC out for high praise. In December last year a team of senior World Bank officers visited the Narmada Sagar project. In its draft country assistance strategy (CAS 2004), the bank said: “While for many years the hydro-power business had a poor reputation, some major actors [including the NHPC] have started to improve their environmental and social practices.”
Interestingly, this is the third time in six months that the bank has singled the NHPC out for praise. Why? Read the next sentence in the CAS: “Given this … the bank will work with the government of India … to seek possible new areas of support on a modest scale for hydro-power development.”
What makes the World Bank so very solicitous?
Power and water “reforms” in developing countries are the 21st century’s version of the Great Game. All the usual suspects, beginning of course, with the World Bank, the big private banks and multinational corporations are cruising around, looking for sweetheart deals. But overt privatisation has run into bad weather. It has been widely discredited and is now looking for ways in which to reincarnate itself in a new avatar. From overt invasion to covert insurgency.
Over the past few years the reputation of big dams has been badly mauled. The World Bank was publicly humiliated and forced to withdraw from the Sardar Sarovar project. But now, encouraged by the Supreme Court judgements on the Sardar Sarovar and Tehri dams, it is back on the block, and is looking for a back door into the industry. Who better to cosy up to than the biggest player in India’s hydro-power industry — the NHPC? The NHPC which is eyeing a number of other dam projects and aims to install 32 000MW of power over the next 13 years. That’s the equivalent of 32 Narmada Sagars.
It is dark on the highway back to Khandwa. We pass truck upon truck carrying unmarked, illegal timber.
Trucks carrying away the forest. Tractors carrying away the town. The night carrying away the dreams of hundreds of thousands of people.
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