Summary
Guinea: Dam Displacement Destroys Livelihoods
16,000 People Losing Land for China-Backed Souapiti Project
Souapiti’s output, however, has a human cost. The dam’s reservoir will ultimately displace an estimated 16,000 people from 101 villages and hamlets. The Guinean government had moved 51 villages by the end of 2019 and said it planned to conduct the remaining resettlements within a year. Forced off their ancestral homes and farmlands, and with much of their land already, or soon to be flooded, displaced communities are struggling to feed their families, restore their livelihoods, and live with dignity.
The Souapiti project is an example of China’s support for global hydropower and the role of Chinese foreign investment in large-scale infrastructure projects in Africa. China International Water & Electric Corporation (CWE) – a wholly owned subsidiary of the world’s second largest dam builder, state-owned China Three Gorges Corporation – is constructing the dam and will then jointly own and operate it with the Guinean government.
The Souapiti dam is also part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure stretching across some 70 countries, which has supported large-scale hydropower projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The state-owned policy bank Export-Import Bank of China (China Eximbank), which has made loans exceeding over a trillion yuan (US$150 billion) to support BRI projects, is financing the project through a US$1.175 billion loan. In the face of criticism over the environmental and social impact of BRI projects, China’s president, Xi Jinping, pledged in April 2019 that the BRI would support “open, clean, and green development.”
This report documents the impacts of the Souapiti dam on displaced residents’ access to land, food and livelihoods. The report is based on more than 90 interviews with displaced residents, communities yet to be moved, and villages on whose land people are resettled, as well as interviews with business and government leaders involved in the resettlement process. The report makes recommendations on how resettlements can be improved going forward, and describes the remedies needed for communities that have already been displaced.
Residents displaced by the dam are resettled in concrete houses on land ceded by other villages. Residents have so far not obtained legal titles to their new land, creating a risk of future land conflicts between displaced families and host communities. Displacement is rupturing longstanding social and cultural links between families in the area. “In our culture, our social and familial bonds are essential,” said one displaced resident. “Extended families are being split apart. Whenever there is something to celebrate or mourn in the family, we feel the distance.”
Souapiti’s reservoir is also flooding a vast area of agricultural land, threatening communities’ means of subsistence. The dam’s reservoir will eventually flood 253 square kilometers of land, including an estimated 42 square kilometers of crops and more than 550,000 crop-bearing trees. A 2017 project document warned starkly that, “displaced populations will generally have less favorable land than they have been farming for generations.”
Dozens of displaced residents told Human Rights Watch that they are already struggling to find adequate food for their families. “The people here are hungry, sometimes I don’t eat so my children can,” said a woman displaced from the village of Tahiré Center in 2019. Residents from several villages said that, whereas before being displaced they used to grow their own food, they must now find enough money to buy it from local markets. “With the fields gone, we’re slowly selling our cattle to make ends meet,” said a local herder and farmer. “We’re fragile like eggs because of the suffering here,” said a community leader relocated in 2019. “It’s only thanks to God that we survive.”
Officials at the Souapiti Agency acknowledged that displacement threatens communities’ livelihoods. “When you move a village, you’re breaking up the way they make a living, and you have to try to reestablish it,” said the Souapiti Agency’s head of environmental management and sustainable development. The Souapiti Agency said it intends to restore communities to the same or improved standard of living that they enjoyed prior to the resettlement. The Souapiti Agency does not provide displaced residents with replacement farmland but said it will assist them to farm more intensively on their remaining land and find new income sources, such as fishing or cattle-raising.
Displaced residents, however, have so far received no such assistance. “We’re not asking for something extraordinary. Prepare land for us to continue our activities, a pasture area for livestock farming. Respect the promises made,” said the president of Tahiré District, which encompasses several villages relocated in June 2019.
International human rights standards require that resettled populations have immediate access to livelihood sources, and that resettlement sites should include access to employment options. The 2015 and 2017 action plans prepared to guide the resettlement recommended that the Souapiti Agency begin work on livelihood restoration programs as soon as construction on the dam started in 2015. At the end of 2019, however, the Souapiti Agency had not started implementing livelihood restoration measures and displaced populations were receiving no support to help them reestablish the farming-dependent lifestyle they had left behind. The Souapiti Agency told Human Rights Watch that it is, “in the process of redoubling its efforts to invest in the restoration of livelihoods in the coming month and for years to come.”
The Souapiti Agency pointed out that, in the short term, the government has provided food assistance – two deliveries of rice over six months and cash for basic essentials – to displaced families. “It helps people get on their feet,” said a Souapiti Agency official. But residents said that, given how long it would take to find new livelihoods, this was not enough. “We consumed what we were given in just over a month,” said a father of five resettled in June 2019 from Warakhalandi. International standards recommend that displaced communities receive support until they return to the living standards they enjoyed prior to resettlement.
The Souapiti Agency also said that it compensates residents for the trees and crops growing on flooded land, although it has provided no payments to reflect the value of the land itself. Farmers have therefore received no compensation for land lying fallow as part of a crop rotation system, nor for land used for grazing animals.
A lack of transparency in the compensation process – with the Souapiti Agency failing to adequately inform people about how compensation is calculated – has also fueled dissatisfaction with the payments made. Some residents said they have not been paid any compensation at all; others contend that, while they had been compensated for perennial crops, like fruit trees, they have received nothing for annual crops like rice or cassava. “The government gave us what they wanted. We accepted money without negotiation because we didn’t know the value of our resources,” said one village leader. Several women said that the bulk of compensation has been paid to men in family or community leadership roles, giving women little say over how money is used.
Residents from all the villages Human Rights Watch visited said that they had complained to representatives of the Souapiti Agency or to local government officials about the resettlement process, but that they had received either no response or one that did not address their concerns. “Someone says give [your complaint] to this person. They ask you to wait. He also has his director. Who are we supposed complain to?” said a community leader from Konkouré district. The Souapiti Agency told Human Rights Watch that it had “delayed” in implementing a formal grievance policy, and only did so in September 2019, after more than fifty villages had been moved. The Souapiti Agency did not explain the reason for the delay. As of December 2019, 110 complaints had been submitted to the new grievance mechanism.
The Souapiti Agency said that for future relocations is it negotiating agreements with communities that set out the Agency’s responsibilities during the process. While this could help clarify displaced residents’ rights, a sample agreement shared by the Souapiti Agency contains only a single paragraph summary of the Agency’s obligations and offers no detail on how the Souapiti Agency will address key issues like lack of agricultural land and support for livelihood assistance. The Souapiti Agency should also ensure that residents have access to independent legal advice, of their choice, prior to signing agreements.
Furthermore, to address the profound problems in the villages that have already been resettled, the Souapiti Agency should negotiate agreements with displaced households detailing how the Agency will remedy problems with access to land and livelihoods and any residual issues with the quality of housing and infrastructure at resettlement sites. The Souapiti Agency should also review the compensation payments made so far and explain clearly how compensation was calculated. Any underpayments should be remedied immediately.
The flawed resettlement process for the Souapiti dam is also evidence of the need for Chinese companies, banks, and regulators to ensure that BRI projects and other Chinese overseas investments respect human rights. CWE, in an email to Human Rights Watch, said that the resettlement is the responsibility of the Guinean government but that, as a shareholder in Souapiti, the company “participates in the reinstallation and plays a role of supervisor.” CWE, as well as China Eximbank, should use their influence to ensure that the Souapiti Agency addresses the problems identified in this report.
Finally, with more hydropower projects on the horizon, Souapiti’s resettlement process should alert the Guinean government of the need for better regulation and oversight. The government should, after consultation with civil society and impacted communities, draft and adopt regulations that clearly define the rights of anyone who loses access to land or is resettled due to large-scale development projects. “We’re leaving our home for the development of Guinea,” one community leader from Konkouré Center told Human Rights Watch. “We want the government to help us – otherwise we will suffer.”
Indian families uprooted by dam win compensation after decades-long battle
February 10, 2017 / 4:00 PM / 3 years ago
NEW DELHI, Feb 10 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - After a decades-long
struggle by campaigners, India’s top court has ordered Madhya Pradesh
state to compensate hundreds of families forced from their homes to make
way for a dam.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered the state government to pay 6 million rupees ($90,000) to each of the 681 families who did not receive any compensation for their land that was acquired for the Sardar Sarovar project in western India.
“You have been struggling for compensation for 38 years. We are giving it to you in one shot,” Chief Justice J.S. Khehar told counsel for rights group Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), or Save the Narmada Movement, which had filed the petition.
The ambitious Sardar Sarovar dam is the centrepiece of the multi-billion dollar Narmada Valley development project to provide water and power to millions in India’s west through a series of dams, reservoirs and canals spanning three states.
It was completed in 2006, about two decades after construction began. The project has been mired in controversy since it was conceived in the 1960s, with protracted battles over water sharing, evictions and compensation.
The NBA has said the dam displaced 320,000 people — many of them poor tribal farmers who were not properly resettled on fertile land — and disrupted the lives of tens of thousands more. Thousands have still not been compensated, the NBA said.
The families who have won compensation had remained on their land, refusing to accept the state’s terms. The court asked them to leave by July 31.
The court also ordered the state to pay 1.5 million rupees each to 1,358 families who had earlier agreed the compensation, and asked the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra to prepare a plan for relief and rehabilitation for others displaced there.
“I am happy with the Supreme Court order, but I think the court should have covered more families for compensation,” said Medha Patkar, lead campaigner of NBA.
“All the affected families would have benefited then.”
About 65 million people were displaced in India by dams, highways, mines, power plants and airports between 1950 and 2005, according to Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Less than a fifth have been resettled.
In the wake of newspapers reporting the shutting down of gates of the
Sardar Sarovar Project, several people displaced from the Narmada
Valley during its construction made their way to the Indore bench of the
Madhya Pradesh high court. These people expressed their discontent with
the rehabilitation sites allotted to them and articulated serious
lapses in implementation of the Supreme Court order
dated February 8, 2017 which ordered the state to provide adequate cash
package, in addition to bringing up the unavailability of basic
amenities at the resettlement sites.
Advocate Tushar Mehta, representing the Narmada Control Authority (NCA), in response spoke of the crores of rupees spent on this large project and urged the court to recognise the sensitivity of the government. He alleged that this case was been filed with mala fide intent on the part of the displaced and opened his hands wide while declaring, “The facts speak for themselves”.
There are several facts which speak for themselves in this case: almost 40,000 families are being forced to evacuate their land at the behest of an ideology which serves to destroy rather than build. For the last 32 years, the people of the Narmada Valley have stood strong, refusing to bow down to this destruction. They have negotiated with the government through policy changes, judicial processes and protests, all backed by the Gandhian ideology of non-violence. The decision of the state to invoke the National Security Act, which sanctions heavy police powers and grants impunity to arrest any protestor to collectors, on June 1, 2017 is an attempt to stifle the voices of these 40,000 families, whose land is under siege.
As several newspapers start to carry front-page advertisements celebrating the completion of the Sardar Sarovar Project, they fail to mention how the project has failed farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Irrigable, fertile and cultivable land in MP and Maharashtra has been snatched from many farmers in the name of providing water to irrigate the drought-prone Kutch region, but in reality the underdeveloped canal system has been misappropriated to irrigate the treasuries of large MNCs such as Coca Cola.
The backwater levels – or the water that splashes backwards from the water stored in the dam reservoir – were decreased by a technical sub-group formed by the NCA, by ‘revising’ rather than ‘reviewing’ them, as was the mandate in 2006. These levels were revised through a new projection of the maximum water level of the dam. The Narmada Waters Dispute Tribunal Award (NWDTA) had fixed the maximum water level 141.21 metres, but the backwater levels were revised on the basis of a maximum water level of 137.21 metres. This led to approximately 16,000 families being declared as out of submergence. Backwater level submergence areas are entitled to resettlement as any occurrence of flood could cause untold damage to houses, kill cattle and poultry, and render children, the elderly or infirm and pregnant women particularly vulnerable.
Land was thus acquired using the name of backwater level submergence,
but despite the state providing an undertaking to return the land of
families who were declared out of backwater submergence, none of the
land was returned. Some of these persons have shifted to new plots, a
few powerful families have procured large houses. But the ones who
remain confused and uninformed, and are still suffering the most, are
primarily the most marginalised like the landless, women, widows and
tribals.
On June 27, 2017, the sub-divisional magistrate Manawar visited the village Ekalwara. He was aghast to see that the recent backwater levels markings drawn on all sides of the village indicated that the entire village would be under backwater submergence, despite a significant part of the village having been declared to be out of submergence under the new definition. The SDM, a new appointee in the region, expressed helplessness at his inability to help the villagers, who were anguished by the thought of impending floods dispossessing them of the bare minimum they possess. The memory of floods in the Ghazipur district in 2012 and 2013s, where the water came almost till the backwater level even though the rain was not extravagant, haunts Ekalwara, even though it has been declared to be out of backwater submergence levels. Internationally, backwater levels are computed on the basis of the last 1,000 years’ floods but in the Sardar Sarovar Project, the backwater level is being arbitrarily computed on the basis of the highest flood in 100 years – the flood in 1971.
For a farmer, his or her land is the primary source of sustenance. When the farmer in question is marginal, the dependency on the land is greater, as is their vulnerability when the land in question becomes a subject matter of dispute. Bearing in mind the specific vulnerabilities of such farmers, the Madhya Pradesh government, while unilaterally and arbitrarily amending the rehabilitation policy to effectively exclude those whose lands are acquired for the purpose of construction of rehabilitation also as displaced persons entitled to rehabilitation, inserted a proviso to the policy saying that the land of small and marginal farmers, Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes would not be acquired for this purpose as far as possible. Even if land was acquired from such persons, it would be ensured that each of the landholders in the family (includes adult sons, unmarried daughters and landholding daughters) would get a minimum of two hectares of land each of their choice as compensation.
Ignoring Supreme Court orders on resettlement and rehabilitation
The NWDTA puts the burden of rehabilitation entirely on the state of Gujarat, holding Gujarat liable to resettle and rehabilitate all displaced persons. In case the displaced prefer to stay in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat is supposed to pay for their resettlement and rehabilitation. Post the amendment in the backwater submergence level, the Gujarat government has conveniently shirked its responsibilities, transferring the entire burden on to the farmers in Madhya Pradesh, many of them belonging to SC and ST communities, with little or no land left to cultivate. Several of these persons have filed claims in the grievance redressal authority, which has recognised resettlement and rehabilitation, and NWDTA entitlements to those who received the notice for land acquisition prior to the 2001. However, the authority has demonstrated confusion about whether persons who have received notices in lieu of such acquisition post 2001 are entitled to rehabilitation or to benefits of the tribunal award.
The Supreme Court Order dated February 8, 2017, clearly mandates the state to provide habitable resettlement options, with drinking water, drainage, sewerage, primary medical facilities, cattle grazing land and schools, as per the NWDTA. No such facilities are present in the rehabilitation sites which have so far been constructed. Many sites have been allotted on black cotton-growing soil, which is difficult to level and construct on. There is no land provided for grazing cattle; the black soil does not facilitate even wild grass to grow. Some of the land is in a ditch and water from above will flow into the site. There are no proper roads, no drainage facilities, no sewage and, to top it all off, no provisions for water. The house plots allotted to the displaced persons are ridiculously far from their agricultural land and the resettlement sites either have tin sheds to accommodate the project-affected families or a meagre sum has been extended to families for house construction.
The Supreme Court order clearly mentions that 681 families are
entitled to the final package of Rs 60 lakh per two hectares, in lieu of
two hectares of cultivable irrigable land as per the NWDTA. However,
the 60 lakh package has been extended only to 663 families, on the
grounds that the remaining families are not available. Until now, no
complete list of the 681 families, the 663 families or the remaining 18
families has been provided.
The Supreme Court has, furthermore, gone into the calculations of how much money would suffice to enable affected families to purchase land and has fixed the sum of Rs 30 lakh/hectare. Accordingly, it has arrived at the sum of Rs 60 lakh as the settlement for those entitled to two hectares of land, which is the minimum entitlement. The spirit of the judgement is clear – land in return for land or a sum of money creating the capacity to purchase the same amount of land. However, all families, regardless of the amount of land that has been acquired, are being given the Rs 60-lakh package as a blanket settlement, even if the land they gave up was more than two hectares.
Women who are widow mothers, minors and wives have been deemed to be dependants of the male head of the family as per the otherwise-progressive resettlement policy. Unmarried daughter who were majors on the date when the notice of land acquisition was issued have been deemed entitled to a separate landholding title of two hectare, as are landholding women, even if they are widow mothers, minors or wives. However, the rights of landholding women have been severely compromised even after a clear direction from the high court to provide to uphold the policy. Ninety-five percent of applications of such women are pending with the grievance redressal authority, on the pretext that the Narmada Valley Development Authority is going to file a case or has filed an appeal in the high court against the rights of the few women who actually have a landholding title. The grievance redressal authority has decided it would rather sit on these cases and reinforce the idea that women are ‘dependents’ and their property rights are not to be taken seriously.
Potters, fisherfolk and other landless people will, in all
probability, lose their livelihood and the cultural and economic systems
that have until now sustained and nourished them. No alternative
livelihood to prevent their destitution has been planned, going
against the order of the Supreme Court in 1993. Those persons who have
been living in the forests and other lands without a title for years
have been provided rights under the doctrine of ‘adverse possession’ in
the resettlement policy, but this entitlement is yet to find a just
translation in the Valley as hundreds of such families are being coerced
into leaving without any rights being ensured to them.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered the state government to pay 6 million rupees ($90,000) to each of the 681 families who did not receive any compensation for their land that was acquired for the Sardar Sarovar project in western India.
“You have been struggling for compensation for 38 years. We are giving it to you in one shot,” Chief Justice J.S. Khehar told counsel for rights group Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), or Save the Narmada Movement, which had filed the petition.
The ambitious Sardar Sarovar dam is the centrepiece of the multi-billion dollar Narmada Valley development project to provide water and power to millions in India’s west through a series of dams, reservoirs and canals spanning three states.
It was completed in 2006, about two decades after construction began. The project has been mired in controversy since it was conceived in the 1960s, with protracted battles over water sharing, evictions and compensation.
The NBA has said the dam displaced 320,000 people — many of them poor tribal farmers who were not properly resettled on fertile land — and disrupted the lives of tens of thousands more. Thousands have still not been compensated, the NBA said.
The families who have won compensation had remained on their land, refusing to accept the state’s terms. The court asked them to leave by July 31.
The court also ordered the state to pay 1.5 million rupees each to 1,358 families who had earlier agreed the compensation, and asked the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra to prepare a plan for relief and rehabilitation for others displaced there.
“I am happy with the Supreme Court order, but I think the court should have covered more families for compensation,” said Medha Patkar, lead campaigner of NBA.
“All the affected families would have benefited then.”
About 65 million people were displaced in India by dams, highways, mines, power plants and airports between 1950 and 2005, according to Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Less than a fifth have been resettled.
Despite SC Intervention, Those Displaced By Sardar Sarovar Dam Project Struggle With Uncertainty
Resettlement
and rehabilitation packages are being provided in an exclusionary and
ham-handed manner, leaving out those who need it the most.
Advocate Tushar Mehta, representing the Narmada Control Authority (NCA), in response spoke of the crores of rupees spent on this large project and urged the court to recognise the sensitivity of the government. He alleged that this case was been filed with mala fide intent on the part of the displaced and opened his hands wide while declaring, “The facts speak for themselves”.
There are several facts which speak for themselves in this case: almost 40,000 families are being forced to evacuate their land at the behest of an ideology which serves to destroy rather than build. For the last 32 years, the people of the Narmada Valley have stood strong, refusing to bow down to this destruction. They have negotiated with the government through policy changes, judicial processes and protests, all backed by the Gandhian ideology of non-violence. The decision of the state to invoke the National Security Act, which sanctions heavy police powers and grants impunity to arrest any protestor to collectors, on June 1, 2017 is an attempt to stifle the voices of these 40,000 families, whose land is under siege.
As several newspapers start to carry front-page advertisements celebrating the completion of the Sardar Sarovar Project, they fail to mention how the project has failed farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Irrigable, fertile and cultivable land in MP and Maharashtra has been snatched from many farmers in the name of providing water to irrigate the drought-prone Kutch region, but in reality the underdeveloped canal system has been misappropriated to irrigate the treasuries of large MNCs such as Coca Cola.
Changing definitions of submergence
There are also thousands of families residing in the Narmada Valley
in Madhya Pradesh, a large number whom belong to Scheduled Caste
groups and are small farmers, who are refusing to move, for they have
nowhere to go to. Several families are facing submergence but have been
completely exempted from the list of the displaced . Many of them have
land that has come under a ‘tapu’ – which means the land is now
an island. Bridges connecting these islands to the rest of the world
are still to be constructed. Several families have not been surveyed and
many have been exempted from backwater-level submergence through a
vicious game of numbers.The backwater levels – or the water that splashes backwards from the water stored in the dam reservoir – were decreased by a technical sub-group formed by the NCA, by ‘revising’ rather than ‘reviewing’ them, as was the mandate in 2006. These levels were revised through a new projection of the maximum water level of the dam. The Narmada Waters Dispute Tribunal Award (NWDTA) had fixed the maximum water level 141.21 metres, but the backwater levels were revised on the basis of a maximum water level of 137.21 metres. This led to approximately 16,000 families being declared as out of submergence. Backwater level submergence areas are entitled to resettlement as any occurrence of flood could cause untold damage to houses, kill cattle and poultry, and render children, the elderly or infirm and pregnant women particularly vulnerable.
Rally and aam sabha of Narmada Bachao Andolan in Manawar on June 20, 2017. Credit: Nikita Agarwal
On June 27, 2017, the sub-divisional magistrate Manawar visited the village Ekalwara. He was aghast to see that the recent backwater levels markings drawn on all sides of the village indicated that the entire village would be under backwater submergence, despite a significant part of the village having been declared to be out of submergence under the new definition. The SDM, a new appointee in the region, expressed helplessness at his inability to help the villagers, who were anguished by the thought of impending floods dispossessing them of the bare minimum they possess. The memory of floods in the Ghazipur district in 2012 and 2013s, where the water came almost till the backwater level even though the rain was not extravagant, haunts Ekalwara, even though it has been declared to be out of backwater submergence levels. Internationally, backwater levels are computed on the basis of the last 1,000 years’ floods but in the Sardar Sarovar Project, the backwater level is being arbitrarily computed on the basis of the highest flood in 100 years – the flood in 1971.
For a farmer, his or her land is the primary source of sustenance. When the farmer in question is marginal, the dependency on the land is greater, as is their vulnerability when the land in question becomes a subject matter of dispute. Bearing in mind the specific vulnerabilities of such farmers, the Madhya Pradesh government, while unilaterally and arbitrarily amending the rehabilitation policy to effectively exclude those whose lands are acquired for the purpose of construction of rehabilitation also as displaced persons entitled to rehabilitation, inserted a proviso to the policy saying that the land of small and marginal farmers, Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes would not be acquired for this purpose as far as possible. Even if land was acquired from such persons, it would be ensured that each of the landholders in the family (includes adult sons, unmarried daughters and landholding daughters) would get a minimum of two hectares of land each of their choice as compensation.
Ignoring Supreme Court orders on resettlement and rehabilitation
The NWDTA puts the burden of rehabilitation entirely on the state of Gujarat, holding Gujarat liable to resettle and rehabilitate all displaced persons. In case the displaced prefer to stay in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat is supposed to pay for their resettlement and rehabilitation. Post the amendment in the backwater submergence level, the Gujarat government has conveniently shirked its responsibilities, transferring the entire burden on to the farmers in Madhya Pradesh, many of them belonging to SC and ST communities, with little or no land left to cultivate. Several of these persons have filed claims in the grievance redressal authority, which has recognised resettlement and rehabilitation, and NWDTA entitlements to those who received the notice for land acquisition prior to the 2001. However, the authority has demonstrated confusion about whether persons who have received notices in lieu of such acquisition post 2001 are entitled to rehabilitation or to benefits of the tribunal award.
The Supreme Court Order dated February 8, 2017, clearly mandates the state to provide habitable resettlement options, with drinking water, drainage, sewerage, primary medical facilities, cattle grazing land and schools, as per the NWDTA. No such facilities are present in the rehabilitation sites which have so far been constructed. Many sites have been allotted on black cotton-growing soil, which is difficult to level and construct on. There is no land provided for grazing cattle; the black soil does not facilitate even wild grass to grow. Some of the land is in a ditch and water from above will flow into the site. There are no proper roads, no drainage facilities, no sewage and, to top it all off, no provisions for water. The house plots allotted to the displaced persons are ridiculously far from their agricultural land and the resettlement sites either have tin sheds to accommodate the project-affected families or a meagre sum has been extended to families for house construction.
Activists
from the Narmada Bachao Andolan protesting against the Sardar Sarovar
project and the displacement it caused. Credit: PTI/Files
The Supreme Court has, furthermore, gone into the calculations of how much money would suffice to enable affected families to purchase land and has fixed the sum of Rs 30 lakh/hectare. Accordingly, it has arrived at the sum of Rs 60 lakh as the settlement for those entitled to two hectares of land, which is the minimum entitlement. The spirit of the judgement is clear – land in return for land or a sum of money creating the capacity to purchase the same amount of land. However, all families, regardless of the amount of land that has been acquired, are being given the Rs 60-lakh package as a blanket settlement, even if the land they gave up was more than two hectares.
Women who are widow mothers, minors and wives have been deemed to be dependants of the male head of the family as per the otherwise-progressive resettlement policy. Unmarried daughter who were majors on the date when the notice of land acquisition was issued have been deemed entitled to a separate landholding title of two hectare, as are landholding women, even if they are widow mothers, minors or wives. However, the rights of landholding women have been severely compromised even after a clear direction from the high court to provide to uphold the policy. Ninety-five percent of applications of such women are pending with the grievance redressal authority, on the pretext that the Narmada Valley Development Authority is going to file a case or has filed an appeal in the high court against the rights of the few women who actually have a landholding title. The grievance redressal authority has decided it would rather sit on these cases and reinforce the idea that women are ‘dependents’ and their property rights are not to be taken seriously.
Narmada Bachao Andolan rally in Dhar on June 27, 2017
The
Supreme Court on February 8 instructed the displaced persons to
approach the grievance redressal authority in case of any trouble. It
has also laid down a solid timeline – all land in return for land
(through the cash package) was to be provided by March 8, 2017, the
resettlement and rehabilitation work was to be completed by May 8,
2017 and the project-affected families were allowed to be evacuated by
force only after July 31, 2017. On June 13, there were a total of 6,752
cases pending before the grievance redressal authority. The estimate is
that presently, the number has risen to about 8,000 cases. The entire
Valley stands at the brink of drowning. The facts really do speak for
themselves.
Nikita Agarwal is an advocate with the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group.