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Qui custodiet custodiens? ("Who will guard the guardians"?). Thus goes the Latin saying. In today's India, what does it take to make a government obey the law? In the case of the Madhya Pradesh government and the Narmada Control Authority (NCA), defining and restating the law and getting clear orders from the Supreme Court are clearly not enough.
The pleas of those who have been unjustly displaced and provided no compensation are obviously of no interest. Nor is any peaceful mass protest by thousands of ordinary people of the region of any use in changing unlawful decisions, apparently. Even knocking at the gates of the powerful in Delhi, or going on indefinite hunger strike in protest against blatantly illegal actions does not seem to be enough.
Yet all that is being asked, from the government, is that the laws of the land be upheld and the Supreme Court's orders be respected. Even this appears to become something to be extracted as a huge concession after endless requests and ever increasing social pressure.
Consider the recent facts relating to the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. This controversial project has been under question for more than 10 years, as all of its intended benefits have been questioned at different levels. It is the hugest such project in recent years, involving thousands of hectares of land and displacing well over three lakh families. The dam has gradually been raised to 120 metres from the original chosen height of 80 metres, and each increase has involved ever more extensive displacement.
Not only are the supposed gains for the farmers in the dry areas of Saurashtra and Kutch still unclear, but the huge human and ecological costs of submergence and displacement have been inadequately measured and certainly not compensated for. There have also been scathing reports from the Comptroller and Auditor-General's (CAG) office on the financial practices of the project.
Yet the recent furore relates not to the project per se, but to specific measures that blatantly go against administrative and judicial norms. There is overwhelming evidence of completely inadequate rehabilitation, in contravention of previous promises, declared procedures and court strictures. And what is even more alarming is that on March 8, the NCA unilaterally took a decision to raise the dam height from 110.64 metres to 121.92 metres.
This decision was taken even though the Supreme Court in a 2005 judgment had expressly said that raising the height of the dam would not be permitted unless the rehabilitation programme, which was found to be lacking, had been carried out in full. In fact, almost all reports, even those from official sources, confirm that the rehabilitation process thus far has been a disaster.
The core rehabilitation principle in the Sardar Sarovar Project is land for land, rather than cash compensation. The onus has been placed on the state to "acquire and allot" cultivable land to all eligible affected families. According to the Narmada Tribunal Award, rehabilitation sites should have been developed and ready for occupation one year before the date of submergence, and notices for shifting to the developed sites must be issued to each and every project affected family.
Yet in fact, in Madhya Pradesh, hardly any families have been resettled with cultivable land. Instead, some families have been offered or sent off to occupy lands that are already encroached upon by others, or of such poor quality as to be uncultivable, or simply non-existent. Other sites have no house plots and the areas themselves have no amenities. For many thousands of other affected families, there is even no stated site that has been decided upon. And this, according to the government's own affidavits filed before the Supreme Court.
Instead, the State government created a new (and illegal) Special Rehabilitation Package, under which a cash package is given to project affected families instead of land. Usually the amount given is so small that there is no question of purchasing new cultivable land with that money. As a result, the people are not only rendered homeless but deprived of livelihood. Even in Maharashtra and Gujarat, many affected families are still to be either compensated or rehabilitated. The grievance redress authorities are barely functioning in any of the three affected States.
The situation with respect to rehabilitation is so dire that even the Union Minister for Water Resources, Saifuddin Soz, issued a statement on March 10 indicating his lack of confidence in the rehabilitation process thus far. He conceded that in this context the decision of the NCA to raise the height of the dam was premature, and said he would convene a meeting of the Review Committee for NCA to consider the case.
It might be expected that after such an admission, there would be no question of continuing the work of raising the height of the dam. Yet, this is apparently too naive an expectation, since even as late as the first week of April, nearly a month after the statement was issued, no such meeting has been convened and work at the dam site continues apace in complete disregard of all protestation.
All this forced the most recent protest in Delhi, where Medha Patkar and some other activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) went on a hunger strike. This did indeed get some publicity, certainly far more than the months of continuous protests within the region by the affected people. But at the time of writing, it was still not enough to force the government to stop immediately all work on what is a completely illegal exercise at the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Instead, the government only promised to "examine the matter" through a field visit.
Against the mandate
We have in place a Central government that thus far has viewed a significant aspect of development as necessarily involving the sale of land - to agri-businesses, to urban land developers, to big projects in general. The same government that would not stop the height of the dam from being illegally raised, signed a huge deal selling off land to a consortium of private companies for developing Delhi and Mumbai airports in what is an extremely dubious and murky privatisation deal, in the process breaking their promises to airport workers that they would be heard before a final decision. Despite coming into power on an anti-communal and pro-poor platform, it has stubbornly refused to exercise the most elementary discipline on rogue State government like that in Gujarat, even in this matter of respecting the basic rights of its citizens, especially the weak and assetless.
It should be noted that most of the displaced families are Adivasis, and were already among the poorest and most vulnerable communities in India. Dispossession from their meagre resources leaves them no alternative existence. At the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi where many of the activists and affected people had gathered along with local supporters, there was a stark question. We are thrown out of our land and not welcome in cities or villages, so where do we go? How do we continue to exist?
Nearly 150 years after the first war of Indian independence, it seems that it is not only freedom that is of concern. It is not just the case of the state failing to ensure for many of its citizens their right to exist. Its market-obsessed economic priorities seem even to have deprived it of the basic political sense at least to be seen to care for those at the receiving end.
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