---For the sake of greater common good---
if you are to suffer, you should suffer it in the interest of country...
-- Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking to villagers who were to be desplaced by Hirakud Dam. 1948.
we will request you to move from your houses after the dam come up.If you move it would be good, otherwise will shall release the water and drown you all...
-- Morarji Desai, speaking at the public meeting at the submergence Zone of Pong Dam,1961
*According to the land aquisition act of 1894 (amended in 1984) the government is not legally bound to provide a displaced person with anything but cash compensation. Imagine that.
Most adivasis have no formal title to their land and therefore cannot claim compensation anyway.
Most adivasis --or let's say, most small farmers -- have as much use for money as a supreme judge for a bag of fertilizer.
*The millions displaced doesn't exist anymore, not in history, not even in statistics. Some of them have subsequently been displaced three or four times -- a dam, an artillery range, another dam, a uranium mine, a power project. The great majority is eventually absorbed into slums on the periphery of our great cities, where it coalesces into an immense pool of cheap construction labor (that builds more project that displace more people). True, they're not being destroyed to taken to gas chambers, but i can warrant that the quality of their accommodation is worse than in any concentration camps of the third Reich.....
And steal the nightmare doesn't end. They continue to be uprooted even from their hellish hovel by government bulldozers that fan out on clean up missions whenever elections are comfortingly far away and urban rich get annoyed about hygiene.
*Ninety per cent of India's Big Dams are irrigation dams. But are they the key to India's food security?? To even ask this question is to invite accusations of sedition, of being anti-national, anti-development, of being a foreign agent, of being receiving 'foreign funds'. However the question must be asked.The extraordinary thing is their is no answer.
According to Himanshu Thakker Big Dams account for only twelve per cent of India's total foodgrain production.
*According to the food and civil supplies ministry 10% of India's total food grain production is lost to the rotunds and insects because of bad and inadequate storage facilities. We must be only country in the world that builds dams, uproots communities and submerges forests, in order to feed rats. Clearly we need better storeroom urgently than we need dams.
** India lives in her villages, we are told in every other sanctimonious public speech, That's bullshit. India doesn't live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India's villages just live only to serve her cities. Her villages are her citizen's vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.
* Democracy (our version of it) will be the benevolent mask behind which pestilence flourishes unchallenged.
** India is in a situation today where it pays back more money to the bank in interest and repayment installments than it receives from it. The bank is more cautious about choosing the countries in which it finances project that involve mass displacement. China is its most favored client.It is the great irony of our times--American citizens protest the massacre in Tienanmen square but the bank has used their money to fund studies for the Three Gorges dam in China which is going to displace 1.3 Million people!
* Total affected population by Sardar Sarovar Project is about-- 5,00,000!!!
** The power needed to pump water through its vast network of canals, the sardar sarovar projects end up consuming more electricity than they produced.
* conformation between people and the authorities continued unbated in the valley -- humiliation, arrests, baton charges.
Indefinite fasts terminated by temporary promises and permanent betrayals.
***Even though the dam is nowhere near its eventual projected height, its impact on the environment and the people living along the river is already severe.
Around the dam site and in nearby villages the number of malaria has increased sixfold.
several kilometers upstream from the Sardar Sarovar Dam huge deposit of silt, hip deep and over 200 mitre wide, have cut off the access to the river. Women carrying the water pots now have to walk miles, literally miles, to find a negotiable entry point. Cows and goats get stranded in the mud and die.
The little single-log boat that adivasis use have become unsafe on the irration circular currents caused by the barricade downstreem.
Landless Adivasis and Dalits have traditionally cultivated rice, melons, cucumber and gourds on the rich, shallow silt banks the river leaves when it resides in the dry month. Even now and then the Engineers manning the Bargi Dam(way upstreeem, near Jabalpur) release water from the reservior without warning. Downstreem, the water level in the river suddenly rises. Hundreds of families have had their crops washed away several times, leaving them with no livelihood.......
Suddenly they can't trust their river anymore..........
*Dams have eliminated or endangered one-fifth of the worlds fresh water fishes.!!
So!! Quiz Question -- where will the 40,000 fisherman go?????????
** People stop growing things that they afford to eat, they start growing the things they can only afford to sell. By linking to the market they loose control over their lives.
** according to the secret govt study 50-60% of the Sardar Sarovar command area is prone to salination.
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