The forest cover of the districts along the western ghats like Karwar and Uttara Kannada have been significantly reduced yet the flawed model of development keeps destroying nature and communities living symbiotically in the region.

In the morning, Samvidhan Samman Yatra reached Bhatkal where organisations like Social Democratic Party of India, Welfare Party of India, JDS, Popular Front of India, Student Islamic Organisation and many others welcomed the Yatra on its 19th day. People joined the rally rejecting of anti-constitutional forces who are hell bent on subverting rights conferred to people of the country.

People in large number joined the public meeting organised after the rally in Bhatkal. Sister Celia from Domestic Workers Union and NAPM graced the meeting with her presence. “Samvidhan Samman Yatra is mobilizing voices from all over the country and rejecting anti-constitutional, anti-people, communal forces”, said Himshi Singh from NAPM. She also introduced the travelers with the people of Uttara Kannada who joined the public meeting.

Inayatullah from JDS welcomed everyone on behalf of all the participating organisations and emphasized on the need to get together and protect the western ghats when the country has started facing the consequences of ignoring the importance of nature and indigenous communities.
“Recently, the country is witnessing the garlanding of people accused of mob lynching and atrocities on dalits”, said Bhupendra Singh Rawat from Jan Sangharsh Vahini. He emphasized that the violence is being praised continuously by state machineries in various ways. Even institutions with constitutional powers are tried to be used for political benefits, be it CVC, CBI, Election Commission, or the Judiciary. Nothing remained democratic and aloof from corrupt and unbiased practices. Member of Parliaments are openly threatening the judiciary to refrain from interfering in executives functioning.

Ashish Ranjan from Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan, Bihar said Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Mahatma Gandhi, and many others fought tirelessly for the freedom struggle and the Idea of India. Baba Saheb Ambedkar shaped the Constitution of India after rigorous discussions and deliberations. The Preamble shows us the way to remain peaceful and prosperous. But now again right-wing extremists are posing threat to the cultural integrity and peace of the nation as they did before the independence of India.

Mohammad Toufeek from Socialist Democratic Party applauded the ongoing Yatra and urged people to spread the message to fight against the communal forces with all its strength. The demolition of Babri Masjid was a major blow to the secular fabric of the nation and we cannot let such forces to rise again in a country known for peace and harmony. It was a clear attack on our constitution violating the principles laid in our preamble, the soul of our Constitution.

“Travelling from North to South, People can easily witness the diversity in culture, traditions, language, food, etc. This is our real strength and beauty which unites us and makes us different from other democracy in the world”, said Richa Singh from Sangatin Mazdoor Kisan Sangathan, Uttar Pradesh.

Asad from Student Islamic Organisation extended the views of Richa Singh and said that now the aforesaid unity is under threat. Student Najeeb is still missing. Members of different groups affiliated to ruling party rallying in support of rapists, and killers. He also opined that the yatra is in a direction to restore the lost values which we as a nation and people had before. On behalf of people of Bhatkal, he expressed full support to the yatra and pledged to fight against communal divisive forces that are trying to polarize Bhatkal, Karnataka and the nation.
Renowned social activists like Prafulla Samantara, Lok Shakti Abhiyan, NAPM, Odisha; Gabriele Dietrich, NAPM, Tamilnadu; Amitava Mitra, NAPM, West Bengal; Arundhati Dhuru, NAPM, Uttar Pradesh; Ashish Ranjan – Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan (Bihar); Meera Sanghamitra – NAPM (Andhra Pradesh – Telangana); Bhupendra Singh Rawat – Jan Sangharsh Vahini; Krishnakant – Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (Gujarat); Madhuresh Kumar – NAPM, Delhi; Suhas Kolhekar, Prasad Bagve – NAPM Maharashtra; Sanjay Nazre – Vidrohi Sanskritik Andolan; Yogiraj, Mahendra Rathore, Jayesh Lal – MNREGA Mazdoor Union, Purvanchal Kisan Union, Uttar Pradesh; Ram, Poonam Kanojiya, Subhadra tai, Parvati tai, Ghanekar kaka – Ghar Bachao Ghar banao Andolan, Mumbai; Tilola Haldar, Mrityunjay Haldar – Sundaravan Shramjivi Sangathan; Ramashish Yadav, Premshila Yadav, Manisha Patil; Kalai, Vishnu, Vinod – Organic farmers, Tamilnadu; Fauziya – Jammu & Kashmir Soochna Adhikar Abhiyan; Madhusudan – Odisha; Akshit – Guhaar; Aryaman Jain, Aryan – Delhi; Rimpy – Student, Dibrugarh University; Himshi, Uma – NAPM Delhi, are traveling in the second phase as a part of Samvidhan Samman Yatra.

For further details, contact 9971058735 / 9867348307 / napmindia@gmail.com

Discussion on Samvidhan Samman Yatra

1. On VNM News – https://www.facebook.com/VNMNEWS/videos/851565491900666/
2. महाराष्ट्रात होणाऱ्या संविधान यात्रेत सामील होण्याचे आवाहन… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfOlQqNTgCw&feature=youtu.be
3. संविधान सन्मान यात्रा, Satara 24 taas – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aLMITeoKCI&feature=youtu.be

For details about Samvidhan Samman Yatra, check our website www.samvidhanyatra.wordpress.com
Call for Solidarity – https://samvidhanyatra.wordpress.com/call-for-solidarity/

Samvidhan Samman Yatra
We are standing at crossroads and passing through a critical juncture in India’s history and have a historical responsibility to save and salvage the ethos of this country, to fulfill the dreams of social, economic and political justice that Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar envisioned. There is an overwhelming urgency to come together, beyond diversity of perspectives, to safeguard the constitutional values and principles of humanity, based on social justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, scientific and rational thinking in the social psyche to deal with all these political, economic, social, cultural challenges. The need of the hour is to create understanding and tolerance in society, by peaceful, democratic and constitutional means. It is equally vital to aim for economic equity, social parity, environmental protection, sustainable development, establishment of people’s rights over access of resources and annihilation of caste and patriarchy.

It is with this urgency and spirit that National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) has, after numerous discussions, planned to embark on a Samvidhan Samman Yatra – a nationwide tour to restore and protect the core values of our Constitution and democracy, at a time when there is an all-out attack on the Constitution, people’s rights, livelihoods, environment and the spirit of diversity in the country, even as massive scams, resource loot and dilution of laws are taking place and farmers, workers, students, employees, women, dalits, adivasis, muslims all are on the streets asserting their rights, spaces and freedoms.

Yatra shall travel more than 25000 Kms through 26 states in 65 days holding meetings, discussions, public events, supporting struggles, sharing grief of victims of the violence and hate and spreading message of plurality, love, peace and social justice. The Yatra shall culminate in a Manvadhikar Rally and Jan Sansad in Delhi on 10th December, 2018, the International Human Rights Day.
 

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Image: Tar sands, Alberta. Credit: Dru Oja Jay/Flickr, CC 2.0.

The consequences of colonialism and imperialism, in all their forms and across all their epochs, defy our imagination. Unspeakable cruelties were inflicted, their scars and agonies are unspeakable.

Colonialism was, and remains, a wholesale destruction of memory. Lands, the sources of identity, stolen. Languages, ripped from mouths. The collective loss to humanity was incalculable, as cultures, ideas, species, habitats, traditions, cosmologies, possibilities, patterns of life, and ways of understanding the world were destroyed. Countless ecological traditions – involving diverse ways of being with nature – were swept away.

As formal colonialism came to an end, the process of erasing its crimes from public memory and effacing history began. The forces of forgetting crafted and promulgated mythological narratives of innocent imperial greatness, unblemished by enslavement or genocide. When forced to give away the Congo, King Leopold took to burning all documents associated with his brutal rule. ‘I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there,’ Leopold said. His palace’s furnaces burned for eight days (1).

There are many such shredded chapters that we will never reconstruct. Every death count, every statistic, every fragment of history, is bitterly incomplete. But the preliminary arithmetic of cruelty is enough to illustrate the sheer magnitude of destruction.

So catastrophic and widespread was the decimation of human life in the Americas that nine-tenths of its original population was extinguished through war, epidemic diseases, enslavement, overwork, and famine (2). Most of us have heard the simplistic story of a genocide by germs, where populations were wiped out by diseases to which they had no immunity. But the vulnerability of communities to maladies was not just a product of biological misfortune. Malnutrition, exhaustion, absent sanitation, enslaving missions and overcrowding helped to weaken people’s protection (3). Demographic research has shown, for example, that on Hispaniola, the indigenous population plummeted before any smallpox cases were documented (4).

In the last decades of the 19th century, tens of millions of Indians died of famine, while British colonial policy forced the country to export record levels of food.  If their bodies were laid head to foot, the corpses would cover the length of England 85 times over (5). The evisceration of the Congo, designed to extract maximum levels of ivory and rubber, killed at least 10 million people – half the country’s population at the time (6).

The bounties of colonialism underwrote the wealth of Europe. Seams of silver and gold swelled the coffers of banks and merchants. The fortunes made from metals, slave trading, and plantation commodities, served as direct stimuli to colonial economies, helping to bankroll the Industrial Revolution (7). Consumers in the colonies proved vital to purchasing products and supporting Western European industries (8). By the late 19th century, over half of the British state’s revenue stemmed from its colonies.

Colonialism reconfigured the world economy. India’s share of the global economy shrank from 27 per cent to 3 per cent. China’s share shrank from 35 per cent to 7 per cent. Europe’s share exploded from 20 per cent to 60 per cent (9). The tables of development were overturned. In the 18th century, differences in income across the world’s leading civilizations were minimal. It is in fact likely that average living standards in Europe at this time were lower than elsewhere (10).

The story of colonialism, sanitized and blotted out from the historical consciousness, needs to be recalled, for many reasons – not the least of them because of our concerns about the climate. Colonialism’s ledger of lavish of destruction – its wholesale removal of ecosystems, and the subjugation of those communities that had nourished them – unleashed major rises in emissions. Between 1835 and 1885, deforestation in the territories of the United States was the largest global contributor to emissions (11).

Ultimately, colonialism transformed the speed, scope and scale of ecological destruction. It generated dramatic changes in land and marine ecosystems, and transformed the dynamics of economic growth. Political ecologist Jason Moore argues that ‘the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization’, marked ‘a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities’ (12).

Across most continents and contexts, the grip and influence of empire impelled an era of major devastation. As environmental historian Joachim Radkau outlines, ‘[i]n the opinion of the vast majority of scholars, a large-scale ecological crisis developed in the 18th century and became acute and obvious in the 19th… In China, as in Europe, one can detect in the 18th century a desire to use natural resources to their limits and to leave no more empty spaces…’ (13).

Its legacies endure today in colonial complexes that underlie our visions of nature, and other humans. Economically, its inheritance was the naturalization of a model of intense cost-shifting, which allowed for states to offload resource-consuming industries, and the costs of ecological damage. By the birth of the New World, silver mines and seams in Bohemia and Saxon had been exhausted. European forests were bearing the burden of centuries of exploitation for use in shipbuilding. Around 3,000 oaks were required to build a single warship (14). Iberian shipbuilding, which had eaten through the forests of Catalonia, was transplanted to Cuba and Brazil (15). The construction of British battleships was transferred from London to Bombay shipyards (16). Once the industries had been externalized, resources could be extracted with scant attention paid to the environmental consequences. Japanese policies for example, protected forests in Japan, but exploited them during Japan’s rule of Korea (17).

Colonialism also firmly shaped the ways we view conservation and ecology. Colonial efforts to protect nature, particularly popular at the end of the nineteenth century, became further opportunities for colonial control. Inhabitants were removed from areas of ‘pristine nature’ that then became national parks, while lands outside these were devoted to intensive extraction. Ahwahneechee communities were, for example, expelled from the valleys that today make up Yosemite Park in California.
 

Neocolonialism: the metabolism of misery

During the 19th and 20th centuries, formal colonialism came to an end. Countries were liberated, new flags unfurled, and rewritten constitutions adopted. But although imperial states were forced to relinquish their hold, their legacies prevailed. Centuries of enslavement, despotism, crushed sovereignty, and ecological demolition, had guaranteed a long afterlife to imperial haunting, and its logics of conquest and predation. Many of the new nation states carried on down tracks laid for them by the colonial powers and continued the process of ecological destruction. Under the banners of development, thousands of communities were evicted and displaced in development programmes.

In India, between 1947 and 2000, around 24 million Adivasis (indigenous peoples) were displaced by large development projects. The construction of the Narmada Dam displaced over 100,000 people alone. In Brazil, military and non-military governments triggered the wholesale destruction of huge areas of the Amazon rainforest, subsidizing road building, clearing the way for large cattle ranches, and opening up the land for migrants. In Egypt, the regime of Hosni Mubarak transferred control of land to large landowners, evicting hundreds of thousands of farmers were evicted, under the banner of ‘development’.

In 1972, following colonial precedents, the Nigerian government outlawed traditional agriculture by fire clearance, a move that would subsequently contributed to devastating famines (18). In addition, the government’s encouragement of new oil projects was described by prominent Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa, as ‘recolonization’ (19). 

Deforestation took hold across former colonies. Between 1960 and 1980, Indonesia’s timber exports rose 200-fold. Côte d’Ivoire’s timber exports rose from 42,000 tonnes in 1913 to 1.6 million tonnes in the early 1980s; less than a fortieth of the country’s forests remain (20). Between 1900 and the present day, over half the ‘developing world’s’ forests were removed (21).

Those resisting these models, were met with severe repression, and extrajudicial violence (22). This metabolism of misery continues to this day, with hundreds of social leaders and community activists killed worldwide every year, for resisting the encroachment of extractive frontiers. Between 2010 and 2017, at least 124 environmental and land activists were murdered in Honduras (23).

The frontiers of ecological destruction are constantly expanding, as the global economy’s appetite for new materials staggers on. Between 2003 and 2015, the number of mining projects in Argentina rose from 40 in 2003 to 800 in 2015 (24). A fifth of Peru has been conceded to mining companies (25).

Today’s world is a landscape scarred by environmental violence: the monocultural soybean fields of Brazil’s Mato Grosso; the modern gold rushes of Madre de Dios and Zamfara; the vast tar-sands ponds of Canada; the forest-consuming coal mines of Kalimantan; the megadams of the Mekong Delta; the rivers dredged to yield sand; the phosphate mines of Western Sahara; the palm plantations of Tela; the bauxite mines of Guinea; the mesh of pipelines across the Niger Delta; the sugarcane fields of Uttar Pradesh.

It is also a world of furnaces: the brick kilns of Peshawar; the smelters of Norilsk; the glass industries of Firozabad; the chemical factories of Dzerzhinsk; the steel mills of Xingtai and Mandi Gobindgarh; the fertilizer plants of Baocun; the tanneries of Hazaribagh and Rawalpindi; the aluminium smelters of Al Jubail; the polluted deltas of Ogoniland; the ship graveyards of Bangladesh; the cancer villages of industrial China.

The full impact of colonialism would be revealed in its long-term impacts. It radically transformed landscapes, state relations, philosophies and cultures, leaving as one of its inheritance an intensive and plunderous economic model. In pursuit of resources, countries ran roughshod over limits, and destroyed many of the ecosystems necessary for preventing climate change.

This is the second of two extracts from ‘The Memory We Could Be’, Daniel’s new book published this Autumn by New Internationalist Books.

Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik is a writer and activist. He tweets at @bywordlight 

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net

Notes

1. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999.
2. JR McNeill, Mosquito Empires, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p 16.
3. Justin McBrian, ‘Accumulating Extinction’, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? PM Press, 2016, pp 116-137.
4. Massimo Livi Bacci, Conquest: The Destruction of the American Indios, Polity, 2008.
5. Cited in Jason Hickel, ‘Enough of aid – let’s talk reparations’, Guardian, 27 Nov 2015.
6. Adam Hochschild, op cit.
7. Jason Hickel, The Divide, William Heinemann, 2017.
8. Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
9. Angus Maddison, The World Economy, OECD, 2006.
10. Mike Davis, ‘The Origin of the Third World’, Antipode, Vol 32, No 1, 2000.
11. John L Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History, Cambridge University Press 2014, p 496.
12. Jason W Moore, ‘The Capitalocene, Part I’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol 44, No 3, 2017.
13. Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p 111.
14. Jeremy L Caradonna, Sustainability: A History, Oxford University Press, p 33.
15. Jason W Moore, ‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’, Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol 10, No 1, 2010.
16. Joachim Radkau, op cit, p 173
17. Ibid, p 117.
18. Michael J Watts, Silent Violence, University of Georgia Press, 2013.
19. Silke Stroh, ‘Towards a Postcolonial Environment?’, Local Natures, Global Responsibilities, Rodopi, 2010, p 197.
20. Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World, Random House, 2007, p 192.
21. John H Bodley, Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems, Rowman Altamira, 2012, p 47.
22. Such as in the case of the Rio Negro massacres in Guatemala.
23. Autumn Spanne, ‘Why is Honduras the world’s deadliest country for environmentalists?’, Guardian, 7 Apr 2016.
24. Darío Aranda, ‘Qué hay detrás de la campaña antimapuche’, La Vaca, 27 Nov 2017.    
25. Gestión, ‘Concesiones mineras ocupan la quinta parte del territorio del Perú’, 14 Sep 2014, nin.tl/Peru

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During one week long trip to the affected districts of Champawat, Pithoragarh and Almora, I along with Sumit Mahar of Himdhara visited the proposed dam site and few of the villages that may face submergence in the unlikely possibility of the project coming up, to understand the local social and environmental issues.

The Pancheshwar dam site is about 90 km away (by road) from Pithoragarh district headquarters in south direction. The distance comes down to one fourth if straight jungle route is taken. The gigantic dam is proposed 2 km downstream from ancient Pancheshwar temple built at the confluence of mighty Saryu river and Kali river in Lohaghat block of Champawat district. The geographical location of dam site is 29°25’36.55” N and 80°14’41.91” S. The river is called Sharda in India and Mahakali in Nepal after the confluence.

The confluence of Saryu and Kali Rivers

On the day of the visit, deafening sound of a generator welcomed us at the dam site. The road leading to the dam ends there. The generator was on to facilitate boring of testing tunnels. In all 14 such tunnels have to be bored, we were told, ranging from 30 to 60 meter deep vertically inside mountain.

The contract of this work was awarded to a Shamli-based company. Labours were mainly from Nepal side. About half a dozen tunnels have been bored. The dust clouds were seen flying around as the muck was being dumped from 500 meter above the riverbed of Sharda/ Mahakali river. People from Nepal side were crossing the river through a rope way trolley located hardly 200 meters away from the tunnelling site. There are several risks involved in digging up of tunnels during monsoon season. Given the recurring cloud burst events in the region, it was an invitation to disaster.

Pancheshwar temple is sacred shrine dedicated to Lord Shiva. Local people in large number visit the temple during festivals. At the temple site, Kali river from east and Saryu from west, merge together to form Sharada river which is known as Mahakali in Nepal side. There is a ropeway bridge built on Saryu river to reach the temple. Many local people have settled around the bridge on both side of the river. Fishing activity, particularly catching Mahaseer fish or angling is banned in 500 m river stretch around the temple. The entire temple will be submerged if the project is built. Local people are totally against the dam.

The dam site

When we reached the temple, a local person from Sail village, located on the hill standing behind the temple was sitting with the temple priest named Ram Teerath. He looked very sad and told us that his entire village was against the project. “Our children have stopped eating, elderly are having sleepless nights ever since they heard that they will have to leave their village and forest for the dam” said the person.

“Bhagwan Bholenath (Lord Shiva) will never allow the construction of the dam” the priest interjected strongly. Explaining the religious significance of shrine, the priest in temple service for two decades, condemned the way Environment Public Hearing (EPH) were conducted in Champawat on August 9, 2017.

Since it was monsoon time, the surrounding hills were lush green. Thick fog was enveloping the hills. It seemed like the clouds were floating too low. Both the rivers were in floods and could be seen flowing fast. With silt load, their water colour had turned muddy.

“This government keeps talking of Mandir and here are hundreds of ancient temples facing submergence due to Pancheshwar dam. We have Daropadi Kund, Bhim Kund, Jata Kund, Rameshwar, Taleshwar which are imbibed deep in our culture. How can this government sink them? Why don’t they develop religious pilgrimage on the line of Char Dham shrine. It will generate much more employment without destroying our cultural heritage”, suggested Laxman Singh Bisht, living on left Saryu bank one km from Pancheshwar temple. Laxman Singh, the 60 years old local contractor, has petitioned PMO (Prime Minister Office) and raised these concerns even during Mann Ki Baat, the monthly radio program of the PM.

Pancheshwar Dam Testing Tunnel

There were more habitats across the river on right bank. “Where would we go, we don’t want to leave the place, whether offered compensation in gold. This is no less the heaven to us. Our very existence is attached to this place and temple. We can never survive without them” exploded Janaki Devi a local woman, when asked for views on the project. In an outraged manner she kept expressing her emotions non-stop for minutes.

Her husband Ganesh Pant was equally apprehensive. “We were told nothing about the public hearing. We were given no information about the project. Having deprived for decades of development works, now we have got road and some livelihood means. How can they displace us? We don’t want the dam, we need the development” outburst the middle aged Ganesh. There were many local employed in Mahaseer angling. They all were fearing loss of their jobs drowned in the proposed mammoth dam project.

On our way back we saw the Central Water Commission (CWC) monitoring office undergoing expensive renovation work with air conditioner, steel fences and glasses being installed inside the office complex. We also saw mini and mega landslide sites apart from massive soil erosion across nearby hills on account of mechanized road construction.

Ara village is under Salparh gram sabha in Bhanoli Tehsil of Almora district. In total, 14 villages are part of Ara-Salparh gram sabha. Seven villages including Dhankana, Seri, Rajuyda, Bahisudi, Tiluvapari, Chimkholi and Ara are listed in submergence area of the proposed Pancheshwar dam project. All these agriculturally prosperous villages are located along the right bank of Saryu River bordering Pithoragarh district. The proposed dam project lies about 40 km downstream at India-Nepal border.

Landslide close to the dam area

Officially, the project will submerge 21 villages in Almora district. As per Detailed Project Report (DPR) only 3 villages, namely Uncha Bauragunth, Kaula, Dhura Laga Taak, are to be fully affected and the rest 18 are mentioned as partially affected.

The EPH for these affected villages was scheduled two days later on August 17, 2017.  With the help of Ramesh Bhat, a helpful village youth settled in Danya, we managed to reach the area. He also facilitated a meeting with villagers facing submergence.  The affected villages in Ara-Salparh area are located at base of hill adjoining to Saryu river bank. It can be reached by a 30 km long zig-zag road journey from Danya on hill top. About one and half hour long downhill drive to Ara revealed the living natural wealth of the area. The site of several landslides along the way also exposed the fragility of young hills.

The villagers could know of the Pancheshwar EPH only because of great uproar created by locals during Pithoragarh EPH held on August 9, 2017.Will the government listen to us, was the first question asked by anxious villagers gathered in the meeting held at Maneshwar, a local temple. The question seemed simple but the increasing unease in villagers, lent it added weight as it was repeatedly asked on the very noon, when rest of the country was celebrating 70th Independence Day.

More than a hundred villagers attended the meeting in two sessions. Most of the villagers reported of having no formal information of the EPH. They even told us that no document regarding EPH has been provided in their area. “How can we tell what is at stake unless we get the documents” said Kishen Singh of Bhainsudi. As per local sources, overall 500 hectares highly productive farm land will be gone to the project. There is as much yet to be registered (excluding forest Van Panchayat forest area) land currently under cultivation in these villages.

Villagers also reported that many big villages have disintegrated in smaller settlements which are not mentioned in DPR. The land ownership is also complex web to resolve as there are several instances where exchange and transfer of land has taken place many a time.

The ancient Pancheshwar temple

Ganesh Joshi, a local reporter, stated that post 1960 the government has not registered lands so no one knew the actual land against which compensation will be given. “Mine is irrigated land. I have grown orchard. The road has come to village and now it’s time we reap the benefit of the slow and steady progress made over decades. We are happy here and do not want to be drowned and displaced”, said Dinesh of Dhankana working as a tailor at Dhyadi the local market on hill top.

Gopal Ram the Birkola village Pradhan told us on phone that till that day he neither had information of EPH nor he had been provided any document regarding the project. “We know nothing about the project and do not know what to say in EPH” said Gopal Ram. As per Ramesh Bhat, many villages in the area like Salparh and Setti were on the edge of reservoir rim but not mentioned in DPR. “Once the reservoir is filled, landslide will bring our village down, but we are listed neither as fully nor as partially affected”, said Ramesh.

Due to lack of reliable official information, there were misleading rumours like Rs 80 thousand crore released as relief package for affected villages, plots allotment started in Haldwani for displaced doing rounds among affected villagers.

Ara-Salparh area is bestowed with rich natural resources. It has fertile farms, irrigation facility, electricity, road connectivity, healthy livestock and water mills. Villagers demand improvement in basic health and education facility and regular bus service to the village. The area is self-reliant and on the path of sustainability. They feel Pancheswar dam will take away all this.

Temple priest Ramteerath

Other Observations
During the trip, the conversation held with numerous people with different background, also revealed that some people are supporting the project. It appears that they already have settled in urban centres hence do not have much to do with village life and lands. They see the project an opportunity to gain monetary compensation to make their urban life more comfortable.

Deprived of basic facilities even after 70 years of independence, some villagers are compelled to see destructive dam project as solace and escape route to better living. If their their basic development needs are met, they do not wish to move away from their native places.
However, some corrupt politicians, hand in glove with the dam lobby, will never stop vouching for such projects even when they know or do not know the social and ecological costs of the project and know that such a project is not even needed either for the local people, for India or for Nepal.

The Pancheshwar dam is proposed in an area where forest patches are still intact, where rivers are still pristine and flowing, where communities are thriving, where agriculture is rewarding and where community needs can be met locally with alternative and sustainable development programs. Unfortunately an unwanted dam project imposed from outside, threatens to undermine all this and could be scripting a disaster as the area is ecologically sensitive, earthquake prone where cloudburst and landslides are recurring with increasing frequency and intensity. The proposed dam could worsen all these and more vulnerabilities.

—
Courtesy: *bhim.sandrp@gmail.com. Source: https://sandrp.wordpress.com/
 

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