Doomed by Development

Review of ‘A Village Awaits Doomsday’ by Jaideep Hardikar, Penguin Books India, 2013, 217 pp., Rs. 299

Biblio, July - August '13

A pithy slogan often raised by the people of the Narmada Valley in their fight against the mighty Sardar Sarovar dam is Vikas Chahiye, Vinash Nahin (We want development, not destruction). To many urban Indians brought up to believe in large dams and development, these words might sound unrealistic. But for an adivasi or farmer who loses his agricultural land and his way of life for ‘the common good’, this concise slogan says it all.

The story of development projects such as large dams, expressways, national parks, special economic zones, and nuclear power plants bringing in their wake the deprivation of human communities and destruction of the environment is a familiar one. Yet it needs to be retold again and again, with sensitivity and insight, so that we recognise the price of such development and understand who pays for it.

Since independence, the country has had a long and vexed history of development projects with devastating impacts on those displaced. According to independent estimates, 50 to 100 million people have been evicted from their homes and villages in the name of progress. The notion of development has been perceived as the utilisation of natural resources, which in practice has translated into large scale projects that involve the displacement of people at the bottom of the economic ladder. Tribals and dalits are disproportionately impacted by these projects, the benefits of which accrue to the cities, in particular, to the urban middle class. While these abstractions help us to understand the big picture of development and displacement, individual stories are important in their own right. Jaideep Hardikar’s poignant and hard-hitting book A Village Awaits Doomsday brings together such stories of dispossession and injustice, and asks the difficult question: “What happens to those who are being forced out for the ‘greater public good’ – national interest?”

Hardikar set out to investigate the plight of those displaced by development projects across the country. At the outset, he explains that his book does not enter into the debate over whether a project was necessary. Instead, it explores the implications of the displacement brought on by development projects for the millions who had nowhere to go. Travelling extensively across the states of Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, the author investigates why most people are unable to build back their lives after the onset of a project that they had neither a say nor a stake in. In the introduction to the book, his stark words lay out the fate of those who are forced to leave their homes and villages:

"The process of uprooting is painful, to say the least. Emotional, economic and psycho-sociological issues apart, diseases plague the oustees in their new homes. Corrupt bureaucrats eat into their cash compensation awards. Hundreds of them don’t even get a penny. Fraudulent banks cheat them. Family feuds emerge. In places where the people are resettled, host villagers become antagonistic to them. Hunger comes knocking on their doors almost instantly. Mental health problems are common. Women evictees struggle to fend for themselves. In no time their village bonds crumble and relations break. Many yearn for no more than basic food and shelter. Some migrate to cities to start their lives afresh; some manage to restart their lives; most fail."

After tracing the contours of this narrative of displacement, Hardikar painstakingly fills in the details, one project, one village, one oustee at a time. It is through the stories he narrates that he explains why and how development projects bring on such misery and doom for the oustees. One such story is that of Chithuli Baiga, a tribal man whose family was displaced twice within the span of a lifetime – first, by the Rihand Dam in Sonebhadra district in Uttar Pradesh, and the second time, by the Shakti Nagar (Singrauli) Super Thermal Power Station in the same district. After their first uprootment, the family was able to buy some agricultural land with their savings and pull their lives together. However, this new beginning was not to last for long.

When NTPC surveyors arrived in their village to plan for a power plant, Chithuli Baiga was served an acquisition notice, ordered to take compensation, and leave, one more time. The officials made promises that the displaced would get permanent jobs and houses, only to dishonour them once the villagers surrendered their lands and homes. Revealingly, Hardikar tells us that Chithuli’s house and farm “used to be exactly where the towering chimneys of the Shakti Nagar Super Thermal Power Station stand today.” The upper-caste oustees got jobs and better compensation; the illiterate and poor Baiga and Kolasi tribals lost out.

Paid a pittance for his agricultural land, Chithuli had to make do with a plot for a house in the rehabilitation colony where he resides. And when the Khadiya project – an open cast coal mine of Northern Coalfields Limited – began operating in Singrauli, a new wave of troubles reached his doorstep. With a power station to its west and a coal mine to its east, the houses in his dingy and congested residential colony shake violently with each rumbling, their roofs covered with thick coal dust. Chithuli knows his hut could collapse any day, but with no other place to call home, where can he go? When he was forced to sell off his cattle after having spent his cash on rebuilding the house, his last source of income was gone. With this loss, the family’s diet deteriorated without milk and milk products. Having lost their agricultural land, they could not grow their own food either. In Chithuli’s own words, “It is a shock to us that we cannot buy the grain and vegetables that we once cultivated on our farms.”

Each experience of development induced displacement is a unique one, layered with a variety of unpredictable and insurmountable hardships which impoverish and debilitate the affected communities. Through a series of narratives, Hardikar’s book brings us face-to-face with the trauma of eviction, and the towering hurdles in starting afresh. For instance, though people might receive cash compensation, it is often not enough to buy land of the same quality as that lost to the project. And once compensation is paid, land prices invariably shoot up, making it impossible for the oustees to replace their land. Also, in the case of tribal evictees, a significant part of their livelihood is obtained from the forest. With displacement, they are forced to move away from the forest they depend on, thus losing out on a source of income. Needless to say, the government does not train them in new skills to make up for their losses. Additionally, numerous communities who lose their livelihoods to the project are not even recognised as project-affected by the administration, including landless, traditional artisans whose means of livelihood disappear once the community disintegrates with the arrival of the project. Through multiple stories, the author provides a comprehensive view of the varied and complex adversities faced by those displaced, which the single newspaper or newsmagazine article often fails to do.

While deprivation is a tragic outcome of displacement, for many, the injustice does not end here. State violence against the oustees is commonplace. As Hardikar tells us:

"Whichever the government and whoever may be in power, firing at protestors and killing those resisting acquisitions of the last of their assets, land, has become a tragic norm. In Jaitapur the Congress-NCP alliance government fired at protestors killing one of them; in West Bengal the communist regime did not shy away from firing at protestors at Singur and Nandigram; in Uttar Pradesh it was Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) that ordered policemen to open fire on protestors in villages along the controversial Yamuna Expressway Project; in Chhattisgarh the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been ordering that protestors resisting land acquisitions be fired upon. No political party is opposed to land acquisition, but each one of them acts out a political drama in the states in which they are the Opposition."

One such victim of state violence is Tabrez Sagvekar, a fisherman who died in a police firing during a protest against a gigantic nuclear power park coming up near Jaitapur village in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. The fishing communities in the area argue that polluting effluents from the nuclear plant will destroy the habitat of the fish and impact their livelihoods. Tabrez’s maternal uncle and fishing partner says he just can’t fish with the same zeal after his nephew’s death. He also declares inspiringly, “If they go ahead with the project, our protests will intensify. We don’t have any land. But this ocean is our farm.”

The book also educates us about the legal and policy framework governing land acquisition and resettlement. Crucially, it explains the overarching implications of the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 which is used by the state to evict people from their homelands. Mired in a web of legalese, hostile policies, and an insensitive and corrupt administration, development projects continue to dispossess the impoverished of what is rightfully their very own. Hardikar’s thorough and sensitive work - the stories he has gathered, the data he points to, and the arguments he presents – insistently points to this uncomfortable truth of India’s development story.