The following from Tehelka: Eyeless in Yazali
Beyond the gaze of Delhi, the Northeast is sitting on a time bomb. 73 dams in the Northeast, 42 of them in Arunachal Pradesh, plus hundreds of other projects. They will destroy these magnificent ecological hot spots and its indigenous people. Amit Sengupta enters the interiors of pristine Arunachal and discovers that it's apocalypse now
Arunachal has 26 tribes with different dialects and languages, but no written script. It tells a hidden story.
"Once we had a script," said Bamang Anthony, student leader at Nirjuli near Itanagar. "In fact, we had two scripts. One was written on an animal skin. The other on a leaf. Once, very hungry and with no food available, our ancestors ate up the animal skin. But the leaf script was intact. One day an 'outsider' arrived and he was served food. But along with the food, he ate up the leaf too. And we were left with no script."
The absence is a crisis. And it's time they write a new script. And that is a story of apocalypse now and it's happening.
So where did beautiful Ranganadi, flowing like an unruly, primordial, living creature through the pristine mountains disappear? And why are they hell-bent on killing the Himalayan rivers in these forests where all the ancestors' spirits of these quiet, ethnic civilisations roam about celebrating freedom in death as they did in life?
Come to Yazali, waiting for judgment day. Come to this little village-town through the undulating zigzag of a long road high up in the Lower Subansiri district of this protected border state next to China. Wild Ranganadi used to flow here through this amazing expanse of the Amazonian wild. Where the tribal community of Nishis have carved their ancient memories with oral traditions, and simplicities, and where the cool local wine inside tall bamboo 'glasses' filtered with banana leaves moves inside intestines like an unfinished sentence wanting to become a river.
If this ecological marvel is a testimony of the precious heritage of our declining natural habitats, then little Yazali is only the tip of the volcano which can burst, in hundreds of similar Yazalis across the ravaged Northeast. There is a bomb ticking in the seven sisters' land. (Plus Sikkim.)
But no one's listening. Not the governments, not the elected representatives, not the power-brokers of power, not the experts in distant Delhi, not the contractors, pimps, goons and miscellaneous profiteers who compulsively gather around the many dams and hydro-electric projects. Yazali is just one moment of time frozen by an Octopus-like parasitic machine.
There are about 11 lakh people in Arunachal, mostly tribes, most of them hidden in the vast interiors of the wild forests in the mountains. For most of India they are not even dots in the map. For Delhi it is a geo-strategic, protected zone, very sensitive, due to its proximity with China. To enter Arunachal you need inner-line permits, the army presence is tangible, there are check-points and bases spread across the state, and often, they are the only 'outsiders' high up in the terrain.
The Nishis are the biggest tribe, though the Apatanis and Adis have strong presence. Even today, the people cross into China (and they into India) for marriage and social dos: happily, the border guards have accepted these ancient ties.
The Northeast is precious national and natural heritage because of its biological and cultural diversity, the Brahamaputra river system, and the Himalayan eco-systems which link up with China and Tibet. There are more than one hundred tribal communities in this heterogeneous melting pot who are intrinsically linked with the natural resources of the region for their livelihood. There is nothing like a unilateral Northeast: it is multi-dimensional in its aesthetic, cultural, linguistic, social currents. And it is spread across one of the youngest, geologically most fragile Himalayan terrains, especially Arunachal. That's why the alarm calls.
Ranganadi is blocked and dying. It's called stage one of the Ranganadi Hydro-Electric Project where a concrete, rock-fill diversion dam (68 ft high) has been built near the 41 km post of the Kimin-Ziro road near Yazali. The river has been diverted through a 9 km tunnel at Hoz on the banks of the Dikrong river where three turbines are supposed to generate 405 megawatt of power. One of the turbines has reportedly failed and the others are constantly falling short of the target. The project began in 1988-89 and was commissioned in 2001. And herein lies the dubious story.
The stage two of the project is yet to start. It will be a high 112 (or 117?) metre rock-fill storage dam on the Ranganadi near the 51 km post of the Kimin-Ziro Road at Yazali, 10 km upstream of the stage one dam site. It is meant to provide a reservoir with storage capacity of 370 by 106 cubic metres. The reservoir discharge will be used to generate unknown megawatts of power.
The stage one fallout is not accidental. It is designed. If an Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) has been made, no one knows about it, certainly not the villagers. The villagers have been pushed up on rocky terrains where cultivation is impossible. Says Zimmy Likha of the Land Affected People's Forum: "We have gradually stopped doing slash and burn jhum cultivation and moved to wet land rice cultivation in the valley around the river. Now we are being asked to move back to rocky areas. Our houses are being submerged. Our land goes under water. They are paying us dirt for an acre and they are not ready to compensate land for land. Most of us don't even know what they are planning."
The stage one displacement was as mysteriously done, as is the usual routine with big dams anywhere in India. There was no information shared, no public hearing. People were not asked their opinion. The dam was built, the river killed and trapped in a reservoir and in the tunnel, the people evacuated; no extra electricity comes to the villages, the villages in the valley were forcibly demolished, old forms of agriculture suddenly stopped, fishermen were reduced to starvation because no fish would anymore swim upstream or go downstream.
Arunachal has no land revenue records. Land rights are customary, decided by the village councils. With the Land Acquisition Act in force, or dubious cash compensations, this might lead to a complete restructuring of old land relations. The Nishis might actually end up landless, homeless, jobless, in their own homeland, and where can they go from here?
In the long run, the forests and the mountains will die due to the absence of a strong and ancient river system, streams might disappear, and constant digging, tunnels, blasting, siltation and sedimentation might lead to landslides etc, in this fragile zone. Floods might follow and wreck devastation downstream, including in Assam.
All this, for what purpose, when even the targeted power supply cannot be generated? And what is the guarantee that the stage two of the mega dam, which will submerge hundreds of hectares and the entire fertile valley, will prove to be even half as useful? That is why environmentalists are suspicious: "The stage one project turned out to be a failure, a secret deal. Arunachal gets only 12 percent of the power share in any case, because the project is controlled by Northeastern Electric Power Corporation Limited (NEEPCO) and the Union power ministry," says Keiparaja, a student activist "Let them fulfill the right to information. Let them give us every little detail of the next dam. They survive on misinformation. They will give reports that there is no cultivation in the slopes, which is a lie, or there are no fishermen in the area. Let them come clean and we will stop this resistance," says an angry Dr Bengia Abo.
And that is the catch-22 of the time bomb. There are 73 dams being proposed or constructed in the Northeast - the storehouse of future power generation for the nation - with a dream-run of 50,000 megawatts. Arunachal itself will have 42 dams. "In every block there will be a dam," says Rabindranath, an activist. "Not a single river, not a single forest range, including reserved forests, will be left untouched. They will bring the military to crush the people. And the pimps with easy money to corrupt the jobless and the young. There is disaster waiting to happen."
Outside the nation's gaze, beyond Delhi's eyes and ears, there is disaster waiting to happen, and there is invisible anger waiting to spill over. It's happening all over, in the Teesta river in Sikkim, in the Ramsar heritage wetland sites in Assam, in the land of the Bodos on the Pagladiya river, around the Tipaimukh Dam in Manipur where tribal students are up in arms, across Tripura's Gumti dam, in the Kameng and Subansiri dam projects in Arunachal, among several such projects. (See box below). Millions will be displaced, thousands of forests and eco-reserves will be destroyed or submerged, the entire fragility of the region will move from magnificence to volatile decay, and floods and droughts will destroy the cultural and biological biodiversity of this rich region. This is a recipe for disaster and the locals will get nothing out of it. Nothing.
That is why the South Asian Rivers and People's Solidarity (SARP) meeting at Nirjuli near Itanagar last week, with activists from across the Northeast and India (and Burma, Japan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan) have pledged to stop the big dams. Come what may. As Anthony said as a final conclusion: "No confusion. No big dams. No big dams. No confusion."
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