[ZESTEconomics] When the government wants your house

Mon, 15 May 2006 03:18:05 -0700


 
  When the government wants your house
  For all the negative vibes that Medha Patkar attracts she is
probably the best the thing that could have happened to a country
caught up in the complex processes of economic and social reform.

  Indian Catholic |May 12, 2006
  http://www.theindiancatholic.com/news_read.asp?nid=1669


Most businessmen bristle at the mention of her name. Some
journalists do likewise, perhaps because they think it is a good
idea to bristle in step with big business. Among NGOs you may
occasionally hear her ridiculed for being too shrill. Politicians
and bureaucrats can't stand her because she has a way of stripping
them of their self-importance.

But for all the negative vibes that Medha Patkar attracts she is
probably the best the thing that could have happened to a country
caught up in the complex processes of economic and social reform. By
camping on hunger-strike at Jantar Mantar in the heart of Delhi to
get justice for the people being thrown out of their homes and lands
for the Sardar Sarovar Dam in Madhya Pradesh, she has forced the
country to face the problems of eviction and rehabilitation, which
could finally undermine all economic progress.

So, for all the vehemence with which Medha opposes liberalisation
and privatisation, she has done the reforms process a good turn by
making its more fickle champions look at issues they have insisted
on ignoring. If those who want the economy to grow faster are truly
serious about their mission, they will listen to Medha and people
like her. And then perhaps reforms can be saved from tunnel vision
and the tyranny of an influential few.

There are 35,000 families who will be pushed out by raising the
height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. As things stand, they will get
nothing even though the Supreme Court had decreed that work on the
dam could only proceed if people were rehabilitated. The Congress-
led UPA government has not done anything to implement this order.
The Prime Minister himself has tried to ignore the report by a team
of Central ministers – Saifuddin Soz, Prithviraj Chauhan and Meira
Kumar – who said that people had not been resettled.

On paper, people have been rehabilitated. But in reality the Madhya
Pradesh government's claims are fake and have been incorrectly
endorsed by the Narmada Valley Development Authority (NVDA). The
ministerial team was sent after Medha's fast. But Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh chose to keep the team's report under wraps. The
government was more interested in the votes it would get in Gujarat.

So secretive was Manmohan Singh's office that Aruna Roy of the MKSS
had to file a right to information petition asking for the report to
be made public. Similarly, respected environmentalist Anupam Mishra
of the Gandhi Peace Foundation and others wrote to the Prime
Minister wanting to know why he was sitting on the report.

Medha's strident campaign and her fast unto death at Jantar Mantar
under the UPA government's nose brought national attention to the
Sardar Sarovar Dam and the true lies of official records.

But the dam is just the tip of the problem. India is seeking rapid
economic growth with investments in manufacturing, power, housing,
roads and so on. Industry's appetite for land is going to keep
growing. With it will come eviction and the need for rehabilitation
on a scale which dwarfs the experience in the Narmada Valley.

Industry is seeking tens of thousands of acres and expecting to get
the land in a rush. There are steel, cement and automobile plants
coming up. Mining projects are taking companies into forests.
Airports, roads and power plants have to be built. Reliance's
special economic zones (SEZs) have made headlines in business
papers. Mahindra and Mahindra is not far behind. Software companies
want to expand their campuses.

Much of this investment is long over due. It is needed to broaden
and deepen the economy. The question is, however, at whose cost. If
it leads to widespread alienation from the land without commensurate
benefits will this model of growth cause instability and tumult?
Will it undermine the very progress being sought to be achieved?

Acquisition of land is merely part of the story. Environmental
damage is the rest of it. Indian industry's record in this
department has been indifferent. Indian businessmen have been slow
in learning from the global experience.

Organisations like CII and FICCI show little newness in approach.
They have become forums in which industry talks to industry and
hears what it wants to hear. Much like NGOs who want to confirm the
obvious to each other without trying to listen to the other side.
CII and FICCI have come to be known for their lunches, dinners,
junkets. There is little evidence of a national perspective, of a
sense of mission in which industry can take the country forward.

Little time seems to get spent on how industry can be more
inclusive, on how it can be a catalyst for prosperity through
employment, skill-building and education. Resettlement of people
evicted for projects, be they in the countryside or the cities,
doesn't figure at all.

An important reason for the problem is the absence of governance.
Public institutions don't have credibility. Industry knows how to
cynically use them. The popular perception is that when politicians
and businessmen come together, it is only to get richer, rip the
common man off a little more. There is little faith in the system.
The dam height being raised despite the Supreme Court's earlier
directives on rehabilitation and the Prime Minister's unwillingness
to act is cited as further proof of the breakdown.

So far development and investment across sectors has resulted in
surges in the numbers of the homeless. The evidence is there in all
our cities.

Invariably people in rural areas have been affected and left to fend
for themselves. Among them there have been those who have been
reasonably well off. But the really big numbers are made up by the
poor, particularly tribals and scheduled castes.

If the migration to cities, as seen in the multiplicity of slums, in
not evidence enough, perhaps the growing Naxalite movement in a
swathe of territory across the country should be cause for concern.
Alienation from the land and the absence of a working criminal
justice system are the reasons for the Naxalite influence. The
government has all but lost the right to administer this territory,
which could account for as much as 20 per cent of the Indian
landmass. The Naxal movement itself is getting more complex with it
being controlled by gun-runners, drug-smugglers and other varieties
of brigands.

But even as these alarm bells toll, industry and the government
withdraw to an enclave of their own. A separate world, so to speak,
which lives in denial of realities that may require the rewriting of
some business plans.

As people protested on the streets in Delhi against the illegalities
of the Narmada project and survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster at
the Union Carbide plant sought justice after all of 20 years, CII
held a two-day meeting on development and sustainability at the Taj
Palace. Here industry spoke to industry. Industry patted industry on
the back. The Prime Minister found the time to make an inaugural
address. He spoke of rehabilitation and affirmative action in the
manner of an academic pondering on some remote problem.

The fact is that Medha Patkar's agitation and life-threatening fast
had brought the problem of rehabilitation to the door of the Prime
Minister's Office in Delhi. It had to be so because the government
had not found out the facts on the ground in the Narmada Valley. And
when it sent three ministers there it did not want to hear what they
had to say.

By hiding the report of its own ministerial team, the PMO was doing
what governments have always done on the question of rehabilitation:
tried to seal it in official files. Worse still, work on raising the
dam height was undertaken after the NVDA's sub-committee certified
that the rehabilitation had been done. Was the sub-committee lying?
Or did it compose its report without visiting the affected areas to
check the claims of the Madhya Pradesh government.

The Supreme Court now needs to ask the sub-committee on
rehabilitation on what basis it said that people had been
compensated and resettled. It perhaps needs to investigate the
entire system of supervision at the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

For years now the environment sub-committee of the NVDA has never
visited the areas it has reported on. Each time Shekhar Singh, the
only independent member of the sub-committee, has put up notes of
dissent. On one occasion, the minutes were drafted even before the
meeting had been held and Singh had to protest.

It would be simplistic to point to corruption or the inefficiency of
the system. Anupam Mishra of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, one of the
earliest campaigners against the Sardar Sarovar Dam, makes the
point, ``The same state has no problems constructing dams with the
required efficiency. And it is not as if there is not ample scope
for corruption in the course of such construction. The problem is
more basic, the state lacks sensitivity to the problems of its
people.''

The controversy at Kalinga Nagar in Orissa, where the largely tribal
displaced population has launched an agitation, illustrates the
problem. The state awarded land for projects, in much the same way
as land is being given in Chhatisgarh and Jharkhand, but it again
failed to handle the rehabilitation responsibilities in an adequate
manner.

Interestingly, in Kalingar Nagar, the Tatas, known to be serious
about social commitments and with sound rehabilitation work done in
Gopalpur, have been caught in a crossfire that is not of their
making.

"No one is saying the dam should not be built. But people must be
compensated if they are being asked to give up their land," says
Nasser Munjee, an experienced funder of big ticket projects. He is
now Chairman of DCB and used to head the Infrastructure Development
and Finance Company (IDFC). Munjee worries about the impact of
taking land away. "When people are evicted from their land it
results in instability which lasts over generations. The impact of
evictions should not be underestimated."

Says Arun Maira, Chairman of the Boston Consulting Group: "I think
the first 'rehabilitation' that is required is in the minds of those
promoting industry and growth. They should not make their case in
abstract terms--of 'national growth', 'increasing the size of the
overall pie', etc. What do these abstract, larger benefits to
society matter to the poor, hopeless people who lose their toeholds
of livelihood? Their needs have to be understood in their simple
terms and dealt with directly and fairly."

Maira adds: "Industrialists whose plans will disrupt the lives of
people have to deal with issues of rehabilitation fairly, even
generously--and they must be seen to be doing so. Even a few who
fail to do this, will destroy society's confidence in industrialists
generally and make it more difficult and more costly for industry to
get its projects going, thus affecting their viability."

Many of the big projects such as steel plants will be based in the
largely tribal areas of the country because of the availability of
raw material. This work will go hand in hand with an increase in
mining activity, further contributing to large-scale displacement.
Quite apart from the question of justice, even from a pragmatic
viewpoint both government and industry need to realise that if
rehabilitation is not better handled the very economic growth they
aim to foster and benefit from will come into question.

Both in Kalinga Nagar and in the case of the Sardar Sarovar Dam this
is one aspect that is overlooked. The delay and disruption in such
projects because of inadequate rehabilitation only serves to add to
cost overruns that call into question the very economic feasibility
of such projects. Clearly then, a sane and efficient rehabilitation
policy is in the interests not just of the displaced or the NGOs
espousing their cause but also of industry and a government that
seeks faster economic growth.

Unfortunately, no such policy exists. The reason why separate
procedures have to be put in place for every major project is
because there are no policy guidelines. In many of the dam projects
after Independence, the land to be submerged was simply acquired
from the owners under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Leave alone
the merits of giving cash for land, the Act itself was created by a
colonial state to ensure it ran into no trouble in acquiring land
for its needs. It is heavily weighted in favour of the State. Legal
challenges in the courts have brought a level of equity to the cost
compensation but a land acquisition act can hardly be the basis for
a fair relief and rehabilitation policy.

While the Prime Minister mentioned rehabilitation to his audience at
CII, what he did not tell industry was that his office has with it a
draft of policy for rehabilitation. This has been put together after
national consultation among public-spirited groups with an
experience of dealing with displacement. Sadly the government has
initiated no discussion on the policy and continues to treat it like
some kind of incendiary device which has unfortunately reached its
door.

The draft policy was first brought to the National Advisory Council,
till recently chaired by Congress President Sonia Gandhi. It went
from there to the PMO.

The Draft National Development, Displacement and Rehabilitation
Policy (see civilsocietyonline.com) is based on a few key premises –
1) Displacement must be considered as a last alternative. 2.) The
displaced must be better off after displacement than they were
earlier. 3.) There must be consensus among those about to be
displaced, a clear majority (the draft says 75 per cent) of those
who are to be displaced must agree to the displacement. 4.) There
has to be a clear monitoring principle and perhaps a national
authority that monitors such projects.

A rehabilitation policy is far too important an issue to be left in
abeyance. Not only will this avoid the ad hoc responses which have
marked the entire Sardar Sarovar controversy from the very
beginning, such a policy is in fact be a necessity as private
industry steps into key infrastructural areas.

It is to Medha Patkar that the credit must go for bringing the need
for rehabilitation into sharp national focus. Her agitation is the
best tonic for reforms. What we now need are the reformers who can
see that.

o o o o o o o o
Courtesy: Civil Society Online









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