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Narmada Bachao Aandolan

It took this team of eight Narmada Bachao Aandolan activists in Madhya Pradesh one full year to make the government realize that there was a unique scam in the resettlement programme of Sardar Sarovar project on Narmada river. Starting with an RTI application in July 2006 in Madhya Pradesh’s revenue department, this team exposed through government’s own information how poor farmers displaced by the project had been swindled by a nexus of middlemen and government officials to part with huge amount of compensation money which was rightfully theirs. They revealed how the government’s Special Rehabilitation Package (SRP) encouraged spawning of touts in the system and led to several fake registrations. Records accessed under RTI revealed that government land, rivers and schools were sold and even re-sold to get a farmer his resettlement money. He was then left with just a couple of thousands as officials and middlemen pocketed lakhs. The government was forced to institute an inquiry and finally admitted in Madhya Pradesh High Court in 2008 that 758 registrations were fake. On August 21, 2008, an inquiry commission was instituted under Justice Shravan Shankar Jha to investigate the scam. The struggle continues as these activists say the scam is much bigger and the government is trying to brush it under the carpet by framing poor farmers and shielding corrupt officials.

 

Seventy-year-old Ter Singh Hamir, is a farmer and lives in Kadwal village of Dhar district. He has been blind for the last 30 years. In 2006, his neighbor Burla knocked on the door and said the government had sent relief for Hamir. He would get Rs 10,000 to get an eye operation done. Hamir was ecstatic. He would finally be able to see again. He gladly accepted the money. Earlier this year, when Ashish Mandloi and other activists of Narmada Bachao Aandolan came to his mud hut Hamir found out that he had sold off his 30 acres of cultivable land for a mere Rs 10,000 to six different people, who were oustees of Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP). The sale deed registered in land revenue court shows that he had done it willingly. And as per government records, six oustees have been successfully “rehabilitated” on Hamir’s land.

This is just one of the heart-rending stories that Mandloi, Rahmat bhai, Ramesh Yadav, Dayaran Yadav, Ranvir Singh, Devender bhai, Kailash Awasiya and Mohan Patidar of Narmada Bachao Aandolan have unearthed over the last three years through RTI and intensive field work. “There are those who are directly affected by SSP who we call Project Affected Farmers or oustees. There is a second category of people who are affected because of the so-called rehabilitation of the oustees,” explains Mandloi.

His team explains the entire background. The Planning Commission approved the Sardar Sarovar dam in 1988. The project raised the basic conflict of local people and development. SSP translated to more power, water and irrigation facilities at the cost of uprooting 2 lakh people from their homes and submerging thousands of hectares of agriculture land. The choice was made as the governments of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra convinced the affected people that they would be suitably rehabilitated.

Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal (NWDT) recognized the fact that cash-based rehabilitation doesn’t work and said that there should be “land-for-land” rehabilitation. It said in its order, “Every displaced family from whom more than 25 per cent of its land holding is acquired shall be entitled to and be allotted irrigable land to the extent of land acquired from it ... and a minimum of 2 hectares (5 acres) per family, the irrigation facilities being provided by the State in whose territory the allotted land is situated. This land shall be transferred to the oustee family if it agrees to take it.”

This is where the story began. In 2000, Government of Madhya Pradesh, a state where 80 per cent of the oustees are, created a land bank and told Supreme Court that it has the requisite land to rehabilitate people. However, farmers refused to take the land as much of it was non-cultivable land carved out from “charwaha” (land left fallow for cattle grazing).

Mandloi says this gave rise to Special Rehabilitation Package (SRP). Since the government is unable to give “land for land” compensation to the oustees, it decided to give them money to buy land. Under this scheme, each oustee and a major son is entitled to Rs 5.6 lakh to buy 5 acres of land. He gets the first installment to buy land and then has to furnish a sauda chitthi or land agreement toget the second installment.

The scheme posed a lot of problems. As oustees started looking to buy land, the prices shot up and suddenly Rs 5.6 lakh was too little to buy 5 acres. Then came the problem that very few people were ready to register sale deed without the full payment and farmers seldom had that. As individual farmers located cultivable land, communities got dispersed.

The team of Narmada Bachao Aandolan activists started suspecting something was amiss when they realized that too many people had opted for SRPs but they were still getting complaints from the oustees of non-rehabilitation. “There was sudden mushrooming of middlemen at revenue offices. We decided to seek information under RTI and filed our first application in July 2006 asking the government for all registration papers and how many people had opted for SRP,” says Mandloi. RTI was just being implemented and getting data out of government departments did require a lot of cajoling and persistence.

“We got immense data. Then began our field work,” says Mandloi. The eight activists then divided villages and trooped down to each village and traced each khasra that was shown in registration papers. What they discovered was mind-boggling. This is how it all happened. “When oustees would go to a government office for compensation he practically got no information. He usually thought that I have lost my land and now my money would also be gone. So he became very vulnerable to middlemen. Suddenly these touts and middlemen appeared and struck deals with officials. The touts promised compensation money for a hefty fee. Farmers thought ‘something is better than nothing’ and gave in,” explains Mandloi.

First the farmers got their very first installment. Then the touts stepped in. They created fake registration papers showing transfer of land from a person in a village to the oustee. These fake papers were then furnished by the oustee farmer to get his second installment. He was left with just a couple of thousands with the middlemen and revenue department officials pocketing the rest of it.
“So the oustees got practically nothing and some poor farmer in a remote village also lost his land in the revenue records of the government,” says Mandloi explaining the double whammy. As the team traced every land deal they realized sometimes a piece of land had been sold nine times to get compensation. “There was government land which was sold showing it as private and then there were sometimes school plots also which were seen. When we went to a tribal village looking for a person whose name featured in the land records, they told us that this surname cannot exist in the entire region because of the caste,” Mandloi says.

The team first unearthed 22 cases in Dhar and Khargone district. By the end of the second year, the number had gone up to 294 cases. This expose forced the government to order an investigation and it finally admitted that 758 registrations were fake. But this had a bad fallout. “The government started booking poor farmers. FIRs have been registered against 320 farmers as the government says that they are the ones responsible for the scam. Around 52 farmers were in jail, some of them for three months.,” says Mandloi.

The struggle continues for Mandloi and his team. The commission of inquiry instituted under Justice Shravan Shankar Jha is looking at the fake registration cases. “We have given them 200 more on top of the 758. I don’t know what will come out of this,” says Mandloi.

EOM