Their dammed future

The SDM (sub-divisional magistrate) came in June and said, “Here’s a notice to leave.” Babulal Adivasi points to the large banyan tree at the entrance to his village Gahdara — the place where community meetings are held — and now the spot where the future of his people changed in a day.

Thousands of residents of 22 villages in and around the Panna Tiger Reserve (PTR) in Madhya Pradesh have been asked to give up their homes and land for a dam and a river-linking project. Final environmental clearances came as far back as 2017, and tree cutting has started in the national park. But imminent eviction threats have gained momentum.

In the pipeline for over two decades, the project is a Rs 44,605 crore plan (Phase I) to link the rivers Ken and Betwa with a 218-kilometre long canal.

The project has been widely criticised. “There is no justification for the project, not even hydrological justification,” says scientist Himanshu Thakkar, who has been involved in the water sector for 35 years. “To begin with, the Ken does not have surplus water. There has been no credible assessment or objective study, only pre-determined conclusions.”

Thakkar is coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP). He was a member of the expert committee set up around 2004 by the ministry of water resources (now renamed as jal shakti ministry) on the interlinking of rivers. He says the very basis of the project is shocking. “River linking will have huge environmental and consequent social impacts on forest, river, biodiversity and will impoverish people here as well as in Bundelkhand and far beyond.”

The dam’s 77-metre high reservoir will drown 14 villages. It will also drown core tiger habitat, cut off critical wildlife corridors, and so eight other villages like Babulal’s have been handed over by the state to the forest department as compensatory land.

So far, nothing unusual. Lakhs of rural Indians, especially Adivasis, are routinely displaced to make way for cheetahs, tigers, renewable energy, dams and mines.

The stupendous success of Project Tiger, now in its 51st year with 3,682 tigers per 2022 tiger census, has come at great cost to India’s indigenous forest communities. These communities are among the nation’s most deprived citizens. In 1973, India had nine tiger reserves, today we have 53. For every tiger we’ve added since 1972, we have displaced on average 150 forest dwellers. That too, is a serious underestimate.

It’s not ending. On 19 June 2024, a letter issued by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) called for moving lakhs more — 591 villages across the country will be moved on a priority basis.

Panna Tiger Reserve (PTR) has 79 of the great cats and when the dam drowns a large part of core forest area, they must be compensated. Babulal’s land and home in Gahdara must go for the tigers. Simply put: it’s the forest department being ‘compensated’, not the displaced villagers who are losing their homes forever.

“We will reforest it,” says Anjana Tirki, deputy forest officer of Panna range. “Our job is to convert it into grassland and manage the wildlife,” she adds, unwilling to comment on the agroecological aspects of the project.

On condition of anonymity though, officials admit that the best they can do is only grow plantations to compensate for the 60 sq km of dense and biodiverse forest that will drown. This, just two years after UNESCO included Panna in the World Network of Biosphere Reserves. What will be the hydrological implication of cutting down some 46 lakh trees (as per the assessment given at a Forest Advisory Committee meeting in 2017) from natural forest has not even been assessed.

Tigers are not the only hapless wild residents. The area is also an important nesting site for the Indian vulture that is on the IUCN Red List for Critically Endangered birds. Besides there are many large herbivores and carnivores who will lose habitat.

Babulal is a small farmer with a few bighas of rain-fed land which he relies on to feed his family. “Since no date was given for leaving, we thought we would plant some makkai (maize) so that we could feed ourselves.” As he and hundreds of others in the village got their fields ready, forest rangers appeared. “They told us to stop. They said, ‘we will bring a tractor and crush your fields if you don’t listen’.”

Showing PARI his fallow land, he grumbles, grumbles, “Neither have they given us our full compensation so that we can move, nor have they allowed us to continue living and sowing here. We are asking the government that as long as our village is here, let us farm our fields… or what will we eat?”

Loss of ancestral homes is another blow. A visibly distressed Swami Prasad Parohar tells PARI that his family has lived in Gahdara for over 300 years. “We had income from farming, from forest produce like mahua and tendu. Now where will we go? Where will we die? Where will we drown, who knows?” The 80-year-old worries that coming generations will lose all touch with the jungle.

The river linking project is just the latest land grab by the state for ‘development’. In October 2023, when the final sanctions for the Ken–Betwa River Linking Project (KBRLP) came through, it was welcomed with cheers by then BJP chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. He called it a “fortunate day for the people of Bundelkhand who had lagged behind”. He made no mention of the thousands of farmers, herders, forest dwellers and their families in his state that it would deprive. Nor did he see that the forest clearance was awarded on the basis that power generation would be outside the PTR, but now it is inside.

The idea of linking surplus with deficient river basins started in the 1970s, and the National Water Development Agency (NWDA) was born. It began studying the possibility of 30 links across rivers in the country — a ‘grand garland’ of canals.

The Ken originates in the Kaimur hills of central India and is part of the Ganga basin, meeting the Yamuna in Banda district of Uttar Pradesh. On its 427-km journey, it passes through the Panna Tiger Reserve. The village of Dhodan inside the park is the site for the dam.

Running far west of the Ken is the Betwa. The KBLRP aims to take water from a ‘surplus’ Ken and send it upslope to the ‘deficient’ Betwa. Linking the two is expected to irrigate 343,000 hectares in water-deficient areas of Bundelkhand, an economically backward region and vote bank. But in fact, scientists say the project will facilitate export of water from Bundelkhand to areas of upper Betwa basin, outside Bundelkhand.

The notion that the Ken has surplus water needs to be questioned, says Dr. Nachiket Kelkar. The dams that already exist on the Ken, such as the Bariyarpur barrage, Gangau dam and one at Pawai, should have provided for irrigation. “When I visited Banda and surroundings along the Ken some years back, I regularly heard that irrigation water was not available,” adds this ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Trust.

Researchers from SANDRP who walked the length of the river in 2017 wrote in a report, ‘...the Ken is now not a perennial river everywhere… For a longer part, the river runs flowless and waterless.’

Ken itself has an irrigation deficit, so what it can give to Betwa will compromise its own command area. A point echoed by Nilesh Tiwari, who has lived all his life in Panna. He says there is a lot of anger about the dam as it will permanently deprive people of Madhya Pradesh while seeming to benefit neighbouring Uttar Pradesh.

“The dam will drown lakhs of trees, thousands of animals. People (forest dwellers) will lose their freedom, they will be rendered homeless. People are angry, but the State is not paying attention,” says Tiwari.

“Somewhere, they (government) set up a national park, somewhere a dam in this river and on that… and people are displaced, moved out…,” says Janka Bai whose home in Umrawan was swallowed by the expanding PTR in 2015. In her 50s, the Gond tribal has been fighting for adequate compensation for a decade now. She points out that her land, taken for the tigers, will now house a resort. “See, here is the land they have surveyed for tourists to come and stay, after throwing us out.”

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On the eastern side of the PTR in Gahdara, the situation is no different. “The collector (of Panna) said we will re-establish you as you were. It will be to your convenience. We will rebuild this village for you,” says Parohar. “Nothing has been done, and now we are being told to leave.”

The amount of compensation is also not clear and many figures are floating around — between Rs 12 lakh and 20 lakh for each male over 18 years. People here ask: “Is that per head or for each family? What about where women are the head? Will they compensate us for the land and animals separately?”

In every village that PARI visited, no one knew when and where they would go, or the exact amount of compensation. People of 22 villages seem to be living in a state of suspended animation.

Article and photos courtesy: People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI)