The End of Imagination (24 page)

It did this despite the fact that it was aware that the tribunal guidelines have been consistently violated for thirteen years. Despite the fact that none of the conditions of the environment ministry’s clearance have been met. Despite the fact that thirteen years have passed and the government hasn’t even produced a resettlement plan. Despite the fact that not a single village has been resettled according to the directives of the tribunal. Despite the fact that the Madhya Pradesh government has stated on oath that it has no land on which to resettle “oustees” (80 percent of them live in Madhya Pradesh).
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Despite the fact that since construction began, the Madhya Pradesh government has not given a single acre of agricultural land to displaced families. Despite the fact that the court was fully aware that even families displaced by the dam at its current height have not been rehabilitated.

In other words, the Supreme Court has actually ordered and sanctioned the violation of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award.

“But this is the problem with the government,” Mr. and Mrs. Well-Meaning say. “It’s so inefficient. These things wouldn’t happen with a private company. Things like resettlement and rehabilitation of poor people will be so much better managed.”

The Maheshwar experience teaches you otherwise.

In a private project, the only things that are better managed are the corruption, the lies, and the swiftness and brutality of repression. And, of course, the escalating costs.

In 1994, the project cost of the Maheshwar dam was estimated at $99 million. In 1996, following the contract with S. Kumars, it rose to $333 million. Today it stands at $467 million.
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Initially, 80 percent of this money was to be raised from foreign investors. There has been a procession of them—Pacgen of the United States and Bayernwerk, VEW, Siemens, and the HypoVereinsbank of Germany. And now, the latest in the line of ardent suitors, Ogden of the United States.

According to the NBA’s calculations, the cost of the electricity at the factory gate will be 13.9 cents per kilowatt hour, which is twenty-six times more expensive than existing hydel power in the state, five and a half times more expensive than thermal power, and four times more expensive than power from the central grid. (It’s worth mentioning here that Madhya Pradesh today generates 1,500 megawatts more power than it can transmit and distribute.)

Though the installed capacity of the Maheshwar project is supposed to be 400 megawatts, studies using twenty-eight years of actual river flow data show that 80 percent of the electricity will be generated only during the monsoon months, when the river is full. What this means is that most of the supply will be generated when it’s least needed.
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S. Kumars has no worries on this count. They have Enron as a precedent. They have an escrow clause in their contract, which guarantees them first call on government funds. This means that however much (or however little) electricity they produce, whether anybody buys it or not, for the next thirty-five years they are guaranteed a minimum payment from the government of approximately $127 million a year. This money will be paid to them even before employees of the bankrupt State Electricity Board get their salaries.

What did S. Kumars do to deserve this largesse? It isn’t hard to guess.

So who’s actually paying for this dam that nobody needs?

According to government surveys, the reservoir of the Maheshwar dam will submerge sixty-one villages. Thirteen will be wholly submerged; the rest will lose their farmlands.
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As usual, none of the villagers were informed about the dam or their impending eviction. (Of course, if they go to court now they’ll be told it’s too late, since construction has already begun.)

The first surveys were done under a ruse that a railway line was being constructed. It was only in 1997, when blasting began at the dam site, that realization dawned on people and the NBA became active in Maheshwar. The agency in charge of the survey is the same one that was in charge of the surveys for the Bargi reservoir. We know what happened there.

People in the submergence zone of the Maheshwar dam say that the surveys are completely wrong. Some villages marked for submergence are at a higher level than villages that are not counted as project-affected. Since the Maheshwar dam is located in the broad plains of Nimad, even a small miscalculation in the surveys will lead to huge discrepancies between what is marked for submergence and what is actually submerged. The consequences of these errors will be far worse than what happened at Bargi.

There are other egregious assumptions in the “survey.” Annexure Six of the resettlement plan states that there are 176 trees and 38 wells in all the affected 61 villages combined. The villagers point out that in just a single village—Pathrad—there are 40 wells and more than 4,000 trees.

As with trees and wells, so with people.

There is no accurate estimate of how many people will be affected by the dam. Even the project authorities admit that new surveys must be done. So far they’ve managed to survey only one out of the sixty-one villages. The number of affected households rose from 190 (in the preliminary survey) to 300 (in the new one).

In circumstances such as these, it’s impossible for even the NBA to have an accurate idea of the number of project-affected people. Their rough guess is about fifty thousand. More than half of them are Dalits, Kevats, and Kahars—ancient communities of ferrymen, fisherfolk, sand quarriers, and cultivators of the riverbed. Most of them own no land, but the river sustains them and means more to them than to anyone else. If the dam is built, thousands of them will lose their only source of livelihood. Yet simply because they are landless, they do not qualify as project-affected and will not be eligible for rehabilitation.

Jalud is the first of the sixty-one villages slated for submergence in the reservoir of the dam.
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As early as 1985, twelve families, mostly Dalit, who had small holdings near the dam site had their land acquired. When they protested, cement was poured into their water pipes, their standing crops were bulldozed, and the police occupied the land by force. All twelve families are now landless and work as wage laborers. The new “private” initiative has made no effort to help them.

According to the environmental clearance from the central government, the people affected by the project ought to have been resettled in 1997. To date, S. Kumars hasn’t even managed to produce a list of project-
affected people, let alone land on which they are to be resettled. Yet construction continues. S. Kumars is so well entrenched with the state government that they don’t even need to pretend to cover their tracks.

This is how India works.

This is the genesis of the Maheshwar dam. This is the legacy that the Ogden Energy Group of the United States was so keen to inherit. What they don’t realize is that the fight is on. Over the last three years, the struggle against the Maheshwar dam has grown into a veritable civil disobedience movement, though you wouldn’t know it if you read the papers. The mainstream media is hugely dependent on revenue from advertising. S. Kumars sponsors massive advertisements for their blended suitings. After their James Bond campaign with Pierce Brosnan, they’ve signed India’s biggest film star—Hrithik Roshan—as their star campaigner.
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It’s extraordinary how much silent admiration and support a hunk in a blended suit can evoke.

Over the last two years, tens of thousands of villagers have captured the dam site several times and halted construction work.
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Protests in the region forced two companies, Bayernwerk and VEW of Germany, to withdraw from the project.
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The German company Siemens remained in the fray (angling for an export credit guarantee from Hermes, the German ECA).

In the summer of 2000, the German Ministry of Economic Co-
operation and Development sent in a team of experts headed by Richard Bissell (former chairman of the Inspection Panel of the World Bank) to undertake an independent review of the resettlement and rehabilitation aspects of the project.
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The report, published on June 15, 2000, was unambiguous that resettlement and rehabilitation of people displaced by the Maheshwar dam was simply not possible.

At the end of August, Siemens withdrew its application for a Hermes guarantee.
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The people of the valley don’t get much time to recover between bouts of fighting. In September, S. Kumars was part of the Indian Prime Minister’s business entourage when he visited the United States.
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Desperate to replace Siemens, they were hoping to convert their Memorandum of Understanding with Ogden into a final contract. That, fortunately, didn’t happen, and now Ogden has withdrawn from the Maheshwar project.
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The only time I have ever felt anything close to what most people would describe as national pride was when I walked one night with four thousand people toward the Maheshwar dam site, where we knew hundreds of armed policemen were waiting for us. Since the previous evening, people from all over the valley had begun to gather in a village called Sulgaon. They came in tractors, in bullock carts, and on foot. They came prepared to be beaten, humiliated, and taken to prison.

We set out at three in the morning. We walked for three hours—farmers, fisherfolk, sand quarriers, writers, painters, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists. All of India was represented. Urban, rural, touchable, untouchable. This alliance is what gives the movement its raw power, its intellectual rigor, and its phenomenal tenacity. As we crossed fields and forded streams, I remember thinking: “This is my land, this is the dream to which the whole of me belongs, this is worth more to me than anything else in the world.” We were not just fighting against a dam. We were fighting for a philosophy. For a worldview.

We walked in utter silence. Not a throat was cleared. Not a
beedi
lit. We arrived at the dam site at dawn. Though the police were expecting us, they didn’t know exactly where we would come from. We captured the dam site. People were beaten, humiliated, and arrested.

I was arrested and pushed into a private car that belonged to S. Kumars. I remember feeling a hot stab of shame—as quick and sharp as my earlier sense of pride. This was my land, too. My feudal land. Where even the police have been privatized. (On the way to the police station, they complained that S. Kumars had given them nothing to eat all day.) That evening there were so many arrests, the jail could not contain the people. The administration broke down and abandoned the jail. The people locked themselves in and demanded answers to their questions. So far, none have been forthcoming.

A Dutch documentary filmmaker recently asked me a very simple question: What can India teach the world?

A documentary filmmaker needs to see to understand. I thought of three places I could take him to.

First, to a “Call Center College” in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi. I thought it would be interesting for a filmmaker to see how easily an ancient civilization can be made to abase itself completely. In a Call Center College, hundreds of young English-speaking Indians are being groomed to staff the backroom operations of giant transnational companies.
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They are trained to answer telephone queries from the United States and the United Kingdom (on subjects ranging from a credit card inquiry to advice about a malfunctioning washing machine or the availability of cinema tickets). On no account must the caller know that his or her inquiry is being attended to by an Indian sitting at a desk on the outskirts of Delhi. The Call Center Colleges train their students to speak in American and British accents. They have to read foreign papers so they can chitchat about the news or the weather. On duty they have to change their given names. Sushma becomes Susie, Govind becomes Jerry, Advani becomes Andy. (Hi! I’m Andy. Gee, hot day, innit? Shoot, how can I help ya?) Actually it’s worse: Sushma becomes Mary. Govind becomes David. Perhaps Advani becomes Ulysses.

Call center workers are paid one-tenth of the salaries of their counterparts abroad. From all accounts, call centers are billed to become a multibillion-dollar industry.
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Recently the giant Tata industrial group announced its plans to redeploy twenty thousand of its retrenched workers in call centers after a brief “period of training” for the business, such as “picking up [the] American accent and slang.”
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The news report said that the older employees may find it difficult to work at night, a requirement for US-based companies, given the time difference between India and the United States.

The second place I thought I’d take the filmmaker was another kind of training center, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
shakha
, where the terrible backlash to this enforced abasement is being nurtured and groomed. Where ordinary people march around in khaki shorts and learn that amassing nuclear weapons, religious bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, book burning, and outright hatred are the ways in which to retrieve a nation’s lost dignity. Here he might see for himself how the two arms of government work in synergy. How they have evolved and pretty near perfected an extraordinary pincer action—while one arm is busy selling the nation off in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is orchestrating a baying, howling, deranged chorus of cultural nationalism. It would be fascinating to actually see how the inexorable ruthlessness of one process results in the naked, vulgar terrorism perpetrated by the other. They’re Siamese twins—Advani and Andy. They share organs. They have the ability to say two entirely contradictory things simultaneously, to hold all positions at all times. There’s no separating them.