Don't reverse order, NBA's plea to Manmohan

THE HINDU; Gargi Parsai ; March 30, 2011

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh not to reverse the stop-work order imposed by the Ministry of Environment and Forests on the construction of the Maheshwar dam for “non-compliance” of various norms. The dam is being built by S. Kumar's group in Madhya Pradesh.Addressing a joint press conference here on Wednesday, noted lawyer Prashant Bhushan, RTI activist Arvind Kejriwal and NBA activists Alok Agarwal and Chitaroopa Palit said that unless rehabilitation and resettlement of project-affected people was completed, the stay on the construction of the dam should remain. They also sought scrapping of the “power purchase agreement” with the State government that provided for ‘take or pay,' as it was “unviable.”Alleging that “financial irregularities of the project promoters and investment of public money belonging to public financial institutions and banks was a scam bigger than the 2G spectrum one,” Mr. Bhushan sought a CBI probe into it.

Digvijay Singh's letter

Referring to a letter written by the former Congress Chief Minister, Digvijay Singh, requesting the Prime Minister to remove the stay-order on the construction of the dam “as the first stage of reservoir filling would not involve submergence of any villages,” the NBA said that already land acquisition orders were served on 46 villages for taking over about 300 acres without giving ‘land for land' to protect livelihoods of affected people.

The Maheshwar dam is one of the largest projects on Narmada. The project was privatised by the Madhya Pradesh government in 1992 and handed over to S. Kumar's. About 70,000 peasants, fisher people, boat people and landless workers in 61 villages will be affected by the project.According to NBA, the rehabilitation and resettlement of the oustees is a statutory requirement under the environmental clearance of May, 2001 under which the affected families have to be provided a minimum of two hectares of land and irrigation facilities and the company had to provide complete rehabilitation and resettlement plan with details of farm land by December 2001.The implementation of the dam should have been simultaneous to the resettlement of affected people, but while the dam has been constructed up to 80 per cent, rehabilitation and resettlement had lagged at less than 10 per cent. “After a protracted agitation by the oustees and in the light of violations, the Ministry of Environment and Forests, after giving a show-cause notice on April 23, 2010, suspended construction work on the project,” the NBA said.