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Dreams die first.

IN 1994, the Narmada Bachao Andolan had filed a writ petition as public interest litigation seeking to halt the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP). A Supreme Court judgment in October 2000 in the NBA versus Union of India case granted legal sanction for continuing construction of the SSP.

The Supreme Court asked the Narmada Control Authority (the monitoring agency of the SSP) to draw up an action plan for further relief and rehabilitation work for project-affected families (PAFs). The SSP's rehabilitation plan is governed by the recommendations of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award.

The NWDTA lays down that adequate cultivable land must be provided to PAFs who lose their lands as a result of submergence consequent to the construction of the dam at various stages.

On January 10, 2001, at a meeting of the Review Committee of the Narmada Control Authority, the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, Mr. Digvijay Singh, said that given the non-availability of agricultural land for distribution, cash would have to be substituted for land as compensation.

At the 50th meeting of the Rehabilitation and Resettlement (R&R) Sub-Group of the Narmada Control Authority on August 29, 2001, in Bhopal, the State Government formally proposed an amendment to the provision of land-for-land compensation as given in the NWDTA. The amendment proposes the payment of cash, in lieu of land. The NBA has launched a series of struggles against the proposed amendment.

A great deal of complexity surrounds the SSP. The impact of the dam on the lives of thousands of families who would lose their land and livelihood as a result of submergence has indeed been the foundational issue in the critical activism surrounding the dam.

The NBA has played a pivotal role in sustaining this critique. The broader public and academic debate, also, of course, has been over issues concerning competing developmental models, conflicting knowledge systems, the role of multilateral agencies and that of corporate capital, the position of the Judiciary in public policy, and the scope of activism.

To a certain extent, in the academic and even in the public debate, all these issues have crowded out what should perhaps be our everyday concern at a sustained level of urgency: what happens to the lives of families who lose their land as a result of submergence.

The latest amendment proposal serves to reorient our attention back to the starkness of this question. In such a context, the most urgent question is no longer whether dams are good or bad. Indeed, the most critical issue now goes to the heart of the question of the nature of India's democracy.

For, the suggested amendment indicates that the state's power can potentially be used to change an established legal framework of resettlement and rehabilitation in a manner that intensifies the threat to the livelihood of oustees.

There are several issues involved in the proposed amendment of which the most significant, perhaps, is that the proposal to substitute cash for land constitutes a fundamental breach of the legal guarantees framing the SSP. Thus sub-clause IV (7) of clause XI of the NWDTA states under ``Allotment of Agricultural Lands: Every displaced family from which more than 25 per cent of its land holding is acquired shall be entitled to and be allotted irrigable land on the extent of land acquired from it, subject to the prescribed ceiling in the State concerned, 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.''

The Central Government's defence of the SSP, in the hearing of the NBA versus Union of India case, hinged centrally on justifying the project on the basis of the land-for-land compensation package. In this connection, the Centre sought to criticise and distance itself from earlier compensation schemes based on cash.

Thus, in a written submission to the Supreme Court, the Centre stated that in earlier river valley projects ``cash compensation was the practice which resulted in the resettlement of displaced families becoming unsustainable due to squandering away of the compensatory money''. In contrast, it was stated, ``the NWDTA contained detailed directions in regard to acquisition of land and properties, provision of house plots and civic amenities for the resettlement and rehabilitation of affected families''.

It is clear, therefore, that the justificatory framework for the SSP, legally and politically, lies in the land-for-land compensation package. There is a distinctly contractarian element in the provision of any compensatory package, which is essentially to receive something in order to balance the surrender of something.

The terms and conditions of this exchange, however, cannot be changed without violating the legality of the contract, unless all parties to the contract (or their representatives) agree to the change. In this particular case, of course, the contract has been made essentially without the consent of those affected, and in the face of strong opposition by the affected people, and is now being proposed to be changed in the same circumstances.

It is important to remember that the constitutive argument of the challenge to the SSP has hinged on the question of rehabilitation. And the crux of this question has been the availability of land.

The main objection raised by the NBA (in its petition to the Supreme Court in 1994) to the continuation of the construction of the dam was that adequate provision for rehabilitation of the families whose lands were submerged had not been made, and since it was a condition precedent to the construction of the dam (as laid down by the NWDTA) the construction could not go on. Given the scale of displacement, sufficient land was not available, the NBA pointed out. In a large number of cases, oustees had been given land, which was not cultivable, or land which belonged to someone else. The proposed amendment thus vindicates the NBA's argument that there is not enough land for rehabilitation of the oustees.

The proposed amendment, therefore, also overturns the logic on which the Supreme Court sought to base its October 2000 judgment, that rehabilitation is possible on the basis of a land-for-land compensation package.

The text of the proposed amendment runs as follows: ``Provided that the displaced family has the option of obtaining full compensation for settling down and purchasing land in a village of its choice by submitting an application to this effect in writing, to the concerned officer of the State of Madhya Pradesh... An option once exercised shall be final and no claim for allotment of land can be made afterwards,'' (Narmada Control Authority, R&R Sub group's Agenda for 50th meeting, held on August 29, 2001).

The provision of cash payment is suggested only as an option, to be exercised by the oustee if he chooses to accept cash payment in lieu of land.

However, the context in which this amendment is being suggested will possibly make the acceptance of cash a compulsion rather than an option. In the first place, given the urgency of land acquisition by the Government for the purposes of the dam, and the non-availability of alternative cultivable land for distribution, there is a good chance that some amount of coercion will be applied to make families surrender their land and accept cash payment.

Second, the lure of ready cash for indigent rural tribal families is not inconsiderable and it is possible that the Government will take advantage of this.

Third, the statement that the oustee may ``obtain full compensation for settling down and purchasing land in a village of his choice'' actually means very little in the context. The element of ``choice'' would, in fact, be completely absent in a real situation. A rush for land creates a spiralling escalation of land prices in the market.

The rush to buy land would result in the splintering of the community since procuring land in huge chunks for an entire village to settle down in one location would be quite impossible. Thus, what needs to be underlined is that cash cannot in any way be seen as a substitute for land as an assurance of livelihood. Additionally, there are the more obvious objections to a cash compensation scheme, relating to wastage and expenditure on non-priority items. Also, in a context where unemployment has been on the rise, there would be no way to assure the PAFs some form of employment as an alternative to cultivation.

Thus, depriving the PAFs of their land essentially means cutting them off from a life support system - defined in narrow economic terms, or more broadly in terms of community - to which they have been accustomed for generations, without providing a better, or a viable alternative.

Following the Supreme Court judgment sanctioning the dam's further construction, the land under submergence in Madhya Pradesh proved to be more than was earlier estimated (by almost 13 per cent according to the NBA's calculations), thus pushing up the number of PAFs. Construction of the dam has been at a standstill for the last one year because of inadequate rehabilitation arrangements.

The State Government's interest in introducing this amendment may well stem from a genuine absence of any alternative to cash compensation. The amendment can come about only if the Centre and also the NCA, which includes representatives from Maharashtra and Gujarat, provide the necessary sanction.

The point, however, is that the suggested amendment - which ignores the longer term rehabilitation interests of PAFs - has been made in preference to other alternatives, (such as rethinking the dam's further construction), in a clear reflection of the weak political leverage that PAFs have upon the policy-making apparatus. This is also a reflection of the differential manner in which state power ascribes citizenship rights, depending on the socio-economic and political leverage of groups.

There is a clear and substantive violation here of Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to life, which includes the right to live with dignity, and from which emanates the right to livelihood. The other stark violation, of course, is of the principles of democratic governance, in a context where a developmental project is being pushed, without local consent, and by potentially overturning the legal framework created by the state itself.

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