Date:26/04/2004 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2004/04/26/stories/2004042602120300.htm

Karnataka - Bidar

Karanja project evacuees left in the lurch

By Our Staff Correspondent

BIDAR, APRIL 25. Elections come and go but the problems of nearly 15,000 evacuees of the Karanja Irrigation Project in Bidar continue and grow every passing day.

The State Government cleared the project to build a dam across the Karanja to irrigate nearly 40,000 hectares of land in 1969. About Rs. 420 crore has been spent on it till date. But not a single hectare has been irrigated.

Nearly 1,500 families were evacuated before the gates of the dam were closed in 1988. The evacuated families were settled in nine rehabilitation villages built on the outskirts of Bidar. These villages lack the infrastructure to accommodate the families whose number has since doubled.

Those replaced by the project face the danger of being replaced again from their rehabilitation villages, owing to a faulty survey of the project. The final level of the backwaters, supposed to be at least three km. away from the nearest human settlement, lay exactly at the centre of Dakulagi and Marakal villages, inundating at least half the area of these villages.

Spending on rehabilitation and resettlement has been far from satisfactory. While in the Upper Krishna Project, the State Government earned accolades from the World Bank for spending nearly 20 per cent of the project cost on rehabilitation and resettlement, only 4.7 per cent was spent in the case of the Karanja project. Delay in payment of compensation to farmers who lost land has created a situation where they have far less money than the market cost of these lands. They have been incapable of buying new land as their cost has escalated.

Farmers who owned hundreds of acres and employed many labourers are now forced to work as labourers and stand before fair price shops for buying subsidised grain, says Suryakant Patil Dakulagi, President of the Agitation Committee of Farmers Displaced by the Karanja Project. The committee has been organising protest rallies and "rasta rokos" across the district demanding a special rehabilitation and resettlement package. The committee members had threatened to boycott elections if their demands were not met within a given deadline.

At a meeting of evacuees in February, the Minister for Water Resources (Krishna Basin), Allum Veerabhadrappa, made 11 promises and asked them to participate in the election process.