Thursday, March 31, 2011
a dam(n) meeting
The tap of drinking water Jar was open, drops were falling on the floor and drying out instantly in a hot summer afternoon. He got up from his chair, slowly, unmindful, walked towards the tap, shut it tightly, trying to save every drop of water. End of the meeting , a room full of 20/25 people he is one person who will possibly loose his home, livelihood, his forefathers village, lands , trees everything to these drops of water we waste in Delhi. It was a meeting to make strategies to protest against making Renukaji Dam. A place 300 km away from Delhi, 37 villages, 775 hectors of forestland will be submerged; countless numbers of wild animals, 1700 families will be homeless to supply water to our continuous growing capital and to produce 40 megawatt electricity for our industries to hold on to our double figure growth rate. We made Bhakra, we made Teharis, made millions of people homeless to supply water in
Lets go back to that meeting, two of them were there…rest were us, people from the big cities. Probably tired of seeing “those” homeless people on the roads, some of us dared to think about having a fool stop. But here number follows its natural law. Big numbers dominant smaller numbers. We were merely 25 compare to billions of
End of the meeting we drink tea, go back home, having small evening drinking session with friends, take shower , dinner and go to bed.
End of the meeting their eyes search for every drop of water, licking from the taps, they tighten the taps, trying to save every drop of water in
NB 1: to answer some questions that may come in your mind about rehabilitation and compensation. Only for last 10/15 years we have a rehabilitation policy but as we have already lost a amount of agricultural land to these dams and industrialisation so most of time ( take it as 99.99%) they are being rehabilitated to the baron lands and spend 5/6 years to even make it proper cultivable land. Only those who can bare the cost of living for those years they managed to hold the land , rest got lost into those homeless , nameless people we see everyday on the roads of big cities ( I agree some times we even run some schools for those street kids, not bad !!!) There are also number of people from those villages who are landless, earn their bread by working in others land or gazing sheep or goats then don’t even get any proper compensation. These hill people got rehabilitate to the planes, where because of the difference in soil and climate they can not produce those familiar crops they were producing from generations. Most of these remote villages a major section of economy follows barter system, so for them it takes a lot time to understand the market economy and the competition.
For a long time I was talking from “my mind”…which is possibly will be considered as a babbling of a emotional, oversensitive mind. So I would just like to add one line from Dr. Amrtya Sen’s book Development as Freedom where he stated “People’s capability to choose the lives they have reason to value” as one of the main component of development, which we are denying continuously in the process of development in our country.
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