Nitin Sethi
The power sector gathered in an opulently polished banquet hall of a hotel in Delhi on December 16. The Arunachal government had invited them to ponder how to push for hydroelectric power generation. The Union government too was well represented – the Planning Commission, Central Electricity Authority, CERC, Planning Commission. They were bound to come. After all, Arunachal holds the key to 20,000 MW power potential capacity. The power minister was scheduled to fly in directly from the inauguration of the controversial Tipaimukh Multipurpose Hydroelectric Project in Manipur.
With the exception of one voice, that of A M Gokhale, advisor to the Planning Commission, the meeting carried on complaining about the ‘problem’ of rehabilitation and resettlement, the ‘issue’ of land acquisition and how they hampered ‘exploitation’ of the vast potential the northeast of India gridlocked in. Of course there were standard noises about the security costs and concerns in the region. Almost every speaker who held forth on issues concerning northeast power sector brought it to the fore.
At almost the same time, in Imphal, Manipur, the Indian power minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, was inaugurating the Tipaimukh and Loktak projects, backed by the might of Indian armed power and its statecraft. Here, in Delhi the power sector satraps were discussing how India’s 8-9 per cent growth was being curtailed because of security related issues for power projects. There in Manipur, the government had promised a Rs 400 crore security cover for a 1500 MW project that one arm of the government had already declared was financially unviable unless the government subsidised it. Here, in Delhi, the satraps discussed new ways of ensuring a faster clearance process for setting up power projects. There in Manipur, the public hearings (mandatory under Indian environmental laws to clear a project) had been held under the careful siege of the armed forces, managed well to secure on paper the verdict the state had already decided upon – the dam had to be built at all costs.
The project
For the past five decades Tipaimukh had been a pipe dream of the government. But once the project was handed over to the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation, the government-owned company meant to build power projects in the Northeast region, it got impetus. In November 2005 the corporation advertised a global tender for the project, almost announcing to the world, that the government is finally ready to start work on ground. In July 2006, the seal of the pre-bid qualification of the global tender announced by the Corporation for the first phase was opened at Guwahati Three firms from Japan, one from Iran, two from China and seven others from India had responded to the global tender. The ball had been set rolling.
A 1500 MW project, one of the largest in the region, it is to generate power from the Barak river, the second largest river in the region. The site of the dam is almost on the state border with Mizoram and close to the international border with Bangladesh. The proposed 164 m rock-filled high dam will come up 500 metres downstream of the confluence of the Barak and Tuivai rivers. It will have a gross storage of 15,900 million cubic metres and create a reservoir, which at its maximum depth would be of 1725.5 metres.
The project has a long history. According to the Reworked Detailed Project Report the project was seeded in 1954 when the government of Assam requested the Central Water and Power Commission for ways to manage floods in the Barak Basin. But claiming that the project would harm the fertile valley of Cachar, the project was later shifted upstream. In 1984, the Central Water Commission presented its detailed project report with the location of the dam on river Barak in Manipur where it took a 220 degree bend from south-west to northerly direction flowing through a gorge, a stretch 24 kilometer downstream of Tipaimukh. At that time the dam, the studies showed, would cost Rs 1,078 crore at 1984-85 price levels. The project got shelved, temporarily, as the state protested and economists called it unviable. But in 2003 it was revived yet again, when the Public Investments Board and the Central Electric Authority cleared the project by which time the project costs had been revised by NEEPCO to a humungous Rs 5,163.86 crore. The Tipaimukh project had reached a critical stage after good five decades of flip-flops.
Driven by logic?
In this flip flop of state and central governments and their various arms, somewhere the entire logic of the project lost its meaning. Why was the project to be built? Who would get affected? Who would gain? Was it worth it? Have the people who would benefit and who would lose been consulted?
The project is to be built primarily for flood control and power generation. The irrigation and other benefits, the reworked detailed project report states are of secondary nature. The flood control is to benefit primarily the plains which lie in the state of Assam. Manipur and Mizoram, which will bear most of the brunt of submergence, have nothing to gain in terms of flood control. But they are to share, as the central government stipulates, the 12 per cent free power from the project while the rest is taken up by NEEPCO and centre. But of the installed capacity of 1500 MW, the firm generation is to be of mere 412 MW. Firm generation implies the least the project will generate at any time. In any such projects the most efficient periods are only the monsoons. But in case of Tipaimukh there are more worrying statistics. The detailed project report states that the project will have plant will have a load factor of 28 per cent. For whatever duration a power plant generates below its full capacity, to that extent it is a capacity loss. Plant Load Factor is a measure of average capacity utilization. This means that the Tipaimukh project will be hitting even average plant capacity only 28 per cent of the time in a year. The economics, though the officials of NEEPCO say, can be taken care of with a little help from the Union government.
Help us go down
The Indian government has committed to subsidise the infrastructural network need to build the dam – roads and transport links etc. It has promised a robust security cover. What it has still not promised or even planned for is the rehabilitation of the people who will be impacted by the dam and its reservoir. The project will submerge lands in two districts, Tamenglong and Churachandpur. The Zeliangrong naga of Tamenglong have not let go of a single opportunity to protest against the dam which brings them nothing but loss of land, culture and livelihood – the perfect combination for destitution.
In Churachandpur, where the dam is sited, though there is a partial support. Deputy General Manager, North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited, NEEPCO, Manipur says, “The areas to be affected is practically a no man’s land and with the coming of the project, roads and communication facilities will improve significantly. Apart from fee power, there will be tremendous scope for small scale industries. There will be 400 jobs, both skill and unskilled, and many indirect employment opportunities.” Some of the Hmar leaders have bought this logic. Others have wondered why the people of Churachandpur should get these facilities as doles when it’s their right in the first place. Why should all these basic utilities come tagged to a destructive project when the government of India should rightfully provide these anyways? Perhaps because in last 60 years the government of India has not.
What will they get?
Now that the dam has been given the final clearance one must consider the resettlement and rehabilitation process to be put in place. There are bound to be people who shall carry on protesting against the dam and rightly so. But one must not forget the capability of the government to rough shod its way through protests and go ahead with what it has decided. This happened in the case of Sardar Sarovar project on river Narmada. While many submerged their years in an ideological battle against mega-dams, many others, because of the ideological battle, forgot to consider the hard reality of submergence under columns of water once the dam did come up.
There is a threat that a similar situation may arise in Tamenglong and Churachandpur as well. People may protest, but when and if the dam comes up, if there is no clear-cut rehabilitation process in place, the affected will get a raw deal.
If one is to read the reports of NEEPCO it is clear that the government at present does not consider the way of the Zeliangrong people as productive. In the DPR, jhum has been declared as destructive therefore not worth compensating. Commons have not been valued and in Indian history there is no precedent for evaluating and compensating for commons. The average productivity of a village, in market economics, obviously comes out to be little when measured against cash. This is because ordinary evaluation does not take into consideration the non-cash components of a rural economy – the natural resource based components. Usual evaluations do not take into consideration the market rates of forest usufructs like cane or bamboo. Usual schemes do not compensate for the loss of earnings that people would enjoy if there was a non-exploitative market for these goods. Consider the case of bamboo. Should one pay a farmer for the loss of his bamboo forest at the rate at which he could possibly fetch in Guwahati, Imphal or Tamenglong head quarters for his goods, if there was no middle-man involved? At what price should the fish he takes out of the rivulets be compensated for, or for the yam or the tubers that work as medicinal plants that save costs on exorbitant allopathic medicine?
In the larger battle over mega-dams these quibbles seem minor and irrelevant at present. But when the dust subsides the quibbles could end up deciding the fate of the hundreds displaced by Tipaimukh.
The Zeliangrong villages depend on three economic mainstays, the jhum crop, the settled paddy fields and the forests. Then they have the vast kitchen gardens that give them food through the year. The jhum fields are measured not in terms of land but the tins of rice it can generate. Patches of land are therefore graded and remembered by their productivity. The terrace fields are more productive. There is absolutely no use of chemicals in any cultivation in these regions therefore input costs are minimal. From jhum itself villagers on an average are able to take out 400 to 500 tins of rice. Another 150 tins comes from wetland rice. This obviously varies to as much as 600-100 tins depending upon the plain area a family has along the Barak river but that remains an average. The jhum fields besides paddy can give them as Neilolung Goimei of Tajijang village explains, “We can get vegetables to last us the year around, at times almost 20 different things at the minimum at least 5 or 6 vegetables.” He explains, “The rice we eat here is the costliest in Manipur. In the district head quarters it’s sold at Rs 16-30 per kg depending upon availability and the price rises considerably in Imphal valley. The chilies they produce are sold at Rs 500-150 per kg in the city below too. It is a well-known delicacy across northeast. “
The economy of the village or a family hinges between the wet rice and the jhum. In different seasons they provide staple food source. “If one is submerged, the other does not matter, no one can live here if he doesn’t have both to eat off,” explains Chingoing Kamei chairman of the village council in Tungtao.
Then fish from the river is another lucrative product. Some families can make as much as Rs 40,000-50,000 from just selling fish in the nearest market. But most villages in Tamenglong are not connected by road therefore they do not sell but fish only for self-consumption or sale to their own village or at best nearby villages. “If I could sell in district headquarters I could make Rs 150 per small basket of dried fish and much more for fresh fish,” says another village elder. Even a pack of small snails from a rivulet can be sold for Rs 10 to get supplementary income.
The other steady provider of cash and food is the forest. While protein supplements are found in the meat the villagers hunt in the forests, the forest provides precious herbs, fruits, tubers, wood, bamboo and timber. “My brother sells cane in Imphal, he buys it from the village and takes it down to Imphal or now we have a charcoal producing factory which also buys it in Tamenglong. Each cane goes for Rs 30. Our forests are stocked with cane and bamboo,” explains, “Ramkhun Pamei editor of Dih Cham, a local daily in Tamenglong. The villagers obviously get little out of the deal as most of the money is made by brokers or in the valley. In fact most villages are unable to sell because there are no roads to transport the forest produce. Timber used to be a major product but since the Supreme Court restrictions the trade has gone underground now we can’t sell our own timber,” he explains. Even when they did sell, unfortunately, the villages earned little by giving away entire swaths of forests for a pittance.
Most of what cash we get ends up either in expenditure on education of our children or medicine. We don’t need cash to buy food but for things that come from the city or the valley,” explains a lady in Tungtao. They end up spending almost 70-75 per cent of our money in sending children to the city to study at times.
A vibrant though small economy ensures that the region keeps a 65 plus per cent of literacy despite being the poorest district in one of the poorest states of the country. This NEEPCO likes to call destructive and primitive.
“I don’t get this. First the government does not build any infrastructure in our areas. Six months of monsoons we remain cut off from rest of the world. We are unable to sell anything we have and therefore we subsist. Then the government comes in and says because you only subsist and not thrive you are dispensable. Imagine if the state had provided what it should – roads, water etc we would have been the richest people in the region, selling our goods to the entire world. They wouldn’t have dared to touch us because we too would be influential. But now they promise us these utilities in the name of dam and say you shall get them when we remove you from your lands. What will we do with the hospital and roads then?” asks a rather bemused secretary of the Zeliangrong Union in Tamenglong.
His questions may sound rhetorical at present. But in months to come these questions will turn up in a critical face off against the government machinery as it comes rolling over the Naga and Hmar lands.
It is vital that the communities, if they decide to stand up against the dam create several fronts. There will be those submerged in the idea of protest against the dam per se. But others, elders of the society and the intellectual support groups, have to take on another role - bring together a body of evidence on the real cost of such development. Create, document and disseminate information and analysis on the economic and social losses of the people when the dam comes up. Unfortunately a lot of these debates are fought only in the realm of rationale science and logic therefore the leaders of the society will have to provide analysis and information that can stand the test of such scrutiny. It’s a tough battle because the terms of the battle are set by the opposition. But it’s the only way left to fight off the road roller called ‘development’ flattening the lives and culture of hundreds in the hills.
(The author is Assistant Editor, Down To Earth magazine)
