Straddling 30km on both sides of the border of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, the region known as Singrauli saw its people scatter as seven power plants and several coal mines arrived on the rim of the Gobind Ballabh Pant reservoir in the mid-1970s.
Landless in India: Manti Naha (centre), a widow from Dibulganj in Uttar Pradesh, did not own arable land at the time of displacement. She, among others, is not entitled to any compensation. Today, she lives on alms
But three decades later, farmers and forest dwellers, mostly scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, uprooted to make way for industry, are still waiting for compensation, jobs and rehabilitation, even as unemployment pushes them deeper into poverty.
Their predicament serves as both a reminder of how resettlement and rehabilitation has been carried out—and failed—before and as a warning to the millions who remain in the path of land needed for industrial development. For their part, the companies in Singrauli seem resigned to the situation, mainly citing growing populations that make unclear who is entitled to what.
Resettlement issues are usually governed by the state’s revenue administration and funded by the firms, but there is a lack of awareness among officials about the living conditions of the poor, said Nandini Choudhury, a senior executive at the New Delhi-based industrial project consultancy Green Sea. “Post-project monitoring in India is very poor. And, in many cases, the compensation does not reach people,” she added.
Today, land is even more of a burning issue as several big-ticket industrial projects face opposition from locals unwilling to give up their land. The growing troubles have also forced the Union government to address the problems faced by those displaced long-ago, for the first time seriously.
India still does not have a national rehabilitation and resettlement Act. Such a Bill is now pending before a parliamentary panel, but many say it fails to address issues of those whose homes and livelihoods have already been devastated—such as the people here.
Ravaged landscape
Less than 2km south of state-run NTPC Ltd’s oldest 2,000MW plant in Shakti Nagar, in Uttar Pradesh’s Sonbhadra district, is the sprawling Chilka Tand colony, where many of the 2,086 displaced people were shifted after their land was identified for the power complex in 1977.
Pushed to the edge of the Khadia coal mine—a ravaged landscape of dug-out mountainside stripped of any vegetation—residents daily battle dust and disease. Every afternoon, dynamite blasts the core of the overhead hill in the hunt for coal, sending gusts of gray dust blowing into their homes.
Homes flood during the monsoons when mud sludge flows down the mined hills, creating breeding grounds for gastrointestinal ailments and malaria. And the community toilet, provided by the power company, has been shut since it was built several years ago.