In the dozen resettlement colonies for the displaced, there is no clean water or proper health care. Nearly 30% of the people who live near the power plants suffer from bronchial asthma, according to a doctor at the local public health care centre, who requested anonymity.
According to Sahyog, a local non-profit group representing the displaced, about 45,000 people faced mass displacement due to the power plants and coal mines in Uttar Pradesh’s Sonbhadra district alone.
NTPC tied up with Uttar Pradesh’s special area development authority to improve and build infrastructure at the colonies, but the deal broke off last year due to differences over money.
Joblessness
Adding to the gloom, joblessness has accelerated as automation increases and migrants from Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh flock here.
“It has become difficult to distinguish who is a land oustee and who is not. We are already overstretched to provide facilities to everybody,” said an NTPC official, who works in the corporate social responsibility department of the Singrauli power station. This person, who requested anonymity, said the firm has a budget of Rs43 lakh for each of its three settlement colonies, but the population has reached 7,000, more than anticipated.
At Dibulganj, 20km away and the site of state electricity board’s 1,600MW Anpara thermal power station, land oustees are still fighting for jobs promised in 1978. The 1,207 families that lost a total 3,195 acres of land, were each promised a job, but only 304 people are employed today as clerks, peons and labourers. Now, as the company has plans to lease out surplus land to another private plant, the 1,200MW Lanco Anpara Power Pvt. Ltd, local protests have erupted again.
A senior official at the Anpara power station, who requested anonymity, said a board order had specified that no land oustees be given jobs if they hadn’t got one within the first seven years of displacement. Anpara power station is run by the state-run Uttar Pradesh Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd.
“It’s grave injustice,” said Shyam Jaiswal, a clerk at the Anpara power plant and a trade union leader. “First they acquired our land and kept promising we will get jobs when they expand capacity. Then they gave the land away to another company and changed the rules for employment.” He said many of the jobless belong to families evicted in the early 1960s by the Rihand dam, which created the Gobind Ballabh Pant reservoir.
Living on alms
Many others, who did not own any arable land at the time of displacement, such as Manti Naha, a frail widow with a wizened face, were not entitled to any compensation at all. Today, she lives on alms from passers-by of the Anpara station, gathering rice and dal from different homes. “I have to walk 2km every day to get one meal,” said Naha, whose two sons, a truck driver and a wage labourer, are away in Allahabad and Lucknow. “I can’t ask them for money because they need it too.”
“It will turn into another Nandigram if people do not get their entitled compensation, land and jobs,” warns Pankaj Mishra, who works with Sahyog. “About 90% of the people are unemployed here,” adds Mishra, who recently filed a public interest litigation against Anpara power plant on behalf of the land oustees.