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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  What's really behind the Bhangar agitation?
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What's really behind the Bhangar agitation?

Those behind the Bhangar protests in West Bengal speak of environmental worries and 'toxic' gases, but what lies at the root of the conflict?

Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/MintPremium
Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint

Sulphur hexafluoride, or SF6, is a gas known to be non-toxic, non-corrosive and even non-flammable. But it was little known until recently that its metaphoric release into a politically charged environment can ignite massive unrest and claim lives. 

There was no real leakage of SF6 in Bhangar in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district, but villages there have been on the boil for the past couple of weeks. People in Bhangar are up in arms against the setting up of a power substation on a small plot of around 15 acres, which activists claim could impact livelihoods and is a potential health hazard.

Matters came to a head on 18 January when two people were killed in clashes with the police—a first since Mamata Banerjee took office as chief minister in 2011—and protesters retaliated by laying siege to Bhangar. 

Though the police denied firing at anyone at all, Bhangar served to Trinamool Congress chief Banerjee a grim reminder of the agitations against land acquisition in Nandigram—the political cul-de-sac of voter apathy from which her Communist predecessors could never emerge. 

Banerjee exercised caution initially, but would have none of this nuisance after people in Bhangar dug up a road to prevent police incursions, stirring up memories of Nandigram again. 

Two ultra-left-wing activists were arrested immediately for inciting trouble and charged with crimes such as rioting and unlawful assembly. At least one more of their comrades is on the run as the administration continues to take cautious steps to re-establish the writ of law in Bhangar.

For at least three years, activists in Bhangar have been fomenting popular resistance against a power substation being built by Power Grid Corp. of India Ltd, a electricity transmission enterprise owned by the central government. If it materializes, the substation will connect high-tension power cables and supply electricity to the Rajarhat township and parts of Kolkata. The substation is almost ready for trials, but in the wake of recent developments its future is uncertain.

Only a small plot of around 15 acres was acquired by Power Grid in 2013. Even taking into account the fact that most landholdings in the area were quite small, the project would have displaced only a handful of people, unlike in Nandigram, where the state government had proposed to acquire thousands of acres uprooting several villages. Still, the activists managed to bring together people from at least four villages to oppose an innocuous power substation as if it were a nuclear reactor.

SF6 held the key. Through a sustained campaign, they managed to convince villagers that the gas, which is commonly used in electric circuit breakers, had huge implications for the environment. Its potential for global warming is 24,000 times that of carbon dioxide and could seriously impact agriculture in the area, they said. Besides the threat to livelihood, activists said the high-tension overhead power cables were a deadly health hazard that could cause all kinds of ailments: from leukaemia to infertility.

I.S. Jha, Power Grid’s chairman and managing director, said the concerns are totally misplaced. The use of SF6 in substations is a proven technology, which has no alternative (various attributes, notably its insulating nature, make it ideal for circuit breakers), he said, but people of Bhangar would have none of it. 

To contain the political damage, West Bengal power minister Sovandeb Chattopadhyay hurriedly announced in the wake of the violence that the project was shelved, but later backpedalled, saying that it would be a “huge loss" if the people blocked it.

What the activists from the ultra-left-wing Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Star concealed is the fact that SF6’s contribution to global warming relative to CO2 is as minuscule as 0.01%, according to Srikumar Mallick, visiting professor and former head of the electrical engineering department at Bengal Engineering and Science University. If its leakage and disposal continue at the current level, SF6’s contribution to global warming compared with CO2 is projected to rise in 100 years to 0.1%, he said. And there is no evidence either that SF6 contributes to stratospheric ozone depletion.

Without SF6, substations will have to be scaled down to infeasible levels, according to Mallick. “There is indeed no alternative to SF6," he said, “and the environmental concerns appear to be hugely exaggerated."

There is no denying that high-tension power cables create strong electromagnetic fields, said Kesab Bhattacharya, professor of electrical engineering at Jadavpur University. These can have ill effects on human health, but there are clearly laid down laws to mitigate them. There is no evidence that the cables cause any harm at all to human lives if these laws are followed, he said, adding that even the site for building substations is determined following strict safety guidelines.

According to a study recently released by the Union government and consulting firm Deloitte, the energy deficiency in West Bengal was assessed at 0.5% at the end of fiscal 2015, compared with a national average of 3.6%. 

Power demand in the state is expected to grow at an annual average of 5% to 62,926 million units by the end of fiscal 2019, says the study. Five utilities distribute power in West Bengal and they have all made provisions to meet the projected demand. 

The state has achieved near 100% rural electrification, according to power minister Chattopadhyay, but there are issues with the quality of supply. The state has plans to build more than a dozen substations to address the problem of low voltage in some areas.

The campaign run by activists was only eyewash: the concerns they voiced by them wouldn’t have held any water with the villagers had the activists not been able to feed on deep-seated discontent, said several key officials in the administration, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The trumped-up claims of environmental hazards were tacked on to mobilize a larger mass, they added.

Though Power Grid claims to have paid four times the market price in keeping with local laws, people sold their properties grudgingly under political pressure. They said they never got the premium that the company claims to have paid because almost all of it went to land aggregators who acted as agents for Power Grid.

The land mafia has been on the prowl for years in Bhangar and adjoining areas, and in the same way as the Left Front previously, it plunged Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress into a whirlpool of unrest. “It was, in a sense, unavoidable," said one of the officials cited above.

Since Banerjee took over as the chief minister, ending the Left Front’s unbroken rule of 34 years, the state has stopped acquiring land. Even infrastructure projects have been abandoned or delayed because the state wouldn’t force people to give up their properties, no matter the price. As an alternative, Banerjee allowed companies to buy land on their own.

Even under the previous regime, that was an option. In the wake of political unrest over land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram, many companies tried to buy land directly from farmers, but most had horrible experiences. 

Landholdings are small in West Bengal and ownership records are a mess. It is almost impossible for companies to acquire large tracts on their own. There is no alternative to relying on local agents. That’s the case in many other parts of India, such as Haryana, but in West Bengal, this model doesn’t seem to be working either.

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Published: 28 Jan 2017, 11:36 PM IST
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