Assessment of Rehabilitation of People Displaced due to Indira Sagar Pariyojana (ISP)
By Kaivalya Desai, Vineet Jain, Rahul Pandey, P. Srikant, and Upmanyu Trivedi
March, 2007
Abstract and Conclusions - full paper coming.
This paper is based on a field survey of a sample of 429 rural families displaced from Indira Sagar Pariyojana (ISP), covering 5 government and 6 private sites, all resettled 2-4 years ago. Majority of ISP oustees preferred to resettle privately because the state failed to provide adequate number and quality of resettlement sites.
We observed significant deterioration in living standard of people in both government and private sites. Incomes of most families have fallen by more than half as compared to pre-displacement years. Farmers lost significant land but could not purchase even a small fraction; small farmers have to now do more of labour work for sustenance; landless labourers have been further marginalized as both farm labour demand and wage rates have fallen.
Cash compensation for assets jointly held by multiple families of a house, combined with corruption and misinform ation that characterized compensation estimation and disbursal process, has led to an atmosphere of mistrust and break-down of family and community relationships in almost every village. Absence of civic amenities in resettlement sites, like pucca roads, clean water and drainage, and poor access to primary health center, schools, markets, grazing land and forests, have made matters worse. More children, especially girls, have dropped out of school.
Cattle population and trees have declined sharply. With economic hardship and uncertain future, cases of physical illness and psychological depression have increased. Main cause of all this devastation has been poor design and implementation of Rehabilitation and Resettlement (R&R) package. Our findings highlight inadequacy of cash compensation as main support for rebuilding lost livelihoods of people displaced from such projects. In light of ongoing frenzy of industrial investments, India urgently needs a comprehensive R&R policy. New R&R package must explicitly aim at rebuilding livelihoods and project clearance must be linked to its satisfactory performance after resettlement. R&R performance must be measured on livelihood indicators like change in family income, market value of new productive assets, sustainability of new sources of income, and access to farmland, clean water, grazing land, forests, electricity, markets, education and health facilities. And finally, the processes of R&R design, approval and monitoring must become democratic and have participation of affected people, especially the landless and small farmers.
Conclusion
In our survey of 429 families (out of a total of more than 30,000 families accounting for over a lakh people) displaced due to ISP (one of large dams on river Narmada), we could not find a single family whose living standard has not deteriorated after the rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) process. The cash compensation and Special Rehabilitation Grant (SRG) package has been utterly insufficient to help families make adequate productive investments. Most of government resettlement sites lack several basic amenities like access to markets and employment opportunities, proximity to affordable and cultivable land and forests, availability of trees, grazing land for cattle, infrastructure of proper roads, drainage, and in some cases, clean water supply. Inability of the state to provide decent resettlement sites is the reason that majority of oustees chose to resettle privately. While government sites are slightly better on aspects of roads, water and electricity supply, many privately resettled sites fare slightly better on more fundamental economic aspects like proximity to markets and relatively favourable price of land. However, most private sites do not have even basic infrastructure of roads, water, electricity and primary school. Moreover, oustees resettled in private sites face hostility from neighbouring host community whose resources (like water, trees, grazing land, schools, primary health care facilities) they share and with whom they compete locally for labour work and other employments. On the whole, we did not observe any significant difference in the extent of deterioration in standard of living between those settled privately and in government sites. No family covered in the survey has been able to rebuild its lost livelihood even after 2-4 years of displacement and resettlement.
Most farmers have lost substantial farmland to submergence but could purchase at best a small fraction of it. Several small farmers have become either landless labourers or more dependent on farm labour work to supplement insufficient income from farming. The landless labourers, who comprise overwhelming majority of oustees, have been pushed further to the brink of precarious survival.
The cash received as compensation for lost assets like land was much less (by at least 50%) than prevailing market rates. Cash received as SRG too was not sufficient to invest in any major productive asset. In the end, most of compensation and SRG money was spent by the people in multiple contingencies like purchase of new house-plot, construction of new house, paying off all or part of old debt, and meeting running expense of families suddenly trapped in a situation of drastic reduction in farm output and labour demand which has been continuing with same severity even after 2-4 years of resettlement. Farm labourers’ incomes have fallen sharply and become more uncertain as both farm labour demand and wage rates have been squeezed. Adults of labourer families are not sure at the beginning of a week if they would be able to support family through the week. In majority of resettled villages, a labourer now hopes to get at most 5-6 days of work in a month, whereas finding work was not this difficult earlier.
As economic hardship has deepened and common grazing land is not available, almost all families have been forced to sell off all or part of their cattle. Some children, especially girls, have been withdrawn from schools. Health problems, including physical illness and psychological depression, have increased. We observed that due to economic distress, seasonal migrations have become common, some landless families have begun to migrate for the long haul, and more are contemplating longer-term migration. The irony is that people are not sure which would be a good place to migrate and whether their economic condition will improve after that.
The hopeless situation that we encountered village after village and family after family forced us to think what alternative R&R package could have been appropriate. After our experience we have become convinced of two things. First, the amount of cash offered as compensation and SRG was highly insufficient to make any productive investment required to rebuild a livelihood. Second, though cash can be a useful component of compensation package, it cannot suffice as the main or only component. The second point becomes crucial in the special context of displacement as in case of ISP oustees. The context is that of a person, who has rarely seen even a few thousand rupees cash at a time, being suddenly handed over cash worth tens of thousand rupees (or even a few lakh), and thrust with the contingency of making fundamental livelihood decisions in the midst of local environment marked by high level of mistrust, misinformation and corruption, and surrounded by several goons, middlemen, money-menders and marketers ready to pounce at the slightest opportunity to make money at others’ expense. Few of us can take cool-headed, rational decisions in such a context.
Now that the dust has settled down and their daily lives have stabilized at a worse level of struggle than before, everyone is ruing about what happened. In retrospect, almost everyone we met feels they must have got land for land. When people, whose main skill and knowledge base is in agriculture, are suddenly uprooted from agricultural assets and resources, there are only two ways to rebuild the lost livelihoods. Either they get back good quality agricultural assets ( i.e. cultivable and irrigated lands along with peripheral support systems) which they can harness with the skill and knowledge they already possess. Or they are provided with alternate productive assets with potentially attractive markets and granted sufficient material support and cushion of time to train themselves in acquiring new skill and knowledge base required to operate new assets economically, source new inputs, market new outputs, and begin lives afresh.
In the case of ISP, other dams on Narmada, and other development projects that displace local people who are mostly underprivileged, a robust R&R policy should have at least the following components:
* Project approval linked to R&R implementation and performance.
This must be non-negotiable because unless the stakes of policymakers and project owners are linked to granting full justice to potential oustees, the R&R implementation will not receive desired level of commitment. Thus project approval must be linked to not only implementation but also outcome of R&R. Before clearing a project, there must be visible signs that the process of rebuilding livelihoods of affected people is on track. Since it may take at least 2-3 years for such signs to emerge even in case of best possible R&R, the design and implementation of R&R as part of a project’s approval process should be appropriately phased in time. This is not a problem as preparatory lead time for most such projects in much longer (it was
about 20 years in case of ISP).
* Comprehensive design of R&R package aimed explicitly at rebuilding livelihoods.
R&R package must contain various elements that are critical for rebuilding lost livelihoods of displaced families. These must include:
Ø Non-cash elements like investment in productive assets such as adequate size of cultivable and irrigated farmland for each family (this size should have a minimum fixed component sufficient for sustaining a family and a variable component proportional to lost land), provision of wide choice to a family with respect to location of new farmland and house-plot, selection of resettlement sites based on proximity and access to markets and urban or semi-urban habitations, provision of appropriate training in case a family wishes to make its investment in a productive asset or skill other than agricultural land, provision of good quality infrastructure in and around resettlement sites like primary/middle/ high schools, primary health centers, pucca roads, drainage, electricity distribution and communication systems, and availability of grazing land and natural resources like forests, and
Ø Cash element similar to SRG but higher enough amount which can be used by a family towards exercising its choice while making new productive investments besides taking care of financial and other contingencies. The cash element of R&R package must take care three fundamental needs of a family that is trying to pick pieces and rebuild livelihood from the scratch – (i) begin on a clean base (pay off past debt, buy house-plot and rebuild new house), (ii) make fresh productive investments (for example, new cattle, land, skills, equipments, grocery shop, other manufacturing/ service units, etc.), and (iii) have reasonable savings for the future. Bank account must be opened for each family in the location of its resettlement so that it
can save money.
* Robust measures of R&R performance.
Performance of R&R implementation must be measured on a set of indicators that gives a reliable idea if, after 2-3 years, a family is on an irreversible
track towards rebuilding its livelihood. Such a set should include measures like family’s net annual income; change in annual income compared to pre-displacement years as well as over the past 2-3 years; whether current sources of income are sustainable in the long run; market value of family assets/resources including farmland, house-plot, house, trees, animals and others; change in value of such assets/resources compared to pre-displacement years; whether some adults need to temporarily migrate under economic distress; whether all children above 4 years go to school; whether family members have easy access to primary health care center, clean water, pucca roads, electricity, communication, and natural resources like river and forests; whether animals have easy access to sufficie nt grazing land.
* Participation of affected people in R&R design and approval.
A longer-term solution is to establish a democratic mechanism that necessitates participation of project affected people in the processes of design of R&R package, its approval, implementation and performance monitoring. There must be a system to ensure that, once R&R implementation is underway, periodic certification of its satisfactory performance is taken from the affected people before proceeding further, and they, if not satisfied, have the authority to rescind project approval. Representatives of gram panchayats as well as of the landless and small-land-owning people need to be involved in all this.
Our observation has been that gram panchayats are often controlled by land-owning and influential sections whereas majority of villagers are often the landless labourers and very small farmers. Hence adequate representation of the latter sections is crucial. Such kind of democratic mechanism is the only long-term antidote to existing centralized decision-making processes which, by definition, are controlled by individuals who, even if not bad-intentioned, are often alienated from the ground reality and have visceral suspicion for the ordinary people. Such alienation is the main reason that the authorities, far from being sensitive to concerns of people facing submergence due to ISP, used brutal force to evict many of them and demolish their houses even when no R&R was in place. Only a democratic process of R&R design, approval and monitoring, and its linkage to project clearance, can bring the most essential element, i.e. sensitivity towards oustees, at the core of R&R’s guiding principle.
As India, in its ongoing phase of rapid industrial investment, is likely to witness an even greater surge in projects like SSP, ISP, Singur, and Nandigram-type SEZs in the near future, livelihoods of at least a few million people are at stake. In order that these people are not further marginalized and pushed to limits of hopelessness, it is imperative for the government to establish a robust R&R policy. Such a policy, like the one on rural employment guarantee, should be seen as an integral part of a comprehensive social security system that India urgently needs to put in place to allow marginalized populations – the rural landless, small farmers, urban slum-dwellers, dalit and tribal people – the luxury of a safety valve for mitigating potentially devastating effects of ruthless industrialization and GDP growth. In addition to having such a social security system, if we are
somehow able to redesign core economic policies that re-channel investments so as to make deprived people explicitly participate in new economic activities and reap fruits of growth, and simultaneously reduce distress migration and preserve ecosystems, what else would be left to do in the name of ‘inclusive economic development’ ?