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By Panchali Ray With an eye on the elections and unwilling to stir up situations like Singur and Nandigram, the West Bengal government has stalled plans to build a thermal power plant in Katwa, even though 9.910 acres of land have already been acquired. But nobody believes the project has been scrapped and villagers who will have to give up their land and livelihoods are preparing for a long battle ahead
The land versus development debate has reared its head in West Bengal once again. This time it’s the proposed thermal power plant at Katwa, Burdwan district, West Bengal, that is in dispute. Under the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, the Bengal state government plans to set up four power plants in Birbhum, Purulia, Murshidabad and Burdwan districts, with a total capacity of 3,390 MW. But the land earmarked in Katwa (Burdwan district) has run into considerable opposition from farmers and landowners who claim that it is rich multi-cropped agricultural land that they will not give up. Memories of the government’s miscalculations in Singur and Nandigram are still fresh in people’s minds. In the past few years, the state has seen a tumultuous change in its political landscape as the aggressive industrialisation policy pursued by the CPI (M)-led Left Front government met with stiff opposition. While militant resistance built up to what was seen as undemocratic forceful acquisition of land, the government was quick to describe it as interventions by “Maoists” and other “outsiders”. And so it is that with an eye on the elections, and the earlier trouble in Singur and Nandigram, the government has withdrawn from Katwa even though 9.910 acres of land have already been acquired. It focused instead on Phase II development of plants in Sagardighi. The thermal project plant at Katwa has been put on the backburner until, presumably, the Lok Sabha elections are over. The establishment of a thermal power plant in Katwa by the West Bengal Power Development Corporation Limited (WBPDCL) is part of the government’s plan to tackle the acute power crisis in the state. Existing plants generate around 3,000 MW a day; in peak summer months, the demand hovers around 4,900 MW. One regional daily reported that though the state has the capacity to produce 6,140 MW, the shortfall has been precipitated by a crisis in the supply of coal, attributed to a myriad reasons -- floods, heavy monsoons etc... State power minister Mrinal Bannerjee claims: “Currently, the total requirement of coal for WBPDCL is about 55,000 tonnes a day. But we have been receiving only about 30,000-35,000 tonnes. This has made the situation worse.” Katwa block, with 32 villages, is largely dependent on agriculture and allied activities. Well irrigated, three seasonal crops flourish alongside a multitude of vegetables. Ninety-five per cent of the people here are marginal farmers whose lives and livelihood depend on their land. Local people first became aware of land acquisition in Katwa through an advertisement by the WBPDCL in a Bengali dailyon August 5, 2005. The advertisement stated that 1,625 acres of land would be acquired from 16 mouzas in Katwa. This led to the formation of the Krishijami Krishak O Khet Majoor Bachao Committee(KKKMB, or Save Agricultural Land Cultivators and Agricultural Workers Committee) where not just people who would lose land but also landless labourers and sharecroppers joined forces. Haricharan Saha, who owns 15 kathas of land, says: “I don’t want to give up my land. But maybe if the government had sat down and talked to us, some kind of decision could have been reached. We would have known what to do. They did not even bother to give us notice. We just read from the papers that our land would be acquired.” The amount of land that needs to be acquired is also mired in controversy. While the WBPDCL in its initial advertisement mentioned that 1,625 acres of land would be acquired, this has subsequently been revised and brought down to 1,000 acres. However, a third notice by the WBPDCL in the CPM mouthpiece Ganashakti, on January 14, 2007, stated that the norm for producing hydroelectricity was one acre per megawatt. In reply to an RTI application, the district administration claimed that the plant’s capacity would be 2,400 MW, in two phases. That means 2,400 acres of land would have to be acquired. It would be interesting at this juncture to take a look at what the government’s main contentions are and the objections that have arisen with reference to the project. As reported in the ‘First State Human Development Report’, released in 2004, unemployment is one of the biggest challenges that West Bengal faces. In this particular case, the government has said that only 600 people would be employed in the project. There is no mention of work being provided to people who have given up their land, once the thermal power project starts. According to economist Amit Bhaduri: “The current national-transnational big capital-sponsored development model does not improve the living conditions of the poor, enhance the natural resources they can command, or develop their various sources of livelihood; rather, it destroys what is already there. Not only for the poor but also for unemployed young men and women, big investments by Tata and their ilk are meaningless -- they do not generate employment.” Most agricultural workers, especially women, whose livelihood depends on land, are excluded from the job market on grounds of lack of skills and expertise. Feminist economist Nirmala Bannerjee explains that with rapid mechanisation women are usually the first to be retrenched or relegated into the casual workforce. Even the discourse on compensation and rehabilitation is exclusionary both in form and content. Women rarely possess land records in their names and are hardly ever counted as agricultural workers. This refusal to acknowledge women’s unpaid labour in agricultural production leads to their automatic exclusion from any rehabilitation/compensation efforts. Compensation also bypasses unrecorded sharecroppers, agricultural workers and others who are dependent on activities allied to agriculture, and, in this particular case, those dependent on fishing (the proposed land acquisition includes a waterbody). In the case of Katwa, the government has not even outlined any form of rehabilitation for the land-losers. Like Singur and Nandigram, Katwa too has shown up the state’s culpability in an undemocratic, non-participatory top-down approach to ‘development’. Instead of involving or opening channels of dialogue with the affected people, the government is evasive to the point of active compliance in refusing to recognise the Right to Information Act, 2005. All applications under RTI (six were filed) regarding details of the acquisition have either been met with stony silence or vague answers. Although a public hearing was organised by the district administration of Burdwan on September 22-24, 2008 to hear objections to the proposed project, it was thinly attended. A daily newspaper reported that farmers, fearing violence and intimidation, boycotted the hearing alleging poor security arrangements. According to a report by the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Keno Bahufashal Jamita Katwa Tapbidyut Prakalpa Staphaner Birudhe? (Why are we against the establishment of the Katwa Thermal Power Plant on Multi-Cropped Land?), the public hearing was heavily guarded by police and party cadres to prevent any opposition. Debiprasad Chattopadhya, joint secretary of the KKMBC, alleges: “Though we were promised police protection, when the first truck of cultivators and land-losers reached the BDO office they were beaten up by CPI (M) cadres and their identification papers were snatched away. In (the face of) such violence, we refused to attend the hearing.” An earlier public hearing organised by the KKMBC in July 2008 was a move to create a platform where project-affected people could voice their concerns as well as investigate the viability of the project and its implications. The hearing was attended by almost 4,000 people, as reported by a daily newspaper. The hearing noted that no details of the project had been made available to the affected communities, despite repeated requests. People were not even sure which families were going to be affected -- no list was provided to those who stood to lose both their land and their livelihood! Ashish Panja, who owns 10 acres of land, says: “I don’t understand why the government wants such rich, multi-cropped land for its project. What will happen to us? What will happen to all the agricultural workers? They will not be given jobs or any compensation. What will we do with cash? It will not sustain us for the rest of our lives. Only our land will sustain us.” Another important concern is the impact of the coal-based thermal power plant on the environment. According to a study by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute on the impact of such plants, people living within a radius of 5 km around the plant could develop serious respiratory problems due to carbon gas emissions. Waste water, ash and slurry contaminate the groundwater making it unsuitable both for domestic and agricultural use, and adversely affecting local aquatic biota. Any thermal power plant needs to get clearance under the Environmental Protection Act, 1986. This means doing an environment impact assessment and preparing an environment management plan. However, no information regarding any such detailed report has been made available either to the affected people or organisations that are demanding it. Whilst one cannot deny the reality of the power crisis in West Bengal, one must question the nature of development the state is endorsing. Despite most industrialised nations rejecting large-scale hydro and thermal power plants, countries like India continue to back them despite significant environmental concerns and human displacement. There have been endless debates on switching to renewable energy like solar energy, wind energy, biomass-based electricity, and fuel cells. Indeed, wind energy is one of the fastest growing energy sources worldwide, standing at 25.7%, while coal remains 1.2% (source: REPP Worldwatch, 198/99). Asish Bose, a retired engineer with the Calcutta Electrical Supply Corporation who has been working for the past 30 years with thermal power plants, believes that plants using renewable energy are unviable because of their astronomical costs. And because they cannot meet the rising demand for power, only nuclear, thermal and hydro power plants can meet this crisis worldwide. But each comes with its own drawbacks. While nuclear energy posits the danger of radioactive waste (the West stopped building nuclear power plants after catastrophes at Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island), the Three Gorges dam in China has shown the futility of large hydropower plants which submerge huge tracts of land and lead to large-scale displacement of human populations. Bose is of the opinion that thermal power plants are the lesser evil. Although they spew large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, this can be mitigated if there is the will. Explaining an experiment suggested by eminent scientist M G Menon, of carbon dioxide being broken down into carbon and oxygen by the bacteria spirulina, Bose believes that if gas can be channelled into vats where spirulina and other bacteria are bred (they consume carbon and release oxygen into the environment), then the ecological hazards of thermal power plants could be substantially reduced. He extends the argument to fly ash and other residuals which can also be dealt with innovatively to prevent environmental pollution. Bose admits, however, that the political will to achieve this is simply not there. “We tend to select the easiest way out. We don’t want to travel the difficult route. The easiest thing is to take it out in a truck and dump it somewhere.” Although the Katwa project has been temporarily suspended, there is little doubt that it will not be relinquished. Debiprasad Chattopadhya says: “The government has its eye on the elections. We don’t know what will happen once the elections are over. We are hoping that the law will stand by us, and we are absolutely adamant that we will not give up multi-cropped agricultural land for the project. Let them find barren land for their project.” (Panchali Ray is a senior research fellow and a PhD student at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata) InfoChange News & Features, May 2009 |
