Displaced villagers await rehabilitation

As the legal war wrangles on over the Sardar Sarovar Dam project in Gujarat with groups clashing over the height of the dam, the village of Hapeshwar has been completely submerged in the waters of the Narmada, leaving behind its residents without a home.

For the past several years, villagers from Hapeshwar have been doing the rounds of various state government offices in the hope of a rehabilitation package. The promised rehabilitation was little more than a shanty atop one of the few hills still untouched by the water. It is a struggle to grow crops on hill lands which are barely arable.

Hapeshwar is sandwiched between Gujarat and Maharashtra, making it easy for government officials on both sides to pass the buck. "The authorities come and go... they do nothing. In Gujarat they say go to Maharashtra, there is no land in Gujarat. When we go to Maharashtra, they say go back to Gujarat. Nothing has happened, till date I have been given no land," said Jasubhai, one of the displaced villagers.

Jasubhai says only a fraction of the village's 300 families were actually rehabilitated. While some of the more enterprising ones moved to cities and towns to work as labourers or rickshaw pullers, but ones like Jashubhai, illiterate and untrained in anything except farming, have been left in a lurch.

The men say they have only managed to find an odd jobs as a farmhand in nearby villages but the income is meagre and not permanent.

"We sit on this hill, doing nothing. We are facing difficulties, of course we are facing difficulties, its is getting impossible to run our homes," said Jasubhai. "All our land has been submerged, now we are trying to cultivate this little bit of high ground and trying to eke out a living somehow, Bhaganlal, another villager, added.

Local authorities however say the men were given lands but were too choosy to accept. The Sardar Sarovar Dam was in the limelight last month after authorities began work to raise its height bringing the multi-billion dollar Narmada Valley development project one step nearer completion.

But the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) bitterly opposed the move saying authorities have not yet rehabilitated lakhs who have already displaced.

NBA says if the dam's height is raised further, more than 35,000 families, most of them impoverished tribal farmers, could have their homes and fields submerged when the monsoon rains arrive in June and are still waiting to be resettled.

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to halt work on the dam, being touted by its supporters as life line, it had rapped state authorities over the shoddy rehabilitation work.