The car stopped at the village centre and Ramadhar Mishra pointed us to the four-walled concrete square structure with Panchayat Bhawan painted in black with a bright yellow highlight. Also clearly visible were two stacks of a thermal power plant located within a kilometre from the village. A few glances below was attractive text colours set in stone, enlisting all the activities that the power plant claimed to have undertaken for 16 villages of one gram panchayat that it had the credit to displace.
Till now, I hadn't noticed the left side of the village. An abandoned toilet complex with no water, hand pumps devoid of water, a railway line carrying coal wagons, respiratory and other ailments are some perks that the Chilika Dand panchayat in Sonebhadra district of Uttar Pradesh have been living with for the last three decades.
It is often said that if you reach the centre of a problem, all its facets begin to unfold clearly. That's where we were, at the centre of the village and ironically we had not noticed one of the biggest problems that the village has been facing since the early 1980s. It all came out sharply as we saw the huge overburden of an open cast coal mine located just 100 metres away. Alongside and closer to the village is located the haul road of the coal mine where trucks transport coal at the rate of one every minute, casually ignoring all the coal dust that is carried with wind and through water channels.
Double loss
A miffed village woman passed us by. Even as I barely managed to get her attention, she looked at me with disdain, “pehle basti ko basaya gaya, uske baad coal ki railway line aur mining company ka overburden aaya. Hum log thage gaye. Na hamare paas hamare khet bache, na ab naukri hai” (First they resettled this village in the current location and after that a railway line carrying coal and the mining overburden came along. We were duped. Neither are we left with our agricultural land, nor do we have jobs). To understand what she had to say, it was important to get into the history of these 16 villages which were first displaced due to the construction of the Rihand Dam in the 1960s and then subsequently when a public sector undertaking set up its Shaktinagar thermal power plant in 1977. The coal mines came a few years after the thermal power plant was set up.
Dinanath Giri, whom we spoke to as we traversed through the many problems the village mohallas are living with everyday, said: “I have been displaced twice, in 1960 by the Rihand dam and then NTPC. If we knew we were going to be resettled next to a coal mine and a railway line, we would not have agreed to give up our lands, livelihoods and cultural surroundings to resettle in this place.” There are many in the panchayat who echo Giri's thoughts every time there is blasting in the coal mine creating an earthquake like situation.
The words of Baiju Gupta, one of the oldest in the village, took us back to the times when the village even after it had been displaced twice would have looked like in the late 1970s. He said, “where this mine overburden rises, was once a thriving forest, which supported our daily lives in more ways than one.” He took a puff from his pipe, smiled at me and recalled, “I came here in 1978 and began to live where the railway line is located today. When the railway came, I was asked to shift where I am now. We had to move twice and lost all our agricultural land. During that time there was thick forest with lots of trees and shrubs. There was wild life right here next to the road at 12 in the afternoon. People came to hunt here.”
Left adrift
I could not help but think about how the people of the 16 villages continued to live here. Those who got jobs with one of the three operations around the village would have a stake despite all the neglect that their homes have had to face. Why did the others not think of leaving this place, selling off their 30 x 50 ft resettlement plots and go find employment elsewhere? Perhaps they would have if they could. Ironically, even as the industrial expansion of the country took away people's homes and agricultural lands, changed the forested hill into a mine overburden, it left the resettled community with nothing much in hand. Some did get jobs, and most their housing plots. But the land they live on does not belong to them. Till date, it remains registered in the name of the company which in simple terms means that the villagers have no rights to sell their lands. This is in tune with the land acquisition policies of the country, which are currently under the scanner of the highest offices of the country.
Chilika and many such villages are located in the heart of Singrauli region spreading across the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. It has for long been considered India's energy capital, and houses at least five large-scale power stations, several operational coal mines, an aluminium smelting plant, and other industrial and commercial operations. There are many other thermal power plants and coal mines under construction in the region and areas demarcated for several others. With this the impact on the forests, rivers, agricultural lands of the region is only likely to increase and intensify. It brings under further strain the already threatened lives, cultures and livelihoods of the people living in the area.
By the time I left the village, it was dusk. We were at the centre of the village again at the Panchayat Bhawan, which was being decorated for an event. A wedding perhaps, I thought. Then, I saw a labourer diligently cleaning the painted rectangle listing the company's CSR activities. With half of it clean, the muck on the left-over section was even more visible. Ramadhar Mishra's parting words were as if mocking at the cleaning operation, “Even if they comply with 50 per cent of their promises, things will be better.”
