Financing Dams in India: Risks and Challenges
From the briefing paper...
NHPC in Action: The Indira Sagar Project
"We were evicted at gun point. With the use of bulldozers. When we begged the officer ‘Saab, please do not bulldoze our houses, let us remove our belongings’, he ordered the bulldozers to work even faster." Women from Baldi village of the Indira Sagar submergence area report.
The Indira Sagar Project in the State of Madhya Pradesh exemplifies NHPC’s mode of operating. This 92 meter high dam will displace over 200,000 farmers, tribals and fisherpeople and will impound more land than any other hydro project in India. Instead of fulfilling its contractual obligations to provide land–based resettlement, NHPC quickly became notorious for its use of intimidation, threats and Special Armed Forces against people in the project area. Villagers were forced to accept small amounts of cash instead of the land–based compensation they are legally entitled to. Those who tried to complain were told that this would result in a loss of their right to any compensation.