Asia Times: Indian protests damn German involvement in dam



	December 2, 1999	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Indian protests damn German involvement in dam
By Ranjit Dev Raj

NEW DELHI - More than 100 villagers displaced by the $500-million Maheshwar Dam in central India's Narmada Valley demonstrated outside the German embassy here Tuesday protesting against funding from that country for the project.

The demonstrators who sang songs in praise of the Hindu god Maheshwar and shouted anti-German slogans said they were in Delhi to protest against the exploitative policies under the World Trade Organization which affected their lives.

Maheshwar Dam, which falls in central Madhya Pradesh state and is one of a series of large dams in the Narmada Valley project, is being built by a private contractor, S Kumar, whose foreign funders have deserted it following controversy over resettlement.

After a brief argument, riot police cordoned off the demonstrators, many of them middle-aged women, with thick nylon ropes and confined them to open lawns opposite the embassy gates. But the demonstrators held aloft banners which read ''No German Money for Our Destruction'' and ''Siemens Go Home,'' for embassy officials peering out from windows.

Tuesdays' demonstrations were focused against the funding worth $125 million being provided by the Bonn-based Hypovereinsbank to the German engineering giant Siemens to provide generation equipment for the Maheshwar dam.

Chittaroopa Palit, who led the demonstrators, said Hypovereinsbank was prepared to lend the money in spite of being aware of gross human rights violations in the construction of the dam and has applied for a German government guarantee. ''The German government should not give this guarantee - our lives are more important than German business interests,'' the demonstrators from villages in the fertile Maheshwar area yelled in chorus outside the embassy gates.

A delegation from the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement - NBA) led by Palit was allowed in to the embassy for a scheduled meeting with Economic Counsellor E Bierbrauer but elicited no satisfactory response even after two hours of discussions. ''We were told by Bierbrauer and other officials that our petition would be forwarded to authorities in Bonn for a final decision,'' Palit who led the delegation explained.

Bierbrauer, who personally escorted Palit and other members of the delegation to the gates of the embassy, declined to speak to journalists and demonstrators waiting outside, including Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who has just returned from Germany and Switzerland where she was campaigning against the Narmada dams.

Disappointed with the outcome, the villagers, who have come on tractors and trains to Delhi, set off another round of slogan-shouting demanding that all German investment in India be withdrawn. ''We don't believe that they are all that helpless,'' said Patlan Ma Mardana, one of the many women among the demonstrators, as they prepared to move away in a waiting bus to join demonstrations being held elsewhere in Delhi against the Seattle Ministerial meeting of the WTO.

The NBA, through sustained agitation on behalf of people displaced by the dam, has forced several major banks out of the project, including US power utilities Bechtel and PacGen. In April this year, following a 21-day fast by the dam's displaced at Maheshwar, two major German banks, Bayernwerke and VEW Energie withdrew the 49 percent equity they were to have contributed saying they did not want to be a party to blatant human rights and environment violations.

Siemens has a 17 percent share in the project while the Swiss-owned Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) has another 10 percent - but their involvement is limited to the sale of power equipment.

Palit said the NBA would now approach the Indian Environment Ministry to seek revocation of clearance accorded to the project because of flagrant violations by the promoters.

Granted four years ago, the clearance was conditional on proper rehabilitation and resettlement of all the displaced by 1998, but a recent government report has shown that no worthwhile effort has been carried out in this direction. The report recommended that all blasting work for the dam be suspended until the people from Jalud, the first of the villages to be submerged are satisfactorily resettled and rehabilitated.

According to Palit, the Maheshwar project has long ceased to be of public interest because of constantly inflated cost estimations made by the promoters who hope to recover it through power tariffs far in excess of existing ones. ''Clearly this is no longer a least-cost project but has become an inferior endeavor which must be abandoned,'' she said.

A total of 40,000 people who live on and make a living out of the rich black cotton soil are to be displaced by the 400 megawatt hydro-electric project which is not designed to carry an irrigation potential, unlike the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam, construction on which has been challenged by the NBA in the Supreme Court.

''The dam will be built over our dead bodies - we will never give up our struggle,'' vowed Lakhan Lal from Behegaon, one of 61 villages which will be submerged if the project is completed.

(Inter Press Service)