Adivasis in Panna tiger park: dammed futures

“The SDM [sub-divisional magistrate] came in June and said, ‘here’s a notice to leave’.”

Babulal Adivasi points to the large banyan tree at the entrance to his village Gahdara – the place where community meetings are held – and now the spot where the future of his people changed in a day.

Thousands of residents of 22 villages in and around the Panna Tiger Reserve (PTR) in Madhya Pradesh have been asked to give up their homes and land for a dam and a river-linking project. Final environmental clearances came as far back as 2017, and tree cutting has started in the national park. But imminent eviction threats have gained momentum.

In the pipeline for over two decades, the project is a Rs. 44,605 crore plan (Phase I) to link the rivers Ken and Betwa with a 218-kilometre long canal.

The project has been widely criticised. “There is no justification for the project, not even hydrological justification,” says scientist Himanshu Thakkar who has been involved in the water sector for 35 years. “To begin with, the Ken does not have surplus water. There has been no credible assessment or objective study, only pre-determined conclusions,” he adds.

Thakkar is Coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP). He was a member of the expert committee set up around 2004 by the Ministry of Water Resources (now Jal Shakti) on interlinking of rivers. He says the very basis of the project is shocking: “River linking will have huge environmental and consequent social impacts on forest, river, biodiversity and will impoverish people here as well as in Bundelkhand and far beyond.”

The dam’s 77-metre-high reservoir will drown 14 villages. It will also drown core tiger habitat, cut off critical wildlife corridors, and so eight other villages like Babulal’s have been handed over by the state to the forest department as compensatory land.

So far, nothing unusual. Lakhs of rural Indians, especially Adivasis, are routinely displaced to make way for cheetahs, tigers, renewable energy, dams and mines.

The stupendous success of Project Tiger now in its 51st year – 3,682 tigers (2022 tiger census), has come at great cost to India’s indigenous forest communities. Overwhelmingly, these communities are among the nation’s most deprived citizens.

In 1973 India had nine tiger reserves, today we have 53. For every tiger we’ve added since 1972, we have displaced on average 150 forest dwellers. That too, is a serious underestimate.

It’s not ending – on June 19, 2024, a letter issued by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) called for moving lakhs more – 591 villages across the country will be moved on a priority basis.

Panna Tiger Reserve (PTR) has 79 of the great cats and when the dam drowns a large part of core forest area, they must be compensated. Babulal’s land and home in Gahdara must go for the tigers.

Simply put: it’s the Forest Department being ‘compensated,’ not the displaced villagers who are losing their homes forever.

“We will reforest it,” says Anjana Tirki, Deputy Forest Officer of Panna range. “Our job is to convert it into grassland and manage the wildlife” she adds, unwilling to comment on the agroecological aspects of the project.

On conditions of anonymity though, officials admit that the best they can do is only grow plantations to compensate for the 60 square kilometres of dense and biodiverse forest that will drown. This, just two years after UNESCO included Panna in the World Network of Biosphere Reserves. What will be the hydrological implication of cutting down some 46 lakh trees (as per assessment given in Forest Advisory Committee meeting in 2017) from natural forest has not even been assessed.

Tigers are not the only hapless wild residents. One of India’s only three ghariyal (crocodile) sanctuaries is a few kilometres downstream of the proposed dam. The area is also an important nesting site for the Indian vulture – on the IUCN Red List for Critically Endangered birds. Besides there are many large herbivores and carnivores who will lose habitat.

Babulal is a small farmer with a few bighas of rain-fed land which he relies on to feed his family.  “Since no date was given for leaving, we thought we would plant some makkai [maize] so that we could feed ourselves.” As he and hundreds of others in the village got their fields ready, forest rangers appeared. “They told us to stop. They said, ‘we will bring a tractor and crush your fields if you don’t listen’.” 

Showing PARI his fallow land he grumbles, “neither have they given us our full compensation so that we can move, nor have they allowed us to continue living and sowing here. We are asking the government - as long as our village is here, let us farm our fields…or what will we eat?”

Loss of ancestral homes is another blow. A visibly distressed Swami Prasad Parohar tells PARI that his family has lived in Gahdara for over 300 years. “We had the aamdani [income] of farming, of through-the-year forest produce like mahua, tendu…Now where will we go? Where will we die? Where will we drown…who knows?” The 80-year-old worries that coming generations will lose all touch with the jungle.

The river linking project is just the latest land grab by the state for ‘development’.

In October 2023 when the final sanctions for the Ken-Betwa River Linking Project (KBRLP) came through, it was welcomed with cheers by then BJP Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. He called it a “fortunate day for the people of Bundelkhand who had lagged behind.” He made no mention of the thousands of farmers, herders, forest dwellers and their families in his state that it would deprive. Nor did he see that the forest clearance was awarded on the basis that power generation would be outside the PTR, but now it is inside.

The idea of linking surplus with deficient river basins started in the 1970s, and the National Water Development Agency (NWDA) was born. It began studying the possibility of 30 links across rivers in the country – ‘grand garland’ of canals.

The Ken originates in the Kaimur hills of central India and is part of the Ganga basin – meeting the Yamuna in Banda district of Uttar Pradesh. On its 427 kilometre-long journey, it passes through the Panna tiger reserve. The village of Dhodan, inside the park is the site for the dam.

Running far west of the Ken is the Betwa. The KBLRP aims to take water from a ‘surplus’ Ken and send it upslope to the ‘deficient’ Betwa. Linking the two is expected to irrigate 343,000 hectares in water-deficient areas of Bundelkhand, an economically backward region and votebank. But in fact, scientists say the project will facilitate export of water from Bundelkhand to areas of upper Betwa basin, outside Bundelkhand.

The notion that the Ken has surplus water needs to be questioned, says Dr. Nachiket Kelkar. The dams that already exist on the Ken– Bariyarpur barrage, Gangau dam and one at Pawai – should have provided for irrigation. "When I visited Banda and surroundings along the Ken some years back, I regularly heard that irrigation water was not available,” adds this ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Trust.

Researchers from SANDRP who walked the length of the river in 2017 wrote in a report, “...the Ken is now not a perennial river everywhere…For a longer part, the river runs flowless and waterless.”

Ken itself has an irrigation deficit, so what it can give to Betwa will compromise its own command area. A point echoed by Nilesh Tiwari who has lived all his life in Panna. He says there is a lot of anger about the dam as it will permanently deprive people of Madhya Pradesh while seeming to benefit neighbouring Uttar Pradesh.

“The dam will drown lakhs of trees, thousands of animals. People [forest dwellers] will lose their freedom, they will become beyghar [without a home]. People are angry, but the state is not paying attention,” says Tiwari.

“Somewhere, they [state] set up a national park, somewhere a dam in this river and on that…and people are displaced, moved out…” says Janka Bai whose home in Umrawan was swallowed by the expanding PTR in 2015.

In her fifties, this resident of Umrawan, – a village of Gond tribals – has been fighting for adequate compensation for a decade now. “The state is not worried about our future, the future of our children. They have made fools of us,” she adds, pointing to the fact that her land, taken for the tigers, will now house a resort. “See here is the land they have surveyed for tourists to come and stay, after throwing us out.”

In December 2014, the Ken-Betwa river link was announced in what was supposed to be a public hearing.

Locals however, swear there was no public hearing, only eviction notices and verbal promises. That is a violation of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (LARRA). This act mandates that: “Matters of land acquisition should be announced in an official gazette, local newspapers, in the local language, on relevant government sites.” Once the notification has been given, the village gram sabha (council) must be informed by a meeting called for this purpose.

“The government had not notified people through any of the ways prescribed in the Act. We have asked multiple times, ‘tell us which section of the Act you are doing this under’,” points out Amit Bhatnagar, social activist. In June this year, he had organised a protest at the District Collector’s office demanding to see proof of the gram sabha sign-off. They were lathi-charged.

“First tell us what gram sabha meeting you [state] did, because you didn’t,” says Bhatnagar, a member of the Aam Aadmi Party. “Secondly, this scheme, like the law says, must have people’s consent which they don’t have. And thirdly, if they are leaving, where are you sending them? You have not said anything, given any notice or information regarding this.”

Not only was LARRA disregarded, but state officials made promises at public forums. Dhodan resident Gurudev Mishra says everyone feels cheated. “Officials said, ‘we will give you land for your land, a pukka house for your house, you will get employment. Your send-off will be like that of a beloved daughter’.” 

A former sarpanch, he is speaking to PARI at an informal village meeting. “We are only asking what the government had promised, what the District Collector [of Chhatarpur], the Chief Minister, the officials of the [KBRLP] project had promised us when they came here,” he says. “But they have not done any of that.”

On the eastern side of the PTR in Gahdara, the situation is no different. “The collector [of Panna] said we will re-establish you as you were. It will be to your convenience. We will rebuild this village for you,” says octogenarian Parohar. “Nothing has been done, and now we are being told to leave.”

The amount of compensation is also not clear and many figures are floating around – between Rs. 12 to 20 lakh for each male over 18 years. People here ask: “Is that per head or for each family? What about where women are the head? And will they compensate us for the land separately? What about our animals? We have not been told anything clearly.” 

As a result of the lies and opacity behind state action, in every village that PARI visited, no one knew when and where they would go, or the exact amount / rate of compensation for houses, land, cattle and trees. People of 22 villages seem to be living in a state of suspended animation.

Seated outside his home in Dhodan that the dam will drown, a worried Kailash Adivasi brings out past receipts and official papers to prove his land ownership. “They say I don’t have a patta [official document of ownership]. But I have these receipts. My father, his father, his father…they all had this land. I have all the receipts.”

According to the Forest Rights Act 2006, Adivasi or forest-dwelling tribes are allowed “conversion of pattas or leases or grants issued by any local authority or any State Government on forest lands to titles.”

But Kailash is being denied compensation as his papers are ‘not enough.’ “We are not clear now if we have rights on this land and house or not. We are not being told if we will get compensation. They want to chase us away. No one is listening.”

In the next village, Palkoha, Jugal Adivasi prefers to speak privately. “The patwari [headman] declares we have no records of your patta” he says, as we walk away from the village centre. “Half the people have got some compensation, and the rest nothing.” He worries that if he resumes his annual migration due now, he may miss out on any compensation, and the future of his seven children will be jeopardised.

“When I was a young boy, I worked on the land and we went into the forest,” he recalls. But in the last 25 years, restriction on entry into the forest that became a tiger reserve has left Adivasis like him with no option but to migrate for daily wage work.

Women in the to-be-displaced villages are adamant about getting their fair share. “[Prime Minister] Modi is always saying ‘this scheme for women…that scheme for women.’ We don’t want that. We want what is our right,” says Sunni Bai, a farmer in Palkoha who belongs to the (Dalit) Ravidas community.

“Why are only men getting the [compensation] package and nothing for the women. On what basis has the government made this law?” asks this mother of a son and two daughters. “What if a woman and her husband fall out, then how will she feed her children and herself? The law should be thinking of these things…after all, she is also a voter.”

“Jal, jeevan, jungle aur janwar [water, livelihoods, forests and animals],” people here tell PARI, “are what we are fighting for.”

Gulab Bai of Dhodan shows us her large courtyard and says the compensation for the house has excluded courtyards and kitchens as they lie outside the ‘walls’ of their living rooms. The 60-year-old is not backing down. “Adivasi [like me] have got nothing from the shahsan [administration]. I will fight from here to Bhopal [state capital]. I have the strength. I have been there. I am not scared. I am ready for andolan [protest].”

Protests against KBRLP started in a small way in 2017 with village meetings. Momentum built up and on January 31, 2021, over 300 people gathered to protest at the Chhatarpur District Collector’s office against the flouting of LARRA. On Republic Day 2023, the first of three jal satyagrahas (protests for water-related causes) saw thousands of people from 14 villages in the PTR speaking up against the violation of their constitutional rights.

Locals say their ire has reached the Prime Minister who decided not to come to Dhodan to inaugurate the dam last year, but this reporter could not independently verify that.

The controversy and ill will surrounding the project hit the tendering process that began in August 2023. It saw no takers at all. So, dates were extended by six months.

“Not many people talk about climate change in central India, but it is here that we are witnessing rapid increase in extreme rain events as well as droughts, both indicative of climate change impacts,” points out ecologist Kelkar. “Most rivers in central India are seeing accelerated flows caused by climate change, but they won’t last. These flows may be feeding the notion of surplus now, but under climate change projections, it is evident that they would be short-term.”

He warns that if these short-term changes are encashed to link rivers, the possibility of the region facing far more serious drought in the future cannot be ruled out.

Thakkar also warns that the hydrological impact of destruction of a huge area of natural forest, is a monumental mistake. “The report of the Central Empowered Committee of the Supreme Court has thrown light on this, but that report has not even been considered by the SC.”

A paper published in 2023 by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mumbai on river linking in Nature Communication also rings a warning bell: “Increased irrigation from the transferred water reduces mean rainfall in September by up to 12% in already water-stressed regions of India…Reduced September precipitation can dry rivers post-monsoon, augmenting water stress across the country and rendering interlinking dysfunctional.”

Whatever data has been used by the National Water Development Agency (NWDA) under whose aegis the project exists, is not being shared with scientists, citing national security concerns, adds Himanshu Thakkar.

In 2015, when the dam began to look like a real possibility, Thakkar and others in SANDRP had wrote many letters to the Environment Assessment Committee (EAC). One such titled ‘Flawed Ken Betwa EIA & violations in Public Hearing’ said, “the EIA of the project is fundamentally flawed, incomplete and its public hearings involved numerous violations. Any clearance to the project with such inadequate studies would not only be wrong, but also legally untenable.”

Meanwhile over 15-20 lakh trees have already been felled. Threats of eviction hang in the air with no clear idea of compensation. Farming has been stopped. Migrating for daily wage work risks getting excluded from any potential handouts in the name of compensation.

Sunni Bai sums it all up in these few words: “we are losing everything. They are taking it away. They should help us. Instead they say ‘here is the package, sign the form, take your money and go’.”