On the 5th of November I was in Khandwa, a town in central India, taking part in a rally organized by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), or Save the Narmada Movement. About 20,000 rural people, mostly landless farm labourers or small-medium farmers, many of them tribals, had traveled 50 to 400 km on tractors, trucks and buses to participate in the rally, all at their own expense. Every family carried a packet of food cooked at home to last for a day or two. The women with babies carried them along as well.


The day long rally and mass gathering looked like a sea of people - women in colourful saris and men in white dhoti-kurta - united by common peril and anger. The peril of them and their children becoming pauperized. The anger at being taken for a ride. These people represented more than 100,000 families, or over half a million citizens, who have been displaced because their original villages and lands are either submerged or about to be submerged by the reservoirs of six big dams built on the river Narmada. The dams are Indira Sagar, Onkareshwar, Maheshwar, Maan, Upper Veda, and Bargi. The people in the rally narrated their woes and demanded land for the lost land that is guaranteed by the government'''s own resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) policy but denied to them.

The experience of these people from the Narmada valley is the story of how the poor always get a raw deal by the politics of the market driven economic paradigm. It is the story of how inequality and poverty are reinforced by the current system. Broad contours of this story are the same all over the globe wherever the profit and growth objectives of big money come in conflict with the basic livelihood rights of the economically weak - landless labourers, small farmers and artisans in villages, tribals in forests, fishing communities in coastal regions, and city based vendors and workers living in slums and other low income areas.

Here is what has happened to the people in the Narmada valley. Some time back a team of five persons from academic institutes, including myself, carried out an independent survey of 429 families displaced due to Indira Sagar dam, to understand how their living conditions have changed after displacement. At the time of the survey these families had been already displaced for 3-5 years and living either privately or on government resettlement sites. We visited eleven such sites. Most of resettlement sites lacked basic amenities like access to markets and employment opportunities, proximity to affordable and cultivable land, trees, clean water, grazing land for cattle, and drainage.

Although no family received any land as mandated by the R&R policy, the government provided them some cash compensation against the fixed property lost in submergence. This compensation was grossly insufficient to help families make productive investments. We did not find a single family that could rebuild its lost livelihood even after 3-5 years of displacement. Most farmers lost substantial farmland to submergence but could purchase at best a small fraction as the cash compensation for land was much below the market rate. Small farmers became either landless labourers or more dependent on farm labour work to supplement insufficient income from farming. The landless farm labourers were pushed further to the brink of precarious survival. Their income fell sharply and became more uncertain as both farm labour demand and wage rates were squeezed in the areas in the vicinity of submergence.