Nearly 3,000 Adivasis from the Sidhi and Singrauli districts of eastern Madhya Pradesh (MP) have staged an indefinite sit-in protest since 24 February to express their opposition to a proposed 26-metre tall earthen dam to be built across the Gopad river in Songarh village of Sidhi district.


The protesting villagers set up tents and makeshift houses on a plot of land near the proposed dam construction site, where they spent the days sloganeering, listening to speeches by their leaders and resolving not to back down. Others contributed groceries and cooked food for those participating in the demonstration, now well into its third month.


According to the Adivasis, a construction company began work even before the district administration served notices on the families of those affected, an estimated 10,000 people whose farmland will be submerged by the proposed dam.


Officials told Article 14 that the Fair Compensation And Transparency In Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act, 2013 is to be applied for acquiring villagers’ land, but that a final decision is awaited.


Meanwhile, villagers feared that the proposed dam will partially or completely submerge six village panchayats in Sidhi and five in Singrauli. The dam requires 1,442 hectares of land in total.

As many as 44 village panchayats in Sidhi and five in Singrauli will be directly or indirectly affected by the dam. As per documents released by the Madhya Pradesh Pollution Control Board in 2018, the catchment area of the dam will be 2,095 sq km, and it will submerge 1,263 hectares of land, much of which is currently under cultivation.

Despite Constitutional protection to the land rights of India’s scheduled tribes (STs), they remained vulnerable to development-induced displacement. While STs constitute only 8.6% of the total population, they constituted an estimated 40% of all displaced people.

Research by the Centre For Policy Research’s Land Rights Initiative showed in 2018 that 1,437 dams in the country were located in ‘scheduled areas’, the geographically demarcated Adivasi-dominated regions listed in the fifth and sixth schedules of the Constitution.

Read more - https://article-14.com/post/mp-dam-will-submerge-adivasi-lands-homes-na-chahi-say-protestors-62870cd3ab199