About 50 people, who are among the families that will be displaced, protest at Jantar Mantar, Thursday. (Source: Express Photo/Tashi Tobgyal)
Gajender Patidhar draws two concentric circles to explain his point. He peppers the circumference of the inner one with little dots to indicate hamlets. “Narmadaji flows from this side, and from the other side,” he says, dragging the blue ballpoint pen on either side of the inner circle. His village, he points out on the paper, has transformed into an island. “They say the houses near the water will get submerged but the ones inland won’t. For those houses, they say they will make a bridge to access the outside world,” says Patidhar, drawing two lines coming out of the circle. “But it’s impossible for the 1,000 families who live there to stay afloat.”
Many kilometres from the Narmada bank in Dhar district — where their ‘Didi’ and founder of Narmada Bachao Andolan Medha Patkar is on an indefinite fast — 50 people, including Patidhar, sit in protest at Jantar Mantar. These are people who will be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada near Navagam in Gujarat. The dam’s height is being increased to 138.62 metres, leaving more families at risk of drowning. The Supreme Court had ordered resettlement of people of a town and 192 villages that fall in the submerged area, by July 31.
At the gathering are two youths from Ekalbara — one of the villages that will be submerged — who have temporarily left their education to join the movement. Hemendra ‘Raja’ Singh (20) was moved by the changes he has seen in the social fabric of his village and decided to volunteer. “Everything works in our village. The roads are good and the electric cables are new and, most importantly, we all get along and know each other well. Every evening, the whole village sits outside their homes, talking to each other,” he said.
He added that their “new homes”, distinctly different from the “airy courtyards”, are cramped. “When they make us move, the village will get split,” Singh said. His friend, 19-year-old Hansraj Singh Tomar, who studies computer science, has been a volunteer for four months now, helping illiterate families access the right kind of information. “A lot of touts are trying to make money off people’s ignorance,” he said. “My own house was within the flood lines. Later we were told it is not,” Tomar said, adding that it was the government’s way to avoid paying compensation. A little away sits Kamla Yadav (60). “How are we to fit our entire lives into these small cubicles that the government is throwing us into?” she asked.
