‘We Will Never Forgive the Government’: A Personal Testimony*

My Life before the Dam

I was born in Village Khedi-Balwadi in District Dhar in Madhya Pradesh in Central India. We are Bhilalas—an adivasi community. All of us in [Page 271]these villages belong to the Bhil and Bhilala adivasi communities. My village is along the Man river—one of the tributaries of the Narmada river. I grew up seeing the river from my house. Every day we would spend a lot of time in the river—bathing, washing clothes, taking the cattle to drink at the river and swimming—sometimes I would swim all day. When the river was in spate, I would help people cross the river. I never thought that one day they would turn the river against us.

When I was about 11 years old, we heard that the government wanted to take away our lands and that a dam would be built on the river. The officials had lied to us saying that only a small lake would be built and that nothing would be submerged. Then one day they called my grandfather to the government office and gave him a cheque. They told him that our lands would not submerge, so we were getting something for nothing. They gave us around Rs 20,000 for each of our houses. When the money for the land was distributed between my grandfather and his five sons, it came to Rs 19,000 each. It was too little to purchase even a small amount of land elsewhere. We lived in ignorance for a long time as the dam construction continued. In our region, there were many elderly people who were illiterate and could not even see properly. They were fooled and given a lowly sum of Rs 2,000–2,500 as compensation. So it was spent on this and that and we continued to cultivate our lands. Then in 1997, much later, the officials came back to us saying that some parts of the village were going to be submerged. They said, ‘We have already compensated you so you must leave your houses and lands. If not, you will drown or we'll have to force you to move out.’ We were shell-shocked and in tears—there was nowhere to go, no land to earn our living on. What would we do?

This was the time when the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) activists came to our village. They asked us whether we had been given land in lieu of the submerging land by the government. That was the policy. We were surprised. The government officers had never ever mentioned that we were entitled to land. If they had offered us land we would have accepted it like a shot. But the fact is that they never offered us land, only cash, and now we had nothing. So we joined the Narmada Bachao movement and began to struggle against the tactics of the government to make us leave our village with nowhere to go to. As it turned out, intense struggle emerged over the next nine years and [Page 272]we have to fight, fight and fight all the way. We are still fighting. The government insists that we have been rehabilitated and resettled, and that they have even provided special benefits to women. These hollow lies are meant to mislead the poor. Our only option has been to fight and resist these lies altogether.

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