Avoid Uttarakhand in Darjeeling .... Darjeeling Hills Villages fear drowning by dams on Teesta

Bharati Chaturvedi , HT, July 22, 2013: About a year and a half ago, the Gramsabha of the 29th mile forest village, in the Darjeeling hills, resolved that the dam-building by the National Hydro Power Corporation in the 27th Mile Teesta Lower Dam Project (TLDP) , Stage-III, impinged upon their constitutional rights to live. 

No one paid any attention. But it is still not too late. Infact, if we don’t act, we may see a repeat of Uttarakhand in the Darjeeling hills. Reports from a local group, NESPON, are alarming. 

The National Highway 31 A--and adjoining areas in the Teesta basin in Sikkim and North Bengal are threatened by July’s heavy rains. 

As it is, the Geological Survey of India points out that any dams or building will re-activate dormant landslide zones and create new ones. 

Plus, this is an earthquake prone area. Exacerbating this are the dams, TLDP III and IV, on the Teesta. Thousands of local people are in danger of being flooded out and caught in landslides. A guard wall to protect the villages has broken. 

This in turn will lead to landslides on the unstable slopes. We just cannot ignore this. 

Dam building has to stop at once, and people in danger now and later, rehabilitated with land and adequate cash. 

And can we have high quality data please-about the carrying capacity of the entire zone, its disaster risks and a cumulative impact assessment of all the projects? It is foolhardy to let Darjeeling carry on like this.

Darjeeling Hills Villages fear drowning by dams on Teesta

Biswajit Roy, frontierweekly.com: As the politicians are now playing blame game over the ravages by rivers Alakananda and Mandakini in Uttarakhand and environmentalists express horrors over the rape of the Himalayas by reckless construction of dams for hydropower generation, roads and tourism infrastructure, another man-made disaster in the hills with potentially terrible toll on human lives is waiting to unfold.

This time, the towering tragedy may strike in the eastern Himalayas along the course of mighty river Teesta, which is now being violated repeatedly by the same votaries of vulgar developmentalism—the State-corporate nexus.

Dismissing the myth of national development, the critics of top-down development have already pointed out that dams have been built to produce power for the cities leaving villages around the dam sites damned. The villages close to upcoming two dams on river Teesta in the Darjeeling Hills may justify these critics again, as the local residents are scared of submergence or subsidence of their settlements.

The National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) is constructing the dams, known as Teesta Low Dam Project stage III and IV. The first one is located close to Teestabazar in Kalimpong sub-division while the latter is at Kalijhora in Kurseong. Fall within a 20 km stretch in the river Teesta up to Teesta Bazar, starting from Sevok Bazaar, both are situated within 45 km from Siliguri town, the gateway to north Bengal and northeast.

With water stored in 32 meter and 45 meter high barrage and dam respectively, hydro-power stations fed by them will have the capacity to generate power— 132 MW and 160 MW correspondingly. The stage III dam has already become operational while the stage IV would be commissioned in the next fiscal, NHPC officials said.

These two low dams and power projects are part of the chain of small dams and hydro-electricity generation stations on Teesta in Sikkim where the mighty river begins its journey from eastern Himalayas though Darjeeling hills and plains of north Bengal before entering into Bangladesh.  The stage-V dam on Teesta in Sikkim with 510 MW power-generating capacity has already been commissioned.

West Bengal government is collaborating with the NHPC to develop stage III and IV dams under an agreement that it would get 12 per cent of the power generated by these two units free as well as around 30 per cent of the tariff.
Interestingly, the Gorkha Jana Mukti Morcha-controlled Gorkhaland Territorial Administration is now also claiming its stakes in both accounts. “We want our share both in electricity and revenue generated out of the hydel power projects in the GTA areas. We are also asking to make the GTA party to the MoUs on future power projects in our area,’’ the Morcha general secretary and GTA executive committee member Roshan Giri had told this correspondent.

This macro politics and economics of dams and hydro-power has little concern for the adverse impacts on community lives at micro-level as well as on the ecology of Teesta basin, environmental experts, NGOs and affected people complained. According to them, the two dams would affect at least 500 families of 10 villages from Kalijhora to Teestabazar in Darjeeling Hills. In the wake of a catastrophe of Uttarakhand's magnitude, the larger and long-term ecological-social impact will be borne by vast areas in the northeast and the plains of north Bengal and Bangladesh.  

NHPC website and its officials, however, do not offer any dam-specific information on wholly and partially affected families. The agency has hardly engaged the affected hill communities in Sikkim and Darjeeling who have been protesting against dams nor it has dispelled their fear of ecological disasters. The official website and babus we spoke to only referred to 'law and order problems' plaguing the NHPC projects across the country. This reveals the mindset of our policy mandarins and development bureaucracy that cares a damn for the adverse impact of mega projects on the lives of affected millions. 

When the river comes up to homes
Located on either side of the national highway 31-A that runs parallel to Teesta, the residents of upstream villages at 29th mile, Gayelkhola, Mangua and Nazeok in Kalimpong block-I either fear drowning or fatal subsidence as the water-level at the TLDP at 27th mile has been rising since the monsoon has set in this year.  Some of them have already lost their cultivatable land and part of homestead.

NHPC had earlier constructed a so-called ‘guard wall’ to protect the village at 29th mile. This wall has broken at several places since last week, letting the rising dam water come directly to unguarded and fragile slopes which have a tendency to cave in as soon as there is a moderately heavy rainfall. According to the NESPON activists who had met the affected people recently, locals are scared and spending sleepless nights. Frequent landslides in this area are adding to the problem. This monsoon, the villages Gayelkhola, 29th mile, 27th mile, Rombhi and Riyang are under threat.

NHPC personnel have asked the villagers to evacuate and promised to pay rupees two thousand (Rs 2000 only) to each of the 15 families living near the river only for 4 months as house rent. It needs to be mentioned that at 29th Mile alone there are 70+ families, all of whom live in danger: continuous and heavy rains can swallow the whole area within a few moments.  "The administrative is unresponsive, the main political party of the region is apathetic; nobody is talking about rehabilitation and any permanent solution," Soumitra Ghosh of North Eastern Society for Preservation of Nature and Wild Life (NESPON), said.

At present, the villagers are too scared of politicians and NHPC musclemen to talk about their problem publicly. NHPC is also offering some work to a handful of villagers at the TLDP-III site. The villagers complained to a visiting Nespon team that the Sub Divisional Officer of Kalimpong came to the village and threatened them with eviction because they are occupying GREF (defence) land. 29th Mile is a forest village and people there had already filed claims under forest Rights Act. "The idea evidently is to clear the area before it goes to the river, and without paying any compensation," Ghosh complained.

Earlier, the NHPC officials have called villagers' fears largely misplaced assuring that the concrete gorge wall would protect them from flooding. However, speaking on the condition of anonymity, a highly placed NHPC official who had been supervising both the dams told this correspondent that both the dams would lead to 'partial submergence of the villages'. "There is no possibility of entire villages getting submerged except few households. We have taken measures to ensure the safety of the villages. But partial submergence can't be ruled out,'' he said.

But the villagers staying close to dam sites pointed out that the NHPC officials had put the eventual submergence mark quite close to level of the highway that runs parallel to their settlement. They recalled the devastating flood in Teesta in 1968 when the river came up to swallow the road and their homes. Also, they find their fears justified following the ongoing construction for the diversion of a 7 km stretch of NH-31A that would connect between the two dam sites bypassing the riverside village at 29th mile and other neighboring areas.

“This makes amply clear that the NHPC knows well that our area will be submerged. We also know from our experience that the village and the road will subside with the rising water sipping in the soil, ’’ Lalan Prasad Gupta, an elderly villager at 29th mile told this correspondent during a visit to the area some months back.
“If NHPC is so confident that our apprehensions are baseless, why the authority is dragging cold feet about giving us a written assurance to that effect,” his neighbor Nirmal Chetri asked.                 

Doctored approval
The villagers complained that the NHPC held the mandatory public hearing for Ecological Impact Assessment of the dams without the mass participation of the affected villagers as the law required. “They held it Deorali, far away from our villages and avoided most of us to obtain a doctored approval of local population. A former GNLF leader was instrumental in getting approval before the construction began in 2004-5,’’middle-aged Mina Sherpa said.

Now she is worried of losing her home, close to the riverbed as well as the eatery she runs at the roadside above the riverbed. One of three villagers who have been recognized as affected by authorities, she has refused compensation as she found it meager. As she continues to be vocal against arbitrary decisions by the NHPC and local administrative officials, the woman is facing persecution as the Babus have instigated some villagers against her.