Aheli Moitra
And the Nagas have figured another way to befuddle India, and India the world. With a little help from Amur Falcons (Falco amurensis) this time. Conservation India’s ‘shocking’ revelation of the killing of these birds has suddenly embarrassed Nagaland. Worse, it has put India in a spot.
India is not only signatory to the Convention of Migratory Species, it is currently presiding over, for the next two years, the Convention on Biological Diversity. So when these wonderful creatures, traversing a course from South East Siberia/North China to better climes of South/East Africa, get killed en-masse mid migration, national and international forums train their guns to what they didn’t care about in the past two decades of the construction and implementation of the Doyang Hydro Electric Project (DHEP).
Funded by the North East Council, the DHEP was estimated to cost Rs. 166.66 crores in 1988. To be completed in 1994, this dam on River Doyang in Wokha district effectively came into being in July 2000. On inauguration in February 2002, it cost Rs. 215.88 crores. It generates 75 MW of power; 12% free power is given to the State of Nagaland as royalty and another 5% is billed by the generating company. Nagaland’s Department of Power generates, transmits and distributes this power. The Project was constructed, owned and is operated by a Government of India public sector company, North Eastern Electric Power Corporation (NEEPCO).
But the dam came under protest as do all dams in this region. Seismic activity in the region remained a matter of concern. Then, rivers provide people here with long term livelihood options. Problems, however, were bigger. In 2006, the NSCN (IM) stated in a press release that “for the first time in the history of the Nagas, different families are compelled to share houses in a forced joint family structure because of the rendered landlessness brought up by the dam [Doyang]”.
As the State and the Corporation drew revenues in terms of crores, people's wings were clipped before the birds'.
In an evaluation report, the Government of Nagaland in 1993 claimed that the reservoir will submerge 5578 acres of land, most of it jhum, cultivated and wood land. The project, in all, was estimated to take up 841858 acres of land. Today, the dam’s catchment area stands at 2606 square kilometers, or 643956 acres. To anyone who understands what so much land means to the Nagas in terms of subsistence and food security will also understand the tune of loss to the local populace that hosts the Doyang reservoir.
By 2008, not only had all the above concerns remained, NEEPCO had not fulfilled its assurances of compensation to the affected people. On a maiden visit to the project, the chief of NEEPCO heard from Doyang landowners affected by the project. “The corporation is appealed to construct school classrooms in institutions in all the villages affected by the project…and to build bridges over rivers and tributaries of Doyang, as traditional passages and roadways have been submerged by the projects reservoir,” said a part of the detailed appeal.
A decade into the Project, a considerable number of affected people continued to live “just outside the project area” without drinking water facilities, electricity or regularized jobs.
Affected and displaced people, however, still have cultural heritage. For the Nagas, a large part of this lies in hunting, easily convertible to a livelihood option. As also a way around poverty created by the dam. When the 10 days of October come with its Amur Falcons, the larger trap, we should say, has been laid by the State and its Corporation. They have ignored activist dialogues on the effect of dams, and their report card on sensitive rehabilitation spells poor. To make the local populace shoulder the entire blame of the brutal massacre of these raptors is to miss the big picture.
A solution to this will remain murky as long as an understanding of the nature of the problem remains so.
