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Sixteen residents of four villages in Jharkhand’s eastern district of Godda moved the Jharkhand High Court on 4 February 2019, asking it to strike down the contentious acquisition of fertile land the size of 1,032 football fields for the Adani Group, one of India’s largest conglomerates.
The ongoing land acquisition and the latest legal challenge to it from locals is important to Jharkhand – one of India’s poorest states – and the rest of India, because it is the first time the state government has invoked a landmark 2013 land acquisition law for private industry.
Meanwhile, Ramamurthi Sreedhar, a scientist from Environics Trust, a Delhi-based nonprofit, has moved the National Green Tribunal (NGT), challenging environmental clearance to the Adani Group’s thermal power project coming up on this land.
The petition cites numerous grounds, including the company switching the water source for the plant from the Chir river to the Ganga river, post-clearance.
Godda Deputy Commissioner Kiran Kumari Pasi, whose office is acquiring the land, did not respond to calls and a text message from IndiaSpend on 11 February 2019, seeking the administration’s response to the villagers’ case in the high court.
Adani Group representatives had not responded to an email from IndiaSpend, sent on 11 February 2019, seeking comment on the legal challenges to the land acquisition and to the environmental clearance.
This story will be updated with their responses, if either of them gets back.
In May 2016, the Adani Group, led by Gautam Adani, one of India’s richest and most powerful men, asked the Jharkhand government to acquire close to 2,000 acres of land – 95 times larger than Mumbai’s downtown Nariman Point business district – in 10 Godda villages to build a 1,600-megawatt power plant fired by imported coal. The Adani Group will sell the power generated in Godda to Bangladesh.
In March 2017, the government said it would acquire 917 acres in six villages: Mali, Motia, Gangta, Patwa, Sondiha and Gaighat. So far, the government has acquired over 500 acres of private land in four – Mali, Motia, Gangta and Patwa – home to the 16 petitioners.
The Jharkhand government has undercut several safeguards in a landmark new law, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (the LARR Act of 2013), to acquire land from unwilling villagers for the Adani Group, according to a 1 December 2018 IndiaSpend investigation. The legal safeguards undermined relate to ‘public purpose’ reasoning, social impact assessment, consent and compensation.
Instead, in Godda, as several villagers told IndiaSpend, sustained protests and pleas, and even gram sabha (village council) resolutions passed against the land acquisition, have been ignored by authorities since 2016.
The 16 villagers who have now moved the high court are from Santal Adivasi, Dalit and other backward caste communities, and include retired teachers, farmers, sharecroppers and agricultural workers. The petitioners said that they and other affected villagers had written "several letters to different authorities highlighting the illegalities in acquisition of land and protesting against the acquisition of land, but not a single response/reply was received." Aggrieved, they were approaching the court.
The petitioners include Suryanarayan Hembrom, a Santali farmer from Gangta. After Hembrom and other villagers protested the forcible acquisition of their land in July 2018, Adani Group personnel filed criminal cases – including charges of rioting, criminal trespassing, and breaking public peace – against them.
In their petition, the villagers said they want the court to strike down the land acquisition on several grounds, including:
Last October, Sumitra Devi, a Dalit farmer in Motia village, had broken down while telling IndiaSpend that her land was in the possession of the Adani Group, after the government forcibly acquired it in February 2018. Days after giving the interview, she died. Her husband Ramjeevan Paswan is now among the petitioners.
The petitioners are asking the court to quash the acquisition of agricultural and common property land, and order the return of land acquired so far to its peasant owners, for many of whom land is the sole source of livelihood. They are also seeking interim relief of a stay on all construction activity, currently underway on the land, by the Adani Group.
“The company should have directly approached villagers, and they would have decided if they want to sell their land,” said Sonal Tiwary, a Ranchi-based lawyer with Human Rights Law Network, representing the villagers.
“While officials are giving government land to the company on a lease, in the case of the farmers’ land, they are transferring ownership rights to the company,” said Tiwary, “So that the land cannot revert to villagers.”
Meanwhile, in a petition filed on February 6, 2019, in the NGT, scientist Sreedhar, as we said, has challenged the environmental clearance awarded to the power plant in August 2017 by the ministry of environment, forests & climate change.
The Adani Group secured environmental clearance for the project citing Godda’s Chir river as the water source for the plant’s annual requirement of 36 million cubic metres. It now says it will draw water instead from the Ganga river in adjoining Sahibganj district. It also wants sub-surface rights to over 460 acres of land for a 92-km water pipeline.
The petition argued that the company gave “wrong data” to show that there is “adequate water” in Godda’s Chir river, in order to secure “speedy approval” for the project, and regulators failed in their duty to analyse and verify claims made in the project’s EIA report.
The environmental clearance granted should be rejected, as per provision 8.1.vi of the ministry’s Environmental Impact Assessment rules, which deals with concealment and submission of false or misleading data, said the petition.
The petition also puts forward other grounds to challenge the project, including the violation of the government’s own guidelines for locating thermal power plants; these state that no prime agricultural land shall be converted into an industrial site.
In Godda, the plant is coming up on fertile, irrigated, multi-crop lands, and 97% of the villagers depend on year-round agriculture for their livelihood.
The petition also argues that there are a number of environmental impacts of related aspects of the project, which the EIA and the clearance overlook. These include the impacts of:
Villagers, speaking to IndiaSpend this month, alleged that the plant construction underway since last year was already sucking up groundwater in the area, and their water bodies were running dry. IndiaSpend made repeated calls on Monday to S Kerketta, Director (Impact Assessment Division) in the Environment Ministry but he was unavailable for comment.
(Chitrangada Choudhury is an independent journalist and researcher, working on issues of indigenous and rural communities, land and forest rights, and resource justice. Follow her on Twitter @ChitrangadaC)
(This article has been republished with permission from IndiaSpend.)
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