A Rehab Policy for National Development and Adivasi Too by Stan Swamy

The “Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy“ of Jharkhand govt is unacceptable. It is too little, too late. A just and meaningful policy should contain the following elements.

1.Adivasi People should no more be displaced. 30% of them have already been displaced and 41% of their land has already been alienated from them. Only 25% of them have been resettled. The remaining 75% have been neatly forgotten. The following policy should first be applied to those already displaced (15 lakhs in Jharkhand alone). As for other communities, displacement should be avoided if at all possible, and if it cannot be, it must be as minimal as possible. Past experience shows that the govt and the project holder very easily decide on displacement without regard for the dispossession and impoverishment of the to-be-displaced. Again, much more land is forcibly acquired than what is strictly necessary for the realisation of the project.

2.Prior informed consent of the to-be-displaced must be obtained before displacing them. The Gram Sabha should be the medium between people and the company. The prevalent practice as of now is taking the affected people for granted and officially notifying them of the fact of acquisition. This practice is unjust and unethical.

3.Mining of whatever minerals must be done by people’s cooperatives in Scheduled Areas. This is in keeping with the Supreme Court’s verdict [Samata Judgment,1996] which prohibits even the govt from mining in Scheduled Areas.

Private mining companies have no right to enter Scheduled Areas. Rather, the govt should help in the formation of People’s Cooperatives, register them as legal entities, provide the technical expertise and arrange initial capital from a nationalised bank.

4.The people are not just stake-holders but owners of whatever minerals are found in their lands. They will excavate and they will sell to the govt or the private company as an equal partner. This proposition may be difficult to digest in our capitalist society where the govt assumes to itself the right of “eminent domain”. But the validity of this claim has been established by some Indigenous Peoples in some parts of the world.

Stan Swamy is an educationalist and a social worker.

Source:www.newswing.com