चिकापार गाँव, जो विकास के नाम पर तीन बार उजड़ा!

Chikapar 

चिकापार गॉव, जिसका पीछा विकास कर रहा है ओडिशा के  कोरापुट जिले का एक ऐसा बदनसीब  गांव है जहां 1968 में रात के समय मुक्ता कदम नामक जनजातीय महिला अपने पांच बच्चों को लेकर और सिर पर सामान लादे अन्य ग्रामीणों संग जंगल के अंधेरे में और बारिश का सामना करते हुए भटक रहे थे। क्योंकि वहां चारों तरफ से गांव को घेर करके सरकारी मुलाजिम अनाउंसमेंट कर रहे थे यह स्थान खाली करना पड़ेगा क्योंकि यहां हिंदुस्तान एयरोनॉटिक्स लिमिटेड को जगह अलॉट  गई है। अतः गांव खाली किया जाएं। किसी को पता नहीं कि ये गोडावा ट्राईबल के 400 से 500 जनजातीय संयुक्त परिवार उस क्रूर बरसाती रात में जाएं तो कहाँ जाएं। खैर, एक समझदार व्यक्ति ने बताया कि कुछ दूर पर अपने गांव की पुरानी जमीन है वहां चलते हैं। गिरते पड़ते वे वहां दुबारा से अपने घोंसले बसाने लगे और उसका नाम भी उन्होंने वही रखा या कह लीजिये, चिकापार-2 रख दिया। 

  फिर 19 साल के बाद 1987 में ऐसी ही स्थिति हुई है और मुक्ता अपने परिवार के साथ फिर आगे गांव खाली करने के लिए मजबूर हो गए क्योंकि यहां पर अप्पर कोलाब मल्टीपरपज प्रोजेक्ट आ रहा था और साथ ही नोसैना का यानी नेवल अम्मूनिशन डिपो के लिए ये गांव दुबारा अधिग्रहित हो गया। मुकता कदम के अब शायद बहुएं भी आ गयी थी इसमनहूस त्रासदी को झेलने।रात के समय फिर इकट्ठे हुए लोग और आगे अंधेरी बरसात में एक पुल के नीचे सहारा लिया।   धीरे धीरे याद आया कि कुछ जगह और भी गांव की दूर में है वहां चलेंगे और उसको दुबारा से बसा दिया, नाम वही चिकापर, सिर्फ नो बदला चिकापर 3!

जिस दिन पत्रकार पी साईनाथ कहां आया तो पता लगा कि अबकी बार फिर मिलिट्री इंजीनियरिंग सर्विस (MES) के लिए गांव वालों को खाली करने के नोटिस आ गए हैं। यदि ये नोटिस सच्चे हैं तो बेचारे चिकापर गांव को बारी-बारी तीनों सेनाओं, पहली बार वायु सेना, दूसरी बार जलसेना और तीसरी बार थल सेना और  नाम पर उजड़ना पड़ा। उस मनहूस गांव की एक बच्ची यदि दादी  को पूछती है कि बार-बार हमको एक गांव से दूसरे गांव क्यों उजड़ना पड़ता है ? तो दादी यही कहती है एक भूत हमारे पीछे पड़ा है और उस भूत का नाम है विकास !!! (ये कहानी प्रसिद्ध लेखक पी.साइनाथ की अत्यधिक चर्चित  पुस्तक "एवरीबॉडी लव्स ए गुड ड्राउट" से ली गयी है)

मोटा अनुमान है कि आज़ादी के बाद विकास के नाम से उजड़ने वालों के आंकड़े 7 करोड तक पहुंचते हैं। वैसे कहते है कि 72 लाख हिन्दू, सिख पाकिस्तान से 47 के विभाजन के समय भारत आए, 7 करोड़ आजादी के बाद घरों से उजड़े, यानि कि 10 गुना। उस त्रासदी को देख अमृता प्रीतम ने वारिसशाह को गिला किया कि पंजाब की बेटी हीर का रुदन सुन कर तुमने इतना ट्रैजिक ग्रंथ लिखा था, आज लाखों बेटियां रुदन, चीत्कार कर रही हैं तो तूं क्यो चुप है? खैर तब वी विभाजन के समय अमृता प्रीतम तो रोई, परन्तु उससे भी  दस गुना ज्यादा विकास के नाम पर जो पलायन हुआ,  उसपर कोई कवि द्रवित नहीं हो रहा? हाँ, एक गीत जरोइर सुना है।

Youtube Link- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufAz88ZQqJ8

गाव छोडब नही, जंगल छोडब नही,

माय माटी छोडब नही लडाय छोडब नही।

बाँध बनाए, गाँव डुबोए, कारखाना बनाए ,

जंगल काटे, खदान खोदे , सेंक्चुरी बनाए,

जल जंगल जमीन छोडी हमिन कहा कहा जाए,

विकास के भगवान बता हम कैसे जान बचाए॥

जमुना सुखी, नर्मदा सुखी, सुखी सुवर्णरेखा,

गंगा बनी गन्दी नाली, कृष्णा काली रेखा,

तुम पियोगे पेप्सी कोला, बिस्लरी का पानी,

हम कैसे अपना प्यास बुझाए, पीकर कचरा पानी? ॥

पुरखे थे क्या मूरख जो वे जंगल को बचाए,

धरती रखी हरी भरी नदी मधु बहाए,

तेरी हवसमें जल गई धरती, लुट गई हरियाली,

मछली मर गई, पंछी उड गई जाने किस दिशाए ॥

मंत्री बने कम्पनी के दलाल हम से जमीन छीनी,

उनको बचाने लेकर आए साथ में पल्टनी

हो… अफसर बने है राजा ठेकेदार बने धनी,

गाँव हमारी बन गई है उनकी कोलोनी ॥

बिरसा पुकारे एकजुट होवो छोडो ये खामोशी,

मछवारे आवो, दलित आवो, आवो आदिवासी,

हो खेत खालीहान से जागो नगाडा बजाओ,

लडाई छोडी चारा नही,    सुनो देस वासी!!

छोड़ब नहीं … “ के गीतकार मेघनाथ जी ने बताया कि इस गीत के प्रेरणा स्त्रोत भगवान माझी जी हैं, वह आदिवासी संघर्ष के नेता थे, जो काशीपुर में बॉक्साइट माइनिंग के खिलाफ लड़ रहे थे. और पहली बार में ही, यह मधुर गीत सबके ह्रदय को झंझोर जाता है. कितने आसान शब्दों की रचना है, पर इसमें कितने गूढ़ अर्थ हैं. (कुछ लोगों का मत है कि झारखंडके लोकगायक और गीतकार मधु मंसूरी हँसमुख ,का यह गीत है.)

Chikapar  “Chikapar: Chased by Development - 1

CHIKAPAR (Koraput): Mukta Kadam wept as she herded her five children in front of her, luggage on their heads, guiding them through a jungle in darkness and rain. Her village, Chikapar, had been acquired for the MiG jet fighter project of the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) and her family evicted on an angry monsoon night.

‘We didn’t know where to go. We just went because the saab log told us to go. It was terrifying. I was so frightened for the children on that night,’ she recalls. That was in 1968. Mukta, a Gadaba tribal, didn’t know then that she, along with her entire village of 400-500 large joint families, would have to go through the same experience two more times. Chikapar is almost like any other village on the Koraput map. Almost. Perhaps no other village in the world has faced displacement three times, on each occasion in the name of development. In the late ’60s, it was the MiG project. Evicted to make way for the fighter planes, the villagers resettled on other land which too they owned. And which too they nostalgically named Chikapar.

In 1987, Chikapar residents were tossed out en masse from their second location—or what might be called Chikapar-2. Many had not even received the compensation due from the first eviction.

This time, Mukta wended her way down the road to nowhere with a grandchild. ‘Once again, it was raining. We took shelter under a bridge and stayed there for some days,’ says she. Arjan Pamja, also from the same tribe—the Gadabas are one of the most ancient peoples here—recalls the reason. ‘We had to make way for the Upper Kolab multipurpose (irrigation and power) project and the naval ammunition depot.’ Incidentally, the land housing the second Chikapar also belonged to the same villagers.

With great effort, the villagers reorganised Chikapar. It came to life again in several little pockets in yet another location after the second uprooting. They have now received eviction notices for the third time. They must leave this place as well.

Chikapar is being chased by development.

Jagannath Kadam, one of the village’s few educated members, is a schoolteacher. He works in another village, as there has been no school in Chikapar for years. Many of its children have never seen the inside of one. Kadam says, ‘The reasons being given for the third eviction vary. Minister Harish Chandra Bakshi Patra said at a public meeting here that we had to make way for a poultry farm. Another version is that the present set-up of the village poses problems for the Military Engineering Service (MES) in the “villagers are getting eviction notices.’

If the last reason is true, says one official, ‘little Chikapar will have, in succession, taken on the air force, the navy and the army. If it were not so tragic, it would be almost comical. Mind you, the land being confiscated on this third occasion also belongs originally to the same villagers. It has simply been grabbed by the state, making these people homeless, three-time land losers. And all in the name of development.’

Kadam, a Gadaba, had stayed on in Chikapar-2. That was the village’s location after it was evicted the first time to make way for the MiG project. He did not take the second eviction—for the Kolab project—seriously. The waters of the Kolab did not quite reach his house, so he defied orders and stayed put. ‘Since my family has been alone here, we’ve had to face dacoities, but I’m not leaving again,’ he says firmly.

Chikapar was not a village of very poor people. It comprised Gadaba and Paroja tribals, some “doms (harijans) and a few OBCs. Originally located in Sunabeda (literally, the golden lands), the villagers owned big tracts of land. ‘My joint family of seven owned 129 acres in 1963,’ says Balram Patro. ‘Of these, we were compensated for ninety-five acres only and got a total of Rs 28,000. And that, many, many years later. But there was no help with house sites or materials. Nor was there any kind of rehabilitation,’ he says.

‘My family owned sixty acres of land,’ says Jyotirmoy Khora, a harijan, ‘and we got Rs. 15,000— Rs. 150 per acre of hilly land and Rs. 450 per acre of Class I land. Again, the money came much later. And that was it. Not a single paisa towards rehabilitation, not even a home site.’

‘They promised us one job per house and one home for each displaced family,’ says Narendra Patro. He is speaking to us at what can be called Chikapar-3. ‘People did not even resist on either occasion. Yet, the authorities went back on every assurance.’

Less than fifteen people found jobs, at very menial levels, in HAL, which has a total workforce of around 4,500. Another thirty also got into HAL, with some difficulty, as casual labourers. They had no security of tenure. Those who ‘made it’ as casual workers were offered an alternative home—120 km away from the HAL township.

Despite being the village’s first matriculate in 1970, and taking a diploma from a technical training school, Khora remained unemployed for eight years. Only then did he find a job with HAL. Even for casual labour, says Madan Khasla, a harijan, ‘the contractors always bring people from outside. And the recruiting agents want payments from us for other jobs. But what money do we have?’ Years after the displacement, a few more of the villagers got permanent jobs in HAL—on a competitive basis, and not as compensation for displacement.

A Gadaba family in Chikapar. They need to figure out where to go next as their village is being displaced for the third time. Very few among those displaced have found jobs. Almost no one has received any compensation worth the name.

As Chikapar fell apart, another problem emerged. Caste based on domicile certificates. These, in turn, are linked to land holdings. Without their land, the residents of Chikapar found domicile certificates hard to come by. That meant it was also harder to obtain caste certificates proving their adivasi or harijan identities. This, in turn, further damaged their chances of finding jobs.

‘On the one hand,’ says Samara Khilo in Chikapar-3, ‘we could not get jobs here as the authorities had betrayed us. On the other, we can’t get reserved jobs outside this area because we cannot prove our caste.’

Four years ago, the Naval Ammunition Depot promised Class IV jobs to some of the displaced. However, the venue for all these job interviews was Vizag city, says Khora. That made it difficult for the dispossessed villagers to be present. ‘The few interviews they had right here, those jobs too went mostly to outsiders. The posts available at all are those like sweeper, mali, khalasi, chowkidar, helper. Outsiders pay Rs. 8,000 to Rs. 12,000 to get even these jobs. In their present state, many of our people cannot afford this.’

The same projects displaced many other villages as well. But only Chikapar suffered the fate three times. Curiously, the mood of its inhabitants is more than reasonable. Many tell me that even now, they only want a fair deal. In employment terms, they see this as jobs for each family. In parts of Orissa and Bihar, the jobs offered in compensation have been linked to land surrendered for the projects. But this hurts artisans and other landless people.

Mukta has had enough of being shifted around: ‘As it was we had to cover such distances to get water and firewood. Now, we have to spend twice as much time doing that. My body can’t take it any more.’ Her neighbour Mantha adds: ‘At least in the old place we knew everybody.

“After shifting, it’s different. We came to a place where we were strangers and local people behaved badly with us. The men got by. But when we went with our pots for water, some of the men from the area behaved very badly with us. What could we do?’

The revenue inspector of Sunabeda, Purnachandra Parida, confirms that eviction notices have been sent out a third time. ‘They are encroachers and must go,’ he tells me.

Khora laughs when told of the inspector’s assertion: ‘Each time this village has been shifted we have moved, mostly to our own land. Remember, we owned a lot of acres in this region. They have made us encroachers on our own land by declaring it the property of the state. If the government declared your house as its property tomorrow, you too would be an encroacher in your own home.

“Chikapar: Chased by Development - 2

CHIKAPAR (Koraput): When the residents of Chikapar village found themselves facing eviction for a record third time, they weren’t quite sure what to do. ‘What can we do?’ asked Pammia Das, a Gadaba tribal, in despair. ‘Wherever we go, some project or the other will come up and we’ll have to move again.’

Right now, the problem is even more complex. This twice-evicted village may get no compensation at all when uprooted for a third time. And it surely will be, to make way for either a poultry farm or a Military Engineering Service depot. That the present site of the village has no water supply and no electricity, and no Primary Health Centre (PHC) seems to be a deliberate punishment. Pakalu Kadam, also a Gadaba tribal, shows me a notice from the tehsildar which suggests this. ‘You have been occupying this area illegally … vacate within sixty days,’ it says.

‘Even in our second location,’ says Kadam, ‘We have been told we are on this land illegally. This is our land. But they want us to vacate it. Our ownership was never recognised on record. So we have no rights, no domicile certificates. Not even caste certificates.’ Without these, they cannot avail of loans that are theoretically, at least, within their reach.

After getting the notice of eviction at their third location, about one hundred villagers went to the revenue department in June 1993. The department used the meeting to collect fines from all of them— for ‘encroachment on government land’.

Jyotirmoy Khora is a HAL employee who has done much to focus attention on the plight of the displaced for years. He thinks there are issues more vital than the fines. ‘Most crucial,’ he says, ‘is what happened to the over 400 hectares taken from Chikapar. What did they do with the thousands of acres from seventeen other villages attached by the government in the ’60s?’ Then, too, Biju Patnaik was chief minister of Orissa “And he had this grand idea that all the units of HAL would come to Koraput.’ So huge tracts of land were acquired in pursuit of that vision.

Nothing of the sort happened, though. The other units of HAL came up in Bangalore and elsewhere. As a result, thousands of acres forcibly taken over from the eighteen villages remain unused to this day. ‘They are neither returning the land, nor leasing it for cultivation. We are prepared to repay such “compensation” as they gave us if we get back our land,’ says Khora, laughing. That seems unlikely to happen.

‘I can’t move again, let them do what they like,”

“says Mukta Kadam, the oldest woman in the village. She was one of the first to be evicted in 1968. ‘Why does this always have to happen to us?’ she asks. Possibly because they are adivasis and harijans and this is Koraput, home to some of the poorest people in the country.

When the National Aluminium Company Ltd. (NALCO) came up in 1981 in Koraput, says Prof. L. K. Mahapatra, more than 47.7 per cent of the 2,500 displaced families were tribals. And 9.3 per cent were Harijans. Dr Mahapatra, a former vice-chancellor of Utkal and Sambalpur universities, points out that over 55 per cent of the 3,067 families displaced by the upper Kolab project were also from SC or ST groups.

The Machkund hydro-electric project in Koraput district had displaced almost 3,000 families by 1960. Of these, 51.1 per cent were tribals and 10.2 per cent were harijans. ‘It is a pity,’ notes Prof. Mahapatra in a major study on the subject. Delhi, have looked at ‘Development, Displacement and Rehabilitation in the Tribal Areas of Orissa’.

They note that in Koraput district alone, ‘around one lakh tribals have been deprived of their land, including 1.6 lakh hectares of forests on which they had till then depended for their livelihood. More than 6 per cent of the district population, a majority of them tribals, have been displaced (by projects). This trend seems to continue even today.’

Take just the Sunabeda region. Since the break up of Chikapar began, ‘nearly 5,000 families or 40,000 people have been displaced by different projects’, says Jyotirmoy Khora. ‘And all promises of rehabilitation have proved false.’ His own family held land in the original Chikapar.

The process of displacement has brought other results. Many families have simply disintegrated. It has also left thousands destitute. ‘After waiting a long time for the compensation many just went away elsewhere to survive,’ says Kanum Gadaba.

‘When the refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan came into Orissa in the ’60s and again in 1971,’ says Khora, ‘nearly a lakh of rupees was spent on each one of them. Less than Rs. 15,000 was given to whole joint families who belonged here and were losing land, not gaining it like the refugees. Better to be a refugee.’

Meanwhile, the various fragments of Chikapar await their third uprooting. Some people have already been evicted. For a poultry farm, or the depot, or yet another project? No one seems to know for sure.

‘Basically,’ says Khora, ‘they don’t want us to be around like an eyesore, sticking out here. That way, we would be telling our tales of woe to others—especially the minister, if he ever comes.”

“They have got their development and the land. We have got no development, not even a proper school, and have lost our land,’ he adds.

And so, the Golden Lands await their gloomy harvest.

POSTSCRIPT

The problems of the people of Chikapar and other villages here continue. Actions led by people like Khora seem to have kept up in the past year. And some non-governmental bodies, such as the Institute for Socio-Economic Development (ISED), Bhubaneswar, have stepped in. They have given time and effort to studying the problems of the displaced in the area. They hope to reconstruct facts, details and data lost or destroyed by twenty-five years of neglect and apathy.”

Excerpt From: Sainath, P. “Everybody Loves a Good Drought.” iBooks. 

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