NAPM – The Wire

Bullet Train Project Acquires 60% Land but Unlikely to Meet 2023 Deadline

Apart from land acquisition, another major cause of concern before the project is cost escalation due to the fall in rupee against the Japanese yen.

New Delhi: Despite facing public protests and resistance from the Maharashtra government, the country’s first bullet train project between Ahmedabad and Mumbai has been able to acquire almost 60% of the land required for the project. However, meeting the December 2023 deadline is still a cause of concern for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project on the back of the COVID-19 outbreak.

“We are on a fast track. We have acquired 60% of the land required for the project. Interestingly, in Gujarat it goes up to around 77%,” said Achal Khare, managing director of the National High-Speed Rail Corporation (NHSRCL), the company in charge of India’s bullet train road map.

The total land requirement for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail corridor project was reduced to 1,380.08 hectares (ha), from 1,434.47 ha late last year, mainly due to the actual reconciliation of the project scope. Of the total land required, 1,004.91 ha is private land. So far, around 820-830 ha has been acquired by NHSRCL.

The government has signed a loan agreement with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for providing Rs 15,000 crore out of the total loan amount of Rs 88,000 crore. The estimated total cost of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad project is Rs 1.08 trillion, of which 81% of the cost would be funded through the loan from JICA.

Despite strong opposition from Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, the project is on track, “If someone gives a loan without interest or loan with minimal interest, that does not mean we take it and snatch land from farmers. This is a white elephant,” Thackeray said in an interview to Marathi daily Saamana.

“A large chunk of land acquisition is complete. Ironically, people’s queries are not answered in social impact and environment impact hearings. The land is being acquired forcefully in Gujarat. Even in Maharashtra, the government has changed the rules from the earlier model of direct purchase. However, acquiring land in areas like Palghar in Maharashtra and Navsari in Gujarat might be a difficult task for the authorities,” said Krishnakant Chauhan, an office-bearer of the National Alliance of People’s Movements.

Apart from land acquisition, another major cause of concern before the project is the escalation of the cost due to the fall in rupee against the Japanese yen. Moreover, farmers in Maharashtra were asking for a higher compensation package.

The 508.17-kilometre long network will pass through three districts (Mumbai, Thane, and Palghar) in Maharashtra and eight districts (Valsad, Navsari, Surat, Bharuch, Vadodara, Anand, Kheda and Ahmedabad) in Gujarat.

The alignment also passes through a small section in the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Though the state government of Maharashtra was showing discontent, it had recently amended state land rules to start the process of acquisition as direct purchase of land was taking too much of time.

Last year, the company had floated nine civil work tenders, which Khare said would be opened by the end of July or early August. One of the civil work contracts for the construction of stations, bridges, viaducts, maintenance depots and tunnels across the network is to the tune of Rs 20,000 crore. However, key tenders, including Shinkansen technology like electrical, rolling stocks, signalling and tracks will be open to only Japanese companies.

By arrangement with Business Standard.

Time to Save Constitution, Secularism and Unity, Say Activists at NAPM National Convention

Puri: India faces serious political, social, economic, cultural and ideological crises and the party in power at the Centre and its affiliated organisations want to change the secular fabric of the country. Progressive individuals and groups must rise to the occasion to confront the challenges that these trying times have thrown up and find ways to save the Constitution, secularism and unity of the country.

This was the appeal of India’s leading social and civil rights activists including Aruna Roy, Bezwada Wilson, Teesta Setalvad and Medha Patkar at the three-day national convention of the National Alliance of People’s Movement (NAPM), which began in Puri on Saturday. Patkar is the convenor of NAPM, an umbrella organisation of all grassroots movements across the country.

Over 600 delegates from different grassroots organisations leading struggles against mining, industry and displacement, and for rights of forest dwellers, farmers, fishermen and daily wage workers are attending the convention, which will discuss contemporary struggles and challenges, and devise strategies action plans for grassroots movements across the country in the face of corporate onslaught on natural resources and communal politics.

Magsaysay award winner Aruna Roy said, “Workers and farmers are the foundation of India. But land is being snatched away from them in the name of development projects like mines, factories, airports and smart cities. The government is bringing new laws to throttle our voices. Many social activists are in jail, while contractor raj is going on. We must fight to end this.”

Activists at the NAPM convention. Photo: Priya Ranjan Sahu

Civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad said that today such a government is in power, which has scant respect for the Constitution. “The central government is creating fear among common people in the name of National Register of Citizens (NRC) and targeting the most marginalised people including Adivasis, Dalits and minorities. On the one hand, water, forest and land are being snatched away from the poor to make Adanis richer, and, on the other hand, NRC is being used to keep the common people on tenterhooks,” Setalvad said.

Magsaysay award winner Bezwada Wilson added that the Central government is devising policies to benefit the few super-rich richer as well as making poor people more marginalised.

Narmada Bachao Andolan leader Medha Patkar said that India’s unity is in peril due to communal politics while farmers, workers and fishermen face loss of livelihood due to economic slumps. “We must challenge goondaism that divides the country in the name of religion and caste,” Patkar said.

Many activists at the convention lamented that violence of all forms, particularly mob lynching, is on the rise, while people’s movements are being smothered systematically. They said many progressive laws like the Right to Information, Forest Rights Act, coastal regulations, land acquisition and labour laws were enacted after long struggles by grassroots groups, but they are now being diluted to benefit the corporate sector. But on the other hand, repressive laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and NIA Amendment Bill, as well as constitutionally questionable Bills like Triple Talaq are being passed, they said.

They said that corporate loot of natural resources has become the order of the day at a time India’s economy has been badly hit. While lakhs of people have lost their jobs, public sector companies are being privatised at top speed, they said.

Priya Ranjan Sahu is a senior journalist based in Bhubaneswar.

Magsaysay Awardee Pandey Purged from BHU on ‘Anti-National’ Charge

Banaras Hindu University has prematurely terminated the well-known Gandhian Sandeep Pandey’s teaching contract

Sandeep Pandey. Credit: Two Circles

The teaching contract of well-known educationist, social activist and Gandhian, Sandeep Pandey, at Banaras Hindu University’s Indian Institute of Technology has been terminated prematurely on charges of his being “involved in anti-national activities and a Naxalite” and for allegedly “showing the banned documentary on the Nirbhaya case, ‘India’s Daughter’” to his students.

Pandey, who won the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award – considered the ‘Asian Nobel’ – in the ’emergent leadership’ category in 2002, said, “I was informed of the decision taken at a meeting of the Board of Governors (BoG) by Rajeev Sangal, the director of IIT-BHU, on January 1, though I am yet to receive an official letter conveying it.”

The contract of Pandey, who has been a visiting professor at the Development Studies wing of IIT-BHU for the last two and a half years, was to get over in July this year.

Says Pandey, “In a recent board meeting, the vice chancellor of BHU, who was made chairman of the IIT BoG by the Union HRD minister bypassing the panel of five names recommended by a resolution of the board, Prof. G.C. Tripathi, and dean of faculty affairs, IIT, BHU, Prof. Dhananjay Pandey – both gentlemen associated with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – primarily forced the decision. The charges against me are that I am a Naxalite, showed a banned documentary on the Nirbhaya case and am involved in anti-national activities.”

Reportedly, both Tripathi and Pandey took the decision on the basis of a news report published in a Hindi newspaper accusing Pandey of being anti-national.

States Lucknow-based Pandey, “I wish to clarify that I am not a Naxalite. The ideology that I would consider myself closest to is Gandhian. But I do identify with the causes taken up by Naxalites even though I may not agree with their methods. I also think that it requires a lot of courage and sacrifice to be a Naxalite and I certainly don’t have that kind of resolve.”

In 1991, Pandey co-founded Asha for Education, a not-for-profit organisation to provide education to underprivileged children which now has its presence in almost all states of the country. He also co-founded the well-known grassroots organisation National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM).

Pandey said the banned documentary on the Nirbhaya case was to be screened in his Development Studies class during a semester of the academic year 2014-15 but the decision was withdrawn after the intervention of the chief proctor of BHU and the SHO of Lanka Police Station just before the class was to begin. “However, a discussion on the issue of violence against women in our society was conducted after screening a different documentary,” he added.

The one-of-a-kind Pandey, who doesn’t wear ironed clothes, avoids milk (he feels cows produce milk for their young ones) and who led an India-Pakistan peace march to Multan in 2005, reiterates, “I don’t believe in the idea of a nation or national boundaries, which I think are responsible for artificial divisions among human beings similar to ones on the basis of caste or religion. Hence, I cannot be anti or pro-nation. I am pro-people. I am not a nationalist but a universalist.” He says he has no regret about the BoG’s decision “as it was not taken based on my academic performance.”

Allegations against Pandey of supporting Naxalites are not new. In 2002, he, along with some well-known activists, was dragged into a controversy for attending the inaugural function of a leftist outfit where the kin of some Naxalites killed in a police action in Bihar were honoured. In 2010, his visit to the Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh – where the Maoists are active – for a public hearing of NAPM against the local administration met with opposition from some people, which his NAPM colleague and well-known anti-dam activist Medha Patkar later accused of being “stage managed”.

The Wire couldn’t get a confirmation of Pandey’s removal from the BHU administration as all attempts to contact IIT-BHU director Rajeev Sangal and also VC Tripathi’s office met with no response.