11/18/2023 0 Comments Statue of unity being built![]() At least 30 farmers in two or three villages lost their harvest, he said, all for the sake of picturesque photos of the statue in the media. “In order to fill up water in the canal around the statue, the government released water from the dam without any warning to the villages near Garudeshwar weir,” said Musafir. The insensitivity towards farmers was on display once again during preparations for the unveiling of the Statue of Unity on October 31. “For many farmers, their homes are now far away from their farms.” “But they were forced to disperse far away, in places that have still not been provided with basic water and other amenities,” said Musafir. In the 1990s, when 19 villages in Narmada district were displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Dam project and officially recognised as project-affected, villagers were given alternative plots of land. Photo courtesy: Michael Mazgaonkar Submerged without warningĮxperience with displacement has taught villagers of the region that the government cannot be relied upon to provide commensurate compensation. But they have no political will to really give us what we need.” Activist Lakhan Musafir (centre) right after being released from police detention on October 31. “We have always faced water problems and if the government really cared, they could have extended the canal to include all of our villages in the dam’s command area. “These are villages that have been asking for Narmada canal water for irrigation for years,” said Lakhan Musafir. Once the weir is complete, land in seven more villages on both sides of the river will be submerged. Six villages near Garudeshwar have already lost land to the weir. Once the weir is built, water from the Sardar Sarovar Dam will be released to fill up a portion of the region. To make this possible, the government has almost completed the construction of a weir (a low dam across the river) at Garudeshwar, around 6 km from Kevadia. In the tourism zone, farmlands and Adivasi homes will be replaced by a “valley of flowers”, a “Tent City”, guest houses for every state, hotels and a boating lake. Kevadia and its surrounding villages in Narmada district are a part of South Gujarat’s tribal or Adivasi belt, which stands to lose the most once the government completes the tourism zone it has envisioned in the stretch between the Sardar Sarovar Dam and the statue. The Statue of Unity in Kevadia has been built in the Narmada river, a few kilometres downstream from the Sardar Sarovar Dam that has already displaced more than two lakh people in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. The statue, for them, is a colossal waste of public money – a product of Modi’s personal desire for a lasting legacy – built at the cost of Adivasi rights. When Scroll.in spoke to Musafir after his release on Wednesday afternoon, he explained why villagers are angry. Lakhan Musafir, an activist from Garudeshwar village whose house is 8 km away from the statue, was among 24 other Adivasis detained for 20 hours in the block’s Pipaliya police station. By 1 pm, the speeches were over and the dignitaries had left.īut for the Adivasi farmers who had been detained, the long-term impact of the grand statue cannot be wished away as easily. At the base of the statue, he also inaugurated a museum, an audio-visual gallery and a “Wall of Unity”, all aimed at create a new tourism hotspot. With dissidents locked away, Modi unveiled the Rs 3,000-crore Statue of Unity – the tallest statue in the world – on freedom fighter Vallabhbhai Patel’s birth anniversary, declaring it a historical day for India. ![]() ![]() The government responded by jailing them for a day in police stations across the district and deploying an army of special police forces for security at the inauguration. The activists – many of them Adivasi farmers – had planned to protest against the statue for which their land and farms had been taken over. On Wednesday afternoon, long after Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled the 182-metre statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and left Kevadia in Gujarat’s Narmada district, the state police gradually released nearly 300 activists who had been detained a day before the grand event.
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