The official website and glossy booklets dwell on elaborate plans for the towering Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel statue, surrounded by an enormous 12 km ‘man-made lake’. The idea is that statue visitors will be able to go boating around it. The lake is on the Garudeshwar weir, which will displace around 11,000 tribals inhabiting 11 villages in the valley, according to a petition filed with the National Green Tribunal by rights activists. It states that those in the villages of Garudeshwar, Gabhana, Kevadia, Vagadia, Navagam, Limdi, Gora, Vasantpura, Mota Piparia, Nana Piparia and Indravarna will lose their land and livelihoods if the man-made lake comes up around the statue. The next hearing is due on February 4. “If the statue has to have water around it, the weir will not be able to pump all of it back for irrigational use. Constructing the weir will fail in its original purpose of making better use of the water, as it will have to hold it back around the statue,” argues activist Rohit Prajapati. Work on the weir is said to have commenced ‘illegally’, without obtaining any clearances or conducting any impact assessment studies. Although officials maintain the weir was proposed way back in the ’80s during the Sardar Sarovar Dam’s inception, Shekhar Singh, permanent member of the Narmada Control Authority confirms no clearance for it was obtained while permission was granted for the dam in 1987. In a letter to the MoEF on March 24, 2013, Shekhar demanded immediate stoppage of work on the weir (whose width too is yet to be determined), citing adverse consequences, like the villages it will submerge and fisheries it will affect in downstream areas. Yet, work on the weir continues.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 19:53:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015