In recent years, thanks to the Narmada agitation, the attention of the country has been focused on the rehabilitation of the people, particularly Dalits and tribals, from the villages submerged by the reservoirs created for irrigation and/or power generation — an age-old problem that has been neglected by the governments in India during the last century.

Against this background, the government of Madhya Pradesh, led by Chief Minister Digvijay Singh, took a very innovative decision five years ago.

The state government conferred exclusive fishing and fish marketing rights to the cooperatives and their federation of the tribals resettled in villages within three kms of the reservoir boundary in the Tawa reservoir on a tributary of the Narmada. This decision was preceded by a similar decision in 1994 in the case of Bargi, a reservoir on the Narmada.

The encouraging experience with the working of this during the last five years would have led not only to the continuation of the arrangement in these two reservoirs, but also to a formulation of policy along this line in all present and future reservoirs in the state and the country. Surprisingly, forces are now at work in Bhopal to negate this policy: in one, Bargi, it is already in doldrums and it is feared that the other, Tawa, may soon suffer the same fate or worse.

The story is like this: Both the reservoirs displaced a large number of villages, mainly of tribals. The tribals received almost no compensation for the lands they were cultivating since these were largely forest lands, unrecorded in revenue records. The compensation for the houses was paltry. Most of the oustees settled in small villages not far from the shores of the reservoirs. Willy-nilly they learned to catch fish in the reservoirs, an occupation with which they were not familiar earlier.

The fishing in these two reservoirs was being done by a state-level corporation either directly or through contractors. After prolonged agitation and subsequent recommendations of a state level committee, the fishing and fish marketing rights in both these reservoirs, first in Bargi in 1994 and then in Tawa in 1996, were given to the cooperatives and their federations in the respective reservoirs for a five-year period. The performance of these unique experiments can be understood from the brief account of the Tawa federation.

Mostly tribal, the 480 fishermen from 33 village cooperatives in the Tawa reservoir today fish for 250 to 270 days a year. The average per hectare catch during the last four years has been 27 kg, which is double the catch by the contractor who extracted all the fish, small and large. A fisherman receives about Rs 10,000 a year and the fishermen families get on an average Rs 1,000 a month, thus lifting them above the poverty line.

Unlike the contractors, the federation stocks the reservoir with fingerlings at its own cost, polices the reservoir against poachers, managed the stock in an efficient manner and also learnt the skill of hatching fish eggs. It is marketing the fish to distant markets like Kolkata and Guwahati where fish fetches a better price, net of transport cost.

The state-level corporation/mahasangha, which has been endowed with the exclusive fishing rights in all the reservoirs, has, as per contract, received Rs 62.9 lakh as royalty from the Tawa Matsya Sangha in the four years ending last March. This rental, for merely owning the reservoir, constitutes 15 per cent of the gross value from sale of fish by the sangha. Compare this unearned income of the mahasangha with the earnings of the fishermen which constitute 40 to 47 per cent of the gross value of sales!

This amounts to rack renting because these poor tribals were paid no compensation for the lands they lost. All that the sangha received from the state government is an outright grant of Rs 3 lakh in the beginning to buy boats and nets.

With such achievements of the Tawa Matsya Sangha in rehabilitating the poor and displaced tribals in a profitable enterprise and with the mahasangha collecting a fat rental for doing nothing — a rental even a fraction of which they had not received from 1979 to 1996 — one would have thought that the government would feel assured about the success of its policy initiated six years ago and, thus, renew the contract with both Bargi and Tawa Matsya Sanghas for much longer periods.

In the light of this experience, it would make a firm policy decision to give the exclusive fishing and marketing rights to the displaced tribal and landless households, in numbers that can be economically absorbed in the enterprise, in all reservoirs — existing and new.

But, no! When the Bargi federation’s contract period was about to expire, despite the express instruction of the chief minister to renew the contract, the fisheries department’s order twisted the instruction to endow only fishing rights to the tribals’ cooperatives, reserving the right to market the catch with the state- level mahasangha. By this act, the federation was reduced to a non-entity and the fishermen to wage earners under the mahasangha as earlier under the contractor, with no option left. Their desperate representation to the chief minister evoked his surprise. The order was duly amended.

But, in the short time that elapsed, the mahasangha signed a marketing contract with a private contractor. Both ran to the court against the revised order and obtained a stay which, surprisingly, was not contested by the government. The matter stands there, with the five years of Bargi fishermen’s efforts in ruins.

Seeing the fate of the Bargi cooperative, the Tawa federation, whose contract expires in the last week of December, is worried. Their agitation has resulted in the formation of an official committee to recommend to the government further steps. But, in the five months since its formation, the committee has not asked the Tawa federation for any information. Instead, a high official has threatened the federation executives with non-extension of the contract. There is deep suspicion that Tawa may go the way of Bargi, or worse.

It is sad that an extremely productive and imaginative policy decision of the MP government concerning the rehabilitation of submerged area tribal households and the encouraging performance of the two reservoir level cooperatives of these tribals should be wrecked in this inscrutable and pathetic way. Indeed, this is one of the three-fold policy package for the rehabilitation of households from areas submerged by reservoirs which every state must adopt: