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Leo Saldanha of the Environment Support Group (ESG) Bangalore, writes about the BMIC saga.
September 2001: During 1995, the Government of Karnataka approved the development of a massive urban and transport related infrastructure corridor between Bangalore and Mysore. The project was justified as a much-needed measure to decongest Bangalore and thus provide relief to the city's growing problems of unplanned growth, high cost of living, pollution and crime. The project also aimed at promoting Bangalore as a major centre for investment in view of the liberalisation programme initiated in the country. What was originally envisaged as the development of toll-based expressway between Bangalore and Mysore on a Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) scheme, was soon converted into the country's single largest private real estate/infrastructure project under very dubious circumstances. Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise Ltd. (NICE), the company that the Government has contracted with to develop the project, promoted the idea of cross-subsidising the cost of building this Expressway by developing 5 new cities between Bangalore and Mysore. These cities would potentially house over 5,00,000 people and would support a variety of enterprises in the nature of industrial, tourism, entertainment and housing estates. In 1997 the Government notified about 21,000 acres of land under the Karnataka State Industrial Area Development Board Act for acquisition. About 7,000 acres of this area constitutes government owned land such as forests, revenue land and "wastelands" and the rest consists largely of small farm-holdings and common grazing pastures which support small farmers, pastoralists and landless labourers. The developmental powers of over 170 village panchayats that fell within the acquisition area were made subservient to a State led High Level Committee of Secretaries from various departments. A particularly controversial aspect of the project involves the land transfer agreement. As part of the Government subsidies to the project, acquired private land will be transferred to NICE at highly subsidised rates thus forcing down the compensation to the project affected families. In addition, Government land, including over 170 acres of forests, is being transferred to NICE at Rs. 10/acre per year. Should the company fail to execute the project, the land will continue to vest with the company! A commitment has also been made to allocate a large amount of water to the project both during construction and thereafter that would deprive downstream water starved cities, such as Bangalore, and agricultural areas of their due share. A detailed assessment of these was submitted to the Ministry of Environment and the same is here. The Government has been wholly in-transparent on every aspect of the project. When some details of the deal and the large-scale displacement that the project would cause came to be understood, affected communities have resisted the project with systematic support from grass-root groups. Brutal police action has been employed to subdue such resistance and such treatment was also extended to stop citizens critical of the project, or demanding transparency in the deal, from participating in Environmental Public Hearings on the project during July 2000. The National Human Rights Commission accepted ESG's complaint about the human rights abuse in the process of decision making and its decision is awaited. The detailed representation filed with NHRC is annexed. Even as this process of enquiry is underway, the Union Environment and Forest Ministry accorded the final environmental clearance to the project on 8th August 2001 under questionable circumstances. Questionable as the comprehensive representation by ESG exposing the social, economic and environmental impacts of the project (essential verification that the company has not conducted per standards) had formed a major intervention in forcing a thorough review of the project. The Ministry's Expert Committee on Infrastructure had officially acknowledged the validity of these arguments and yet high level political intervention seems to have prevailed in securing this crucial clearance. The detailed representation filed with the Ministry is annexed. The implications of this decision are quite disturbing and far-reaching. It is now the stated policy of the Government of India that the BMIC type of project would form a model for similar Expressway development ventures across the length and breadth of the country as part of the Prime Minister's proposed Golden Quadrilateral project. Considering that the serious social and environmental impacts of the BMIC project have been scantily assessed, or not at all, it is extremely pertinent that this development should not be sustained by clearances thus far supplied especially given that the same were formed without rigorous examination of issues involved. This particularly when independent informal estimates project the social displacement that the project would potentially cause at about 2,00,000 largely consisting of families of land-less labourers. The Government meanwhile maintains the number of displaced to be only 1,300 families. All available evidence points to the fact that the BMIC project as conceived is an unnecessary and unaffordable development that should be avoided given that the objective of decongesting Bangalore can be easily achieved by re- developing existing Highways funding for which has already been cleared. HUDCO has also committed to finance the doubling of the existing railway corridor to sustain higher public transport opportunities and the development of townships in existing urban areas, an highly viable option that the Government has questionably ignored. Leo Saldanha
Environment Support Group, Bangalore
September 2001