Farmers Fight Nuclear Plant in Bid to Save Land

By BETWA SHARMA

Badlu Ram tugged against the tattered strips of the white gauze that bound his hands and legs to the hospital bed in the town of Fatehabad. “Please free me,” he pleaded. On July 13, Mr. Ram had attempted suicide by consuming pesticide. “It was my duty … it was my duty,” he repeated.

Mr. Ram, 60, said he had failed to protect his family's 26 acres of land, which the government plans to acquire for building a nuclear power plant near Gorakhpur village in Fatehabad district of Haryana state.

Back in the village, Mr. Ram's wife, 58-year-old Bhuri Devi, recalled that two land recording officers had come to survey their property. The villagers attacked them, and a police case was filed against Mr. Ram. “We live with the fear of losing our land, but this shattered him,” she said.

The family also believed that the fear of being evicted killed Ishwar Singh, Badlu Ram's elderly unc le, who had rallied against the nuclear plant and died of a heart attack. “We saw him get sick with worry,” said Ms. Bhuri.

Two other villagers have died from heart attacks while protesting against the 2,800-megawatt nuclear power plant, supported by the Congress-led state government, which is to be built on 1,313 acres of Gorakhpur village, 185 acres of Badopal village and four acres of Kajal Heri village. Haryana will receive 50 percent of the generated electricity.

This summer, Haryana residents have been rioting over the long power cuts. The state's daily power demand of 6,500 megawatts, which is not being met, is increasing 15 percent every year. Ajit M. Sharan, Haryana's power secretary, explained that the state was bearing the brunt of the national coal shortage. “Also, the coal mines are very far away so the transportation costs as much as the mining,” he said.

Presently, Gorakhpur gets about two hours of electricity a day. Mr. Sharan guaran teed that villages within a 10-kilometer (six-mile) radius of the nuclear power plant will get electricity.

“In my experience, poor villages nearby rarely benefit,” said Madhuresh Kumar, national organizer of the National Alliance of People's Movements. “But the people who come to run the facility live in a neighboring complex with the best facilities.”

Nuclear power contributes 2.4 percent, or 4,780 megawatts, of India's total installed capacity. The government has a target of generating 63,000 megawatts of nuclear energy by 2032. M.R. Srinivasan, the recently retired head of the government-owned Nuclear Power Corporation of India, which is building the plant near Gorakhpur, asserted that the country had no choice but to harness nuclear power as a cleaner form of energy. “How else can we meet our energy needs?” he said. “There are very few options available.”

India is facing an energy shortage even if its economy grows less than previously expected. Solar energy and wind energy remain expensive. Mr. Srinivasan also pointed out that a fuel shortage would force India to buy expensive imported coal, which is polluting. “Look, even China is building 26 nuclear plants,” he said. “Are they mad to be doing so?”

M.V. Ramana, a physicist from Princeton University who specializes in nuclear safety, countered that the coal shortage argument had been made for the past 60 years but so far the government had failed to deliver nuclear power. “There is no reason to think it's different now,” he said. “The economic, social and political costs outweigh any benefits it may have.”

Anti-nuclear activists point to recurring accidents at nuclear power plants. Last month, two workers at the nuclear plant in Rawatbhata, Rajasthan, suffered exposure to radioactive tritium. In 2009, 50 workers at the nuclear power plant in Kaiga, Karnataka, were exposed to radiation after tritium made its way to the water coo ler, which the Nuclear Power Corporation said was deliberately contaminated in a possible “act of mischief.”

Mr. Ramana also argued that nuclear power plants in India have a history of mishaps. “The old nuclear reactors are badly designed,” he said. “The record of small accidents shows signs of a heart attack waiting to happen.”

The Haryana government is offering farmers a little over 3 million rupees ($54,000) per acre of acquired land. The total compensation increases to almost 4.6 million rupees per acre after adding 400,000 rupees if there is no legal challenge to the land acquisition cost and 21,000 rupees per acre as an annuity for 33 years. The annuity will increase every year by 750 rupees, which amounts to a little over 1 million rupees.

Farm holdings vary from 1 acre to 50 acres. Ram Singh Bishnoi, the district revenue officer, said that almost 1.65 billion rupees of compensation has already been distributed to 269 farmers of Gorakhpur from a total of 689 whose land needs to be acquired . But the majority of farmers don't want to move.

On July 17, a public hearing in Gorakhpur village to discuss the nuclear plant fizzled out. The farmers were furious about the high number of police officers deployed around the venue to crack down on any unrest. “First our colonizers were white, and now they look like us,” said Satveer Siyag, a 38-year-old farmer from a neighboring village, who is afraid of the danger posed by the plant to the environment and health of residents nearby.

At the hearing, Nalinish Nagaich, executive director of the Nuclear Power Corporation, assured farmers that the plant would have no detrimental effect on the environment. “The radiation that you get from eating a banana every day is the same as what you get from sitting on the periphery of a nuclear power plant,” he told them.

Previously, however, instances of poor health near nuclear plants have been recorded. In 1991, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, based in the United States, found that people who lived within 10 kilometers of the Rawatbhata nuclear plant in Rajasthan had a higher number of chronic illnesses, solid tumors, miscarriages, stillbirths and children with congenital deformities. These findings, also published in Hindi in 1994, led to the first protest to shut down the reactor later that year.

Mr. Siyag said farmers had learned about the problems of disposing nuclear waste. They also knew about the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, the Three Mile Island radiation leak in the United States and the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan. “If Japan with all its technology can't keep people safe, then how can we?” he said.

R. Rajaraman, emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, argued that accidents cannot eliminate the option for nuclear energy. “By that logic, why didn't we shut down all the chemical plants afte r the Bhopal Gas Tragedy?” he said.

The real problem, according to Dr. Rajaraman, is dislocating people. “The government has always been insensitive about displacement,” he said. “It should be more participatory because doling out cash isn't enough.”

For many farmers, money cannot replace land. “I don't care if they offer a crore [10,000,000 rupees] for every acre,” said Balraj Sharma, a 38-year-old farmer with 25 acres. “This land has been with us for generations, and I intend to give it to my children.”

But the next generation has different aspirations. Several young people in Gorakhpur want to leave farming, which is causing family divisions about whether to accept the government's offer.

Hoshiyar Singh, 45, owns 50 acres of land, which will rake in a hefty amount of compensation. But Mr. Singh, who lives with an extended family of 50 members, is afraid that money will break up his household. “Farmers have no identity without la nd,” he said.

The Gorakhpur farmers also contend that good farming land is being taken away. They earn approximately 30,000 rupees per acre every six months. But the government has found large parts of the land to be waterlogged. Experts describe the Gorakhpur soil as average for Haryana and Punjab, which have highly fertile soil.

Farmers are growing wheat, rice and cotton in this soil. The Land Acquisition Bill 2012 provides that “irrigated multi-cropped land” should only be procured as a “last resort” - a provision that several states have opposed. Citing the need to safeguard food security, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the bill has recommended that this clause be expanded to “any land under agriculture cultivation.”

The Supreme Court of India ruled last year that private property of farmers should only be acquired if “absolutely necessary.” It blasted state governments for a “very casual approach” in the acquisition of ru ral land. “If land of such persons is acquired, not only the current but the future generations are ruined, and this is one of the reasons why the farmers who are deprived of their holdings commit suicide,” Justices G.S. Singhvi and S. J. Mukhopadhaya wrote in their judgment.

Mr. Ram, who is expected to recover from his suicide attempt, came home on Monday. “But the problem has not gone away,” said Ms. Bhuri, his wife, speaking over the phone. “I'm prepared to defend this land with my blood.”