We were in Deval, a small town in Uttarakhand located picturesquely amid forests of blue pine at the confluence of the river Kail with the Pindar. Originating from the Pindari glacier, which is a popular trekker destination, the river Pindar forms a distinctive 115 km long valley of its own before it merges with the Alaknanda at Karnaprayag.

Our reason for being in Deval was, to attend a ‘people’s public hearing’ on a dam planned over the river Pindar. We were there as members on a panel (of civil society representatives).

People’s public hearing? The term may certainly sound odd. But what should the project-affected people do when the state machinery mandated by law to consult them without any fear or favour chooses to act in a partisan manner by promoting the cause of a project proponent and thereby tries to curb the people’s opinion about the desirability or otherwise of the project from reaching the decision makers?

‘Public hearing’ of the people likely to be affected from a planned project is a necessary statutory requirement under the environment impact assessment (EIA) law, while an environmental clearance (EC) to a project is under consideration of the Ministry of Environment and Forests. An independent panel of experts called the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) is supposed to take into account the proceedings of the ‘public hearing’ before it arrives at recommendations for or against the grant of EC to a project by the MOEF. 

At stake in Deval is the 250 MW Devsari hydro electric project planned by the Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam (SJVN), a joint public sector unit (PSU) of the government of India and Himachal Pradesh. Also at stake is the freedom of perhaps the last unmolested tributary of the Ganga in Uttarakhand and the life and livelihoods of thousands of families in the Pindar valley.

Of the around 2,000 strong assemblage of local people at the sangam grounds in Deval, the famed matri shakti (women power) of Uttarakhand gave the most clear indication of the mood of the gathering and its strong disapproval of the ill-intent of the ‘company’! Most speakers time and again condemned the ‘company’ in strong terms for trying to dam their lifeline river and to thus change forever their traditional lifestyle and livelihoods. That the same ‘company’ might bring some employment to many of them as the dam was being built, did not find favour with any of the speakers.

Frequent mention by the speakers of the word ‘company’ seemed to the historians amongst us in the panel more like that the days of the East India Company were back.

It takes a while for an outsider to get used to a locally developed popular lingua. Just like ‘company’, ‘slide’ was another term used liberally by the speakers - meaning thereby that their entire valley was naturally prone to landslides and that the proposed 18 km long tunnel through their hills in which the river would disappear if the project went forward, was further going to turn their hillsides, on top of which many villages presently stood, into sitting ducks in case of heavy rains or an earthquake. Many recalled as they spoke that the valley lay seismically in zone 5 (the most prone).

In short, an unequivocal message of the rejection of the planned project by the speakers was loud and clear at the people’s public hearing.

It may be mentioned that the panellists for the hearing had been chosen carefully to prevent personal biases for or against the building of dams on rivers from clouding their sound judgment. Yet as we made our way back from the hearing, having listened to one speaker after another lambast the authority’s repeated endeavour to hold an ‘official’ public hearing, since it was an essential step in the environmental clearance process, we couldn’t help wondering whether the laws of the land existed to dispense justice or to legitimise injustice.