Resettlement in Tharparkar

In my article of July 4, 2021 published in these pages as ‘Transition in Tharparkar’, I shared some of my thoughts about the contested nature of the intellectual debate of transition.

This article is a summary of the local perspective of transition narrated by villagers who have undergone resettlement due to coal extraction. Some 175 families were provided new houses, social facilities and an annual cost of relocation while many other families were paid cash as relocation and replacement cost of land, livelihood and housing in a lump sum.

For an outsider and a social development specialist like me, this may look like a simple land acquisition and resettlement plan without any need for a fussy debate. But once you descend from the comfort zones of intellectual debate to the ground realities, it is an entirely different world. The agony of resettlement was splendidly articulated by the relocated villagers. I am happy to share the summary of this local perspective with my readers and I leave it to their good judgment to interpret it.

“Our open and airy compounds with bush fencing, our mud houses with straw roofs and our traditional hearths with clay and stone are not only inventory assets of a resettlement plan. They are spaces where our relationship has evolved, our culture and memories of togetherness have shaped for centuries.

“In 2018 they came to our village and told us that they were going to build state-of-the-art modern homes. They also said that we were lucky to live in a modern housing society with sanitation facilities and other urban amenities like schools, community centers and a recreational space. Our newly constructed residential colony had accommodation for all 175 households affected by coal extraction. Since then, we have been living in this colony in a small space of nestled houses.

“We were not used to living in a congested space like this with nestled houses and without an open space in front of our homes. Now we feel a bit claustrophobic as if we have been robbed of our breathing space, our privacy and most of all our culture and emotional affinities. We know it was not all deliberate to banish us from our lands; it was rather due to the lack of understanding of our state of being, culture – and lack of empathy towards the poor. We would love to be seen as human beings who feel, think, react, respond, express.

“It does not take a concrete house to live happily, it is the sense of community, solidarity, sharing and caring which keeps us together and which motivates us to assist each other. They think that we are happy in a cramped place; but their premise of keeping us happy has opened the floodgates of miseries on us. We had livestock with grazing open grounds, dug wells with water and large swathe of land to roam around to fetch water in the days of drought and to collect fuel wood from the wilderness of nature. Today all we have is a better house from the outside for a visitor like yourself and many others who come here and count the roofs of our houses from a distance and appreciate its builders and walk away. We do not feature as living beings in the imagination of an outsider who usually keeps a reasonable distance from us as if we are only objects in the grand scheme of corporate excellence.

“The houses we live in are not our own and we have been told that we cannot sell them or even make any alteration to the existing housing structures. They say that after the proper registration these houses will be transferred to us; after the two years of our stay here it has not happened though. The roofs of most of the houses have developed leakages and during the rains we cannot stay inside our concrete homes. We all feel nostalgic about our mud and straw houses, in particular when it rains.

“We have no issue whether you extract coal, diamond or gold. We are worried about our water being extracted from the ground beneath us. What would we do with money and concrete houses when we have no water to raise our animals, to drink and to grow our crops? Who denies the comfort of living a decent life with good houses, better schools and better access roads for our children? We acknowledge the good intentions of the investors in our area but we feel that they have only a partial understanding of what it takes to spend a comfortable and decent life in our case.

“You could have taught us the ways of smart agriculture; you could have provided us alternate water sources for our animals and for our domestic use as your extractive activities are drying up our lands. Had you invested in making us prosperous we would have built our own houses with open spaces, and we would not have burdened you.

“An outsider may say that we are anti-development; we do not want to change, and we are unscrupulous in demanding money from private companies. But if you reduce us to objects, you will see us resisting to restore our human dignity. This is not the first time that we have faced transition and rapid change. We have experienced a transition more than two decades ago from an agro-pastoral barter system to a money-mediated economy. Thanks to the Thardeep Rural Development Program (TRDP) for helping us to weather the storms of transition and to steer us towards a decent and empowering life of self-expression.

“We hope that private companies will learn the secret of locally owned development, as practiced by the TRDP”.

The writer is a social development and policy adviser, and a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com

Twitter: @AmirHussain76