The controversial Tamanthi Dam project on the upper Chindwin River in western Sagaing Division of Myanmar is resulting in forced relocation and impoverishment of ethnic Kuki communities and threatening endangered wildlife species.
A collaboration between India’s National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) and the Department of Hydropower Implementation (DHPI) of Myanmar, the 80 metre high dam is estimated to cost three billion US dollars, with an electricity generation capacity of 1200 MW and annual production of 6,685 Gwh. Approximately 80 per cent of the electricity generated is meant for India’s northeast region while the rest will go to the Monywa mining operation in Myanmar. Although the official agreement was signed in 2004, construction only recently picked up after bureaucratic delays and the inability of the NHPC to tie up with local partners in order to start the project work.
The Tamanthi dam is part of India’s latest efforts at cozying up to the Myanmar military regime and enhances strategic ties with Myanmar, seen as a gateway to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Other collaborations have included the ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) and the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL) getting 30 per cent stakes in exploration and production of gas in Myanmar’s A1 and A3 offshore blocks located at Sittwe in Arakan State. Talks are also on between Myanmar and India to bring the gas through a 1,575 km pipeline, from Sittwe port in Myanmar through Aizwal–Silchar-Guahawti-Siliguri to Gaya (Bihar), and linking it to the Haldia-Jagadishpur oil pipeline in Gaya. India is also keen to ramp up security operations along with Myanmar in its sensitive northeast region where insurgent groups operate from camps located across the border in the Kachin and Sagaing provinces of Myanmar.
The Tamanthi dam’s reservoir will flood almost 1,400 square kilometres including an estimated 52 villages and will permanently displace over 45,000 people, including the entire town of Khamti. Already over 2,400 people have been relocated at gunpoint from the dam site without compensation for loss of property and livelihoods.
Those facing the most impact are the Kuki ethnic people, one of many ethnic groups living along the Chindwin, along with the Kachin, Shan, Naga and Chin. The Kukis have been living on both sides of the border after India and Myanmar got demarcated after independence from the British. Over 600,000 Kuki people live in northeast India in Manipur, Nagaland, Tripura, Assam and Mizoram States, and over 200,000 live in northwest Myanmar, in Upper Sagaing Division and Tungzang township of Chin State.
The dam will also flood parts of the Tamanthi Wildlife Reserve that provides habitats for the tiger and elephant as well as the endemic Myanmar’s Roofed Turtle (Kachuga travittata). One of the world’s most critically endangered freshwater turtles, the Kachuga trivittata is considered an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Less than a dozen living examples of the species are known to exist, and wild populations known only to remain in two rivers: the Chindwin River and the Dokhtawady River in Mandalay Division in Myanmar.
Forced relocation by armed forces is common practice in Myanmar’s infrastructure projects. At the Tamanthi dam site, the two villages of Leivomjang and Tazone, of about 600 and 1,800 people respectively, were forcibly moved out during January to March 2007. Villagers were ordered to move forty miles south to a relocation site called Shwe Pye Aye or “new town.” Soldiers from Light Infantry Battalion 222 at Homalin used bulldozers to knock down the buildings and flatten farmlands and gardens around the villages. The army also razed the church and cemetery in Leivomjang. The officials provided a paltry compensation of 5,000 kyat (US$5) to families for the loss of houses and farmlands.
The resettlement site offers few benefits. Villagers suffer scarcity of water and fuelwood while the farmlands located far from their new homes are mostly sandy soil. So not everyone has accepted the relocation despite threats and destruction of their houses. “I will never leave Leivomjang. My family has been living here and cultivating the land since my grandparents’ time. My house, which cost 30 million kyat (about US$30,000), was knocked down. I have built a hut in its place. The soldiers have come and destroyed it three times! But each time I’ve rebuilt it. I lost so much when they destroyed my fields. I got almost nothing as compensation. This Tamanthi dam has made all of us here poor,” said a 70 year-old woman from Leivomjang village.
India’s NHPC, is no stranger to controversial dam plans that flout environmental laws and regulations given its previous work in India’s northeast that is home to over 100 indigenous peoples. In the Dzongu region in India’s Sikkim state, home to the Lepcha ethnic people, large areas have been declared a Biosphere Reserve to protect the region’s extraordinary biodiversity. However, the NHPC has been planning and building a series of dams that threatens both the Lepcha people and the Biosphere Reserve.
Amraapali N. is a writer based in Bangkok ([email protected]).
“the official agreement was signed in 2004”
“The height of rabid anti SPDC aka Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is the answer. An era when damn the Myanmar citizenry plight is also the unspoken norm”
The SPDC looking for supporters anyway it can, commit this deal as well as others, here to the detriment of the part of citizenry, the Kuki.
Now instead of helping to solve the problems it helped created, the West will soon be using the accepted PC forums such as Wild Life Preservation, Minority rights and such not making any difference to this ongoing tragedy.
How long before this turn into another chance for now near useless save Daw Aung San Suu Kyi groups and such to make hay or a buck?
The West is responsible to an extend yet to be determined by historians, due to it useless careless policy.
Hugging a common house wife, in a country where the citizenry has taken the brunt of an unjustifiable punishment meted out, solve nothing.
How about innovative ways to avert evolving tragedies like this one described here and the many others truly humanitarian ones such as on going consequences of extreme childhood poverty in Myanmar?
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Blame the West,
They’re such a pest.
Blame Daw Suu,
A vexed thorny issue.
Poor generals from pillar to post,
Suffer the country the bottom most.
Humor them, favor them,
They aren’t to blame, er, ahem?!
Make ’em rich forever more,
Forests, gems and gas galore.
In the end they strip us bare,
Blinkers or brass you’ll get nowhere.
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The World Bank estimates that forcible “development-induced displacement and resettlement” now affects 10 million people per year. According to the World Bank an estimated 33 million people have been displaced by development projects such as dams, urban development and irrigation canals in India alone.
India is well ahead in this respect. A country with as many as over 3600 large dams within its belt can never be the exceptional case regarding displacement. The number of development induced displacement is higher than the conflict induced displacement in India. According to Bogumil Terminski an estimated more than 10 million people have been displaced by development each year.
Athough the exact number of development-induced displaced people (DIDPs) is difficult to know, estimates are that in the last decade 90–100 million people have been displaced by urban, irrigation and power projects alone, with the number of people displaced by urban development becoming greater than those displaced by large infrastructure projects (such as dams). DIDPs outnumber refugees, with the added problem that their plight is often more concealed.
This is what experts have termed “development-induced displacement.” According to Michael Cernea, a World Bank analyst, the causes of development-induced displacement include water supply (dams, reservoirs, irrigation); urban infrastructure; transportation (roads, highways, canals); energy (mining, power plants, oil exploration and extraction, pipelines); agricultural expansion; parks and forest reserves; and population redistribution schemes.
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I’m writing on this and was wondering if you would be so kind as to give me links to the information you are providing. Thank you!
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We would like to invite to see our cultures and triditional festivals. For example Chavang Kut ect. Thank you for loving us.
When u come to us do not forget to use one word. which is the Kuki peoples’ favourite word Kakipah E.
Kakipah e means Thank you.
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