Pong Dam and its Oustees

Digital Woodcut generated with OpenArt

The waters of the Pong reservoir had receded deep into the basin of the Beas river, its waters a faint glint in the haze of a summer morning. Sumit eased his jeep off the tarmac road, onto a faint track of river stone, of rounded pebbles that shifted under our wheels. We threaded through the shade of giant ficus trees, their hoary beards reaching the ground, then out into the harsh light of a vast flood plain.

Huge posts of driftwood were staked in the ground, strands of barbed wire marking out large plots of farmland. Temporary plots, Sumit explained, on government land, part of the reservoir; but when it’s not submerged, the villagers take over and plant a crop. 

“Kanak”, he elaborated - “they’ve harvested the wheat, and though they may grow small amounts of summer vegetables, the land will revert to water by the end of June.”

Now we bounced along the flat bottom of the receded reservoir, a thin cover of green struggling against the intense heat, heading for the water, for the fishing boats beached in the silty slush of the shore. 

“It’s too messy getting into the water from here”, Sumit observed, so we bounced a couple of 

hundred meters up the bank, and edged our way down a slope of river pebbles, to dive into the cool waters of the Pong. There were always fishermen in these villages, Sumit told us later, catching river fish from the Beas, but now the bottom-feeding catfish of the reservoir are abundant, and the tribes of fishermen are vastly expanded.

Half a kilometer out, set against the shimmering outlines of hills on the opposite bank of the Pong, fishermen were setting their nets out in the still waters of the dam. Every couple of hundred meters, I had to stop stroking, ease myself over a net, and swim on. Our jeep had receded, now a faint blob of white in the silver-grey haze of the rising heat, but the far shore seemed to get no closer. “The scale of this place!”, I told myself.

Three hundred and thirty nine villages were submerged when the Pong dam was commissioned, I learned later.

 “And what happened to the villagers?”, I asked Sumit.

They got land in Rajasthan, he told us. This, anyone with even the faintest knowledge of such projects in India will tell you, is only the beginning of a story - which never ends with the line - And there they lived happily ever after.

‘Oustees’, they are called, the people who are displaced by India’s development plans. This particular cohort of oustees was drafted to the national agenda in 1974, when the area behind the Pong dam was submerged. The Rajasthan Canal was being built at the time, and the governments of Himachal and Rajasthan worked out an agreement under which the bulk of the affected villagers would be granted newly irrigated lands along the canal.  

In 2018, nearly half a century later, the Tribune* wrote about their on-going travails::

“The oustees were to be allotted land in canal irrigated areas of Ganganagar and Anoopgarh districts of Rajasthan. However, the land pool kept for the Pong Dam oustees has forcibly been occupied by the locals….the Rajasthan Government has failed to evict locals from the occupied land. Instead, the Rajasthan Government is offering non-irrigated sandy land to the oustees on the Pakistan border in Jaisalmer and Bikaner districts.” 

Allegations of intimidation by natives of Rajasthan were widespread, and in 1992, 

“a forum of oustees known as Pradesh Pong Bandh Visthapit Samiti Rajasthan filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court* regarding these issues. In its 1996 judgement, the court constituted a committee led by the secretary to the union ministry of water resources, and with one secretary from each state government as members, to carry out and complete the rehabilitation. It also appointed a District Judge in Rajasthan to verify all cancellations made after 1992 and investigate claims of intimidation.”

Twelve years, in 2008, it was decided that two committees are better than one, and, as reported by Land Conflict Watch*:

“The revenue ministers of both states (Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan) met in Shimla and agreed to form two committees to resolve the issue: a standing committee led by the revenue secretary of Rajasthan and with representatives from oustees to resolve their grievances, and a subcommittee with representatives from both states and oustees to select appropriate land for rehabilitation. The sub committee carried out field inspections in the same month and found that land earmarked for rehabilitation was not suitable for cultivation and that there was not enough irrigated land available to accommodate all eligible oustees.”

In 2020, the Himachal Minister for Forests, Rakesh Pathania, responded to a question in the Himachal Assembly:

"As per latest information, out of a total 16,352 families declared eligible for allotments in Rajasthan, 6,355 families are yet to be settled against which 2020 cases are pending with the Rajasthan government for allotment."

More recently, since we know that all problems of governance can be solved by information technology, the government’s informatics service* proudly announced the launch of:

The software for the Pong Dam Oustees enables affected citizens to send online applications from Deputy Commissioner (Relief and Rehabilitation), HP to the Government of Rajasthan for allotment of Murabba to Pong Dam Oustees. These all applications are being sent to Rajasthan Government online and they are allotting the land to Pong Dam Oustees using the online software. In addition to land allotment, a provision has been made in the software for sanctioning other kinds of assistance to these Oustees, such as funds for house repair, marriage, education and medical assistance.

This is a charade dressed in software, since it has been established that there is not enough irrigated land available for the ‘oustees’. What an ugly word. But I retain it, because it carries the emotional weight of being uprooted from the soil of your sustenance, of your trees, your culture, your kin, your gods and temples. 

Jawaharlal Nehru famously called dams the temples of modern India. Their canals would bring irrigation to fields, their turbines light bulbs in village homes. Which they did, but it is a cruel temple that creates ‘oustees’, whose children and grandchildren are still waiting for the findings of committees, jostling for water at public taps, scrounging for menial jobs in the Kangra district of Himachal they once called home.

1. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/himachal/pong-oustees-now-demand-financial-compensation-635421

2. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1150493/

3. https://www.landconflictwatch.org/conflicts/rehabilitation-issues-in-rajastan-due-to-pong-dam#:~:text=Many%20oustees%20either%20abandoned%20their,Supreme%20Court%20regarding%20these%20issues

4. https://informatics.nic.in/news/1425#:~:text=The%20software%20for%20the%20Pong,can%20apply%20for%20these%20schemes