Shot on assignment for Greenpeace, this was a rare chance to meet people literally living in the shadows of some of Karnataka’s largest Hydro Electric Projects at the Kadra and Supa Dams.
Walks through fields, endless drives across the Uttara Kannada District in Karnataka, and night treks to fringe forest hamlets revealed a uniform lack of electricity throughout the region. Without it, there is no power for light, heat and most importantly, for the smooth running of the farm with pumps and agrarian machines of every ilk from threshing to incubation to sprinkling.
Farmers are forced to do everything by hand, unable to even do a simple seed sorting exercise due to the lack of light. Kerosene lamps provide a temporary source of light. To buy kerosene, they have to walk all the way to the ration shop and lug it back all the way to their homes.
The situation gets even more gut wrenching when you hear that they have to trek five kms each way just to access electricity to charge their mobile phones. Mobile phones provide them with the chance to have bi-weekly conversations with their children, who’ve been sent to the bigger towns to stay with distant relatives so that they may grow up and study with the marvel of electricity. With the pittance they eke, they are barely able to see their kids more than thrice a year if they’re lucky.
Multiply these circumstances into the dozens of families spread across one home hamlets dotting the dense jungle hills, and you wonder why the Hydro Electric Project can’t provide electricity to people a few kms away while transmitting tons and tons of megawatts across the state.
An essay within an essay is the story of the people of Ramnagar, who’ve been shifted en masse from a large town the size of Sirsi so that it could be submerged by the Sana Reservoir and Dam. Here they gamely motor on despite a lack of land and livelihood.
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