While farmers, researchers and activists want politicians to be more transparent and honest, the government continues to say due process will be followed in Neduvasal.
After jallikattu, Tamil Nadu is witnessing another massive protest in Neduvasal village of Tamil Nadu’s Pudukottai district. Thousands of farmers, students, environmentalists and activists are in attendance against a proposed hydrocarbon extraction project in active farm lands in and around the village.
On February 15, 2017, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved the awarding of contracts in 31 areas, including a disputed site in Neduvasal (for which Gem Laboratories was the successful bidder). As news of the proposed hydrocarbon project in the farmlands spread, farmers have raised their voices together in dissent. With a failed monsoon, Tamil Nadu had declared drought this January. The farmers who began the protest claimed that this project could only mean further depletion of groundwater as well as possible sea-water intrusion into their farmlands.
A former senior agricultural officer stated that, while Modi’s bid to produce clean energy within India was admirable, it shouldn’t take off by exploiting India’s farm lands. “The state has already been under the National Human Rights Commission’s scanner for rising farmer suicides and such development projects could only drive the farmers further to the brink. We cannot afford to lose any more farm lands.”
He added, “It has been only two years since the Tamil Nadu government rejected permission for extraction of coal bed methane in the Cauvery delta districts and their farmlands are again under threat again by a very similar project.”
The previous order had been issued after the state government upon recommendations of the expert technical committee appointed to study the impact of the proposed coal bed methane (CMB) extraction project of the Great Eastern Energy Corporation Ltd. (GEECL). Then Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa had also written to the Centre to not permit such projects without consulting the state government first.
More recently, however, Modi’s statement at the Petrotech 2016 conference had given reason for social activists in Tamil Nadu to believe that the CBM project was starting to make its way back. Modi had stated, among other things, that the Centre has “come up with a new Hydrocarbon Exploration Licensing Policy (HELP)”. He said it would provide “for uniform license for exploration and production for all forms of hydrocarbon including shale oil, gas and CBM.”
Within a few days, Facebook and Twitter were rife with speculation on a proposed hydrocarbon project – even as northern coastal Tamil Nadu was forced to deal with an oil spill, which it did poorly.
In Neduvasal, the movement against the project was spurred by a Tamil rights activist group called the May 17 Movement, which had produced a video intended to galvanised support. Contributors to it said that information in the video had been put together from various case studies on similar projects from around the world. Paneer Perumal, a volunteer, said they had also gone from door to door and spread awareness about the need to stop methane project because it was going to be on agricultural lands.