Rather than allowing every protest to degrade into name-calling, it may be worthwhile to engage with substantive issues raised by them. To this end, an FAQ follows.
On February 15, 2017, India’s central government announced the award of contract for development and extraction of hydrocarbons from 44 contract areas nationwide, including 28 on-land fields and 16 offshore. Within a day of the announcement, protests broke out in Neduvasal, a little known village in Pudukottai district in southern Tamil Nadu.
The Neduvasal oil field had been awarded to Karnataka-based Gem Laboratories. Less than two weeks following the announcement, the agitation has gathered steam, feeding off the young energy from the recently concluded protests against the ban on jallikattu. Proponents of the project have questioned the credentials and intelligence of the protestors. Union minister of state for shipping, road transport and highways Pon Radhakrishnan has appealed to the people not to oppose the project blindly. “Are all of them scientists who know enough to oppose the project?” he asked.
The people of the villages in and around Neduvasal are not aware of the project’s specifics. However, interactions with protestors suggest that what they know in general about oil exploration and production, and about the track record of ongoing oil production operations in Nagapattinam, Tiruvarur and Thanjavur districts, is robust enough to form an opinion on the desirability of the project.
The region’s farmers fear that hydrocarbon extraction will disturb the comfortable agrarian economy extant in this region. Neduvasal is located in an area rich in groundwater and blessed with the fertile soil of the delta. Unlike the lower reaches of the delta, where agriculture is in distress, Neduvasal still has a healthy multi-crop farm economy.
The issues raised by the protestors are worth engaging with. Rather than allowing every protest to degrade into name-calling, where protestors are branded ignorant, anti-national, misled or foreign-funded, it may be worthwhile to engage with substantive issues raised by them. To this end, the following is an FAQ on the subject.
The people of Neduvasal are blindly opposing the project. How can they oppose it without knowing the specifics of the project, especially when ONGC has been successfully extracting hydrocarbons in the delta region for decades without protest?
While specific information may not be available, villagers are aware about the general consequences of hydrocarbon extraction thanks to a successful and popular campaign against a controversial coal-bed methane (CBM) project in Thanjavur between 2010 and 2016. Led by the late G. Nammalwar, a popular organic farming proponent, the campaign included a massive awareness drive to educate villagers about CBM as well as about how hydrocarbons are extracted from Earth, the effects of such operations on the environment and on people’s livelihoods.
An exploratory well constructed by ONGC near Neduvasal in 2008-2009 also gave villagers a sense of things to come. “For three months after the well was dug, they would burn the gas night and day. Sometimes the gas would burn orange with black smoke, and sometimes blue with no smoke,” says T. Amudha, an engineering graduate who gave up her job in Chennai after being disillusioned by city life to return to farm in her village. Pointing to a pit filled with oily wastes, she says, “Look at that. That has been lying there for seven years. If there are heavy rains, the wastes flow out of the pond into the neighbouring lands. This is only a small quantity, generated during the exploration stage. Much larger quantities will be generated during oil production.”
Nityanand Jayaraman is a Chennai-based writer and social activist.