Looking Back at Our Work with Damodar

Despite its primary aim of promoting sustainable livelihoods among the rural poor, Pradan extended support to the locals in hazaribag and koderma in their rights-based struggle and in creating greater awareness in areas such as gender, reproductive and sexual health, and legal literacy

Background

K oderma and Hazaribag districts are situated in the northern part of Jharkhand state. Pradan works in three blocks of Hazaribag, namely Barhi, Chouparan and Padma, and three blocks of Koderma, namely, Chandwara, Jainagar and Koderma. The six blocks are contiguous in nature. We started our intervention in these blocks in 1992 by organizing village women through Self Help Groups (SHGs). At the time, there was an informal youth collective of young men from a few villages (in the then Barhi and Chouparan blocks) that had been evacuated for the construction of Tilaiya reservoir by the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC). This collective was primarily agitating to get the DVC to provide them the benefits that were promised to them when the dam was constructed, way back in 1952. It was agitating to make sure that the DVC provided the ousted with proper legal documents of the land to which they were being rehabilitated; and that the DVC constructed proper roads and school buildings, installed hand pumps for drinking water, created irrigation infrastructure, provided agriculture inputs as well as jobs to one member each of the displaced families. The delivery on these demands, however, had not been satisfactory. This had agitated the villagers who protested by holding dharnas.

Pradan helped form a federation of SHGs called Damodar, supported by these young men. The villagers, who formed the SHGs, belonged to the dam-displaced villages and had a history of occasional struggles against the DVC. These struggles were confined to a few young men from villages just around the DVC office at Tilaiya Dam, and it had very little mass penetration. When Pradan formed SHGs in all the villages around the dam, it brought together many other men and women from all the villages; they had been, in their own way and severally, protesting against the DVC; their presence gave momentum to the SHGs. Pradan helped them plan their struggle, even though it never came to the forefront in any of the agitations. Pradan worked with the SHGs, clusters and federation, without imposing any ideas on them and encouraging them to choose their own path. The locals intensified their struggle against the DVC. In a major showdown with the DVC in 1995, they even gheraoed the powerhouse for three consecutive days, leading to senior management officials from Kolkata arriving in Tilaiya to negotiate with them.