Dispossession
by Solar
For
most of her life, 65-year-old Neema Bai Veena
Savde tilled her ancestral land in Bodhare, a
quiet village on the western plains of India’s
Maharashtra state. She grew bajra (pearl
millet) and shenga (groundnut) in the
fertile soil, working alongside her family
through long, dry summers. She relied on the
harvest both for income and daily food. The
land, she says, sustained her household for
decades.
In
2018, the village head, Gulab Bhau, arrived at
her doorstep with what seemed like an
opportunity. He told her that a solar company
would purchase her farmland, which amounted to
about 17 acres, for 1.2 million rupees (about US
$13,000). She was handed a check for 350,000
rupees ($3,850) as the first instalment, and
told to wait for the rest of the payment. Seven
years later, it still hasn’t come. Now, she
works as a daily-wage laborer in neighboring
states, earning barely enough to survive.
“They
said the next instalment would come soon,” Neema
Bai recalls. “I’m still waiting.”
Neema
Bai’s story is not unique. She belongs to the
Gor Banjara tribe, an Indigenous farming
community that has lived off this land for
several generations. The solar revolution,
touted as India’s path to clean energy and rural
development, has instead brought dispossession
and debt to her community in Bodhare, she says,
as well as to four other villages with
Indigenous farming communities in western
Maharashtra’s Jalgaon district.…
The
solar industry has also taken an ecological toll
on the surrounding land, including on an
important wildlife sanctuary nearby.
Neema
Bai and several other farmers say they never
fully understood the documents they were asked
to sign while selling their land. Today, they
are pushing back, demanding the return of land
they say was taken from them without informed
consent.
Journalist Naila Khan reports
from Maharashtra on the growing local resistance
to solar development in the region. |
