The banners are in Marathi, but it?s Japan they are talking about. The horror of the faraway country seems more pronounced for the villagers of Madban, a coastal village near Jaitapur in Ratnagiri district, Maharashtra, who will soon have the world?s largest nuclear plant in their backyard. The question on every mind is what the 9,900-mw Jaitapur nuclear power plant of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL), being built in collaboration with French firm Areva, will bode for them.
The villagers not only fear for their own safety but their livelihood as well. The southern Maharashtrian district is a large export base for arguably the most popular mango in the world, the Ratnagiri Alphonso, besides hundreds of tonnes of fish. And, Japan?s food radiation scare couldn?t be more relevant than for the cluster of five villages where the plant is to come up. Ratnagiri has a little over 15,000 hectares under mango cultivation and the estimated turnover is a staggering Rs 2,200 crore. The annual fish catch in Ratnagiri is pegged at around 1,25,000 tonne.
?The tragedy in Japan has precipitated alarm among us all. After all, you can?t control or predict nature,? says Raju Wadekar, 42, a Madban resident. Wadekar has ten acres of mango plantation and earns Rs 6-8 lakh per year selling his mango harvest, a large part of which is exported. Wadekar believes that once the project comes up, people won?t buy mangoes from the area for fear of radiation, and the same would be the case with fish.
?Japan?s crisis has again stirred up the radiation issue. It is natural for people to be sceptical about mangoes and fish coming from a region that will house a 10,000-mw nuclear power plant,? he says.
The sentiment is shared by almost everyone in Madban and neighbouring villages, with villagers adamant that they won?t let the project come up at any cost. ?We feel like guinea pigs; the only difference is that we are being experimented upon with as much as a 10,000-mw nuclear plant,? says Milind Desai of Mithgavane village, a doctor by profession and one of the local leaders agitating against the project. Desai claims that 57 acres of his land was acquired ?by force? for the project. ?This is not acquisition. This is land grabbing. Only a handful of families have accepted the cheques of the around 2,350 affected families,? he adds.
Jaitapur has been in the eye of a storm for quite sometime and the local agitation, on since four years, has received backing from organisations like Greenpeace and Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, besides sections of society. Land acquisition for the 968-hectare project started in 2007, and around 938 hectares have been acquired by the Maharashtra administration so far.
In the fishermen?s village of Sakhri Nate, just adjacent to the project site, Abdul Majid Abdul Latif Gawalkar, a local fisherman, looks anxiously at the 500-odd trawlers moored on the banks of the creek overlooking the village. Residents of Sakhri Nate don?t have any agricultural land and depend solely on fishing. ?Close to 100 tonnes of fish is exported daily from Sakhri Nate alone. But the nuclear plant will crush our livelihood completely. We fear that the nuclear plant will affect the health and the population of the marine life here. Moreover, once the plant gets operational, a large part of the coast would be out of bounds. They will also seal the only passage we have from the creek to the sea,? says Gawalkar. Understandably, the main square of this small village has a huge banner, a blow-up of a newspaper report, against the project.
Villagers claim that it?s not only their trade that would be destroyed, but their social contact with other villages too. ?People are already shying away from marriage alliances in our village. They fear that our future generations would not be healthy. We are also asked how much land we would lose to the nuclear plant and how we will feed our families,? says Mangesh Tiwarkar, a young Madban resident looking to get married.
What?s deepening the worry is the project?s location on a site under seismic zone IV, also called the ?high damage risk zone?. On a cliff right opposite the project site, locals point to a 1.5-foot-wide crack through the length of the cliff, supposedly the result of an earthquake a few decades ago.
Such is the level of anger and frustration among villagers that they boycotted all Republic Day functions this year as a mark of protest and now plan to gather over 1 lakh people to ?shake the administration?s foundation?, albeit peacefully.
The government, however, is going ahead as scheduled on the project, as stated by Maharashtra finance minister Ajit Pawar on the floor of the state assembly recently. Officials at the department of atomic energy (DAE) also seem to be confident about the credentials of the project. S Banerjee, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, had reportedly said after the Japan disaster that there was no reason for alarm and that the 20 plants already operating in India had successfully survived the 2004 tsunami and the Bhuj earthquake in 2001.
And last week, Banerjee had defended the location of the Jaitapur plant in an interview with The Indian Express , saying the location had the advantage of easy access for heavy equipment, adequate water supply and the benefit of a coastline on one side, besides being located at a height ? well beyond the strike of a tsunami.
The first two of the six 1,650-mw reactors are to be built at the Jaitapur plant by 2017-18, but locals in the area seem to be in no mood to wait for that long to check for any radiation effects on their Alphonsos, fish and lives.