Climate justice alliance backs Bundelkhand villagers resisting Ken-Betwa dam displacement

By A Representative 

The National Alliance for Climate and Ecological Justice (NACEJ) has strongly condemned what it calls the violation of constitutional and human rights of communities affected by the Ken-Betwa Link Project, demanding the project's complete cancellation, reparations for losses already suffered, and the adoption of decentralized alternatives that do not require displacement. In a statement issued on July 16, 2026, the alliance expressed solidarity with the ongoing protest movement against displacement caused by the river interlinking scheme, condemning what it described as illegal arrests, evictions and demolitions carried out against affected residents.

The Union Cabinet had approved the Ken-Betwa Link Project in December 2021 with the stated aim of transferring "surplus" water from the Ken river basin to the Betwa basin, intended to supply drinking water to 6.2 million people and irrigate 1.062 million hectares in the water-stressed Bundelkhand region spanning Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Central to the project is the proposed Daudhan Dam, which would channel water through a 221-kilometre canal linking the two river basins. The dam alone is expected to displace around 5,288 families in Chhatarpur district and 1,400 families in Panna district, both in Madhya Pradesh. The entire project carries a budget of roughly Rs 45,000 crore and would submerge parts of the Panna National Park and Tiger Reserve, an important tiger habitat.

NACEJ -- whose members include grassroots activists, ecologists, climate scientists, environmental researchers and lawyers working across India on climate and ecological justice issues -- has disputed the premise of "surplus" water in the Ken basin, arguing that any short-term increase in river flows linked to climate change cannot be treated as a dependable basis for water allocation decisions. The alliance also noted that flow data for the Ken and Betwa rivers remains withheld from the public domain on national security grounds, since the rivers are tributaries of the Ganga, which flows into Bangladesh. It further contended that the project would worsen rather than resolve inequities in water distribution across the two basins, citing a 2019 report by the Supreme Court-appointed Central Empowered Committee (CEC), which found that committing the entire available flow of the Ken river to the first phase of the project would come at the expense of farmers in the Upper Ken basin. According to a former District Collector of Panna cited in the statement, the project would in effect facilitate the export of water away from drought-prone parts of Bundelkhand. The CEC had also observed that an earlier Lower Betwa irrigation project had been designed to consume nearly all available Betwa basin water downstream, leaving nothing for the upper basin — a shortfall the interlinking project is now meant to offset.

The statement is sharply critical of the environmental, forest and wildlife clearance process, describing it as having been reduced to a formality. The project involves diverting 6,017 hectares of forest land and will affect the Critical Tiger Habitat of Panna National Park and Tiger Reserve, home to 79 tigers, as well as the Ken Gharial Sanctuary. An estimated 10,500 hectares of wildlife habitat, including 46 lakh trees, will be lost to submergence and fragmentation, based on 2017 estimates from the Forest Advisory Committee. Roughly 70 percent of the Tiger Reserve's core area, including key tiger breeding zones and habitat for critically endangered white-rumped and long-billed vultures, would go under water. NACEJ also flagged a proposal to build a 78 MW power plant inside the Tiger Reserve, which it said directly violates existing forest clearance conditions. Downstream, the halting of silt flow caused by the dam is expected to harm the Gharial Sanctuary, since the project's design does not provide for water release below the Bariyarpur Weir, where the sanctuary is located; the dam would also cut off upstream aquatic species from those downstream, disrupting breeding habitats on both sides.

NACEJ said that at every stage of clearance — from the Expert Appraisal Committee of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, to the Forest Advisory Committee, to the Madhya Pradesh State Wildlife Board — the process was compromised, with expert objections repeatedly overridden. It pointed to the Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife, which had disregarded its own expert panel's findings that developmental projects should not be allowed to damage fragile, biodiverse ecosystems bearing protected status, and that interlinking may not represent the best route to meeting the region's livelihood and development needs. To offset the loss of habitat within Panna Tiger Reserve, authorities had proposed integrating it with three other wildlife sanctuaries; the Veerangana Durgavati Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh was accordingly notified as a tiger reserve in 2023. Yet in January 2026, the Standing Committee approved diverting around 272 hectares of forest land within this newly created reserve for a separate irrigation dam. NACEJ quoted the CEC's assessment that the mitigation measures proposed by the National Tiger Conservation Authority and the Standing Committee fail to address the loss of a unique ecosystem of gorges, cliffs and riverine life along the Ken, much of which the CEC warned would be permanently destroyed once the project is commissioned. The CEC further noted that the Standing Committee had never assessed the project's downstream impact on the Gharial Sanctuary or on vulture nesting sites, leaving no corresponding mitigation measures in place.

As with comparable large infrastructure projects, the burden of displacement is falling heavily on Adivasi and other marginalised communities, NACEJ said. Gond and Kol Adivasi families in Daudhan village, in Chhatarpur's Bijawar tehsil, have lived on and farmed this land, drawing on the river and forest for generations; more than 6,600 such households now face displacement by the dam. Ten villages face total submergence and 24 face displacement overall, with 14 of them being folded into the Panna Tiger Reserve to compensate for the loss of core habitat elsewhere. As a result, ten villages are being resettled under the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act of 2013, while the other 14 are being resettled under the Wild Life Protection Act of 1972 instead. NACEJ said residents have not been properly informed about the project or its consequences, that no Gram Sabhas were convened in the affected villages, and that no social impact assessment was ever made public — meaning the Gram Sabha consent legally required in Adivasi villages under the land acquisition law was never obtained.

Displaced families are formally entitled to a rehabilitation package of either Rs 6.5 lakh per acre plus an urban plot, Rs 7 lakh per acre plus a rural plot, or Rs 12.5 lakh per acre with no plot at all. In practice, NACEJ said, only cash compensation is being handed out, with additional payments for trees, orchards, sheds, huts, wells and tube wells amounting to just Rs 2 lakh, and compensation for houses capped at Rs 6 lakh. No compensation is offered for the loss of forest access, which many families depend on for food and income from produce such as mahua flowers and tendu leaves — and for many, this marks a second displacement, having already been uprooted once before for the creation of the Panna Tiger Reserve. NACEJ noted that the Forest Rights Act, which would have recognised these communities' claims and given Gram Sabhas final say over forest diversion, has not been implemented; even resettlement from within the Tiger Reserve is proceeding under wildlife protection law rather than forest rights law.

Affected communities are demanding recognition of the deep social and cultural significance of their centuries-old villages, full compliance with the 2013 land acquisition law where displacement cannot be avoided, and rehabilitation that preserves Adivasi culture and ways of life — specifically, land in exchange for land and village in exchange for village, so that community and livelihood can continue intact.

The statement describes an escalating protest movement combining satyagraha, sit-ins, road blockades and gheraos of the Collector's office. Anger over alleged corruption and discrepancies in compensation surveys intensified the agitation in April 2026, when around 7,000 women lay on mock funeral pyres in a protest called the Chita Andolan, symbolising displacement as a form of death, alongside a Jal Andolan and Mitti Andolan in which protesters waded into rivers with ropes around their necks or buried themselves in mud. The movement was called off after government assurances that grievances would be addressed, but NACEJ said this was accompanied by the imposition of Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, effectively banning public assembly. It pointed out that this stands in tension with Section 21 of the 2013 land acquisition law, which requires district authorities to give affected individuals between 30 days and six months to file claims, and Section 38(1), which bars the state from taking full possession of land until all compensation and resettlement dues are paid. Instead, NACEJ alleged, authorities responded with repression — filing false cases against leaders of the Jai Kisan Sangathan, jailing several, and carrying out unlawful evictions, demolitions of homes and schools without notice, and electricity disconnections. The Chita Andolan and an accompanying fast-unto-death resumed in July under the slogan "Give us justice, or kill us."

NACEJ argued that viable alternatives to the interlinking project were never seriously examined, in violation of basic environmental impact assessment principles. It noted that 182 irrigation projects already exist in the Ken basin and 348 in the Betwa basin, whose efficiency could be improved instead. The region receives over 1,100 mm of rainfall annually, and NACEJ pointed to other parts of the country that have achieved water security with less than half that rainfall through watershed development and demand management. Thousands of tanks built during the Chandela and Bundela periods, between the 9th and 14th centuries, are scattered across Bundelkhand but now lie neglected; their revival, alongside existing tank restoration and farm pond schemes and the traditional Haveli system of earthen bunding that raises groundwater levels, could be scaled up region-wide with adequate government backing, the statement said.

NACEJ concluded that the interlinking project exists largely to paper over design failures in the earlier Lower Betwa irrigation project, and that its planning, environmental clearance and resettlement processes have been flawed from the outset, producing social, economic, cultural and ecological injustice for vulnerable communities and non-human life alike. The loss of over 10,000 hectares of protected forest and 46 lakh trees, it said, represents a significant loss of ecological services and carbon sinks at a time of climate emergency.

The alliance has called for the Union Cabinet to withdraw its approval of the project, an immediate halt to evictions, demolitions and coercive land acquisition, withdrawal of all cases filed against protesters and activists, full implementation of the Forest Rights Act and the 2013 land acquisition law including consent processes and fair compensation, dignified resettlement based on land-for-land and village-for-village principles, a fast-tracked investigation into corruption in the compensation process, an independent judicial inquiry into allegations of illegal detention and police brutality, environmental restoration by the state government, central support for reviving existing irrigation infrastructure and traditional water systems, and a comprehensive, independent review of the project's ecological, social and legal impact.