Police on November 19 shot dead Raimal Punya Vasave, a 15-year-old tribal youth, during a protest against the giant Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River in Maharashtra state. Three other tribal people were seriously injured.
The villagers were attempting to prevent their lands being surveyed in preparation for flooding by the dam. A 500-strong force of armed police accompanied the survey officials.
"The police started firing without provocation or warning ... The dam authorities and their foreign backers such as the World Bank and the [British] Overseas Development Administration must share the responsibility for this murderous attack", Shripad Dharmadhikary of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) said.
The British government aid agency, ODA, gave œ700,000 to the World Bank in October 1992 to pay for technical studies on the dam. The ODA is the only foreign funder still involved in the project.
The 61-metre-high Sardar Sarovar Dam is the first of 30 big, 135 medium and 3000 small dams planned under India's ambitious Narmada Valley scheme. The Sardar Sarovar will submerge 39,134 hectares of forests and farm land and displace more than 150,000 people, mostly indigenous people from 245 hamlets in the adjoining states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
Anti-dam activists say the dam design is based on incomplete and outdated data. They advocate decentralised and community-controlled water and energy use through integrated watershed management, local rainwater harvesting and renewable energy sources.
The World Bank financed the dam from 1985 until forced to withdraw in March. It is still legally bound to comply with its loan agreements which state that the 200,000 villagers to be displaced by the dam should be properly resettled. Dam opponents say that the bank is making no attempt to enforce the agreements.
On November 22, Medha Patkar, a woman internationally famous for her opposition to the Sardar Sarovar Dam, was among 150 people injured in a police baton charge of peaceful demonstrators. Fifty protesters suffered bone fractures or head injuries. The protesters claim that the best-known activists were singled out by the police and brutally beaten.
The rally of 1000 people was held in Dhule, Maharashtra state, to protest against the November 19 killing.
Patkar received the Right Livelihood Award — the "alternative Nobel Prize" — in 1991 on behalf of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. In 1992 she was awarded the Goldman Award, a prestigious US prize for social and environmental activism.