AGARTALA: A month after chief minister Biplab Deb announced an ambitious plan to construct two dams on the Haora river , inhabitants of 15 villages in the foothills of the Baramura hills staged a demonstration on the Assam-Agartala national highway on Tuesday in protest against the proposal.The government had planned two dams - at Belfang and Champabari in Jirania, where the Haora river originates - at a cost of Rs 150 crore, to store water, generate power, improve navigability and explore the possibility of river-based tourism. The protesting villagers, however, are concerned that the proposed dams would submerge cultivable land, grazing land and forest resources in the foothills.The villagers submitted a memorandum to the sub-divisional magistrate of Jirania and said they would launch a mass movement against the project if the government decided to go ahead with it. They cited the problems they faced with the Dumbur dam, the state's lone hydropower project, in 1974.Many tribal families were displaced and large swathes of cultivable land were submerged but the project ended up turning unviable - it never generated power to its full capacity and as the water level went down, the turbines could not generate any power at all."The government might offer rehabilitation to affected families, but we don't want that. Once displaced from our villages, we will not be able to count on agriculture-based livelihood options any more," Ratan Bikash Rupini, one of the protesters, said. The river itself would be under threat, he added, if the 80 rivulets of the Haora are not managed, if desiltation of the river bed is not taken up and there is no scientific catchment area management in place.The same project had been brought up with former chief minister Manik Sarkar earlier, but he had rejected the proposal after the villagers met him and explained the threat it posed. "We are surprised to see the new chief minister promoting this project now. We hope he does not give his approval to the dams after considering our memorandum. The dams will not solve any of our problems and will only incur wasteful expenditure," he added.

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