Polavaram Project: Development or Dispossession?
Jacob Clint
THE Polavaram Project, located on the Godavari River in Andhra Pradesh, is officially recognised as a “National Project” under the Andhra Pradesh Re-Organisation Act, 2014. Construction began in 2005, with the state and central governments claiming it would bring irrigation, hydropower, and drinking water to millions. On paper, it appears as a grand promise of development. In reality, it has become a stark example of capitalist accumulation at the cost of working people, adivasis, and peasant communities. The project represents not only a massive ecological disruption but also the forced displacement of lakhs of people – primarily the poorest and most marginalised sections of Indian society.
In spite of the alternate proposals from agricultural experts and Left parties for the better utilising of the Godavari water, the government bluntly refused and went ahead with their own proposals. Polavaram illustrates the dynamics of primitive accumulation in the contemporary era: where capital and the state violently dispossess the people of their land, water, and forests in the name of development, while the benefits are privatised and the costs socialised. The ruling classes – big contractors, political elites, and agrarian capitalists – celebrate it as “progress,” but for the displaced population it is nothing short of devastation.
Polavaram Project is a multipurpose dam aimed at irrigating 7.2 lakh acres, supplying drinking water to urban centers, and generating hydropower. It involves diverting and storing massive flows of the Godavari River. Officially, the central government declared it a “national project” to ensure funding and speedy execution.
But the project is not just an engineering structure; it is a political project. The ruling class in Andhra Pradesh projected it as the “lifeline” of the state after bifurcation in 2014, especially since the newly formed Telangana inherited several irrigation facilities. Thus, the Polavaram dam became a symbol of “Andhra pride” and a bargaining tool for political parties to mobilise support.
Behind this nationalist rhetoric of “development” lies the reality that 1.06 lakh families in 392 villages across 8 mandals are being uprooted, the majority of whom are adivasis. Independent estimates suggest that nearly 2 lakh people will be displaced when the dam reaches full reservoir level (FRL). This includes not only the loss of land but also homes, forests, livelihoods, and centuries-old cultural systems.
DISPLACEMENT
The Polavaram Project exemplifies how capitalism encroaches into tribal areas to extract resources. All the eight submerged mandals are Scheduled Areas under the Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, with nearly 80 per cent of the population belonging to Scheduled Tribes. According to the PESA Act (1996), no project can proceed without the consent of the gram sabhas. Yet, no genuine consent was obtained. Instead, the state bulldozed its way through, violating constitutional safeguards and Supreme Court judgments.
The adivasis, who depend on forests, shifting cultivation, and community land systems, are being forcibly pushed into rehabilitation colonies that lack even the most basic amenities like drinking water, burial grounds, or schools. Community networks and collective forms of survival – the essence of tribal life – are systematically destroyed. The logic of capital, which prioritises profit and infrastructure over people, is imposed violently here.
In 2022 and again in 2023, floods submerged hundreds of villages long before the dam reached its projected level. Rehabilitation colonies themselves were drowned, leaving displaced families homeless for months. Entire mandals in Alluri Sitharama Raju and Eluru districts remained underwater for over 100 days, while the government merely handed out a paltry Rs 2,000 per family. The sufferings of adivasis was invisible in mainstream media, while contractors and politicians enriched themselves through inflated project costs.
This reveals the class nature of the state: it exists not to protect marginalised communities but to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie, big contractors, and capitalist farmers who will ultimately benefit from irrigation.
It is not only tribals but also workers and peasants who are affected. Agricultural workers who earned daily wages in submerged villages lost their source of livelihood. Small peasants who owned little land are being thrown into the ranks of landless labourers, forced to migrate to towns for precarious jobs.
The working-class character of displacement is evident: the landless, marginal peasants, and adivasis – the poorest strata – are sacrificed so that surplus water may be diverted to capitalist agriculture and industry. At the same time, workers employed in project construction face unsafe conditions, irregular wages, and lack of union rights. When technical failures occurred – such as defects in the diaphragm wall and guide bunds – the blame was never placed on contractors or officials, even though hundreds of crores were lost.
The proletarianisation of displaced peasants – their transformation into wage labourers — is being carried out violently through state policy. The Polavaram Project is not “development with justice”; it is the commodification of land and water for profit.
REHABILITATION AND
RESETTLEMENT
Rehabilitation and Resettlement (R&R) is where the injustice becomes most visible. The project’s Detailed Project Report (DPR) estimated R&R costs at Rs 33,000 crore. But as of now, barely Rs 7,000 crore has been spent, covering only 10 per cent of displaced families – and even that only partially.
The state’s approach has been piecemeal and deceptive. In the first phase, it claimed that at 41.5 meters only 20 villages and 20,000 people would be displaced. But in reality, floods submerged 193 villages even before the water level reached 40 meters. Instead of reassessing, the government downplayed the disaster and pressed ahead with construction. Rehabilitation colonies built for displaced families were themselves drowned in the 2022 floods – exposing the falsehood of official surveys.
The basic demands of project displaced families (PDFs) remain largely unmet. In terms of compensation, families are demanding Rs 20 lakh per acre for acquired land and Rs 10.5 lakh per family irrespective of contour level, while the government is paying far less. Their livelihood concerns remain unaddressed, as no alternative agricultural land has been provided, MGNREGA is absent in rehabilitation colonies, and promised youth packages and land rights for shifting cultivation have not been implemented. Basic needs also continue to be ignored, with colonies lacking drinking water, schools, burial grounds, electricity, and health facilities. Despite being entitled to free electricity, PDFs are still being forced to pay power bills. Employment promises have been broken as well, with demands for at least one government job per displaced household left unfulfilled. This situation reflects a broader pattern of accumulation by dispossession, where capital extracts value by displacing communities, undercompensating them, and pushing them into wage labour.
Two additional issues further worsen the crisis. First, technical failures and corruption plagued the project, as flaws in the diaphragm wall and guide bund caused losses of hundreds of crores and delayed construction by two years. Although international experts visited in 2024 to assess the situation, their report was suppressed, and the guilty – including big contractors and political leaders – were never punished. Second, the Polavaram-Banakacharla Project proposed by the ruling TDP government aims to connect the Godavari and Krishna rivers at a cost of Rs 80,000 crore under the label of a “self-financing project.” This would place the burden on farmers, who would have to pay heavy irrigation charges, effectively commodifying water and turning peasants into customers of capital. Moreover, the project is likely to spark interstate disputes, as the Bachawat Tribunal has already ruled that upper riparian states are entitled to water if inter-basin transfers occur, potentially causing further losses for Andhra Pradesh.
Polavaram cannot be viewed merely as a technical project; it is part of the broader capitalist development model that extracts surplus by displacing communities and transferring wealth upwards. For the bourgeois state, “development” translates into mega-projects that enrich contractors, ruling-class politicians, and big farmers. For the working people, it means the loss of land, culture, and livelihood. For adivasis, it amounts to nothing less than cultural genocide, as their collective ways of life are uprooted permanently.
Marx described primitive accumulation as the violent expropriation of peasants from the land to create wage labourers. Polavaram embodies this very process: forcing adivasis and peasants into a proletarian existence without providing them social security or sustainable livelihoods. Capital gains access to cheap labour, while displaced people bear the heavy costs of dispossession. By disregarding constitutional provisions such as the Fifth Schedule and PESA, the state exposes its class character: laws and justice are upheld only when they serve capital. When the poor demand their rights, they are ignored; when corporations demand contracts, the state bends the rules.
The struggles of the displaced underscore a vital truth: genuine development cannot arise from capitalist mega-projects, but only from a radical restructuring of society in which resources are controlled by the working people themselves.
