The Pong dam oustees in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh have been struggling to be rehabilitated for five decades now.

After half a century of battle, these ‘refugees of progress’, who were uprooted to pave way for the Pong dam to facilitate irrigation of fields in Rajasthan in early 70s, have not got their due.

Many of them have been allotted and re-allotted land in Rajasthan after several rounds of meetings between officials in the two states, only to find it unsuitable for cultivation.

“After the entire struggle that my family has gone through, we got the land allotted in sand dunes in Rajasthan. The land has now been rejected officially. We have heard that we will be given some other land. Where and when? We don’t know,” said Jagdev Singh, 56, of Haripur.

“The dam has become the bane of our lives,” he lamented. Work on the 240 square km Pong reservoir on Beas river in Kangra district of HP bordering Punjab was completed in 1974, displacing over 20,000 families in around 339 villages, submerging a huge chunk of fertile land in the area.

However, over 2000 of them are still waiting for real ‘rehabilitation’ promised to them in lieu of the land they lost. They delay is mostly due to the ‘lack of will’ allegedly displayed by the beneficiary state.

“Pong Dam is a curse for us. Our land was very fertile. When we received claims in the form of ‘murabbas’ in Anoopgarh, Rajasthan, the situation was horrific. The land was a complete desert with harsh climate. There were no irrigation facilities, no electricity, no facilities at all and therefore no family life at all. We had no option but to sell it and come back to our native land,” said Tarseem Devi of Dehra Gopipur.

Official sources said over the years, while a number of the displaced did not take possession of land allotted to them in Rajasthan, many more sold it without any such provision only to get poorer.

With much more development in Rajasthan due to better irrigation facilities over time, in some cases, the land allotted to Pong dam oustees in two Rajasthan districts, which remained vacant for long due to the reluctance of oustees to shift bag and baggage, was allegedly encroached on by local residents.

Ultimately, it added to the complete washout of the original rehabilitation plan, together with Rajasthan government’s alleged failure to act and take up individual cases.

As a consequence, all these oustees have been running from pillar to post to get their dues over the last four and a half decades.

Their cases are stuck in ‘procedural lapses’ that numerous official meetings between two states and court cases over time have not been able to solve.

Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana have benefitted the most from the dam and Himachal Pradesh is the worst affected.

”Sarkar ne hamey barbaad kiya aur Rajasthan ko abaad,”(The government has ruined us in making the fate of Rajasthan), said another oustee, Kishori Devi , 87, from Jawali.

“Can you imagine how it feels when you are asked to leave your home, your neighbourhood, relatives and get shifted to an alien place? The cultural dissimilarity apart, the social mixing was also difficult there,” said an oustee, Kamla Pathania from Kangra.

The oustees said life was very risky and unsafe in the area allotted to them in Rajasthan. Another problem was the complex procedure of application for land allotment.

With half the population unlettered then, they faced problems in claiming their dues. “Travelling to Rajasthan every now and then was very expensive so we gave out our land to someone else to take care of it but he sold it to another person. So our land got cancelled. We applied again and again and it got cancelled every time. Now, we do not have any hope of getting back our land,” said Virender Dhiman, a resident of Jwali.