1.5 km shift for a village, a giant leap for West Bengal

All the 82 families in the village, located about 40 km from Santiniketan, voluntarily decided to surrender their land and accept the compensation and re-location package offered by the West Bengal Power Development Corporation Ltd (WBPDCL), for expansion of the Japanese-funded Bakreswar Thermal Power Plant.

The relocation, which started sometime ago, was wrapped up last week. Post-Nandigram and Singur, Manoharpur is the only site where villagers have willingly given away their homes and land for a Government project.

It is also unique in the way the whole exercise was planned, with care being taken to ensure that the “pattern” of the 200-year-old village was not disturbed.

Apart from retaining the old village name ‘Manoharpur’ at the new site, plots have been allotted so as to keep the relative position of the neighbours the same. Families living in adjacent houses in the old Manoharpur continue to do so in the new one. A pond for a pond, a school for a school and even a mosque for a mosque —- it’s as if the entire village has been lifted and placed at the new site.

The only structure that the villagers left behind in the old Manoharpur’s rubble was a small mazaar. While WBPDCL set aside Rs 2 lakh for construction of a mazaar at the new site, identical to the old one, the Imam refused to abandon the place. The villagers have now managed to extract a promise from the WBPDCL authorities that the structure will not be pulled down.

“Our families had been neighbours even before the times of our fathers-in-law. Our husbands had grown up together as brothers, so we are quite happy with this arrangement,” say two of the villagers, Rezina Bibi and Jyosna Bibi.

So is the district administration. “We have given importance to social capital. The idea was to recreate the old surroundings so that villagers don’t feel out of place,” says SDO Dipankar Mondal.

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