Any government that cannot provide social protection to its communities cannot be seen as a people-centred government. Social impact assessment is as important as environmental impact assessment in implementing any project, especially when it comes to building state institutions.
The government wants to build a police station at Amdalai. However, an eviction order has been given to families occupying the land without any utterance of compensation and it is claimed that a family with an 82 year-old widow who claimed to have cleared the land and occupied it for decades, has had children some of whom are working, or married or still living in the compound.
Clearly the plan to evict such family without any compensation would tantamount to transforming them into internally displaced family without war. The family therefore needs to be visited by an agent of the state so that they will have social protection rather than callously dumped into the wilderness.
