MAHARASTRA'S SAD LEGACY
chron.com
Half a world away from Houston, idle Enron complex darkens futures
By CLAUDIA KOLKER
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
DABHOL, India -- Neeta Narvankar hurries through the mist, cradling a tray of fish that gleam like little knife blades. These could be the last she sells before the season ends, and she needs the money.
Her family has no savings for the slow months ahead. Runoff from the nearby Enron plant, her father claims, has killed too many fish.
Half a world away from Houston, the people of Maharashtra state contemplate an idle Enron complex and brood over their darkened futures. The structure is a vast electric power plant, the heart of a $3 billion deal meant to be the largest foreign investment in India. The Dabhol Power Corp., Enron promised, would bathe the state in light and nourish it with jobs, paved roads and running water.
But the 1,700-acre plant went dark last year, extinguished by a price dispute with its one customer, Maharashtra's electricity board. Enron, which managed the project, owns 65 percent of the facility. The Bechtel Corp., General Electric and the state of Maharashtra own the rest.
Now 90 percent finished, the plant looms vacant in a humid coastal forest. In its shadow, Indians struggle to grasp what Enron left behind.
For villagers like 14-year-old Neeta Narvankar, the legacy seems plain. Enron, they contend, tainted their water, stole their lands and abused their human rights. Enron has denied all wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime in India.
Raghu Dhar, a TV editor who investigated Enron for a decade, believes its fallout here is more complex. Many people in this state, he says, once revered the mighty U.S. firm. Enron stood for progress, competence, an ideal of American success.
"They raised our hopes," Dhar says. "They said: `Honey, I'm not going to leave you. I'm going to be with you for the rest of your life.' Then one fine morning, it just crashed."
· · · There were always those who fought the scheme. Outside Bombay, the state's commercial hub, Maharashtra is a land of rice fields, groves and beaches. It doesn't need another power plant, -- it needs efficient, honest distribution, many analysts say.
Environmentalists warned that a plant would blight natural resources. And political observers raised their brows over the project's easy sail past state and national leaders.
"There were various agreements that started ringing bells," editor Dhar says. Most troubling, he believes, was a contract clause that forced consumers to pay more each time energy consumption dipped.
Like many people, Dhar blames Indian officials as much, or more, than Enron for the debacle that followed. Both state and federal officials, he alleges, accepted bribes to approve an essentially flawed deal.
Enron denies it offered bribes to anyone and rejects claims it arm-twisted a cash-hungry Third World nation. "No one had them signing the contract with a gun to their head," spokesman Jimmy Mogal told the Associated Press.
In fact, amid Maharashtra's fields and banyan trees, many welcomed their new neighbor.
"The plant had good effects and bad effects," says Yashwant Bait, an anti-Enron activist in Anjanvel, about a mile from Dabhol. "The good effects were visible most quickly."
A sleek black road stitched distant villages to the main highway. Foreigners with rupees surfaced, eager for hotels and costly treats like chewing gum and Pepsi. Unschooled villagers got their first jobs inside a 15,000-worker complex as foreign as a space station.
Even day and night seemed to switch places. Enron worked on Houston time, so floodlights blanched the darkness while workers scurried underneath the moon.
It all seemed good to Madhukar Saitavdekar, who quit fishing to stock Enron with lumber. His 10 percent pay increase was worth the chill from anti-Enron neighbors.
"My community shunned me for a few months," Saitavdekar admits. He tells the story, though, squatting on a neighbor's clay front porch. His friends have all forgiven him now that he is back in their same boat.
Three years ago, Enron produced its first round of electricity, fueled by naptha rather than the liquefied natural gas it would ultimately need. From Dabhol to Bombay, consumers gasped: Their electricity bills had leaped 400 percent.
Appalled, Maharashtra's electricity board simply stopped buying Enron's product. Enron, which blamed the high rates on surging naptha prices, demanded that the board honor its contract.
It didn't, and in June 2001 the buzzing, glinting plant shut down.
Its fate now stands in limbo, as Enron fights the state in court over the broken contract and as its lenders threaten to seize the plant and sell its assets.
Back on the sea, fisherman Saitavdekar now understands his neighbors' rage. The catch has shrunk 50 percent in just three years. The fisherfolk, and several environmental groups, blame Enron.
"The warm water Enron let into the sea is killing fish," fisherman Prabhata Narvankar says. "You can tell when they release it every month, because it's blue and smells."
His daughter Neeta, who has finished selling the day's slim catch, slips onto the porch to listen. Rain whispers on the ashoka trees. It's the start of the monsoon, which keeps fishermen from work for months.
This year, because the fish were so scarce, Neeta's family took out a loan to get them through the rains.
Experts disagree on exactly why the catch has dwindled. In 1999, Human Rights Watch warned that runoff from the plant threatened fish and prawns. A local group called the Anti-Enron Campaign believes the damage happened and is preparing a lawsuit against Enron, management consultant and activist Pradyumna Kaul says.
On the other hand, the Indian investigative magazine Frontline notes, chemical plants have belched toxins into these waters for decades, and coastal fishermen must now compete with huge, productive ocean trawlers.
There's less doubt about what happened on the land. In Katawaldi village, about a mile from Dabhol, 50-year-old Aziz Mastan sits cross-legged beside two elders and tells about his trees.
"I had a mango orchard in front of what now are Enron's cooling towers," says Mastan, a giant of a man with a swashbuckling mustache. "Twenty acres."
Enron, Mastan says, needed land owned by about 540 farmers. Three hundred accepted compensation. The rest, including Mastan, didn't.
From 1994 through 1997, he and other farmers protested and were brutalized, he says, by Dabhol guards who then took their land. The guards truncheoned, jailed and even sexually abused the protesters, Human Rights Watch reported. Enron, which had hired the guards to comply with Indian law, never condemned the violence or replaced the guards, the rights group said.
The "Dabhol Power Corporation and its parent company Enron are complicit in these human rights violations," the report said. Both, it said, "benefited directly from an official policy of suppressing dissent through misuse of the law, harassment of anti-Enron protest leaders and prominent environmental activists, and police practices ranging from arbitrary to brutal."
Enron spokesman John Ambler, though, said the firm was not responsible for the guards' activities. Enron was required to hire the guards, he said, but they seized the land on behalf of the state. Enron simply leased the property.
"We did not employ or direct the state police in their activities," Ambler said. "We very specifically requested repeatedly that they avoid using any heavy-handed tactics whenever possible."
It was Mastan's turn in 1997. "The police came, built a barricade and bulldozed my trees before my eyes," he says tearfully. Enron's compensation wouldn't cover the acreage, he says, much less 800 mature fruit trees.
In an economy of farms and fish, a mango grove was Mastan's pension plan.
He still can see the property each day, drowned now by forest vines and hemmed in by Enron's chain-link fence.
· · · In the air-conditioned offices of Bombay's Zee TV, Raghu Dhar has formed a theory. If Enron had delivered even a few dreams, he says, many excesses might be excused.
Maharashtra, he points out, is a densely populated state of 110 million people. Any major project, he says, likely would displace some of them.
And the promises were so alluring: constant, affordable electricity. Drinking water in the villages. Jobs, capital, industrial development. Why not a world-class harbor or computer park?
To many here, Enron embodied America's talent for prosperity.
"I'll be honest. Indian people love American people," Dhar says. "Everyone talked about this great corporate governance: `Americans don't believe in lies, people aren't jealous, merit is rewarded.' They'd say, `We're part of the winning team now.' "
In the aftermath, critics including Bombay's Anti-Enron Campaign accused the firm of falsifying data in its contract talks. The state utility alleged Enron's prices weren't covered in its contract. Both cases now are churning through the Bombay courts.
But to Dhar and many others, Enron just availed itself of politicians' weaknesses and ordinary people's hopes.
"Whatever they did at a business level, they may have had their reasons," Dhar says. "At one level, you had investors in the corporation. But at the other level, you had people who invested their faith. Both of them lost out."
And even if the plant's chain-link fence swings open soon, experts say, Dabhol could shadow India for years.
In the cheeriest scenario, someone would buy the complex for a song and reactivate it in a year or two. But if that happens, the Indian lenders who financed more than three-quarters of the deal would take a beating and probably avoid big projects in the future. As for Enron, India's government is bound contractually to cover its lost assets. But India has balked twice at paying, damning itself in the eyes of other badly needed foreign investors.
The suspicion is mutual, especially for fishermen and farmers stripped of livelihoods with nothing to replace them.
"You feel cheated," Dhar says. "People were highly, highly hurt."
He counts himself among them.
Having criticized Enron for years, Dhar confesses that he admired it, too.
Its influence, he dreamed, could sweep new opportunities and values into Maharashtra's austere villages. He was thinking especially of girls like Neeta Narvankar, the fisherman's daughter -- girls who cook their family's meals, sell their parents' wares and never leave their houses after sunset.
"It's a big thing to have light in villages," Dhar says. "So many million women could have come outside. Think of what we've lost. To be very honest, it was hope, hope, hope." |
