New Delhi: Identifying gaps in rehabilitation, unfulfilled promises and a clutch of emerging issues surrounding the Sardar Sarovar Project over the Narmada River, an independent panel led by a former high court judge has recommended various ameliorative measures, including a frank review of the project itself.Complete rehabilitation of all those affected by the project, the provision of civic amenities to every resettlement colony, the supply of benefits to Saurashtra and Kutch, and a halt to illegal sand mining in the Narmada are among the recommendations the three-member body headed by retired Patna high court Justice Anjana Prakash has made in a new report.Also comprising sociologist Enakshi Ganguly and environmentalist Gorky Chakraborty, the ‘People’s Commission’ also called on governments and civil society organisations to “reconsider a development paradigm that displaces communities, undermines livelihoods and damages ecosystems”. They must instead promote systems that are “decentralised, planned through democratic processes and locally manageable with technology, without giganticism”.According to a press note released by the panel, its members apart from examining written submissions also visited the Dhar and Barwani districts of Madhya Pradesh abutting the Narmada, where they held a public hearing that project-affected people from this state as well as Maharashtra and Gujarat attended.They said that in Madhya Pradesh itself almost 16,000 backwaters-affected families were excluded from the official list of affected families starting 2008 due to revisions in backwater levels.“Thousands of them have not been allotted house plots, even after acquiring their houses and shops, and hundreds of families have been living in unlivable tin sheds since 2019,” the panel said. It also claimed that households that were affected by project-related works like colonies and canals have been insufficiently rehabilitated.Resettlement colonies built for project-affected persons lacked water supply, roads, drainage and health centres, the panel said. “In Maharashtra, irrigation facilities or grants for it are pending for hundreds of families. In Gujarat, some sites are suffering due to being allotted uncultivable land,” it added.It also highlighted a number of emerging issues concerning the project and the Narmada, including allegedly illegal sand mining, effluent and sewage discharge into the river, and inadequate compensatory afforestation.A commission of inquiry constituted by the Madhya Pradesh high court had identified irregularities in the project but “no deterrent action has been taken in the past eight years against more than 186 officials, employees and middlemen implicated, as per [its] report”, the panel charged.The project’s original cost-benefit ratio too “has been overtaken by sustained cost escalation”, it said. Its findings “[underscore] the proposition that the social and cultural costs sustained by displaced communities may be beyond the reach of full economic compensation”.Turning to its recommendations for the project, the panel called on the Union and relevant state governments to review the project in light of its findings. “A fresh, non-governmental cost-benefit analysis, based on truthful current ground realities, should be conducted impartially,” it said.Every family, especially those wrongfully excluded from compensation, must be fully rehabilitated, and resettlement colonies should be given the basic civic amenities they currently lack, the panel said.Priority must be accorded to “providing water supply benefits in Gujarat to the really needy communities, as per the initial promises and plan”, it said, specifically referring to canal networks in Saurashtra and Kutch.Mooting an independent ‘statutory resettlement authority’ – perhaps named the National Commission on the Rehabilitation of the Project-affected – the panel advocated for “binding up-front financing for rehabilitation and environmental safeguards before any project begins, and public auditing of cost escalation”.Completed in 2017 and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Sardar Sarovar dam – along with a number of other dams on the Narmada – was staunchly opposed by the Narmada Bachao Andolan led by activist Medha Patkar, on the grounds that it stood to uproot around two lakh people, mostly Adivasis, from their homes.The Andolan was among those groups whose written testimony the panel had considered before preparing its report.