But despite the insurance, what is worrying Pathrad villagers is that a lot of their agricultural land stands to get submerged when the Maheshwar Dam is built on the Narmada river, as part of the Narmada Valley Development Project. And the villagers have turned their ire on government officials and employees of S Kumar's, which has signed a private power purchase agreement with the Madhya Pradesh government and has begun constructing the dam.

The Maheshwar Hydro Electric Project will cost Rs 1,707 crore. It is the first privatised big dam being built in the country. The total cost includes a 66 per cent fundingfrom two German companies, Bayerwerk and VEW. On a short-term basis, Siemens, another German company, has provided 17 per additional equity in return for the contract to provide generators and turbines for the hydel project. S Kumar's has 51 per cent of the shareholdings.

The three German companies have applied to the German government for a guarantee of their investment, which was approved in 1997. But following the NBA (Narmada Bachao Andolan) stir, the decision has been put on hold, according to a German NGO, Urgewald, which is actively supporting NBA's stir against the project.

Right now, the seemingly serene and sylvan Narmada Valley has become a hotbed of controversies. The 1,312 km long river, which begins at Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh and meets the Arabian Sea at Bharuch in Gujarat, will be seeing 30 big dams, 135 medium dams and 3,000 small dams on the river and its tributaries.

The villagers are troubled so much with the development plans that Pathrad even has a signboard right outside thevillage entrance warding off all government officials and S Kumar employees from entering the village to talk about rehabilitation. And last week, when Arjun Raina, a Delhi-based theatre-person, performed a stylised Kathakali spoof on the dam during the `Rally for the Valley' and displayed underwear with S Kumar's emblazoned on them, he became the most cheered person there.

Pathrad is one of the 61 villages that will be submerged by the backwaters of the Maheshwar Dam, and this is one of the dams facing a barge of protests from affected villages, actively supported by the NBA. NBA's main accusation is that the government has not planned for proper rehabilitation of the villagers.

``No single piece of land has been identified by the government to rehabilitate these villages,'' says Chittaroopa Banerjee of NBA. ``The MP government has, in fact, in a affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court, stated that it does not have sufficient land to rehabilitate the villages,'' she points out.

The NBA has also made apresentation to the state government's Narmada Task Force offering alternate power harnessing plans, including lift irrigation, smaller dams and alternate sources of energy.

Last week, as the heat was turned on S Kumar's and the MP government, with the stupendous response to the `Rally for the Valley' in the area, some Pathrad villagers were hurriedly taken to view some model flats built by the company. ``These flats were shown to some landless labourers and not the farmers,'' claims Radhoshyam Patidar, whose family owns about 50 acres of land in Pathrad.

The Patidars are the most dominant land-owning caste in the village, while the Gujjars have some large and medium size holdings. The labourers, mainly Harijans, work in the fields and are also engaged in sand-mining from the river bed.

``I earn about Rs 150 a day from sand mining, which is sent to Indore, Maheshwar and other towns nearby. This will be lost when the dam is built,'' says Shyam Badiyali, who owns a small sail boat. There are more than 350such boats in the nearby villages, all of which will be obliterated by the dam waters.

Khargone district collector Bhupal Singh, however, says the government has enough land to rehabilitate all the villages. ``In the next two years, the government will provide the land to these villagers. Of course, the land may not be as fertile as what they have, but with government support, they can make them fertile,'' he says. Singh says there is plenty of grazing land in the area which can be converted as agricultural land. ``Only 15 villages will be fully submerged, the others will be partially affected, where the villages will lose either their land or their homes,'' he says.

But Ratan Dhanegar, sarpanch of Sondhi village, points to the lush green fields, and says that most of the land has been made green due to the efforts of individual farmers. ``We have taken loans and are paying interest on these loans even now,'' he says. Not convinced with the collector's words, Dhanegar says his village will continue tofight against the dam and its fallout.

The popularity of the NBA's movement against the Sardar Sarovar dam, the biggest in the region, has proved to be a bane for the government, which is now seeing agitations against most of the other projects being taken up in the area. But all eyes will be on Maheshwar Dam, which has private participation for the first time, and is currently under construction. The outcome will definitely have a bearing on the future of the Narmada Valley Development Project.