When a big infrastructure project comes to your land, you’re supposed to be compensated fairly. But in Arunachal Pradesh’s Kamle district, a rights organisation is now asking a very uncomfortable question — did the right people actually get that money?
Human Rights of Arunachal (HRA) has fired off a sharp letter, dated September 1, calling for an independent investigation into what it describes as “serious financial irregularities” in the compensation process tied to the Kamle Hydro Power Project. The allegations are not vague — they are pointed, specific, and deeply troubling.
According to HRA, the organisation received information and representations suggesting that inflated, duplicate, and downright fabricated compensation claims may have been submitted and, worse, approved. The group wants to know if people who had no business receiving a single rupee walked away with payments meant for genuine landowners and project-affected families. That is the core of this — real people, real land, and money that may have gone to the wrong hands entirely.
The letter lays out a web of suspected wrongdoing. Land records allegedly manipulated. Valuation reports that may have been doctored. Beneficiary lists that possibly included names that had no business being there. And then there is the more unsettling possibility — that officials, contractors, and private middlemen may have worked together to make all of this happen. When the entire chain of verification becomes suspect, it’s hard to know where the rot starts.
HRA has asked for a complete beneficiary-wise audit. Every name, every payment, every piece of land — physically verified. Not just on paper, but on the ground. The group has also asked that all original files, land records, payment registers, and digital data be preserved immediately, before anything can quietly disappear.
On the question of who should investigate, HRA has been clear. It wants an independent, time-bound probe — and has specifically suggested the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, to ensure that local influences do not colour the outcome. The organisation has also written to the Prime Minister, urging him to take suo motu cognisance of the matter and push competent authorities into action.
To be fair, HRA has taken care to stress one thing — it is not against the Kamle Hydro Power Project itself. Development, the group says, is welcome. What is not welcome is corruption riding on the back of it, with genuine project-affected families left shortchanged while others pocket funds they were never entitled to.
That distinction matters. Too often, raising questions about a project gets framed as opposition to development itself. HRA is not doing that. It is asking that public money meant for displaced and affected communities actually reach them — lawfully, transparently, without manipulation.
If the allegations are proven true, this would not just be a financial scandal — it would be a betrayal of the very people that compensation law exists to protect. Families who gave up their land for a project serving the larger public good deserve better than to watch that goodwill get exploited by those with the access and influence to game the system.
The probe, if ordered, cannot come soon enough.
