Myanmar’s Planned-Resettlement and Social impact: An empirical case study

This paper explores the planned resettlement process and its social impact induced by the Tha Htay Hydropower project in Myanmar. Through the empirical case study, the status of direct impact on resettled people, changes of their livelihood, policy orientation towards practical limitations, practical consequences of resettlement and inadequate preparation for resettlement implementation were studied as verifiable evidences. In this paper, the survey data was made from responses of resettled people from three resettled villages; Maewa, Payit and Yegauk. Then, the researchers tried to understand them and interpreted them into the real condition of the project affected people because higher degree of their dissatisfaction caused negatively effect on the project whereas higher degree of satisfaction leads to its positively effect. In this paper, a quantitative method was used to analyze the planned resettlement and its social impact. As survey descriptive design, simple random sampling method was utilized to collect samples from target population with contribution of structural questionnaires. The collected data was presented by mean and standard deviation to decide the effectiveness of the resettlement project. The study found that social impact was considered to carry out after the construction of the hydropower project had begun. Then, the policy constraint in the resettlement process was verified. Therefore, they led to insufficient preparation and implementation of resettlement. To meet future development requirements of planned resettlement process with less social impact in hydropower development projects, recommendations are made for compensation of farmland where the people’s livelihoods are land based and additional livelihood packages.