In August 1999, protesters campaigning
against the building of a dam on the Narmada River in India were ready to drown themselves
in the rapidly rising monsoon waters.
The Narmada river
In Khoteswar, a temple still
used in 1998 has since been submerged, a direct consequence of the Sardar Sarovar
dam.
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The realities of
resettlement
In some cases resettlement has meant the fragmentation
of village communities, because neighbours are given land in different sites. Meanwhile,
over 5,000 oustees from villages in Gujarat are being rehoused in settlements alongside
others from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. People from three different states, each
with their own languages and dialects, culinary habits and dress, are thrown together.
Resettled people may also have to face hostility from their host communities. New
lands can be barren rocky ground or waterlogged, saline stretches where farming is
impossible. Fishing communities find themselves far from the river on which their
livelihood has depended for centuries. Often, these resettled people try to return
to their original homes, even if all that remains is a muddy hilltop.
Uncertainty is another dimension of resettlement. Entire generations grow up not
knowing what the ultimate fate of their village will be. As NBA activist Shripad
Dharmadhikari explains, “when it is announced that an area will face submergence,
all development work comes to a halt. So if a school is being built or roads are
being constructed it is all stopped. The actual submergence may remain on paper but
the work stops.” In the village of Kakarana Behena, a Bhillala tribesman said the
electric supply to his village was cut when its status as a submergence village became
known. Power supply was stopped a year ago but the waters are still below Kakarana.
There are also social ramifications. Sulgaon is a village in the prosperous and fertile
Nimad region that will be submerged when the Maheshwar dam in Madhya Pradesh is constructed.
Lakshman Patidar says it is becoming increasingly difficult to find brides for eligible
boys. “Who will want to send their daughters to a home that will soon be under water?”
he asks. And, like other Nimadi farmers, Patidar values his land above all else.
Since boys invariably join their fathers on the farm they get little formal education.
This will make it even harder to adapt to their loss of livelihood and culture.
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The tide may be turning
against the giant Narmada dam project in India
 Vadaj is a desolate place about
40 km from the historic city of Baroda in India’s Gujarat state. During the summer
months the baked earth cracks in the heat. When the monsoon comes, villagers perch
on the furniture like chickens to avoid the rising waters. After the floods have
subsided, the waterlogged clay soil is impenetrable, trapping cattle and people alike.
For the past four years, the tin shacks of Vadaj have been home for dozens of families
forced to leave their ancestral village to make way for the giant reservoir of the
controversial Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river.
These “oustees” could even count themselves lucky. According to a report by Narmada
Bachao Andolan (NBA), a pressure group fighting the Narmada project, when the Bargi
dam was finished in 1990, over 1,000 km upstream in Madhya Pradesh, the 114,000 people
from 162 villages in the path of the floodwaters were simply jettisoned with nowhere
to go. The government, says NBA, offered no resettlement land and only minimal cash
compensation. Many of these villagers, says the report, now have menial jobs in the
slums of Jabalpur, the main city in the region.
The plight of the Vadaj oustees could be shared by over 300,000 others as construction
moves slowly ahead on the 30 large dams, 150 medium and 3,000 smaller dams in a vast
project that will transform the Narmada into a staircase of reservoirs and turbines.
For the past 15 years, the backlash of opposition from NBA, a coalition of local
people’s movements opposed to the different dams, has been challenging the view of
development that these dams promote. NBA argues that the beneficiaries of the project
will be city dwellers, not the rural communities forced to leave their homes in the
flooded valley.
Over 80 per cent of India’s rural households have no electricity–and little hope
of ever being connected to the electricity grid–according to Arundhati Roy, the acclaimed
Indian author who has recently championed NBA’s struggle. She says the increased
food that the dams’ irrigation canals may produce will be destined for export, doing
little to feed the nation’s poor. In 1995, she says, some 30 million tons of unsold
grain were stockpiled in state granaries, while 350 million Indians still live below
the poverty line. What is more, most of the people affected by the Narmada project,
says NBA, are tribal communities, fishing villages and Dalits (the so-called “oppressed”
lower stratum of the Hindu caste system), who already benefit least from India’s
prosperity.
The notion of dam building as a prime technology solution to development is not new.
Back in the 1940s, just after Independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru saw dams
as “the Temples of Modern India”. The Narmada Valley Development Project was to be
a showcase for this vision. Although this particular project stayed on the drawing
board for over 30 years, mostly because of disputes over water rights between the
three states–Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat–through which the Narmada flows,
India went on to build some 3,600 dams.
Coupled to the Green Revolution of the 1960s, these dams provided massive irrigation
systems that have underpinned a fourfold increase in food production. And similar
prospects are being heralded for the Narmada dams. According to official figures,
the Sardar Sarovar dam, the last and largest of the dams before the river reaches
the Arabian Sea, will provide water for 20-30 million people all year round, especially
in the arid areas of Kutch, Saurashtra and the state of Rajasthan. At the same time,
the 138.6-metre multi-purpose dam is scheduled to produce 1,450 MW of hydroelectric
power, while its reservoir should smooth out the yearly seesaw of floods and droughts,
protecting some 400,000 people.
World Bank withdrawal
NBA contests
just about all the official statistics on the future benefits of the project. It
also questions the very principle of the dams from the point of view of development.
Led by Medha Patkar, a sociologist originally from Bombay, NBA argues that the benefits
will never justify the irreversible loss of forest, fisheries, farmland, culture
and livelihood for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Some 30 million
people depend directly or indirectly on the 1,312-km-long river and its valley, with
its fertile farmland, historic temples and pilgrimage routes.
In 1986, a year after the World Bank lent $450 million to construct Sardar Sarovar,
NBA commissioned a series of impact assessment studies that, it claims, exposed crucial
flaws in the official cost-benefit analyses for the entire project. But at the heart
of NBA’s campaign is the apparent lack of resettlement provision for oustees. With
mounting international support, NBA was able to force a review of the Narmada project.
In 1991 the World Bank commissioned an independent inquiry, whose report essentially
endorsed the NBA claims, saying that there had been “no proper appraisal” of the
project’s impact. Two years later, in an unprecedented about-turn, the World Bank
withdrew from the scheme.
In 1994, India’s Supreme Court upheld a case presented by NBA, freezing all construction
on the Narmada dams until the state governments carried out adequate impact assessments.
NBA insists that there must be no displacement if there are no realistic plans for
resettlement. With the exception of Sardar Sarovar, none of the dam projects had
any resettlement plans, says the organization. NBA is adamant that it is not opposed
to the development that the dams promise. It is also looking for a compromise solution,
calling for the final height of the dams to be reduced. The lower the final height,
the fewer people will be forced to move to make way for the reservoirs and the less
land will be lost.
Rally in the
valley
Although it
now seems unlikely that NBA’s actions will stop the dams, the organization has brought
the issue of resettlement to the fore. In 1998 the Madhya Pradesh government set
up a task force to look at resettlement possibilities. It found that not only was
there no land in Madhya Pradesh to house oustees but that the land promised by Gujarat
either did not exist, or was of too poor quality. Madhya Pradesh has now called for
a new evaluation. The state of Gujarat, however, has dug in its heels. Not only did
it refuse to allow the independent World Commission on Dams, set up by the World
Bank (see page 10), to visit the Sardar Sarovar site, it also challenged the Supreme
Court’s earlier ruling. In February 1999, after a four-year moratorium, the Supreme
Court reversed its earlier decision, allowing construction to begin again at Sardar
Sarovar, adding a further 5 metres to the 80 metres already built.
NBA has now reinforced its struggle, organizing a series of passive sit-ins and hunger
strikes. At the end of July last year Arundhati Roy organized a “Rally in the Valley”,
marching with 400 other public figures and supporters from village to village in
the affected area. An estimated 10,000 oustees joined the rally in the fertile Nimad
region of Madhya Pradesh, where the local farmers will lose their land if construction
goes ahead. And when the monsoon rains began in August 1999, Medha Patkar and other
NBA members took up positions in the village of Domkhedi, refusing to move as the
flood waters rose up to their shoulders. Police in boats finally removed them. At
the end of last year, Arundhati Roy published a closely-documented essay entitled
“The Greater Common Good” in Outlook magazine, criticizing the Narmada Valley project
both in principle and in its application.
As the mud flies between NBA and supporters of the project, the withdrawal of the
World Bank could have unpredictable effects in the longer term. With most international
aid programmes now unwilling to be associated with the dams, the developers are looking
for private sector funding. This could be much harder to influence than an institution
such as the World Bank, which has a “worthy” image to protect.
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