Immediate task should be surveys to point out the submergence are a village to village in Dantewara and Malkangiri
Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time - Twenty Five
Palash Biswas
Changing Currents was Earth Report’s countdown to the 3rd World Water Forum (Kyoto, Japan, 16-23 March 2003).
Dam Dam Dam
Big dams. Love them or hate them, we have to live with them. Environmental campaigners contend that vast schemes such as the Three Gorges in China or the Narmada in India, are social and environmental catastrophes in the making. But their backers have a different view. Big dams can provide non-polluting energy and control flooding. In the run up to the World Water Forum, Earth Report presents the case for and against big dams. We travel to China and India to examine two of the most contentious dams presently being built, and we visit Norway where the economy is almost entirely based on hydropower.
http://www.tve.org/cc/doc.cfm?aid=932
Floods are the most destructive, most frequent and most costly natural disasters on Earth. And they’re getting worse. Large parts of central and western England are underwater in the worst flooding in 60 years. Insurers estimate the damage could reach $6 billion — on top of the $3 billion in flood losses suffered in northern England in June.
Over the past two months, the monsoon season in Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan has, conservatively, claimed hundreds of lives. Texas has suffered major flood damage, as have Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and North Carolina. Although California’s primary water worry right now is drought, increasingly serious floods lie in store for us, too.
Flood damages have soared around the world in recent decades for a variety of reasons. Global warming is worsening storms; we’ve deforested and paved over watersheds; and more people are living and working on floodplains (there are few better examples of this than the fast-sprawling cities of California’s Central Valley). But a key factor behind the spiraling flood damages is the very flood-control measures supposed to protect us. Flood damages soar when engineering projects reduce the capacity of river channels, block natural drainage, increase the speed of floodwaters and cause the subsidence of deltas and coastal erosion. In addition, "hard path" flood control based on dams and levees can ruin the ecological health of rivers and estuaries.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/29/EDG3IQ8JRI1.DTL
Dear Bharat Ji and friends!
I have talked you to shift the agitation epicentre in Malkangiri and dantewara on telephone.
I have talked to Orissa and bengal leaders. Since the people in Orissa and Chhatishgargh are quite unaware of the danger ahead and despite official objection the state governments do not help them anyway. The state machinery is avoiding to workout the survey and hearings to measure the impact, direct or indirect, it is nothing but betrayal to the people of the respective states.You may not involve the people or mobilising them unless you clarify the facts. Unfortunately enough facts are not available concerning Malkangiri and Dantewara. But simple logic may put forward the level of danger ahead. The catchment areas have to be submerged and the damage have to be extensive as we have seen in cases of Tehri Dam, Rihand Dam, Bhakhra Nangal dam, Narmada dam and Sardar Sarovar. We know the destined calamity but we may not project it to our people, this the basic problem of any mass movement. And the misinformation campaign overlaps our concern and endevours.
Anti Polavaram Dam Agitation is centred around Khammam and east Godavari districts of Andhra only despite the fact that the project woud cause extensive damage to resettled Bengali refugees, Dalits and tribals in Chhattishgargh and Orissa. The Dandakaranya Project touches the borders of Maharashtra ,too. Thus, the role of respective state governments are not transparent anyway. This is a violation of RTI act.
Medha patkar is quite a vetern in mass mobilastion against anti people River and water management. She has neglected the Orisssa and Chhattishgargh factors. More over link Krishna Godavri project implications are not highlighted properly. Which may have adverse impact on other southern states also.
I believe, the activists involved have greater tasks ahead. It needs proper homework to resist the State Power and Brahminical Set up. I am afaid, the anti Polavarm dam agitation lacks momentum on these points.
Immediate task should be surveys to point out the submergence are a village to village in Dantewara and Malkangiri. Public hearing should be arranged in every effected village.
I believe that it is going a big agitation. Perhaps bigger than Narmada bachao Andolan!
Palash
Bharath to me
Dear Palashda & friends
Met Shridamda and Ujawalda. Discussed the issue of Polavaram damn displacement from different dimensions of the problem that adivasis and dalits are going to suffer from displacement and post displacement that is going to be a disaster in Eastern Ghats
The sheet of reservoir on the bed of displacement of more than three hundred villages in three states of Dandakaranya is a problem with several implications
Social and political unrest as a consequence of displacement and ecological destruction in the region is going to be manifold
Problem in Orissa is not just 13 settlements with around 3000 aces of land at +150 ft RL.
And it is not a question of mere consultation of AP government with neighbouring states
It is a problem much higher in magnitude of implications due to direct displacement and also indirect implications.
Real magnitude of displacement in Orissa and Chattisgarh is not known yet known. It will be much higher like in Andhra Pradesh where the government revised its displacement figures from 250 villages to 276 (officially admitted) after the field studies have pointed out that AP Govt data is all baseless fiction
Similarly it will go up from 13 to many villages in Orissa also
Besides, the whole issue is currently debated at +150 ft RL. While there is also problem of +175 ft for which the AP government has agreed to give compensation for frequent damages due to floods and backwater effect. thus the number of villages affected by displacement and backwaters is going to be high. and that is totally ignored currently
the problem of displaced adivasis and vulnerable communities in tens of thousands moving helterskelter will being havoc in the entire region adjoining the submerged villages. they do not see the boundaries of forests or the states.
so called unaffected villages in the proximity of the submerged villages will pay heavily because of this. it will be social, political and ecological disaster. Bengali settlements in Orissa will face the fallout, so is the the region up to Sukma in Dantewada of Chattisgarh and Bhadrachalam town and surrounding areas of Polavaram and Devipatnam mandals in Andhra Pradesh.
threatened villages are not accepting the government rehabilitation. even if the government succeeds in forcibly evicting them or luring them with compensations the villagers are finally going to live further up in the hills by axing the forest. already the threatened villagers have put up their village name boards to ‘reserve’ a patch of the forest. newspapers have reported of the earmarking villagers have done in the neighbouring forest region.
one needs to realise these aspects of the problem and also press for action in the light if this reality. not just the official data of 13 settlements in Motu block
Shridamda plans to visit Malkangiri shortly
will keep you informed of the progress
bharath
See these references:
References
http://www.iimcal.ac.in/programs/FPM/DataFile.asp?FileID=6
India: Peaceful Demonstrators Against the Narmada Dam Project Arrested, Beaten, and Intimidated by Police.?? The Sierra Club: Human Rights Campaigns.? 1999.
?Medha Patkar.?? The Goldman Environmental Prize.? 1992.
Narmada River page.? International Rivers Network.? 1996-2000.
Roy, Arundhati.? The Cost of Living.? New York: Random House, Inc.? 1999.
?The Sardar Sarovar: A Brief Introduction.?? Friends of the River Narmada.? 2000.
Shruti Mukthyar.? ?Alternatives.?? Friends of the River Narmada.? U of Wisconsin-Madison: Institute for Environmental Studies.? 2000.?
Large dams power India`s growth story
Sapna Dogra Singh / New Delhi July 25, 2007
http://www.business-standard.com/economy/storypage.php?leftnm=3&subLeft=1&chklogin=N&autono=292202&tab=r
Despite the controversies surrounding large dams, the government is betting on a host of such mega projects to meet the country?s power generation needs.
As part of the strategy, it is working on what will be the biggest dam in the country ? the 3,000-Mw Debang multi-purpose project on the Debang river in Arunachal Pradesh. Multipurpose dams serve two purposes ? power and irrigation. The Debang project will benefit the entire North-East and the eastern regions.
?The detailed project report has been prepared and is awaiting techno-economic clearance by the Central Electricity Authority,? said an official of the authority.
Being developed by the Arunachal Pradesh government and the National Hydro Power Corporation (NHPC), the project is likely to be commissioned in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2012-17).
The displacement of people due to the project was ?marginal? and so it was unlikely to face much opposition, said officials working on the project.
Power planners say dams have been good for the country. An example is the Bhakra Nangal dam, which irrigates Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab, and provided water for the Green Revolution. A multi-purpose project on the Satluj river, this 1,326-Mw dam will soon add a capacity of 90 Mw.
According to an official of the Bhakra Beas Management Board, the dam produced 440 million units of electricity in June to meet the demand for paddy crop. During non-monsoon months, the production is 275-300 million units. Last year (April 2006-March 2007), the production was 5,382 million units.
In Maharashtra, the Koyna dam, which has the country?s first underground power house, supplies water to western Maharashtra and power to the neighbouring areas. Completed in 1963, the 1,920-Mw project is one of the largest civil engineering projects commissioned after India?s independence. The Koyna electricity project is run by the Maharashtra State Electricity Board. Most generators are located in excavated caves a kilometre deep inside the surrounding hills.
The 1,000-Mw Tehri dam in Uttarakhand became fully operational this year. By 2011, another 1,000 Mw will be added.
Simultaneously, many other dams are being upgraded. The Srisailam dam in Andhra Pradesh, for instance, will soon add another 900 Mw to its capacity of 770 Mw.
The six river basins in the country have the potential to generate 150,000 Mw. However, so far, only 34,000 Mw has been tapped. The power ministry plans to add 16,553 Mw by 2012.
According to an official of the Central Electricity Authority, the contracts for 16,000 Mw have been awarded. The government plans to add 30,000 Mw hydro capacity during the Twelfth Plan, 31,000 Mw during the Thirteenth Plan and 38,000 Mw during the Fourteenth Plan.
More big projects like Debang might come up, said the official.
By 2012, the country will see three new projects of 1,000 Mw and above. These are the Karcham Wantoo project (1,000 Mw) in Himachal Pradesh, the Tehri pump storage scheme of 1,000 Mw and the 2,000-Mw plant at Subansiri in Arunachal Pradesh.
DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: Poor Pay Social Costs of Big Dams Without Gain, says Global Report
By Meena Menon
http://www.ips.org/socialforum/0122/devindia.htm
MUMBAI, India, Oct 12 (IPS)- The hundreds of big dams built by India in the past half century have boosted national food and industrial production, but at a cost paid by the poorest, says a new study backed by both supporters and critics of multi-purpose river schemes.
The survey was sponsored by the World Commission on Dams (WCD), which has been set up by governments, aid agencies, non-governmental organisations and anti-dam movements from across the world, to review the gains and losses from the world’s 45,000 large dams.
The India study is one of several country studies, which are helping prepare the WCD global report to be released in November. The India report, made available to IPS, has advised India to build big dams only if the benefits can be spread evenly among the people.
The WCD is funded by industry, governments and aid agencies. It has held nine public hearings on six continents and listened to experiences of 120 people from 68 countries, regarding 1,000 dams. Although the Indian government did not permit a WCD hearing in the country two years ago, it subsequently became a member of the global forum.
”Large dams…must only be implemented if they also serve the cause of equitable distribution of resources, wealth and opportunities,” says the India country report prepared by a team of Indian experts.
According to the study, India’s big dams have played an important role in increasing farm productivity, power generation and industrial water supply. However, they also had negative social and environmental effects, specially the eviction of a sizeable part of India’s population from its ancestral home.
India has more than 4,000 large dams of over 15 metres height as defined by the International Commission on Large Dams.
Nearly two-thirds of the people displaced by multi-purpose river valley projects, are either tribals or members of the socially oppressed ’scheduled castes’, who have the lowest incomes among the country’s poor.
These groups had to bear a disproportionate share of the social costs of big dams, considering that tribals and scheduled castes make just one-fourth of the Indian population, the report notes. The big dams have been specially harsh on indigenous people, who are less than a tenth of India’s population, but made up nearly half of those displaced by the projects.
”There seems no justification for the imposition of costs on millions of innocent tribals and other rural people, who lose even the little they have in order to benefit those who already have more than them,” says the report.
The irrigation benefits of big dams are reaped by farmers and others in the command areas and the costs are borne by ‘’society at large, the taxpayers and the project affected people,” it adds.
The report estimates that on average, each big dam in the country has submerged nearly 5,000 hectares of forest. In the last 20 years, big dams are estimated to have swallowed up some 9.1 million hectares of India’s forests.
The study notes with concern that most of these schemes were not required to internalise the costs of preventing or minimising their harmful impact. It expresses greater worry over the Indian government’s inability to enforce compliance with project conditions.
Moreover, the process of environmental impact assessment (EIA) of big dams was subjected to political and administrative pressures, it says. ”Pressure is brought upon the professional project consultants to prepare EIAs in a manner such that the project is cleared,” it says.
India is estimated to have spent about 919 billion rupees (20 billion U.S. dollars) in the past 50 years on irrigation schemes. Most of these were linked to dams. However, India’s big irrigation schemes have run up heavy financial losses, with annual operational losses of more than 30 billion rupees (680 million dollars) in 1993-94, the study estimates.
The report also expresses worry that the safety aspect of big dams has been generally neglected by planners. ”In dam after dam, it has been observed that the required attention is not being paid to this very serious aspect of dam appraisal,” it points out.
Environmental clearance for big dams was made compulsory by the government 22 years ago, and ”that also more as a matter of policy than a statutory requirement.” It became a statutory requirement only six years ago. More than 2,500 of the large Indian dams were begun before the year 1978.
”Consequently, for these 2500 plus large dams, no assessment was required to be done of their social and environmental costs or viability nor was there any attempt to prevent or minimise most of the adverse impacts,” says the study. (END/IPS/ap-dv-en/mm/mu/00)
September 18, 2003: Arundhati Roy discusses India’s dams with host Mishal Husain.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/dammed/transcript.html
Mishal Husain: Arundhati Roy, welcome to WIDE ANGLE.
Arundhati Roy: Thank you.
Mishal Husain: Now you’ve come to be very much identified with the issues that we’ve seen in the film. Why was it that you chose to get involved?
Arundhati Roy: Because I think that the story of the Narmada Valley is the story of modern India — and not just modern India, but the story of the powerful against the powerless and the whole world, really. And it isn’t a story that works itself into the conventional divisions of the left and the right and the working class and the bourgeoisie and so on. It’s a story that somehow is so complex that it involves the river, the ecology, the caste system in India, the class system, too. [It?] sort of a peg, or a keyhole, to use to open a very big lock, you know? I thought this was that story. And in 1999, when the Supreme Court lifted its stay on the construction of the dam after six and a half years, that decision was what pushed me into the valley. Because suddenly it appeared that this fight that we thought had been won — the Bank had been pushed out, [which was] unprecedented in the history of the bank, and the six year stay given by the Supreme Court seemed to point in the direction of a victory — and, suddenly, it was all reversed.
Mishal Husain: The history of dams in India is a very long one. I mean, this is a well-established way that India’s pursued development.
Arundhati Roy: Absolutely. Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. I keep saying they are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They’re the symbol of nationalism to many. And if there were an Olympics in dams, India would have a bronze. It’s the third largest dam builder in the world; and perhaps the most committed because we have built 3,300 dams in the 50 years after independence. And today another 650 [are] under construction. Forty percent of all the big dams being built in the world are being built in India. And so there’s this, until recently, unshaken faith in these completely obsolete things. But hopefully, the faith has been shaken a little. I don’t know.
Mishal Husain: But they’ve been a source of pride for successive Indian governments– a symbol of achievement?
Arundhati Roy: Well, certainly it started off that way. I think it would be unfair to say that in the late ’40s and ’50s, when Nehru was the champion of big dams, that it was a cynical enterprise because they really believed that these were going to be the solution to the famines and hunger in India. But the point is that 50 years down the line, they have proved otherwise. We have 3,300 big dams, but the drought prone and flood prone areas in the country have actually increased. And from being a dream, they’ve become a very cynical corrupt enterprise; a way of letting governments lay their hands on huge sums of money; a way of centralizing resources; a way of snatching rivers away from the poor and giving them to the rich. And so in a sense they’ve become monuments to corruption.
Mishal Husain: But, obviously, there have been benefits because successive governments don’t build over 3,000 dams unless at least some of the benefits are tangible.
Arundhati Roy: You can argue that about anything. Colonialism didn’t have benefits. Surely, it did. The issue is not that they don’t have benefits. The issue is: who does it benefit and how sustainable are those benefits? And you see when a dam is built, forgetting about the issue of displacement, even ecologically, it takes many years for the destruction to set in. So in a place like Punjab, which was the cradle of the Green Revolution and really the heart, the rice bowl of India, today all those lands are getting waterlogged, salinized. They don’t know what to do with the salt water. And that destruction, once it sets in, can’t be reversed.
Mishal Husain: Let’s just talk for a moment about the area that we saw in the film, the Narmada Valley, an area you now know quite well. Describe to us what it’s like from your perspective.
Arundhati Roy: You mean aesthetically? Well, I guess, if you go soon after the monsoon, it’s beautiful. It’s like Scotland… misty and green and lush and idyllic in some way. And in the plains, perhaps the richest soil in Asia, where every kind of crop can grow. And so when you’re there, you keep thinking the ideal had all been flooded, and you keep thinking of all that under water: all that life, all that culture, uninterrupted civilizations from, I don’t know, the Paleolithic Age or something. All those temples, everything just gone, and for what? The argument is always posited as though you can either have irrigation and electricity because of dams or you can go back to the Stone Age, whereas that isn’t what the NBA is saying. [They are] simply saying that there are better, more efficient, more sustainable ways of irrigation and producing electricity than these big dams.
Mishal Husain: But what would you say to the argument that everyone has to start somewhere and the government is trying to do something pro-actively to meet these really pressing needs that India has? I mean, water is such a precious resource and India’s demand for it is going to double in the next 20 years or so.
Arundhati Roy: Precisely. And that’s why the dams are the wrong thing. Just take the case of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. You know, of course it’s been projected as the solution to the problem of Gujarat drought regions of Kutch and Sarashtra. If you actually look at the government’s own plans, it’s going to irrigate 1.6 percent of Kutch’s agricultural land and 9 percent of Sarastra. The rest of it is going to already water rich areas where the big farmers grow sugar and so on. And what it has done over the years? This huge project? It has soaked up almost Gujarat’s entire irrigation budget. And with that amount of money, using more local water harvesting schemes, you could have brought water to every single drought prone village in Gujarat.
Mishal Husain: Do you think exactly the same potential benefits could have been met in other ways?
Arundhati Roy: Not exactly the same. Ten times more. And the question is never asked about why are those areas drought prone? Why are they becoming increasingly more drought prone? Because of this completely random exploitation of ground water or because of the destruction of the mangrove forest as an ingress of salt water from the sea. There’s no question asked about why environmentally destructive projects have been allowed to proceed. And you take the case of Gujarat. I think it has the second largest number of big dams in India, and still it’s drought prone.
Mishal Husain: Why then would the Indian government spend all of this money? After all, India is bearing the entire cost of this huge project alone after international donors pulled out. Why would it spend all this money if the benefits are as questionable as you say they are?
Arundhati Roy: Because for one, a potential dam is more important politically than an actual dam. So when the Sardar Sarovar is coming up, in the election campaigns in Gujarat –of course until this Hindu fundamentalism became the chief issue — the benefits of this dam are trumpeted. It’s complete propaganda. But they?e told, it can serve you breakfast in bed, it will solve your daughter’s wedding. The campaign makes it sound like some magical thing. Eventually when the dam is built, as the Bargi Dam was built, the benefits are never what they say they are. So a lot of it has to do with propaganda and people’s unquestioning belief in big dams, which have never been questioned before. Why are they so terrified of the argument? They don’t let it be made. The World Commission of Dams was threatened with arrest when it was going into Gujarat because they don’t want to question it. They don’t want to say maybe there’s a different way of doing it.
Mishal Husain: But these are tried and tested. I mean, for instance, the United States is water sufficient largely because of some dams over the years. The Hoover Dam is the most notable example. I mean, these are tried and tested ways that countries have become sufficient in water. This particular project might be flawed, but are you against the principle of dams, per se?
Arundhati Roy: Yes, I am, actually, after much thought. And in America, if you ask Bruce Babbitt, they’re blowing up big dams. They’re decommissioning them. In California, there are huge problems because of dams. I’m against big dams, per se, because I think that they are economically unfeasible. They’re ecologically unsustainable. And they’re hugely undemocratic. And even if you look at America and look at India, they’re two very different kinds of countries, you know? Of course when they built big dams in America, they dunked the American Indian into reservoirs. In India, you’re talking about a kind of model of development that has displaced between 35 and 50 million people. On what basis can it be justified? We?e been talking about what big dams have done for India. In fact, there’s not a single study done by the government that says that big dams are the reason that India is now food self-sufficient.
Mishal Husain: No, but the government and– there are other analyses that have been produced — is that this particular dam will displace about 250,000 people. Now obviously that’s a huge number, but the potential benefits will reach 40 million. Somewhere that arithmetic also works.
Arundhati Roy: It doesn’t, does it? I mean, isn’t that a flawed argument when, firstly, the number of people it’s going to displace is 400,000 because there’s a very clever way in which they decide who is officially counted as project affected and who is not. And then if you posit the fact that it’s going to benefit 40 million, first of all, if you read the essay I’ve written, you’ll see how arbitrary that figure has been arrived at –A. B — who are those 40 million people? It’s absolutely untrue that this is going to be the case. But secondly, the assumption is that either you displace these 400,000 people and you bring water to 40 million or nothing. But what we’re saying is that there are more sustainable ways of bringing water to those 40 million people.
Mishal Husain: How would you do it? How would you meet India’s water needs?
Arundhati Roy: If you go to Gujarat today, you’ll see that in Gujarat, there are villages who now know that this rhetoric about the Sardar Sarovar and Narmada water’s coming is simply untrue. And you see the fantastic ways in which local water harvesting schemes have really been producing two and three crops a year in areas which we’ve been told are drought prone.
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Large Dams In India –
Temples Or Burial Grounds?
By Angana Chatterji and Robert Jensen
22 September, 2004
Zmag
How do we measure progress? How are lives improved by progress? Who benefits from — and who suffers the consequences of — progress?
These are central questions today as nation-states and corporations pursue what are typically called "development" projects. One of the most controversial of these in recent years is a series of more than 3,000 dams in India’s Narmada River Valley. Government officials say these dams and an extensive irrigation system will bring electricity and water to areas of the country suffering from drought, and the technocrats insist that it will work.
But other voices challenge this rhetoric of technological triumph, most notably the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement). Arguing that the government exaggerates the benefits and underestimates the costs, this nonviolent people’s movement since the mid-1980s has focused attention on the human suffering and environmental damage that comes with "big dams." These dams flood vast areas and displace hundreds of thousands, mostly peasants and adivasi (tribal) people, while promises of relocation and resources usually prove to be illusory. Just one of the dams, Sardar Sarovar, could uproot as many as a half-million people.
In August 2004, Angana Chatterji was one of three members of an independent commission who went to the Narmada, visiting villages and listening to more than 1,400 people at hearings. The commission investigated violations in resettlement and rehabilitation policies connected to the Narmada Sagar, one of the Narmada dams. Chatterji, N.C. Saxena (a member of the Indian government’s National Advisory Council and former secretary of the Planning Commission of India), and Harsh Mander (former director of ActionAid India) will submit their report this fall to the National Advisory Council, headed by Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi.
Chatterji, a Calcutta-born anthropology professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, described the situation in the Narmada Valley as desperate and cited one villager’s statement to sum up the sense of despair: "There is no future here; we are living out our days, focused on survival. The Narmada gave us life; they have turned her against us."
Despite the setbacks, Chatterji not only continues but intensifies her advocacy work through her association with the Narmada Bachao Andolan and groups such as the U.S.-based International Rivers Network (http://www.irn.org/), for which she is a board member. Chatterji is passionate and sharp-tongued, with an ability to bring the complex issues into clear, and sometimes painful, focus. In a play on an often-quoted comment of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Chatterji began our conversation by saying, "Dams are not the temples of India. They are her burial grounds." In an interview in September, she explained why the Narmada struggle remains crucial.
http://www.countercurrents.org/en-jensen220904.htm
India?s Greatest Planned Environmental Disaster:
The Narmada Valley Dam Projects
http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/Jones/narmada.html
The Narmada Valley Development Project is the single largest river development scheme in India.? It is one of the largest hydroelectric projects in the world and will displace approximately 1.5 million people from their land in three states (Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh).? The environmental costs of such a project, which involves the construction of more than 3,000 large and small dams, are immense.? The project will devastate human lives and biodiversity by inundating thousands of acres of forests and agricultural land.? ?The State? (India) wants to build these dams on the Narmada River in the name of National Development.? But ?How can you measure progress if you don?t know what it costs and who has paid for it?? (Roy 16).?
Each monsoon season thousands of people are told by the Indian government that they will have to be relocated as their ancestral lands are flooded out.? ?The people whose lives were going to be devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard? (Roy 26).? A disproportionate number of those being displaced are tribal people: Adivasis and Dalits.
Damming the Narmada River will degrade the fertile agricultural soils due to continuous irrigation (rather the seasonal irrigation which is dependent on the monsoon), and salinization, making the soil toxic to many plant species.? The largest of the dams under construction is the Sardar Sarovar, which, if completed, will flood more than 37,000 hectares of forest and agricultural land, displacing more than half a million people and destroying some of India?s most fertile land.
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