If you ever happen to stumble across a site for ‘Narmada bachao’, this how their first prose would perhaps read like:
“The Narmada is India's largest westward-flowing river and is of immense religious and cultural importance to the people living on its banks.”
Then they would go ahead to name the proposed project(s) as ‘just another development tragedy’.
The largest river development project in the world, the Narmada Valley Project envisages the construction of thirty large and hundreds of small dams along its length. The Narmada bachao andolan is more or less an organized form of protest against the implementation of these projects. Here I have tried to bring before you the related facts and analyze them to find out whether we are actually loosing anything by “saving” Narmada!
About
The Andolan
Ms. Medha Patkar, an environmentalist, spearheads the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement, NBA), one of the largest non-violent people's movements in the world. The NBA is the voice of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and peasants who are supposedly losing their land and livelihood due to large dams on the Narmada River. This struggle led by Adivasi and farming villages is one of the most influential in the world, and has reached as far as Washington DC and made policy changes in World Bank and multi-lateral funding agencies.
Synopsis
To analyze a few of the criteria these environmentalists give in support of their stand. The NBA has identified certain ‘flaws’ in the rationale for the Sardar Sarovar dam, which promises to displace hundreds of thousands of people and submerge hundreds of kilometers of the richly forested valley, for very dubious and questionable "benefits" to be realized by the people of Gujarat. Two of the largest proposed dams, Sardar Sarovar and Narmada Sagar, are already under construction, the former supported by a US$ 450 million loan from the World Bank. Between them the dams will displace 300,000 people, largely poor peasants and tribal, and cause immense ecological damage through the inundation of forests, including prime habitats of rare species.
How far should it be allowed to go?
The cons
The internationalization of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, or Save Narmada Movement, has had a great impact on India's state sovereignty. International environmental NGOs, such as Oxfam, the Environmental Defense Fund and the International Rivers Network, took advantage of the porous nature of the state's territorial and national borders. International actors intervened in the domestic affairs of the Indian state and built up the fire of the Save the Narmada Movement. The NGOs took part in enormous amounts of information exchange, proving that the state is unable to maintain “absolute control over territorial borders.”(Brown 1995: 15) Also, these interactions caused new, transnational identities to be formed, eroding the state identity. Thus state sovereignty was compromised as a result of the internationalization of the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
Intimately connected to the transfer of information between the local and international movements is the development of new identities. The nature of the debate produced strong local identities, which grew in opposition to the state. The mantra of the Narmada Bachao Andolan became “Hamara gaon mein hamara raj” (Our villages, our rule). Such strong local identities fused with the environmental NGOs, producing a strong antidevelopment movement. The internationalization of the issue also led to a delay in the procurement of the loan needed, and earned India a lot of criticism in the World Bank. The movement’s name ‘narmada bachao’ may also be identified as a publicity stunt to win the sympathy and votes of people. This movement is indeed proving to be a bottle neck to the country’s technological developments and a big obstruction in a major technological breakthrough in the country. Building of the dams would not only resolve our existing power deficit problem, but would also earn India a good name. Successful completion of this (these) project(s) shall boost investments in various other public sectors as well. Needless to say that there are schemes for resettlement of the displaced residential. According to a decision given by the Supreme Court decision of August 1990, 'ousters' (the people to be displaced by the reservoir) should be properly resettled at least six months before submergence of their homes or lands. Another point of concern being that the project would be failure like the earlier similar projects is equally groundless. For, there has been a significant improvement in the techniques since last India when built a dam, and units installed now are of much better efficiency.
There is a lot to be gained from the completion of these projects. Building a network of secondary canals from Sardar Sarovar dam totaling 75,000 km (46,600 miles) in length has been planned to deliver the irrigation water to farmers of Rajasthan. The project proponents claim that SSP will solve the severe drought problems of Kutch and Saurashtra, the two driest parts of Gujarat. The power benefits are huge too. SSP is to generate a 1200 MW from the powerhouse at the dam and a 250 MW from a powerhouse at the head of the canal. Though the immediate profits from the project would fall a little below the estimated values according to an evaluation by the World Bank, but it surely is a profitable project for a long term investment.
Just contrast the situation in India with that in China. The three gorges project after completion will be the largest of its type in the whole world. And the number of people it is displacing is 1.5 million. The only purpose remaining to justify the Narmada bachao andolan is the religious importance of the river, and now it lays on our discretion as to what we consider more important – meting the ever increasing power demand or preserving a culture which promises no more than a ‘ghat’ to say your daily prayers at. To end with, I would just like to add that to achieve something big and great, some short term losses have to be overlooked. The Narmada valley project is in the interest of the whole nation.
