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dam-l LS: Excellent Narmada stories from Indian Newspapers 17 Aug 99
This email contains the following stories.
1) Don't shoot the messenger (Sumir Lal), The Hindustan Times, 17 Aug 99
2) Dams, bombs & development, The Hindu, 17 Aug 99.
3) Narmada: President's intervention sought, The Hindu, 17 Aug 99
--------------------------
The Hindustan Times, Aug. 17, 1999.
Don't shoot the messenger (Sumir Lal)
It's so easy, isn't it? To dismiss the 400-odd citizens who
visited the Narmada Valley last fortnight as "eco-romantics" and to
discredit author Arundhati Roy as "a silly girl looking for fashionable
causes"? If only Roy's critics and others who view the Narmada Bachao
Andolan (NBA) as a nuisance would look at the message instead of shooting
the messengers. And if only the cause was really that fashionable.
To an unbiased observer, it is especially painful that men of
the stature, credibility and expertise of Yogendra Alagh and B.G. Verghese
should dismiss a mass protest without hearing the essence of what it is
saying. It is equally distressing that a leading newspaper chain should
join the provincial press in carrying motivated stories that discredit a
people's movement while falsely presenting a rosy picture of the
administration.
Last Wednesday, a week after the "Rally for the Valley" exited
the area, the authorities quite literally opened the floodgates and flushed
out Medha Patkar and over a hundred protesters camping at the doomed
villages of Jalsindhi and Domkhedi. A do-or-die protest of this nature must
surely have a basis; it cannot be dismissed as a gimmick of romantic
ecologists.
Indeed, one does not have to be a romantic to suggest that
when a gigantic river system is to be suffocated by over 3,000 dams for
howsoever noble a purpose, there are bound to be deep seismic, geological
and ecological impacts. The least that is called for is a thorough study
predicated on worst-case scenarios before work commences. This is no
romantic notion but layman's common sense, which has somehow eluded the
experts.
Note that one is not entering the debate for or against big
dams. What one is pointing to is government callousness and duplicity in
executing a project; a long-sustained mass struggle in protest; and the
deliberate refusal of opinion and policy makers to recognise this
situation.
The Narmada controversy has by now generated enough
documentation to confirm that work on this hugely impactful project
commenced without adequate study of the social, financial and environmental
consequences; that the lakhs of affected people have been subject to
repeated fraud and broken promises; that rehabilitation has occurred only
partially on paper (to the satisfaction of experts in Delhi) but hardly on
the ground (as the rallyists discovered); that entire categories of
affected persons do not even exist for the authorities (two ironic
examples: those evicted from their lands to rehabilitate those evicted by
the dams, and those evicted to build housing colonies for the construction
staff); that a very rich agricultural and civilisational resource base is
going to be submerged; and that basic issues like the right of the affected
people to be consulted and informed have been repeatedly ignored.
(Technical questions have also been raised about the very
feasibility of the projects and the credibility of the promised benefits,
but we shall leave that debate too to the more knowledgeable.)
Medha Patkar's NBA has emerged as the chief forum and
articulator of all these issues. Those who dismiss it as a club of
troublemakers or just another woolly-headed NGO or an anti-development
group not only trivialise a mass struggle, but blind themselves to a
phenomenon that has much significance for the nation.
The rallyists discovered that an overwhelming majority of
people in the project-affected areas actively backed the Andolan, cutting
across caste, class and political affiliations. The mobilisation is at a
mass, social level: every household, and every member of every household,
is involved and aware. This has made the movement collective, informed, and
politically conscious.
Considering that the issue is so emotive - loss of homes, land
and livelihood and violation of rights at the behest of a callous,
bullying, duplicitous government - the protest is peaceful in both practice
and precept. In a democratic set-up, it is nothing less than silly to
dismiss or ignore a mass movement with such credentials.
What a movement like the one in the Narmada Valley does is
carry the voice of the people, the ones most directly affected by
development policies, into the realm of public debate and policy making. It
ensures that policy is negotiated in an informed manner by those
formulating it and those affected by it.
Development economist Devaki Jain, who accompanied the rally
for the Valley, wrote on her return: "The Narmada Andolan story, its
historical course, its method of informed negotiations, its broadening the
issues - from oustees to science and technology, to educating the state
with good humour and seriousness - with a view to influencing policy, is
perhaps the most elegant case study to illustrate one of Prof. Amartya
Sen's political points, that public policy needs the intervention of public
action, the transformation of a lobby into a participant in policy."
Thus, what the rallyists saw was a movement that was enabling
those with the biggest stake in development (and the manner of it) to take
on the power lobbies that dispense it. Crucially, it is ensuring the people
participate in this process through democratic means at a time when all the
formal democratic institutions - a cruel executive, indifferent legislature
and procedure-bound judiciary - have shut them out.
The people of the Narmada Valley have intense grievances; they
are being destroyed in a manner that should send a chill down every
citizen's spine. Yet, through their peaceful, mass, 15-year struggle, they
have shown maturity, patience, understanding of the nation's imperatives,
and democratic spirit. The nation should cherish and respect such citizens.
To crush them, and to dismiss those willing to hear them as
publicity-seekers or eccentrics or romantics, is to insult the very
building blocks of our yet-evolving democracy.
But the all-powerful phalanx of government, development
planners and contractors is intent on doing just this. One wishes that
since they are so obviously incapable of factoring human costs and benefits
into their work, our nation-builders would, henceforth, resort to such
disruptive projects only as a last resort. (They should first look at
alternative modes instead of asking the displaced persons to suggest them,
as is being done in this case.)
And one wishes that the Supreme Court, in order to settle this
dispute between the state and common people, sends a representative to
visit the Valley and hold public hearings there to determine the level and
manner of rehabilitation - the point at issue in the current court case.
Then it should invoke the power of contempt for the purpose it is meant: to
ensure that justice is done. -------------------------------------
The Hindu, Aug. 17, 1999.
Dams, bombs & development
By Ashish Kothari
DAMS ARE not bombs. This key message of the article by Ms. Gail Omvedt
(TheHindu, August 4-5), written in response to Ms. Arundhati Roy's
critique of big dams, is based on two premises: that big dams are
necessary for reaching water to dry areas and that they can be
``decentralised'' to provide benefits to all. In the process, she also
criticises the ``anti- developmental'' stance of movements such as the
Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA). These premises and arguments are faulty.
Ms. Omvedt contends that dry areas in India (500 mm. rainfall) need big
dams. Is this true? In Alwar district of Rajasthan, with a rainfall of 600
mm, decentralised water harvesting has met the drinking water and
irrigation needs of over 200 villages. Some 3,000 johads and bandhs built
by local villagers with NGO help have transformed a severely drought-prone
area into a water- surplus one. Farmers can raise two or three crops now.
No external canal water is involved. Such success has also been shown in
Palamau in Bihar, Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh and several other places
through a combination of water harvesting and efficient use alternatives.
So why not in the Kutch and Saurashtra and Kalahandi? Indeed, the
Saurashtra Lok Manch has revived three lakh of the region's 7.5 lakh wells
by devising a simple technique of diverting the rainfall into the wells,
and aims to irrigate eight lakh acres at a cost of Rs. 200 crores, a
fraction of what it would cost through a big dam.
The trouble is even such money is often not available. In Gujarat, most
such projects are stalled for lack of funds because all the State's
resources are going into the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP)!
Ironically, official documents reveal that only 10 per cent of the Kutch
and Saurashtra will be serviced by the SSP canals, and the rest can be
given water only through an additional scheme, costing several thousand
crores, for which there is no money.
Ms. Omvedt is way off the mark in alleging that critics of big dams are
not genuinely interested in alternatives. The NBA has consistently
demanded alternatives, but when you are fighting a fire in the house, you
cannot simultaneously start designing a fire-proof house. After years of
agitation, now that it has forced the Madhya Pradesh Government to
consider alternatives to other big dams on the Narmada, the NBA is going
to actually try them out in a cluster of villages.
Big dams are not only unnecessary, they have tremendous social,
ecological and economic costs. Such projects always mean either a big
displacement of people and/or a big submergence of forests and other
natural ecosystems. Perhaps with the kind of mobilisation that Ms. Omvedt
mentions as having happened in the Krishna Valley, a few thousand people
can be properly resettled. But the ball game is entirely different when
the figure mounts to 2,00,000 or 3,00,000 people (the displacement by the
SSP.). Where is the land for resettlement? Ms. Omvedt would say in the
command area - take it from the farmers getting irrigation - but is this
politically feasible for a few lakh people? Especially when tens of
thousands are being displaced by the SSP canals in the command area
itself? And what of the social and political tensions that may erupt
between the host and newly-resettled people? It is sheer naivete to
suggest that at this scale, the displaced and the host populations can
amicably settle matters. In Taloda, Maharashtra, an Adivasi, defending her
customary rights to the land earmarked for the SSP oustees, was shot dead
by police who were trying to clear the area for resettlement. Big dams
like the SSP are socially unviable.
The ecological cost too is huge. In India, large dams have already
submerged 1.5 million hectares of forests and countless other ecosystems,
they have endangered several species of fish and mammals by drowning their
homes or blocking their migration, and they have increased salt-water
ingress along the coastline as the outflow of river-borne freshwater has
decreased. Contrary to the popular technocratic perception, rivers do not
go waste into the sea; they keep sea-water at bay, enrich fish spawning
grounds with nutrients, and perform a dozen other functions which we only
imperfectly understand. And while a few people can be resettled, a natural
forest can never be replaced and an extinct species can never be
recreated. At least in this sense, big dams, like bombs, are inevitably
destructive.
Can these impacts be mitigated? As members of the Government of India's
Committee on Environmental Evaluation of River Valley Projects, we found
that in an astounding 89 per cent of the 300 dams given environmental
clearance since 1980, mitigatory measures were being violated.
Compensatory afforestation has not been done, the wildlife has not been
restituted, catchment areas have been left to erode and waterlogged
command areas not reclaimed. And yet, construction has not been halted. In
other words, the vast majority of dams have been built not just in ways
that are environmentally incompatible but in violation of the laws of the
land! Given the scale of impact, such violations are inevitable... big
dams like SSP are ecologically unviable.
Ms. Omvedt's conclusion that movements such as the NBA are
``anti-development'' is illogical. What they assert is that any
development project must be able to meet the standards of ecological
sustainability, social equity and self-sufficiency. The current large
development projects, by and large, fail on both these counts, and hence
the opposition to them. But this is not an opposition to development per
se.
India's villages are indeed full of severe social and economic
exploitation, and it is incorrect to portray them as idyllic agri-pastoral
settlements, as Ms. Arundhati Roy may have implied. It is a travesty of
truth to suggest that such inequities can be solved only by a model of
development which stresses largescale industrialisation and big dams. How
can we ignore the evidence, documented not only by NGOs but even by the
United Nations Development Programme in its Human Development Reports,
that such a model, more so in the current phase of liberalisation and
globalisation, has in fact increased inequities?
Indeed, what is most needed is to help the local people regain the
capacity to take control over their own lives. Big dams will hardly help
do this. Conversely, alternatives such as those practised in Alwar,
Palamau, Jhabua and hundreds of other sites will. Along with the water
harvesting in Alwar has come major mobilisation by the local people on the
issues of forest conservation, sustainable agricultural development,
employment and common property management. In one entire catchment, they
have declared their own parliament, the Arvari sansad. Caste hierarchies
are still strong, but they are beginning to be whittled down as the whole
village unites to make johads and conserve forests. The NBA's own
mobilisation is having this effect... Adivasi and non-Adivasi members, who
would have traditionally shunned each other, are eating together, living
together, willing to die together. What stronger force for fighting
against traditional inequities than being part of a long-term struggle
together? And putting into practice alternative modes of even education
such as the Jeevan Shalas (``life schools'') initiated by the NBA in the
Narmada Valley? At least in these schools, and in the rallies and the
dharnas of the NBA, ``knowledge, grains and songs'' are shared equally.
Movements like the NBA cannot solve all the ills plaguing society, but
they raise critical questions and point to possible answers. They have
failings, like we all do. They must be offered firm but constructive
criticism, criticism that helps them evaluate themselves... just like we
must be able to evaluate ourselves based on questions they are asking. But
to denigrate them as simply the ``voice of eco-romanticists of the world''
and to do so when their Adivasi members are in the midst of a desperate
struggle against drowning amounts to not only being insensitive but also
to playing into the hands of the repressive state which Ms. Omvedt
otherwise so rightly criticises. That is the tragedy of the content and
the timing of her articles.
(The writer is a founder-member of Kalpavriksh - Environmental Action
Group.) ----------------------------
The Hindu, Aug. 17, 1999.
Narmada: President's intervention sought
By Our Special Correspondent
NEW DELHI, AUG. 16. A delegation of the National Alliance for People's
Movements (NAPM) has met the President, Mr. K. R. Narayanan, and sought his
intervention on the Narmada Valley issue.
The delegation comprising Mr. Kuldip Nayar, former judge, Mr. Ram Bhushan
Mehrotra, Commander (Rtd.) T. S. Sinha and the national convener of the
NAPM, Vimalbhai, submitted a memorandum apprising the President of the
present position on the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) and other dams
conceived in the Narmada valley.
Mr. Sinha, who had recently visited the valley with the ``Rally for the
Valley'', reportedly told the President that a ``serious security problem
was in the making as those in possession of rich cultivable land could
never be expected to give them up, while the hopes of the people in
Gujarat had been built up to such an unrealistic extent that both sides
were prepared to sacrifice themselves to protect their lands and their
rights.''
Mr. Nayar pointed out that the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal (NWDT) and
the Supreme Court had both directed that the rehabilitation and
resettlement process must be completed prior to proceeding with the
construction of the dam.
Mr. Mehrotra said during the public hearing early this year in Nandurbar
district of Maharashtra, in which he was the Chairman, it was stated by
farmers who had already been shifted out without allocation of land that
the land allotted to them was actually not available. Some of the land
allotted to them was in reality already occupied by local tribals since
decades and they were not willing to make way for the new allottees.
The memorandum said that in March this year, the people of the valley
along with officials had carried out an inspection of the land said to be
available for resettlement, but in effect there were no such land. This
was later admitted by officials as well. The Madhya Pradesh Government had
recently reported in the minutes of the 44th meeting of the Resettlement
and Rehabilitation Sub-Group of the Narmada Control Authority (held on
June, 1999) that they did not have land to resettle oustees who were
already affected by the increased height of the SSP and who wished to
resettle in M.P.
Mr. Nayar pointed out that both the M.P. Government and the people of
Kutch had filed cases in the Supreme Court on the SSP. While the M.P.
Government has sought a new tribunal to review the SSP, the Kutch petition
has questioned the justification of the project saying that it will solve
the water problems of Saurashtra and Kutch.
The President was told of the M.P. Government's proposal to restrict the
height of the SSP not only to reduce the consequent area under submergence
but also due to other aspects such as reduced water yield, preservation of
environment etc. Madhya Pradesh has claimed that such a reduction was
possible even while maintaining the requisite water supply to Gujarat. It
was pointed out that local schemes to recharge tanks, jheels, wells and
valley reservoirs in Saurashtra and Kutch would raise the water table and
provide irrigation and drinking water and prevent ingress of sea water.
The memorandum said that due to the failure of the rehabilitation
programme and the total non-availability of land to resettle oustees, the
people of the valley, especially those affected by the fresh construction
of the dam had no choice but to resort to ``satyagraha'' at the
submergence villages.
Earlier, the former Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral L. Ramdas had also
written to the President drawing his attention to the situation in the
valley.
Meanwhile, Mr. Alok Agrawal of the Narmada Bachao Andolan denied reports
in a section of the press today that activists had demolished a building
under construction at a site proposed for resettlement of village Behgaon
which is slated to be submerged by the controversial Maheshwar dam in M.P.
which has been contracted out to a private firm. According to them, the
allegation made by the private company was not supported even in the
report of the local Administration.