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dam-l LS: Washington Post on Narmada
>
>Swimming Against the Tide
>Indian Farmers Refused to Be Displaced by Dam Project
>By Rama Lakshmi
>Special to The Washington Post
>Saturday, August 21, 1999; Page A13
>
>JALSINDHI, India: Luharia Bhilala, a gaunt farmer in his thirties, squatted
>on his porch. His eyes were fixed on the small rice paddy that slants
>downward to the Narmada, one of central India's holy rivers. For
>generations, the Narmada has sustained Bhilala's community. But just two
>days earlier, it had risen up and surged over his fields, ruining rice
>plants as he watched helplessly. Bhilala cannot trust his river anymore.
>
>Situated between two dams on the Narmada--one complete and the other under
>construction--the town of Jalsindhi will likely slip beneath the rising
>river within two months. In February, the Indian Supreme Court lifted a
>four-year-old ban on construction of the new Sardar Sarovar dam, threatening
>Jalsindhi and dozens of other towns, prompting activists from India and
>abroad to rise up in opposition.
>
>When more rain comes, Bhilala knows the water will cover his land, his house
>and half of Jalsindhi. If the monsoon persists, an estimated 12,000 people
>in 61 villages between the dams will uprooted. When the 375-foot dam is
>finished, as many as 400,000 people may have been displaced.
>
>"I will not run away and try to save my life," Bhilala said last week as
>hundreds of activists led by novelist Arundhati Roy gathered for a six-day
>Rally for the Valley here and in neighboring villages. "I will go under the
>water myself."
>
>Hundreds of farmers in the valley have pledged not to leave when the waters
>rise. It is a last act of desperation by a community that has fought a
>14-year war against the government's plans to build 3,300 dams--all but 30
>of them relatively small--on the 780-mile-long river. Six have already been
>built, displacing more than 100,000 people, and eight are under
>construction.
>
>The system of dams is intended to provide electrical power and irrigation
>for the region; the Sardar Sarovar alone is designed to generate 1,450
>megawatts of electricity and bring drinking water to 8,000 villages. But
>environmentalists have charged that it would disturb the valley's fragile
>ecosystem. In 1993, the World Bank withdrew a loan to the project because of
>protests, and in 1995 the Supreme Court imposed the construction ban that it
>lifted in February.
>
>Bhilala's village lacks electricity, a medical clinic or even a road. If he
>agrees to move out, the government has promised him a new plot of land, with
>access to education and health services, in the neighboring state of
>Gujarat. More than 8,000 families from his town have already received such
>benefits.
>
>"I do not want a poor tribal farmer to be condemned forever to a life
>without the basic services. I would like to convert the trauma of
>displacement into an opportunity," said Cheruvettolil Koshi, managing
>director of the Sardar project.
>
>Koshi argued that dams prevent widespread hunger. "How do we feed our
>millions?" he asked. "Availability of water for agriculture has enabled
>India to become self-sufficient in food production."
>
>But for Bhilala and thousands like him, the idea of leaving their birthplace
>is unimaginable.
>
>The farmers found an unlikely champion this summer when Roy--whose first
>novel, "The God of Small Things," won Britain's Booker Prize--published a
>second book criticizing the politics and predations of big dams. Called "The
>Greater Common Good," it described how millions of people would lose their
>land and homes--and thrust the novelist into the role of spokeswoman for the
>"Save the Narmada" movement.
>
>In an interview in New Delhi before the rally, Roy said the sudden
>commercial success of her first book "made me feel as though every emotion
>in the book had been traded in for money. It catapulted me into a kind of
>panic. I could not be a silver statue with a silver heart forever. I felt I
>needed to seek out the world of 'The God of Small Things,' the world of the
>little girl who grew up on a river in a village."
>
>Roy's new book, initially published as a magazine essay in May, has
>generated huge national interest in the dam issue. India has built more than
>3,000 dams in the past 50 years, enabling large areas to get electricity and
>develop agriculture. But environmental groups say that 25 million to 30
>million people have been displaced in the process, fishing areas have been
>ruined and thousands of acres of rich forest land destroyed.
>
>Last week, hundreds of activists ranging from interior decorators to
>academics and dancers to garment makers joined Roy for the rally and a tour
>of the Narmada valley. Medha Patkar, a gray-haired Indian grass-roots
>leader, pledged to stand in the rising waters' path even if she drowned.
>
>"The benefits of the dam never go to those who are uprooted," Patkar
>charged. She was later arrested as she stood in waist-deep water with
>farmers from a neighboring village.
>
>The demonstrators were greeted by thousands of farmers, fishermen and
>sailboat operators.
>
>"For generations we have built a life around the river. Where will we go?"
>said Madan Kewat as he anchored his boat. Kewat's village, Telibhattiyan, is
>expected to be submerged if another dam, the Maheshwar, is built on the
>Narmada. Villagers, refusing to accept a resettlement package, have
>repeatedly occupied the site to stop construction.
>
>In a rejoinder to Roy's essay, B. G. Verghese, a water expert at the Center
>for Policy Research, wrote, "Costs have little meaning when weighed against
>corresponding benefits." He noted that 60 percent of the water that Roy uses
>in New Delhi came from a dam.
>
>To Roy, however, the proliferation of dams is ominous for India and the
>world. "The story of the Narmada," she writes in her new book, "is a war for
>the rivers, the mountains and the forests of the world." With luck, she
>writes, the 21st century may bring "the dismantling of the big--big bombs,
>big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big
>heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the century of the small."
>
>
>© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company