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dam-l LS: Omvedt Discussion Part 2/6 - Omvedt Letter
AN OPEN LETTER TO ARUNDHATI ROY (continued)
>From Gail Omvedt
talk it over." "People"-not the government, not just theorganisation
leaders. People like themselves, from both sides.
This never happened.
Arundhati, you see the NBA as a "small ragtag army"confronting the mighty
forces of government and the World Bank. Isee it as a worldwide alliance
with considerable money and backingfrom upper middle class people in North
America and Europe, not tomention Delhi and Mumbai, along with a rather
small local base inthe Narmada valley. Medha Patkar stands in between, at
theintersection between the two. You are calling for the people ofthe
world, doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants whatever, tojoin the
NBA-you don't need to call them, they have been therealmost from the
beginning.
So what is the NBA? an adivasi organisation? ask Waharu. amovement of
those threatened by eviction due to the dam? ask someof the evictees many
of whom have gotten land through otherorganisations working for
rehabilitation, both in Gujarat andMaharashtra.
There is nothing wrong with going out to organise people,with throwing
oneself into a cause or supporting a cause, withrallying world opinion.
NBA has succeeded in giving great powerto a "no big dam" position and in
putting a big question markbefore the whole issue of "development". You
have every right tosupport them. But in doing so, please think about one
thing: whenyou go as leaders to people in the valley, or when you
representpeople in the valley to the world outside, what are
theconsequences for them of the arguments you make? what does itmean when
you put your own arguments, either explicitly orimplicitly, in their
mouths? are you so sure your sweepingopposition to big dams is in their
best interest, or that you aredemocratically representing their real
feelings on the matter?
Talking about alternatives
The NBA has begun to talk of "alternative development." Butthey have not
been much interested in alternatives that departfrom their particular line.
There are people working on alternatives-some in southernMaharashtra
struggles and campaigns, based in struggles, drawingon popular initiatives
and on technological innovations proposed byradical engineers and others in
Mumbai and Pune-of variouskinds. They use some very simple principles in
suggesting
alternatives.
These are: minimizing the height of dams and the areas to besubmerged;
ensuring that all of those who will lose lands orlivelihood to the projects
get compensation, land for landwherever possible; and ensuring that the all
drought-afflected wholook hopefully for benefits will get access to water.
The sloganof "equal water distribution" calls for the widest
possibleavailability of water - and for concrete, technologically
viablemethods of doing this.
You see, to have a really powerful people's struggle againstunjust dams and
the horrors of losing one's home, you have tobuild such a wide unity - of
the drought-afflicted along with thedam-afflicted, of those in the command
area of dams as well asthose in the catchment area. Otherwise, the state
will simplyuse the longings of those millions of drought-afflicted
againstdam evictees; this is their game of divide and rule, and it cannotbe
defeated simply by the support of middle class urbanitesoutside the area of
the project, however fervent and idealisticthey may be.
An alternative along these lines had been proposed for theSardar Sarovar
Dam. It has been published by Suhas Paranjape andK.J. Joy, in a book
titled Sustainable Technology: Making theSardar Sarovar Project Viable.
(They would be glad to send it toyou if they had your address). Their
proposal is based to alarge extent on work done by the groups of engineers
working withK.R.Datye of Mumbai and on struggles and experiments
inMaharashtra. The themes of this are simple: lower the height ofthe dam
drastically; construct a barrage below the present SardarSarovar dam to
take water to Saurashtra andKatch. Instead of storing water the year
around in a hugereservoir, most of the water would be distributed to
farmers andstored in farmers' fields-there to be converted into biomass.The
biomass can provide not only food, fiber, fodder etc. but evenelectricity:
instead of a centralised electricity generating dam,electricity can be
generated on a decentralised base usinggasifiers and other very modern
technological devices BY THEFARMERS themselves, and sold by the farmers to
the central grid.
Such an alternative would not do away with the dam, but itwould lower its
height and drastically reduce the number of peoplewho would lose their
land. It would also unite people, thedrought-afflicted especially in
areas such as Saurashtra andKutch, and the dam-afflicted.
But the alternative was never seriously considered. Thegovernment of
Gujarat of course was opposed; by now most opinionhas hardened and
positions have hardened. No change in the dam.Well, we might expect that
from the repressive State. But thealternative was also never considered,
never taken up, neverpublicized by NBA either. They may have been upset by
the idea of"making the Sardar Sarovar Project viable" - giving a new lease
oflife even though in a radically altered form, to something theywere
trying to totally destroy.
Could we conclude that they are not really interested inalternatives?
Was the NBA not playing into the hands of the State which hassystematically
and continually tried to divide people, which hasbuilt for itself a support
base against the farmers of the valleyamong the millions in Gujarat hoping
for water to maintain theirlivelihood? Isn't talk of only using rainwater
harvesting acruel joke on the people in the areas of Saurashtra and Kutch?
Krishna valley alternatives
Similar issues have come up regarding the dams in the Krishnavalley region
of Maharashtra. Take Koyna dam. There is oneactivist, Avinash B.J., a
long time NGO worker, who is consideredpart of the NBA group, working in
the area. I believe he evenattended a world conference in Rio and talked
of Koyna and Krishnavalley dams. He has little local base. But his
position in regardto the farmers of the region who still have some lands
around thereservoir itself, was that they should not move. The
maincommittee of Koyna evictees has had employment provision as one ofits
demands. But Avinash B.J.'s position was that the farmersshould stay and
carry out their life near the reservoir. Whetheror not it sounds good to
say that people should not join the floodgoing to live in questionable
conditions in the big cities, thefact remains that in this particular case
the result would be thatthe landless and land-poor farmers would have no
other occupationthat to provide agricultural labour to the bigger
landowners.
In the Krishna Valley as a whole the NBA has no support;there is a large
people's movement under the leadership ofNaganath Naikaudi and Bharat
Patankar and others, mainly organisedthrough the Shetmajur Kashtakari
Shetkari Sanghatana-sorry tobother you with a lot of long names, my
publishers always say itsbad for readers from abroad, they get confused,
and quiteunderstandable; talking only of the NBA and of no big dams is
amuch simpler message; unfortunately, however, people organisethemselves in
a multitude of organisations and with a multitude ofideas and aims.
Anyway, some of the movements have been ofvillagers standing to have their
lands flooded by construction ofdams. In Urmodi (in Satara district)
people have held a dharnafor over two months stopping construction of the
dam because theirrehabilitation is not assured; in Azra taluka of Kolhapur
districtthe construction of the Uchangi dam was halted to give thevillagers
a chance to present an alternative proposal.
Overall, the movements has taken up the demand to completethe dams in the
Krishna valley so that the water allotted toMaharashtra can be used before
the deadline set by the BachawatAward, in May 2000. But, the people are
insisting that thegovernment's method of building dams-top down,
bureaucratic,capitalistic-should be changed to provide a distribution
systemthat would give water to every village and every family in theKrishna
valley, not just to create green islands of development ina sea of drought.
And they have amassed experiments and data toshow that this can be done. A
Marathi booklet on this by BharatPatankar sold 10,000 copies on the day of
the conference when itwas brought out. (There is an English translation,
not yetpublished). Within this framework of demanding sustainable
damconstruction, full rehabilitation, and equal water distribution,people
of 13 drought-prone talukas in five districts of southernMaharashtra have
organised themselves. But they are better atcommunicating in Marathi than
in English, and the urban-middleclass component of this particular movement
is very weak. Thelocal papers (that is, the local editions of papers)
publish news,the government pays attention, but the Bombay and Pune
editions donot publish their news. Even when five days of demonstrations
bynearly 100,000 people in the area, simultaneous demonstrations byboth the
dam-afflicted and the drought-afflicted, were held inlate October 1998,
there was no reporting in the big metropolitanpress.
So I ask myself, what kind of movement is this, what kind ofmovement is the
NBA? Whose movement is it, anyway?
On Bags of Grain and the Meaning of Development
That requires a few comments about the question ofdevelopment. You are,
like many urbanites and many people inEurope and North America who buy food
from the market every day,very pessimistic and even antagonistic to the
idea of Indianfarmers getting into "commercialised agriculture." (Oh
yes,starvation in the midst of plenty: I was in Kalahandi, also, in1996
when I spent a few months at an institute in Bhubaneswar; itsproblem is not
commercialised agriculture, but the total andabysmal lack of any industrial
development in the district, alongwith the fact that 40% of forest land is
owned by the state). Itsomehow seems an destruction of a beautiful,
perhaps poor butnevertheless rich in variety and emotion, traditional way
of life.You wrote of the "bags of grain" in the farmers' household, andhow
they bragged about them.
I would like to say a little big about bags of grain. I'vemarried into a
farming family, perhaps not too different fromthese. We have 15 acres on
the banks of the Krishna, and we havea lot of bags of grain that have
sometimes filled even the "livingroom" of the house after harvest.
But, bags of grain are not worth all that much. Maybe 1000rupees a bag,
depending on the crop. Farmers don't make much of aliving off of
agriculture. They do not do so now, they did not doso either in traditional
times. That is, in times before "modern"commercialised agriculture and all
the paraphernalia ofcontemporary society entered their lives. We can say
both goodand bad things about the agriculture and industry and society
oftoday-but let's examine the traditional one a bit.
There is a Marathi saying: "Knowledge in the house of theBrahmans; grain in
the house of the Kunbis; songs in the house ofthe Mahars" (dalits). One
meaning of course is that theMahars, the Dalits, are the worst off, they
hardly have food toeat. But the other is that both the Mahars and the
Kunbi peasantsalong with all the vast middle castes who were identified
as"shudras" traditionally were deprived of knowledge and education.They
were subsistence producers traditionally, growing their ownfood-except for
the surplus eaten up by the Brahmans and thefeudalists and merchants-so
they had grain. But little else.It was a caste-stratified society. Then,
as today, "knowledge"was the mostvaluable; knowledge could command grain
and songs. Kunbis werelooked down upon as shudras and servants, dalits
were even worseoff. Economists have even argued that the average wage
foragricultural and basic manual labourers at the time of theArthashastra
represented the same in money terms as the averagewage during colonial
times; and it has not changed very much inthe 50 years of independence.
That is your traditional, non-commercialised society. Do youreally think
the adivasis, dalits and shudra or Rajput farmers ofthe Narmada valley want
to keep that? Are you so convinced thatthe thousands of dams built since
independence have been anunmitigated evil? Or that the goal should not be
to restructureand improve them rather than abandon them? Or that the
struggleshould not be to unite all the rural people aspiring to a life
ofprosperity and achievement in the modern world, drought afflictedand dam
afflicted,-- rather than to just take up the cause of the
opposition to change?
Development to so many people in India means getting outtraditional traps
of caste hierarchy and of being held in abirth-determined play. It is not
simply economic progress, butthe capacity to participate in a society in
which knowledge, grainand songs will be available in full measure to
everyone. When youso romantically imply that such development is not
possible, whenyou give all publicity and support to anti-development
organisations, are you not yourself helping to close such doors?
Hoping to hear from you,
Gail Omvedt
Kasegaon
District Sangli
India 415404