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From dianne Mon Dec 6 16:31:37 1999
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 16:31:36 -0500 (EST)
From: "D. Murray" <dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>
Message-Id: <199912062131.QAA02605@lox.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>
X-URL: http://www.glue.umd.edu/~arvindr/articles/moni4.htm
To: dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca
Subject: moni4.htm
Why People Oppose Dams
Environment and Culture in Subsistence Economies
By Vinod Raina
(Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi)
The history of social movements goes very far back in India. They have
ranged from religious reform movements to Maoist type left-wing armed
insurrections, and include the adivasi (tribal), peasant, worker and
dalit (low-caste) movements. For a long period of time, over fifty
years, they were overshadowed by the mostly non-violent nationalist
independence movement, led and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, that
enabled the country to oust the British colonialists in 1947. Many of
these movements, in different forms, still continue in many parts of
the country, supplemented by two mostly post independence movements,
the womenís and the environmental movements. The sustenance and
vibrancy of these movements is perhaps a better indicator of the deep
rootedness of the democratic ethos in India, than the rituals of
increasingly frequent assembly and parliamentary elections. As Priya
Kurian[1988] notes, 'rarely have we seen the democratic process at
work so palpably and so effectively as in the growing mobilisation of
people against large dams'. But the continuation of these diverse
movements also indicates that even after fifty years of independence,
many sections of the society forming a majority of the population are
still fighting for their rights and for justice in the social,
economic, and political spheres. Most of these movements are therefore
collective assertions for economic, political or social justice, or
taken together, as struggles in the sphere of development. Very often,
however, the developmental aspects of the struggles are the surface,
the exterior, of a very complex agenda, and if one clicks, like on a
hypertext, one might unravel layers of complexity and discover that
the less visible roots lie somewhere in the sphere of values, customs,
traditions and philosophies, which taken together constitute the
cultural identities of the people involved.
Since similar movements abound world over, it is interesting to
examine what distinguishes the ones in one country, say India, from
those of other countries, as also to explore the similarities between
them. Once we exhaust such an examination from considerations of the
universal kind, like the particular impacts of the globalised market
economy and so on, the significant points of differentiation and
similarity are more likely to emerge from these underlying cultural
elements. The particular movement we shall concern ourselves with here
is the movement against big dams. During the past ten years or so,
anti-dam movements, particularly the one against the Narmada dams, has
received national and international attention, both in terms of
support, as also severe criticism from those who see this as
anti-developmental Luddite revivalism (for a recent example see
Verghese (1999)). Before, however, we get into the specific issues of
the anti-Narmada dam movement, a brief overview of dams round the
globe may provide an illuminating backdrop
Dam building has a very long history. Nearly eight thousand year old
irrigation canals found near the foothills of Zagros mountains in the
eastern side of Mesopotamia suggest that the farmers there may have
been the first dam builders. These primitive dams might perhaps have
been small weirs of brushwood and earth to divert water into canals.
Evidence of dams, nearly 3000 years old, however is found in modern
day Jordan, as part of an elaborate water supply system. Here, the
largest dam was perhaps 4 metres high and 80 metres long. By about
1000 BC, evidence of stone and earth dams are to be found in the
Mediterranean, in the Middle East, China and Central America. Romans
excelled in the area, and their best works are to be seen in Spain. A
46 metre high stone dam near Alicante began in 1580 and completed 14
years later was the highest in the world for the better part of three
centuries.
River work and dam building also has a long history in South Asia. The
canal system from the Cauvery river in South India, the anicuts,
continue to be an engineering marvel even today. Long embankments have
existed in Sri Lanka since fourth century BC. One of these embankments
was raised to a height of 34 metres and was the worldís highest dam
for a millenium. Another embankment was raised to a height of 15
metres and had a length of 14 kilometres!
One however witnesses a frenzy in dam building since the Second World
War. According to the ëWorld Register of Damsí maintained by the
largest dam-industry association of the world, the International
Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD), the worldís rivers are now choked by
more than 40,000 large dams, an incredible 35,000 of them having been
built since 1950! A large dam is usually defined by ICOLD as one
measuring 15 metres in height. The frenzy is most evident in China; it
had eight large dams at the time of revolution in 1949, 40 years later
it had around 19,000! The US is the second most dammed country in the
world with around 5,500 large dams, followed by the ex-USSR (3,000),
Japan (2,228) and India (1,137). Not only did the number of large dams
increase since 1950, so did the size. ICOLD defines a major or mega
dam on the basis of either its height (at least 150 metres), volume
(at least 15 million cubic metres), reservoir storage (at least 25
cubic kilometres enough water to flood the country of Luxemborg to a
depth of one metre) or electrical generation capacity (at least 1,000
megawatts sufficient to power a European city with a million
inhabitants). In 1950, ten giants fell in this category, by 1995 the
number had risen to 305, the leaders being US (50), ex-USSR (34),
Canada (26), Brazil and Japan (19), with China and India at 10 and 7
respectively.
The increase in dam building has not been haphazard. Better river
planning has implied identifying and siting dams to cover an entire
river basin, of which the Tennessee river valley development project
became a dam builders blueprint. Consequently, most of the worldís
river basins are now choked with dams. As McCully describes, 'many
great rivers are now little more than staircases of reservoirs'. A
meagre 70 kilometers of the 20,00 kilometres of the Columbia River
flows unimpeded by the slackwater of the 19 dams that cut across it.
In France, a dam impounded the only free-flowing stretch of the Rhone
in 1986. As for other European rivers, like the Volga, the Weser, the
Ebro, and the Tagus, none of them has a stretch more than a quarter of
length that has escaped being turned into a reservoir.
Movement against Dams
Where as dams have a very long history, large scale and concerted
opposition to them is evident only since the seventies, world over.
May be that is because the impacts of the post war dam building mania
took about two decades to sink in. The early movements, notes McCully,
were mostly inspired and led by conservationists in order to preserve
wilderness areas, and many did not succeed. The notable of these
struggles include the hard fought but unsuccessful campaign against
the 191 metre New Melones Dam during the 1970ís, the struggle of Cree
Indians against Quebec's mammoth James Bay Project (the last two
phases being abandoned due to the struggle in 1994); that against
Norway's Alta Dam between 1970 and 1981, the ongoing campaign against
dams planned for Chileís spectacular Biobio River; the Katun Dam
campaign in Russia (the dam has been suspended); the violent protests
by the Igorot ethnic minority in the Philippines which stopped the
Chico river dams and the struggles of the local people and their
supporters against dams in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Nepal.
These are examples of opposition and struggle from democratically
constituted countries. Anti dam struggles in countries with closed
political systems also became a symbol for the fight against the
system itself. In September 1988, forty thousand Hungarians took to
the streets of Budapest demanding an end, not to the communist rule,
but to the damming of Danube at a place called Nagymoros. Yet one
result of the anti-Nagymaros dam movement was that it helped the
Hungarian people to gain confidence to speak against the prevailing
political system. Similar stories lie behind the fall of authoritarian
regimes in several other Central and Eastern European states, with
environmental protests and opposition to dams in particular ñ acting
as a lightning rod for public mobilisation against deeply unpopular
regimes.
The struggle against the Narmada dams in India since the mid eighties
has, in the words of Washington Post become a global 'symbol of
environmental, political and cultural calamity'. But Narmada is only
one of a long list of examples of resistance to large dams in India.
In 1946, thirty thousand people marched against the Hirakuud dam, the
first huge multipurpose dam project completed in independent India. In
1970, some 4,000 people occupied the Pong Dam construction site to
demand resettlement land. The dam was completed, but fifty years
later; a majority of the oustees are still to be resettled. The
campaign against the Tehri dam in the Himalayas began in mid 1970s and
still continues. In nearly all the cases, the opposition to the dam
could not stop it, even though the people resisting were not far away
conservationists, but those directly affected by displacement. It is
therefore curious that the first successful anti-dam campaign in
India, against the 120-metre Silent Valley dam in Kerela, was not due
to displacement, but conservation. Unlike most Indian dams, few people
would have been displaced by the project, but it would have destroyed
a major rainforest of the country. In the end, the concern for
rainforest and its endangered inhabitant, the lion tailed macaque,
persuaded the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi to intervene and stop
the project. The campaign against the dam is significant in political
terms too. The political left in India has generally kept itself away
from the anti dam movement. But one of the groups in the forefront of
the Silent Valley campaign was the left oriented peopleís science
organisation, the Kerela Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP; the Kerela
Science and Literature Society). The success of the Silent Valley
campaign spilled over to proposed dams on the Godavari and Indravati
rivers, at Bhopalpatnam, Inchampalli and Bodhgat that together would
have displaced over 100,000 adivasis and flooded thousands of hectares
of forests, including a tiger sanctuary. Local people, adivasis and
supporting environment and human rights activists combined to have the
projects suspended.
Dam building in India after independence in 1947 became a major symbol
of modernisation, scientific progress and a matter of national pride.
'Temples of modern India' is how the first Prime Minister of the
country, Jawahar Lal Nehru described them. At the time of opening of
the 226 metre high Bhakra dam in 1954, Nehru, ever eloquent, put his
excitement thus: 'what a stupendous, magnificent work a work which
only that nation can take up which has faith and boldness! As I walked
around the dam site I thought that these days the biggest temple and
mosque is the place where man works for the good of mankind. Which
place can be greater than this, this Bhakra-Nangal, where thousands of
men have worked, have shed their blood and sweat and laid down their
lives as well? Where can be a greater holier place than this, which we
can regard as higher?'
Dam construction was combined with river basin planning for the first
time to form the Damodar Valley Corporation. Modeled on the Tennessee
River Corporation, the project envisaged many dams on the river
Damodar and other works on a number of rivers in the eastern Indian
state of Bengal, Though there was no visible campaign against this
project, a former civil engineer, Kapil Bhattacharya, in a series of
brilliant articles, little known outside since they were written in
Bengali, and based on the project documents, analysed the consequences
of the project, as it later on turned out, with magical prophecy
(Raina, 1998). Though not necessarily opposed to dams in general,
Kapil Bhattacharya contented that the Calcutta port remained
functional only because of the flushing of silt that the rivers that
flowed into the port managed during floods, and by damming these
rivers for flood control, the port would become non-functional,
reducing trade and commerce; which is exactly what happened. He
predicted that in order to overcome the problem, the government
engineers would be forced to divert water in to the port from the an
upstream river flowing into the then East Pakistan (Bangladesh)
through a barrage, the Farraka barrage, which would create
international tensions, which is exactly what happened. And due to
silt, when the Calcutta port's bed rose, the sewage flowing into it
from the Calcutta city would have a back flow, and that again is what
happened. He even mentioned that in such an eventuality, people will
blame the local Municipal Council, little realising that it was a
consequence of dams built far away from the city, outside the control
of the Council that was the culprit. Damodar projects today are seen
as a curse by hundreds of thousands who were affected by them but no
one realises that one of the best social, economic and environmental
impact analysis, perhaps in the world, could have saved a lot of
misery, but Kapil Bhattacharya was writing much before anyone bothered
about such things. He was in fact preceded by many years by the
outstanding Indian physicist, Megnad Saha, who between 1922 and 1934
wrote extensively and brilliantly on the rivers of Bengal and the
misery they were causing due to various impediments in their flow, at
that time due to the embankments of the freshly laid colonial railway
system. His models of river planning, written some eighty years ago
could be an environmentalistís delight today, even though he remained
a staunch developmentalist till his death in the mid fifties. It is
significant that technical writings that have questioned impediments
to river flow, either through dams or through other means have had a
history longer than peopleís campaigns against dams in India, and the
relative success of the anti-dam movement today is not only because of
participation of affected people and others from a broad spectrum of
ideologies, but also because of the association of technically and
scientifically trained professionals, who not only provide economic
and technical criticism of state plans, but also suggest alternatives.
So what is the general background in which the environmental and
anti-dam movements need to be located in India? From its inception,
the Indian state was confronted by two different visions of
reconstruction; the Gandhian project of reviving the village economy
as the basis of development, and the Nehruvian plan of prosperity
through rapid industrialisation. Gandhi put his views together as
early as 1921 in his book Hind Swaraj (Indiaís Self Rule). Many years
later, on the threshold of Indiaís independence (October 5, 1945),
Gandhi wrote a letter to Nehru in which he outlined his dream of free
India. 'I believe that, if India is to achieve true freedom, and
through India the world as well, then sooner or later we will have to
live in villages - in huts not in palaces. A few billion people can
never live happily and peaceably in cities and palaces...My villages
exist today in my imagination.... The villager in this imagined
village will not be apathetic.... He will not lead his life like an
animal in a squalid dark room. Men and women will live freely and be
prepared to face the whole world. The village will not know cholera,
plague or smallpox. No one will live indolently, nor luxuriously.
After all this, I can think of many things, which will have to be
produced on a large scale. Maybe there will be railways, so also post
and telegraph. What it will have and what it will not, I do not know.
Nor do I care. If I can maintain the essence, the rest will mean free
facility to come and settle. And if I leave the essence, I leave
everything'.
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialisation in the
manner of the Westí, Gandhi observed. 'The economic imperialism of a
single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in
chains. If an entire nation of 300 million (nearly a billion today)
took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare
like locustsí. He had earlier in 1940 already expresses his misgivings
regarding centralisation thus, ëNehru wants industrialisation because
he thinks that if it were socialised, it would be free from the evils
of capitalism. My own view is that the evils are inherent in
industrialism and no amount of socialisation can eradicate them ' I do
visualise electricity, shipbuilding, ironworks, machine-making and the
like existing side by side with village crafts. But ' I do not share
the socialist belief that centralisation of production of the
necessaries of life will conduce to the common welfare'. The appeal of
Gandhi lay in his programme of revitalising village communities and
craft production by employing simple technologies to provide jobs and
a decent livelihood to a predominantly rural population. The
liberation that Gandhi promised was not merely an economic
independence; it was, most profoundly, an assurance that the cultural
traditions of the Indian peasantry would reign ascendant.
Gandhi's vision struck no chords in the mind of Jawaharlal Nehru, who
replied rather brusquely to Gandhi's letter of October 1945: 'It is
many years since I read Hind Swaraj and I have only a vague picture in
my mind. But even when I read it twenty or more years ago it seemed to
me completely unreal ... A village, normally speaking, is backward
intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a
backward environment'. Having dismissed Gandhiís plea thus, Nehru's
own ambivalence was to surface only a few years later when he talked
of the evil of gigantic and mega projects.
The Nehruvian developmental agenda has predominated for over fifty
years now. There has of course been a great deal of industrialisation
in these years and a basic technical and service infrastructure laid
for self-reliant development. Poverty however persists unabated. Of a
population of about a billion persons, more than half would have to be
termed poor, which in absolute numbers is much larger than the total
population of the country in 1945 that Gandhi was talking about.
As a person associated with the struggle and the issues surrounding
the Narmada dams I come across a large number of well meaning
professionals, intellectuals as also ordinary middle class people who,
in spite of not necessarily being actively pro-dam, have voiced a
certain concern regarding the anti-dam movements with questions like,
'Where will then power come from?', or 'How can we do without
irrigation what about food?', and so on. These concerns, which need to
be differentiated from similar sounding strident and aggressive
postures of vested interests, of a politician, bureaucrat or a
construction agent and their supporters in the media and academia,
need to be considered seriously because they are at the heart of the
development debate everywhere. It becomes necessary then to situate
the movement against the Narmada dams within the larger
socio-economic, political and cultural realities of India.
It is generally believed, particularly by the governments, that any
kind of development is finally for the benefit of the ëcommon maní.
But who is a common man, or woman in India? The general consensus
would be the ëpoorí man. Though a poor woman would be poorer in many
ways, we shall assume that the word ëmaní is being used here as an
equivalent to the often-used gender-neutral term ëpersoní. I believe
that an adequate definition, in political and economic terms of the
poor common man is missing in India, and the best approximation is
that of the cartoonist, Laxman, that appears daily in the Times of
India. In developmental terms, the Government of India defines all
those who do not get to eat 2200 calories or more per day in terms of
food as poor. It is highly debatable, methodologically, whether
something like poverty should be characterised by an exact line,
defined by a single parameter like ëless than 2200 calories of food
per dayí. Such imported mathematical exactness in a highly complex
socio-political issue would seem to be particularly irrational from a
scientific viewpoint. In particular, enumeration of people on this
criterion is liable to be extremely error prone. For example, in order
to get a rapid assessment of poverty under this criterion, field
agents of the National Sample Survey often ask poor adivasis and
villagers : 'Do you get to eat two square meals a day?'. The answer is
supposed to decide whether the questioner consumes around 2200
calories per day or not!
In the absence of reliable data, orders of estimates, based on
qualitative criterion might be a better alternative in assessing the
nature of poverty in India. Indigenous people, or adivasis, are at the
poorest rung in the economic ladder of India. Out of a total
population of nearly 1000 million in the country, they number about
seven percent, which is around 70 million, or more than half the
population of Japan. At par with them on this ladder are the landless
labourers and marginal and subsistence farmers with up to an acre of
land. Similarly, there is a large population of people who subsist on
their traditional artisinal skills, as potters, iron smelters, bamboo
and grass weavers, small scale handloom workers, leather flayers and
tanners, wood, metal and stone craft persons. If we add to these the
slum dwellers of the cities, living in abject poverty, the total may
add to about 600 million people. India can therefore be seen as
divided between a two third population that somehow manages to survive
and subsist, and another one third, totaling around 300 million
people, that is composed of lower, middle and wealthy classes.
Except for the urban slum dwellers, the rest of the poor population of
India subsists mainly from the availability of some or the other form