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DAM-L LS: Dilip D'Souza: The Sand Between Two Dams (fwd)
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Subject: LS: Dilip D'Souza: The Sand Between Two Dams
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Source: Rediff News, July 26, 2001
Dilip D'Souza
The Sand Between Two Dams
Parvat Varma's boat has a neatly painted slogan on its
prow: 'Mera Bharat
Mahan.' My English companion turned to ask me what it
meant. After I
explained it to him, I looked up at Parvat, who was
standing at my shoulder.
"So Parvat, tell me," I said, "is your Bharat mahan
(great)?"
Parvat stopped punting us
down the river for a few
seconds and considered.
Then he pointed to the
large pile of sand that lay
in the boat. "See the
colour of that sand?" he
asked. "It's like gold, isn't
it? Is there any other
country in the world
where I can get gold like
this? Of course, mera
Bharat mahan (my
country is great)!"
I could only nod. It was one of those moments I seem
to have every now and again, when
something said simply overwhelms my cynicism about the
country I live in.
Parvat and his boat-mates, and several dozen others
like them in Pathrad village, get down to the
riverside by 7.30 each morning. Throwing two shallow
pans into the boat, they then punt it about
a kilometre upriver. I assure you, having spent
several recent hours doing precisely the same kind
of punting myself, that it is hard work indeed.
But once at the spot they want to reach, Parvat's team
let down an anchor and *really* get to
work. Which means leaping into the water, diving under
and lifting out sand from the bottom. One
pan at a time, they pile the sand into the boat till
the side is nearly level with the water: several
hundred kilos worth of sand, I imagine. This takes
them about 45 minutes or an hour of steady,
drenching toil. The boat now full, they pole it back
to the broad flat area on the shore near the
village, where the womenfolk, the kids and a few other
men are waiting.
Parvat and mates lift the sand, one pan at a time
again, onto the heads of these helpers; in turn,
they wade to shore and empty the pans there. Large
piles of sand come up; simultaneously, the
boat rises imperceptibly in the water. When it is
empty, another 30 or so minutes later, Parvat and
mates throw the pans in the boat and set off upriver
again.
They do this cycle about six times through the day. By
about three in the afternoon, they are
exhausted and must stop.
The return journeys with a full boat are always
precarious: "If there's a wind," says Parvat, "the
boat sometimes goes under."
"What do you do then?" I ask.
He laughs: silly question. "We pull it out and fill it
again."
But the wind sometimes helps, too. It allows the use
of a sail, so there's less poling to do. Then
again, some boats don't have sails. In those, one man
goes up to the front, takes off his dhoti, puts
his feet on one end, holds up the other end. Voila! A
sail. There is something amusing, whimsical,
about watching one of these boats scud past, powered
by the wind in a dhoti-sail that's held
down by 10 sandy toes.
And what's it all for, you're ask? Well, river sand is
a desirable ingredient in urban building
construction sites. As Parvat and friends go about
their diving and digging and shoveling, a steady
stream of trucks come and go on shore. They load up
with the sandy fruit of Parvat's labours and
deliver it to construction sites as far away as
Indore, a five hour journey. One truck driver tells me
they occasionally even take a load to Bombay, though
in general that's too far to travel.
So it goes, on the shores of the Narmada, upstream
from Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh. If this
gorgeous river is revered by millions, the hum of
sand-quarrying on this shore near Pathrad is one
reason. After all, there's enough work, enough sand,
to give these Kahars -- Parvat's caste in the
area that does the sand-quarrying -- a daily take-home
of Rs 150-200. That's no small potatoes.
These men and women live in flimsy huts, yes; many are
illiterate, yes; but they are by no means
poor. They do a hard day's work with dignity, and earn
a reasonable amount for it. As Ghisalal,
chai (tea)-stall owner and a retired sand-quarrier
himself, told me: "The river is our kheti (field)."
But the really interesting thing about the Kahars of
Pathrad is that sand-quarrying is not their
traditional occupation. They have been doing it only
since about the end of the 1980s. Before that,
they raised fruits and vegetables in the river bed:
watermelons in particular, which turn out
especially tasty when grown this way (When I bought a
watermelon at the market in Mandleshwar
and took it back to the home I was staying at, someone
there took one taste, wrinkled his nose
and said: "This was not grown in the river bed").
For years previously, Kahars had cultivated fruits
like this. In other villages in the area, they still
do. And going by Parvat and his friends' memories of
their parents' lives, the melons and other
crops brought a reasonable income as well.
So why did the Kahars of Pathrad give it up in about
1990?
The answer lies astride the Narmada, a few hundred
kilometres upstream from Pathrad, some
distance south of Jabalpur. It's called the Bargi Dam.
Completed as the '80s wound down, this
giant wall of concrete was the first large dam to be
completed in the ambitious programme to
"develop" the Narmada Valley. And it is large indeed.
I once chugged over the reservoir it
impounds in a fairly fast little motorboat. There were
times when we couldn't see either bank. All
we could see was the water all around us. Bargi's
reservoir is an enormous and -- on that day --
very placid lake.
Bargi is also the first dam you run into, if you
travel upstream from Pathrad.
When Bargi was completed, the pattern of flow of water
in the Narmada changed completely.
Upstream from it, of course, the water ballooned out
into that lake. But downstream, the flow was
changed by the way water was released through the dam.
How exactly that happened is not really
relevant in Pathrad. But the fact that it did is.
Because the changed flow of water meant that the
river-bed fruit and vegetable fields belonging to the
Kahars became useless. All of a sudden in the
early 1990s, they found that raising tasty watermelons
was no longer a viable way to live.
Thus the turning point in these Kahar lives at about
that time. In Pathrad, they were forced to give
up cultivating fruit and start lifting sand out of the
river. Today, that's what they do: so much so that
the Kahars are now generally known as the retiwale.
Sand quarriers.
This switch from watermelons to sand is an interesting
tale by itself, even a commentary of a kind
on dams. But there's a looming twist in the tale that,
if it comes to be, might just make that
commentary even more emphatic. For it might just mean
an end to sand-quarrying for the Kahars
of Pathrad. And Parvat knows it well.
The reason for this, he says, lies astride the Narmada
too. But this one is some kilometres
downstream from where he lives. It's called the
Maheshwar dam. It's the first dam you run into, if
you travel downstream from Pathrad.
The Maheshwar dam is not nearly as big and imposing as
Bargi. For various reasons, there has
been fierce opposition to it in the 61 villages it
threatens to submerge -- Pathrad among them --
and that may explain the desultory fashion in which
construction on it is proceeding today. Still, the
Madhya Pradesh government claims it will complete the
dam. If that happens, its reservoir will
indeed drown Pathrad.
Which means Parvat Varma will no longer be able to do
his sand-quarrying. Not just because he
will be driven from his home, but because at the place
in the river where they dredge up their
sand, the reservoir will be too deep for him and his
friends to dive in as they do now. Their own
kheti, in a sort of ultimate irony, will rise up to
devour them.
Simple, don't you think? One dam drove the Kahars out
of the fruit business. So they began
quarrying sand. A decade later, another dam threatens
to drive them out of sand quarrying.
"What does this mean?" I asked Parvat and several
others on that shore near Pathrad. "What will
you do for a living if the Maheshwar dam gets built?"
Amused, if resigned, shrugs greeted this second silly
question. "What will we do? Nothing," they
said. Older and wiser, Ghisalal had a sharper vision
of the future. "We'll turn into beggars," he told
me, "and stick our hands out in some big city."
Which, I suppose, is what happens when you are
squeezed between two dams on the Narmada.
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