ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Apathy Follows Man-Made Narmada River Disaster

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 14 2005 (IPS) - Anti-big dam activists are livid that authorities are still trying to evade responsibility a week after at least 65 people drowned in waters suddenly released from the Indira Sagar dam in the Narmada Valley of central India.

The victims, mostly Hindu pilgrims who had congregated on Apr. 7 for a customary new moon, bathing ritual at Dharaji village in the Dewas district on the Narmada River about 25 kilometers downstream from the dam, were swept away to their deaths.

Officials of the state-run Narmada Hydroelectric Development Corporation (NHDC), which operates the dam said they were unaware of the ritual bathing on the rocky river bed. To make matters worse NHDC’s partner, the Madhya Pradesh state government, seems contended with just an internal inquiry.

”We are demanding an independent judicial inquiry into the tragedy rather than an eye- wash state government inquiry,” Himanshu Thakkar, a hydrologist and well-known activist of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), told IPS.

Thakkar said the NHDC claim that it was unaware of the ritual bathing involving 300,000 pilgrims only showed how far removed officialdom was from the welfare of people living in and around the westward-flowing, Narmada river and its tributaries. These waterways are being dammed up by 3,000 dams big and small, with 30 of them classified as mega projects.

Madhya Paradesh Chief Minister Babulal Gaur first announced a compensation package of around 1,500 U.S. dollars for the families of the dead and then doubled it as public criticism began to rise.

Gaur has also refused to comment on the tragedy saying that he would prefer to await the results of the inquiry he ordered. But he admitted that water in the dam reservoir was released routinely to generate hydroelectric power to meet peak demand.

”This is a criminal act. But the state government wants to cover it up using an internal probe and increasing compensation for the dead,” said Thakkar.

Blame has also been laid on the state government by S.K. Dodeja, the chief managing director of NHDC for failing to alert the corporation on ”the presence of so many pilgrims in the area.”

Dodeja regretted the accident but said an internal inquiry conducted by the NHDC had attributed the tragedy to a ”communication gap” between the corporation and the local administration.

But activists have pointed out that this was not the first instance of gross negligence by state-owned hydropower agencies.

A similar tragedy was also caused the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC).

In July 2003, at least 40 people were killed in flash floods following a cloudburst at the Parbati hydro-electric project near the tourist town of Kullu in northern Himachal Pradesh.

In spite of its poor safety record, the NHPC still continues producing hydro-electric power and has 23 running projects in the states of northern Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh in the north-east. In total, all the projects are capable of generating 21,000 megawatts of power.

Following the Dharaji tragedy the SANDRP has demanded that Narmada Hydroelectric Development Corporation officials including its chief managing director S.K. Dodeja be arrested on charges of criminal negligence and culpable homicide.

Army divers at Dharaji have, since Tuesday, been trying to recover bodies still trapped in the sharp rocks beneath the river. Local villagers estimate that 150 people are still to be accounted for.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) which has been waging a losing two-decade-old battle against big dams across the Narmada River with Magsaysay Award winning community leader Medha Patkar also placed the numbers gone missing at 150.

Most of the bodies recovered so far have been found to be badly mutilated and with fractured bones bearing testimony to the brute force with which the victims were swept across the rock-strewn river bed by the released waters.

In a statement, the Narmada Bacho Andolan, which has been spearheading what is regarded as India’s best-known people’s movement, expressed ”deep concern at the very existence of the Indira Sagar dam that constitutes a huge risk to the life and safety of large populations.”

The movement has concentrated most of its activity against the larger and better-known Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada River. Among its well-known activists is Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize winning author. “The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. It’s a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world,” Roy wrote six years ago in a celebrated essay entitled ‘ The Greater Common Good.’

Throughout its long campaign the Narmada Bacho Andolan has claimed that environmental, social and economic costs of the large projects on the Narmada river projects are greater than their benefits. In1993, the movement convinced the World Bank to withdraw from the Sardar Sarovar project in Gujarat state.

The movement succeeded in halting construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam for six years through a temporary injunction from the Supreme Court. In October 2000, however, the court lifted the injunction. Ever since then, the dam has been growing in height enlarging the total displacement area and threatening to render even more people homeless without hope of adequate compensation or rehabilitation.

Narmada Bacho Andolan’s arguments have found support with the World Commission on Dams which has endorsed the view that hundreds of big dams built in India in the past half century boosted national food and industrial production but at a cost borne by the poorest and most marginalised.

The Supreme Court’s orders on rehabilitation and resettlement have also been largely ignored by the basin states – Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.

But on Tuesday, the Narmada Control Authority finally directed the basin states to comply with the court’s orders raising hopes for some 50,000 families affected by the dam projects.