INDIA: Narmada Waters Reach Desert, But More Costs to Come – Critics

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 20 2003 (IPS) - As water from the massive Narmada valley project in central India trickled this week into the parched Kutch district, close to the Pakistan border, people danced and sang, oblivious to what critics say are huge social, ecological and other costs incurred along the way.

The highest price is being paid by some 12,000 tribal and peasant families in the Narmada valley, whose lands and dwellings will be submerged when the giant Sardar Sarovar dam across the Narmada river reaches a height of 103 metres over the next 45 days.

”Everyone concerned knows that it is practically impossible to save these people or their fertile lands and large well-settled villages bustling with agrarian, commercial and social activities,” said Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) or Save the Narmada Movement.

For two decades, NBA has opposed the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam, but failed to stop it.

This is even if the World Commission on Dams (WCD) says that hundreds of big dams built in India over the past half century have boosted national food and industrial production, but at a cost borne by the poorest and most marginalised.

In 1993, the World Bank withdrew participation in Sardar Sarovar project because it was not satisfied that its benefits would be higher than its social, environmental and economic costs. The NBA later obtained a five-year court stay on construction, but this was lifted in October 2000.

Immediately after the Supreme Court lifted its stay, the government added five metres to the already-built 80 metres in the first of construction spurts.

The dam can meet its stated objectives of providing water for irrigation and electricity generation only when it reaches a minimum height of 110 metres. However, the project would be considered complete only when it reaches the originally planned height of 138 metres.

Earlier this month, the Narmada Control Authority (NCA) granted permission for the height of the dam to go up to 103 metres, even as the NBA has been campaigning to get implemented court orders for the resettlement of thousands already displaced by flooding in the catchment area.

Summing up the attitude of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, Gujarat’s Chief Minister Narendra Modi said recently that what the activists did not realise was that ”for every tribal displaced, seven other tribals will be benefited.”

Modi was on hand for Sunday’s celebrations at Samakhiyari village in Kutch, some 600 kilometres north of the Sardar Sarovar dam in Gujarat state, when a pipeline brought the waters of the Narmada to lands parched by three successive years of severe droughts.

Modi vowed that the whole of Kutch would be covered with pipelines by the end of 2004 through a 150 million U.S. dollar project partly funded by the Asian Development Bank (AsDB).

The government says that Sardar Sarovar will, at a cost of 4.6 billion U.S. dollars, irrigate 1.8 million hectares of land, provide drinking water for up to 40 million people, and generate 1,450 megawatts of power.

But for many critics here and overseas, the Sardar Sarovar dam is a case of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’.

Independent experts such as Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) said Sunday’s ceremonies had only symbolic value. Nobody was asking serious questions like how many people were actually going to benefit and what were the real costs of getting the Narmada waters there, he said.

”Even on paper the Sardar Sarovar project is going to benefit only 1.6 percent of the cultivable area of Kutch and officials in Gujarat say that for the remainder they will have to find alternative solutions,” Thakkar said in an interview.

Thakkar pointed out that the fact that the water was now already getting to Kutch was the best proof that there was no need to increase the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam, and thereby submerge more land and displace more people.

According to Sudhirendar Sharma, a former consultant to the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation programme, the real beneficiaries of the Narmada waters will be urban elites in heavily industrialised cities like Ahmedabad and Baroda, who did not care for displaced tribals either in Gujarat’s Kutch district or in the states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.

The cities of Baroda and Ahmedabad in fact already have plans to use Narmada waters for luxury hotels, water parks and industrial parks that are fast coming up along the Narmada canal, said Sharma, now director of the Ecological Foundation that promotes the use of traditional knowledge in water management.

But news reports have also said that the water brought by the Narmada benefits people like those in Kutch.

Reporting on the ceremonies in Kutch, the ‘Times of India’ newspaper said on Monday: ”With the Narmada water meandering its way into a canal at Samikhiyari village in Kutch district on Sunday, Medha Patkar may have to find a new cause soon.”

”It might not be a torrent that entered Kutch but for a district that has been perennially water starved, the Narmada waters at least holds the promise of alleviating drinking water problems,” it added.

Still, Patkar vowed to carry on the anti-dam struggle. She said she foresaw the people of Kutch waging a water war against urban elites in Baroda and Ahmedabad in the same way that people in the Narmada valley have struggled for nearly 20 years to save their lands from being submerged by the dam project.