India's Mega-Dams: Temples Or Burial Grounds?

By Robert Jensen, AlterNet. Posted September 21, 2004.

How do we measure progress? How are lives improved by progress? Who benefits from – and who suffers the consequences of – progress?

These are central questions today as nation-states and corporations pursue what are typically called "development" projects. One of the most controversial of these in recent years is a series of more than 3,000 dams in India's Narmada River Valley. Government officials say these dams and an extensive irrigation system will bring electricity and water to areas of the country suffering from drought, and the technocrats insist that it will work.

But other voices challenge this rhetoric of technological triumph, most notably the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement). Arguing that the government exaggerates the benefits and underestimates the costs, this nonviolent people's movement since the mid-1980s has focused attention on the human suffering and environmental damage that comes with "big dams." These dams flood vast areas and displace hundreds of thousands, mostly peasants and adivasi (tribal) people, while promises of relocation and resources usually prove to be illusory. Just one of the dams, Sardar Sarovar, could uproot as many as a half-million people.

In August 2004, Angana Chatterji was one of three members of an independent commission who went to the Narmada, visiting villages and listening to more than 1,400 people at hearings. The commission investigated violations in resettlement and rehabilitation policies connected to the Narmada Sagar, one of the Narmada dams. Chatterji, N.C. Saxena (a member of the Indian government's National Advisory Council and former secretary of the Planning Commission of India), and Harsh Mander (former director of ActionAid India) will submit their report this fall to the National Advisory Council, headed by Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi.

Chatterji, a Calcutta-born anthropology professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, described the situation in the Narmada Valley as desperate and cited one villager's statement to sum up the sense of despair: "There is no future here; we are living out our days, focused on survival. The Narmada gave us life; they have turned her against us."

Despite the setbacks, Chatterji not only continues but intensifies her advocacy work through her association with the Narmada Bachao Andolan and groups such as the U.S.-based International Rivers Network, of which she is a board member. Chatterji is passionate and sharp-tongued, with an ability to bring the complex issues into clear, and sometimes painful, focus.

In an interview in September, she explained why the Narmada struggle remains crucial. In a play on an often-quoted comment of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Chatterji began our conversation by saying, "Dams are not the temples of India. They are her burial grounds."

Robert Jensen: Before we talk about specifics of the Narmada project, explain the larger context. What's at stake?

Angana Chatterji: Adivasi and peasant movements reject the assumption that development justifies cultural annihilation. Since 1947, 4,300 large dams alone in India have displaced over 42 million. Adivasis are about 8 percent of India's population but more than 40 percent of the country's displaced.

India's record of irresponsible development has placed its most vulnerable in peril – 1,000 more dams are being built, even as food, security and self-determination remain out of reach for 350 million of India's poorest citizens. In postcolonial India, the promise of progress, of freedom, has been linked to techno-economic control by the state, which provides a comfortable life for its elite. But the disenfranchised experience this development as a war against them. Their lands and livelihood have become collateral for the dreams of the privileged.

In the Narmada Valley, different imaginations of nation building collide. The confrontation with state-sponsored big development leaves marginalized people voiceless in decision-making, as local dreams of self-determination and survival, of respect, heritage and history, are jettisoned. The key questions remain: Whose lives matters? Who has a right to life? The Narmada struggle leads us to ask: What good is a nation if it refuses to protect all its citizens?

Let's start with the question of water in India. Advocates of big dam projects say they are the only way to provide the water needed to help regions facing droughts.

Droughts are a harsh reality, and the need for water is immense. India needs to provide water to the fields, villages, towns and industries throughout the year, without placing some communities at risk to benefit others. It needs cost-effective and environmentally responsible technologies for water and power. Rajender Singh's work in watershed management exemplifies a bioregional approach that is ethical in scale, and there are other options. Their success will depend on the inclusion of local knowledge, participation, and ownership, and the nation‚s capacity to ensure the rights of the poor. The Narmada dam projects proceed in exactly the opposite way.

Explain the scope of the project.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004).

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