Damn the Dams: An Interview with Medha Patkar

Over the past two decades the struggle against dam projects that threaten the right to life and livelihood for the people of India's Narmada valley has grown into one of the world's largest non-violent social movements. Activist Medha Patkar has been at the center of these struggles, gaining worldwide notoriety for sharp analysis and courageous activism that has included long fasts, police beatings and jail.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) has tried to pressure the Indian government and foreign investors to stop dams that submerge huge sections of the valley and displace hundreds of thousands of people. The NBA has won some victories, most notably in 1993 when the World Bank expressed concern about human-rights problems and withdrew its funding. But the Indian Supreme Court -- which at one point had stayed construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the centerpiece of the Narmada project -- ruled in October 2000 that the project could go forward.

(A similar project in China, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, has sparked similar opposition. Three Gorges, which will be the largest hydroelectric dam in the world when completed, could force the displacement of as many as 1.9 million people.)

Though the NBA has been unable to halt construction, it has challenged the Indian government's claims that such projects will provide water and hydropower to people most in need and that people displaced by the project are being properly relocated and rehabilitated. The NBA continues to challenge the dams and the ongoing attempts to raise the height of them, while at the same time working to help the displaced people find justice.

NBA also is working to stop a new plan of the Indian government for "inter-linking" of rivers -- the long-distance inter-basin transfer of water. The government claims that such a project would reduce the regional imbalance in the availability of water in different river basins, re-directing water that would otherwise flow into the sea to areas of the country that need it. Critics point out that such a capital-intensive and technology-intensive project will -- like the big dams -- undermine democratic planning, benefit a few, and wreak social and environmental havoc.

Beyond the specifics of these projects, the NBA also has challenged the reigning "development paradigm," the idea that these large-scale projects are always beneficial to ordinary people. Patkar argues that while such projects generate large profits for a small number of people, they also bring social and environmental devastation to those who are in the way of "progress." She and NBA activists put forward an alternative vision of how people can take control of their own lives and guide economic development in the interests of the vast majority of people, not of the wealthy and the corporations.

For this work, Patkar and her NBA colleagues in 1991 were given the Right Livelihood Award (often referred to as the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize), and in 1992 she won the Goldman Environmental Prize. Patkar has served on the World Commission on Dams, an independent global body, and currently leads the National Alliance of People's Movements, a network of more than 150 political organizations across India.

As a featured speaker at the World Social Forum in Mumbai (Bombay) in January 2004, Patkar focused on the threat to "the very life-supporting resources of the world" posed by corporations and the so-called "free market" of the neoliberal economic program, which bring "displacement, destruction, disparity." Patkar linked the goals of the movement to challenge corporate globalization to the longstanding struggles of the adivasi (indigenous, or tribal) people and dalits (the "untouchable" castes) in India to control their own lives, saying, "Without community rights, no human rights can be sustained in the face of corporatization, criminalization, communalism and corruption."