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June 30, 2002
Dam the dams
The World Commission on Dams estimates that worldwide 40 to 80 million people have been displaced by 45,000 dam projects in recent years. Displacement is an intrinsic aspect of wars unleashed by large water projects as people fiercely resist being forced out of their homes and losing their livelihoods, writes Vandana Shiva
River valley projects are usually considered the solution for agricultural water needs, flood control, and drought mitigation. In the past three decades, India has seen the erection of some 1,554 large dams. Between 1951 and 1980, the government spent $1.5 billion on large or medium irrigation dams. Yet the return from this large investment has been far lower than anticipated. Where irrigated lands should have yielded at least five tons of grain per hectare, output has remained at 1.27 tons per hectare. The annual loss due to unexpected low water availability, heavy siltation, reduced storage capacity, and waterlogging now amounts to $89 million.
The Kabini project in Karnataka is a perfect illustration of how water development projects can themselves disrupt the hydrological cycle and destroy water resources in basins. While the dam submerged 6,000 acres of land, relocating displaced villages required the clearing of 30,000 acres of primeval forests. Local rainfall fell from 60 inches to 45 inches, and high siltation drastically reduced the life of the dam. Within two years, waterlogging and salinity destroyed large areas of coconut and paddy fields nearby.
The damming of two of India’s most sacred rivers, the Ganges and the Narmada, has generated vehement protest from women, peasants, and tribals whose life-support systems have been disrupted and whose sacred sites have been threatened. The people of Narmada Valley are not merely resisting displacement due to the Sardar Sarovar and Narmada Sagar Dams; they are waging war against the destruction of entire civilizations. As the internationally acclaimed novelist Arundhati Roy puts it:
Big dams are to a nation’s ‘development’ what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link — the understanding — between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.
Over the past two decades, many men and women have dedicated their lives to the protest of the damming of Narmada Valley and the Ganges. Since the 1980s, two old men have been engaged in satyagraha (Gandhian nonviolence) on the banks of the two rivers. Sunderlal Bahuguna has been living in a small hut at the Tehri Dam site on the Ganges to block the flooding of Tehri and stop the building of a dam on an earthquake fault. Baba Amte, who resisted dam building in Maharashtra, has been stationed on the banks of the Narmada for years. In 1984, Amte wrote a letter to the prime minister, in which he referred to the dams as genocide. Although bedridden due to a severe back problem, he still remains by the valley and says he will go with the river. Medha Patkar, a leading activist of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and Arundhati Roy have also committed themselves to the fight against the Narmada Dam project — the world’s largest water project.
The Narmada project consists of 30 large, 135 medium and 3,000 minor dams on the Narmada River and its tributaries. It is expected to uproot one million people, submerge 350,000 hectares of forest, drown 200,000 hectares of cultivable lands, and cost $52.2 billion over the next 25 years. The Sardar Sarovar Dam, already under construction, is facing major opposition from human rights and environmental groups as well as tribals likely to be displaced. The dam threatens people in 234 villages. Next in line for construction is the Narmada Sagar project which promises to submerge 91,348 hectares of land and displace people from 254 villages.
The Narmada Valley protest, which once was a fight for a just settlement of the displaced people, has rapidly evolved into a major environmental controversy, calling into question not only the method of compensation for the evictees but the logic of large dams altogether. The movement has taken inspiration from earlier successful struggles that led to the withdrawal of two major dam proposals — the Silent Valley and the Bodhghat Dam projects. Large coalitions of local communities, environmentalists, and scientists worked together in the 1980s to stop these dams. As dam tensions emerge and grow, they will not only address problems created upstream due to submergence, they will also raise questions about problems created downstream due to water overuse and misuse by intensive irrigation.
Dam conflicts in the past revolved around displacement. Today, the ecological imperative for the protection of nature has added a new dimension to the struggle of displaced people. They are now fighting for their own survival as well as for the survival of their forests, rivers, and land. In east India, tribals of 121 villages, who faced eviction by the Koel-Karo project in Bihar, successfully stopped the construction work. Had the project been completed, it would have taken water from the Koel River at Basia and diverted it to another dam near Lohajamir village in Topra block, Ranchi district, and to the Karo River. It would also have submerged more than 50,000 acres of land, including 25,000 acres of forests under tribal control by customary law.
In postcolonial India, most large dams have been financed by the World Bank. I was personally involved in assessing the impact of World Bank-financed dams on the Krishna, Kallada, Suvernarekha, and Narmada Rivers. In each case, the ecological and social costs far surpassed the benefits. Typically, the benefits were grossly exaggerated in order to accommodate the World Bank’s logic of returns on investment.
The Sri Sailam Dam on the Krishna River is among the hundreds of dams financed by the bank. In the summer of 1981, the government evacuated local residents from the area with the assistance of police and bulldozers. The experience in Sri Sailam is illustrative of the hidden cost of building large dams in India. Each water development project leaves behind evictees whose lives are violently overturned.
Costs should never be assessed purely in commercial terms. The Suvernarekha Dam was built with a $127 million loan from the World Bank, primarily to provide industrial water for the expanding steel city of Jamshedpur. The dam displaced 80,000 tribals. In 1982, Ganga Ram Kalundia, the leader of the tribal anti-dam movement, was shot and killed by the police. Even after his death, Kalundia’s fellow tribals continued the struggle:
Our links with our ancestors are the basis of our society and of the reproduction of our society. Our children grow up playing around the stones which mark the burial sites of our ancestors. ... Without relating to our ancestors, our lives lose all meaning. They talk of compensation. How can they compensate us for the loss of the very meaning of our lives if they bury these burial stones under the dam? They talk of rehabilitation. Can they ever rehabilitate the sacred sites they have violated?
The massive people’s movements managed to force the World Bank out of the Narmada Valley Dam. But the bank stepped out of one project only to deepen its grip on India’s water resources through more loan conditions. World Bank-driven policies of water privatization are shifting control from governments to corporations. The centralization of power over water through development projects makes this transition easier. With communities bypassed, the World Bank and indebted governments are making frantic deals with corporations to own, control, distribute, and sell our scarce water resources.
The global picture of displacement
While large dams in India have displaced between 16 million and 38 million people, in China, 10 million people have been displaced by the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze River Valley alone. The World Commission on Dams estimates that worldwide, 40 to 80 million people have been displaced by dam projects. The commission concludes that too often “an unacceptable and often unnecessary price has been paid to secure those benefits, especially in social and environmental terms, by people displaced, by communities downstream, by taxpayers, and by the natural environment.”
Worldwide, an estimated $2 trillion has been invested in more than 45,000 large dams. Between 1970 and 1975, the peak period of dam building, nearly 5,000 large dams were built all over the world. The top five dam-building countries account for 80 per cent of all large dams, and China, with 22,000, accounts for 50 per cent of them. The United States is home to 6,390 large dams closely followed by India, with 4,000, Japan with 1,200, and Spain with 1,000. While dam construction has slowed down in the United States and Europe, India is experiencing the largest amount of dam construction in the world and accounts for 40 per cent of dams currently under way. It is no surprise that the most contentious battles over dam construction are taking place in India. Displacement is an intrinsic aspect of wars unleashed by large water projects. People fiercely resist being forced out of their homes and losing their livelihoods. Unfortunately, anti-dam movements in the Third World are facing new violence from states acting in partnership with global corporations. The World Commission on Dams reports that during the construction of the Kariba Dam in Africa, resistance by the Tonga people was met with state repression; eight were killed and 30 were injured. The report also notes that in April 1980, police in Nigeria fired at people protesting the Bakolori Dam and in 1985, 376 women and children in Guatemala were murdered to make way for the Chixoy Dam.
Excerpted with permission from
Water wars: privatization, pollution and profit
By Vandana Shiva
India Research Press, B-4/22 Safdarjung Enclave, New Delhi-110 029. Tel: 091-1-4694610.
Email: bahrisons@vsnl.com
ISBN 81-87943-30-0
160pp. Indian Rs245
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