NEW DELHI, April 4: A week-long hunger strike by India’s most famous environmental activist has helped reignite a two-decades-old row over a controversial hydroelectric dam. Indian authorities began work last month to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar, the biggest dam in the multi-billion dollar Narmada Valley development project in western India, bringing it one step nearer completion.

But they might have underestimated the grey-haired woman who has spearheaded a 20-year campaign to protect hundreds of thousands of poor farmers whose homes and fields have been submerged or will now be threatened by the rising waters.

On Tuesday, Medha Patkar, 52, lay listlessly under a blue tarpaulin in the heat of the streets of New Delhi, her blood pressure falling and her health deteriorating as her hunger strike entered its seventh day.

Ministers have been regular visitors, trying to convince her to end her fast, as television crews and reporters mount a vigil at her side.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (known as the NBA, or the Save the Narmada Movement) is India’s most celebrated environmental campaign, but seemed to have faded from the national consciousness until Patkar began her most Indian form of protest.

She says that if the dam’s height is raised, more than 35,000 families, most of them impoverished tribal farmers, could have their homes and fields submerged when the monsoon rains arrive in June and are still waiting to be resettled.

In 2004, thousands of residents of the town of Harsud, who had initially refused government offers of compensation, were forced to break up and abandon their homes in the face of rising floodwaters caused by another dam on the Narmada river.

“Unless they take a decision to stop killing the Narmada Valley by raising the height of the dam I will not end the fast,” she whispered to Reuters as a woman supporter fanned her face.

Four other people, all from affected villages, have joined her in the strike.

In their favour, they say, are two Supreme Court rulings banning further construction work on the Sardar Sarovar until all affected families are first given land fit for cultivation, and basic amenities such as schools and drinking water.

In the state of Madhya Pradesh, where tens of thousands of families have already been displaced, not a single family has been given proper, arable land, and many have forced to accept inadequate cash compensation, says NBA lawyer Prashant Bhushan.

“This is a gross violation of their human rights and their legal entitlement,” he said.

“These people are told ‘you will not be made to pay the price of this development’... but despite all these legal obligations, that is exactly what is being done.”—Reuters