After years of controversy, India completes massive dam project

It's All Sarovar

One of the world's longest-running social and environmental campaigns is sleeping with the fishes as of Sunday, when the last bucket of concrete was poured on the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Indian state of Gujarat. The project, initiated nearly 20 years ago, diverts India's fifth-largest river, the Narmada; authorities say it will provide drinking water, irrigation, and power to millions in Gujarat and neighboring areas. "India has taken a leap ahead," proclaimed Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. "The dam will change the future of the country." Indeed it will, says green group Save the Narmada Movement, which spent at least five years in a legal battle to stop the project. The group predicts that the dam will displace 320,000 people, many of them poor tribal farmers, and disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands more. "The Sardar Sarovar dam is a classic case of cheating the poor," says Save the Narmada's Medha Patkar. "It has been built to destroy the economy of rural India."

straight to the source: Planet Ark, Reuters, Rupam Jain Nair, 02 Jan 2007

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Comments: (3 comments)

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Sardar Sarovar Is Not Completed!

I admire Grist and appreciate it all the more for having favorably reviewed my book, DEEP WATER: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, so it's with mixed feelings that I point out that a story carried by Grist is flat-out wrong. "It's All Sarovar" to the contrary, Sardar Sarovar Dam, one of the world's largest dams and the subject of a third of my book, is not completed. While work on the dam wall is apparently finished, 16-meter-high gates must still be installed atop it, bringing the dam to its planned height of 139 meters and inundating many more villages in the state of Madha Pradesh. Altogether, the dam will force the desultory and largely unplanned relocation of at least 300,000 people. In the process it will shatter numerous indigenous cultures.

Whoever wrote the story that Grist carried has succumbed to the propaganda of the Indian state of Gujarat, where the dam is located. Because of long delays that have plagued the dam's construction, the state has been anxious to proclaim that both the dam and the irrigation canal connected to it are complete, but this assertion, like many others carried by Indian newspapers in the last few days about the dam, is far from true. Indeed, completion of the dam alone may take another two years.

Jacques Leslie http://www.jacquesleslie.com

by jacques at 6:28 PM on 03 Jan 2007

"flat-out wrong"

Thank you, Jacques Leslie, for pointing out that the Sardar Sarovar dam is not yet completed. Our friends at Grist, as you observe, were not themselves taken in by Gujarat state propaganda; all they were doing was passing along the essence of an article (from Reuters?) in Planet Ark. In fact they seem to agree with you completely on your basic issue, that the dam will be an environmental and social catastrophe.

I would be interested in learning more about the "numerous indigenous cultures" which you say will be "shattered." Also, what is the projected impact on wildlife?

More generally, I wonder if in India there is much explicit competition with China, so that when it comes to providing electricity and drinking water, the decision-makers feel a certain pressure to imitate Chinese dam-building models.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 2:32 AM on 04 Jan 2007

tribals, wildlife, and China

caniscandida, a majority of the people displaced by Sardar Sarovar are Bhil and Bhilala tribal people, who over the last several centuries fled to the mountains surrounding the Narmada River to avoid abuse by plains Hindus. Now, as they are dispersed in small groups to resettlement camps or else take up marginal lives in cities, their cultures are coming apart.

The dam will inundate about 11,600 hectares of productive forest land. It will also drastically reduce or eliminate hilsa and prawn fisheries downstream from the dam, upon which thousands of fisher families have depended. Perhaps most disturbing of all, the Sardar Sarovar reservoir is likely to be filled with sediment, and therefore useless, in less than a century.

India and China are now the world's two most enthusiastic dam builders, but I don't think India's embrace of dams results from competition with China. Rather, it arises from the mistaken assumption that only dams can save India from the accelerating scarcity of water that many of its regions now experience.

Jacques Leslie http://www.jacquesleslie.com

by jacques at 11:45 AM on 04 Jan 2007

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