The End of Imagination (16 page)

India is in a situation today where it pays back more money to the Bank in interest and repayment installments than it receives from it. We are forced to incur new debts in order to be able to repay our old ones. According to the World Bank Annual Report, last year (1998), after the arithmetic, India paid the Bank $478 million more than it borrowed. Over the last five years (1993 to 1998) India paid the Bank $1.475 billion more than it received.
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The relationship between us is exactly like the relationship between a landless laborer steeped in debt and the village moneylender—it is an affectionate relationship, the poor man loves his moneylender because he’s always there when he’s needed. It’s not for nothing that we call the world a global village. The only difference between the landless laborer and the government of India is that one uses the money to survive; the other just funnels it into the private coffers of its officers and agents, pushing the country into an economic bondage that it may never overcome.

The international dam industry is worth $20 billion a year.
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If you follow the trails of Big Dams the world over, wherever you go—
China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala—you’ll rub up against the same story, encounter the same actors: the Iron Triangle (dam jargon for the nexus comprising politicians, bureaucrats, and dam-construction companies), the racketeers who call themselves International Environmental Consultants (who are usually directly employed by dam-builders or their subsidiaries), and, more often than not, the friendly neighborhood World Bank. You’ll grow to recognize the same inflated rhetoric, the same noble “Peoples’ Dam” slogans, the same swift, brutal repression that follows the first sign of civil insubordination. (Of late, especially after its experience in the Narmada valley, the Bank is more cautious about choosing the countries in which it finances projects that involve mass displacement. At present China is its most favored client. It’s the great irony of our times—American citizens protest the massacre in Tiananmen Square, but the Bank has used their money to fund studies for the Three Gorges dam in China, which is going to displace 1.3 million people. The Bank is today the biggest foreign financier of large dams in China.)
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It’s a skillful circus, and the acrobats know each other well. Occasionally they’ll swap parts—a bureaucrat will join the Bank, a banker will surface as a project consultant. At the end of play, a huge percentage of what’s called “Development Aid” is rechanneled back to the countries it came from, masquerading as equipment cost or consultants’ fees or salaries to the agencies’ own staff. Often aid is openly “tied” (as in the case of the Japanese loan for the Sardar Sarovar dam—to a contract for purchasing turbines from the Sumitomo Corporation).
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Sometimes the connections are more murky. In 1993 Britain financed the Pergau dam in Malaysia with a subsidized loan of £234 million, despite an Overseas Development Administration report that said that the dam would be a “bad buy” for Malaysia. It later emerged that the loan was offered to “encourage” Malaysia to sign a £1.3
billion
contract to buy British arms.
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In 1994 British consultants earned $2.5 billion on overseas contracts.
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The second biggest sector of the market after Project Management was writing what are called EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments). In the Development racket, the rules are pretty simple. If you get invited by a government to write an EIA for a big dam project and you point out a problem (say, you quibble about the amount of water available in a river, or, God forbid, you suggest that the human costs are perhaps too high), then you’re history. You’re an OOWC. An Out-of-Work Consultant. And oops! There goes your Range Rover. There goes your holiday in Tuscany. There goes your children’s private boarding school. There’s good money in poverty. Plus perks.

In keeping with Big Dam tradition, concurrent with the construction of the 138.68-meter-high Sardar Sarovar dam began the elaborate government pantomime of conducting studies to estimate the actual project costs and the impact it would have on people and the environment. The World Bank participated wholeheartedly in the charade—occasionally it beetled its brows and raised feeble requests for more information on issues like the resettlement and rehabilitation of what it calls PAPs—Project-Affected Persons. (They help, these acronyms, they manage to mutate muscle and blood into cold statistics. PAPs soon cease to be people.)

The merest crumbs of information satisfied the Bank, and it proceeded with the project. The implicit, unwritten, but fairly obvious understanding between the concerned agencies was that whatever the costs—economic, environmental, or human—the project would go ahead. They would justify it as they went along. They knew full well that eventually, in a courtroom or to a committee, no argument works as well as a Fait Accompli.

Milord, the country is losing two crore a day due to the delay.

The government refers to the Sardar Sarovar Projects as the “most studied project in India,” yet the game goes something like this: when the Tribunal first announced its award and the Gujarat government announced its plan of how it was going to use its share of water,
there was no mention of drinking water for villages in Kutch and Saurashtra
, the arid areas of Gujarat. When the project ran into political trouble, the government suddenly discovered the emotive power of thirst. Suddenly, quenching the thirst of parched throats in Kutch and Saurashtra became the whole
point
of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Never mind that water from two rivers—the Sabarmati and the Mahi, both of which are
miles
closer to Kutch and Saurashtra than the Narmada—have been dammed and diverted to Ahmedabad, Mehsana, and Kheda. Neither Kutch nor Saurashtra has seen a drop of it.) Officially, the number of people who will be provided drinking water by the Sardar Sarovar canal fluctuates from 28 million (1983) to 32.5 million (1989)—nice touch, the decimal point!—to 40 million (1992) and down to 25 million (1993).
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In 1979 the number of villages that would receive drinking water was zero. In the early 1980s it was 4,719. In 1990 it was 7,234. In 1991 it was 8,215.
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When pressed, the government admitted that the figures for 1991 included 236
uninhabited
villages!
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Every aspect of the project is approached in this almost playful manner, as if it’s a family board game. Even when it concerns the lives and futures of vast numbers of people.

In 1979 the number of families that would be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar reservoir was estimated to be a little over 6,000. In 1987 it grew to 12,000. In 1991 it surged to 27,000. In 1992 the government acknowledged that 40,000 families would be affected. Today, the official figure hovers between 40,000 and 41,500.
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(Of course even this is an absurd figure, because the reservoir isn’t the
only
thing that displaces people. According to the NBA the actual figure is about 85,000 families—that’s
half a million
people.)

The estimated cost of the project bounced up from under Rs 5,000 crore
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to Rs 20,000 crore (officially). The NBA says that it will cost Rs  44,000 crore.
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The government claims the Sardar Sarovar Projects will produce 1,450 megawatts of power.
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The thing about multipurpose dams like the Sardar Sarovar is that their “purposes” (irrigation, power production, and flood control) conflict with one another. Irrigation uses up the water you need to produce power. Flood control requires you to keep the reservoir empty during the monsoon months to deal with an anticipated surfeit of water. And if there’s no surfeit, you’re left with an empty dam. And this defeats the purpose of irrigation, which is to
store
the monsoon water. It’s like the conundrum of trying to ford a river with a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain. The result of these mutually conflicting aims, studies say, is that when the Sardar Sarovar Projects are completed and the scheme is fully functional, it will end up producing only 3 percent of the power that its planners say it will. About fifty megawatts. And if you take into account the power needed to pump water through its vast network of canals, the Sardar Sarovar Projects will end up
consuming
more electricity than they produce!
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In an old war, everybody has an ax to grind. So how do you pick your way through these claims and counterclaims? How do you decide whose estimate is more reliable? One way is to take a look at the track record of Indian dams.

The Bargi dam near Jabalpur was the first dam on the Narmada to be completed (in 1990). It cost ten times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more land than the engineers said it would. About seventy thousand people from 101 villages were supposed to be displaced, but when they filled the reservoir (without warning anybody), 162 villages were submerged. Some of the resettlement sites built by the government were submerged as well. People were flushed out like rats from the land they had lived on for centuries. They salvaged what they could and watched their houses being washed away. One hundred fourteen thousand people were displaced.
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There was no rehabilitation policy. Some were given meager cash compensation. Many got absolutely nothing. A few were moved to government rehabilitation sites. The site at Gorakhpur is, according to government publicity, an “ideal village.” Between 1990 and 1992, five people died of starvation there. The rest either returned to live illegally in the forests near the reservoir or moved to slums in Jabalpur.

The Bargi dam irrigates only as much land as it submerged in the first place—
and only 5 percent of the area that its planners claimed it would irrigate
.
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Even that is waterlogged.

Time and again, it’s the same story. The Andhra Pradesh Irrigation II scheme claimed it would displace 63,000 people. When completed, it displaced 150,000 people.
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The Gujarat Medium Irrigation II scheme displaced 140,000 people instead of 63,600.
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The revised estimate of the number of people to be displaced by the Upper Krishna irrigation project in Karnataka is 240,000, against its initial claims of displacing only 20,000.
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These are World Bank figures. Not the NBA’s. Imagine what this does to our conservative estimate of 33 million.

Construction work on the Sardar Sarovar dam site, which had continued sporadically since 1961, began in earnest in 1988. At the time, nobody, not the government, nor the World Bank, was aware that a woman called Medha Patkar had been wandering through the villages slated to be submerged, asking people whether they had any idea of the plans that the government had in store for them. When she arrived in the valley all those years ago, opposing the construction of the dam was the farthest thing from her mind. Her chief concern was that displaced villagers should be resettled in an equitable, humane way. It gradually became clear to her that the government’s intentions toward them were far from honorable. By 1986 word had spread, and each state had a people’s organization that questioned the promises about resettlement and rehabilitation that were being bandied about by government officials. It was only some years later that the full extent of the horror—the impact that the dams would have, both on the people who were to be displaced and the people who were supposed to benefit—began to surface. The Narmada Valley Development Projects came to be known as India’s Greatest Planned Environmental Disaster. The various people’s organizations massed into a single organization, and the Narmada Bachao Andolan—the extraordinary NBA—was born.

In 1988 the NBA formally called for all work on the Narmada Valley Development Projects to be stopped. People declared that they would drown if they had to but would not move from their homes. Within two years the struggle had burgeoned and had support from other resistance movements. In September 1989, more than fifty thousand people gathered in the valley from all over India to pledge to fight “destructive development.” The dam site and its adjacent areas, already under the Indian Official Secrets Act, were clamped under Section 144, which prohibits the gathering of groups of more than five people. The whole area was turned into a police camp. Despite the barricades, one year later, on September 28, 1990, thousands of villagers made their way on foot and by boat to a little town called Badwani, in Madhya Pradesh, to reiterate their pledge to drown rather than agree to move from their homes.

News of the people’s opposition to the projects spread to other countries. The Japanese arm of Friends of the Earth mounted a campaign in Japan that succeeded in getting the government of Japan to withdraw its ¥27 billion loan to finance the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (The contract for the turbines still holds.) Once the Japanese withdrew, international pressure from various environmental activist groups who supported the struggle began to mount on the World Bank.

This, of course, led to an escalation of repression in the valley. Government policy, described by a particularly articulate minister, was to “flood the valley with khaki.”

On Christmas Day 1990, six thousand men and women walked more than a hundred kilometers, carrying their provisions and their bedding, accompanying a seven-member sacrificial squad that had resolved to lay down its lives for the river. They were stopped at Ferkuwa on the Gujarat border by battalions of armed police and crowds of people from the city of Baroda, many of whom were hired, some of whom perhaps genuinely believed that the Sardar Sarovar was “Gujarat’s lifeline.” It was a telling confrontation. Middle-class urban India versus a rural, predominantly Adivasi army. The marching people demanded they be allowed to cross the border and walk to the dam site. The police refused them passage. To stress their commitment to nonviolence, each villager had his or her hands bound together. One by one, they defied the battalions of police. They were beaten, arrested, and dragged into waiting trucks in which they were driven off and dumped some miles away, in the wilderness. They just walked back and began all over again.