Animals, big dams and people - Part II

Medha Patkar

This is the continuation of previous post. I want to talk about another generic statement, 'Build a dam for the people, but tribals lose out'.

I have two problems with this statement. One is the terms 'people' and 'tribals'. When you make dam for people, the non-people tribals lose out. This statement, somehow unconsciously I'm sure, thinks tribals are basically the in-between creatures from primates to urban, civilized people. So 'people' don't lose out on big dams but tribals do.

Actually, the main issue is 'people' themselves lose out. Since independence, there is never a serious study conducted by our governments on how our big dams are performing. The independent studies conducted by NGOs reveal that they have been performing quite badly.

Over the years, we have learned that if you mess with the nature the nature either shrinks or retaliates. In the case of big dams, you are messing with river and it shrinks. There were countless cases across the world where the big dams have either polluted the rivers or made them behave erratically. The developed nations have understood this and they have stopped building dams or worse even demolished some of the existing ones.

Today, only the third-world is busy building big dams. This is because they get world bank funding for dams which goes to the dam-building western companies who in turn bribe the greedy and corrupt politicians. It's like a vicious cycle. Sardar Sarovar Project at Narmada is a classic and horrendous case to testify this.

Apart from environmental disaster, the dams enforce a lot of things. Sardar Sarovar project displaced close to a million people. The governments do not have, yes, DO NOT HAVE a documented procedure to rehabilitate these many. Worse still, they don't even have a scientific data on how many come under 'project-affected'. And for not a single question raised by Narmada Bachao Andholan was answered by goverment authorities satisfactorily.

So big dams are not just about tribals losing out. They are about a small group of people displacing a huge number of people, tribals, villagers, farmers out of their homes throwing them into nowhere, building a practically unviable dam that's going to pollute the river and kill it later on and the built dam helping to irrigate lesser land than the river did before the dam was built and in the process, the policy makers making tons and tons of money.

Before any of you want to jump into contradicting me on this, please read 'Silenced Rivers' by Peter McCully and 'Greater Common Good' by Arundhati Roy. The first book talks about the plight of the dams and rivers in the western world and the World Bank's global scheme to reemploy the dam building companies by loaning greedy rulers of the third world. The second book talks about the plight of the dams in India and with accurate statistics (which the government has not disputed) explains why Sardar Sarovar is a hugely destructive plan.