[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

dam-l moni4.htm (fwd)



Forwarded message:
From dianne  Mon Dec  6 16:31:37 1999
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 16:31:36 -0500 (EST)
From: "D. Murray" <dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>
Message-Id: <199912062131.QAA02605@lox.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>
X-URL: http://www.glue.umd.edu/~arvindr/articles/moni4.htm
To: dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca
Subject: moni4.htm


                           Why People Oppose Dams
                                      
              Environment and Culture in Subsistence Economies
                                      
                               By Vinod Raina
               (Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi)
                                      
   The history of social movements goes very far back in India. They have
   ranged from religious reform movements to Maoist type left-wing armed
   insurrections, and include the adivasi (tribal), peasant, worker and
   dalit (low-caste) movements. For a long period of time, over fifty
   years, they were overshadowed by the mostly non-violent nationalist
   independence movement, led and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, that
   enabled the country to oust the British colonialists in 1947. Many of
   these movements, in different forms, still continue in many parts of
   the country, supplemented by two mostly post independence movements,
   the womenís and the environmental movements. The sustenance and
   vibrancy of these movements is perhaps a better indicator of the deep
   rootedness of the democratic ethos in India, than the rituals of
   increasingly frequent assembly and parliamentary elections. As Priya
   Kurian[1988] notes, 'rarely have we seen the democratic process at
   work so palpably and so effectively as in the growing mobilisation of
   people against large dams'. But the continuation of these diverse
   movements also indicates that even after fifty years of independence,
   many sections of the society forming a majority of the population are
   still fighting for their rights and for justice in the social,
   economic, and political spheres. Most of these movements are therefore
   collective assertions for economic, political or social justice, or
   taken together, as struggles in the sphere of development. Very often,
   however, the developmental aspects of the struggles are the surface,
   the exterior, of a very complex agenda, and if one clicks, like on a
   hypertext, one might unravel layers of complexity and discover that
   the less visible roots lie somewhere in the sphere of values, customs,
   traditions and philosophies, which taken together constitute the
   cultural identities of the people involved.
   
   Since similar movements abound world over, it is interesting to
   examine what distinguishes the ones in one country, say India, from
   those of other countries, as also to explore the similarities between
   them. Once we exhaust such an examination from considerations of the
   universal kind, like the particular impacts of the globalised market
   economy and so on, the significant points of differentiation and
   similarity are more likely to emerge from these underlying cultural
   elements. The particular movement we shall concern ourselves with here
   is the movement against big dams. During the past ten years or so,
   anti-dam movements, particularly the one against the Narmada dams, has
   received national and international attention, both in terms of
   support, as also severe criticism from those who see this as
   anti-developmental Luddite revivalism (for a recent example see
   Verghese (1999)). Before, however, we get into the specific issues of
   the anti-Narmada dam movement, a brief overview of dams round the
   globe may provide an illuminating backdrop
   
   Dam building has a very long history. Nearly eight thousand year old
   irrigation canals found near the foothills of Zagros mountains in the
   eastern side of Mesopotamia suggest that the farmers there may have
   been the first dam builders. These primitive dams might perhaps have
   been small weirs of brushwood and earth to divert water into canals.
   Evidence of dams, nearly 3000 years old, however is found in modern
   day Jordan, as part of an elaborate water supply system. Here, the
   largest dam was perhaps 4 metres high and 80 metres long. By about
   1000 BC, evidence of stone and earth dams are to be found in the
   Mediterranean, in the Middle East, China and Central America. Romans
   excelled in the area, and their best works are to be seen in Spain. A
   46 metre high stone dam near Alicante began in 1580 and completed 14
   years later was the highest in the world for the better part of three
   centuries.
   
   River work and dam building also has a long history in South Asia. The
   canal system from the Cauvery river in South India, the anicuts,
   continue to be an engineering marvel even today. Long embankments have
   existed in Sri Lanka since fourth century BC. One of these embankments
   was raised to a height of 34 metres and was the worldís highest dam
   for a millenium. Another embankment was raised to a height of 15
   metres and had a length of 14 kilometres!
   
   One however witnesses a frenzy in dam building since the Second World
   War. According to the ëWorld Register of Damsí maintained by the
   largest dam-industry association of the world, the International
   Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD), the worldís rivers are now choked by
   more than 40,000 large dams, an incredible 35,000 of them having been
   built since 1950! A large dam is usually defined by ICOLD as one
   measuring 15 metres in height. The frenzy is most evident in China; it
   had eight large dams at the time of revolution in 1949, 40 years later
   it had around 19,000! The US is the second most dammed country in the
   world with around 5,500 large dams, followed by the ex-USSR (3,000),
   Japan (2,228) and India (1,137). Not only did the number of large dams
   increase since 1950, so did the size. ICOLD defines a major or mega
   dam on the basis of either its height (at least 150 metres), volume
   (at least 15 million cubic metres), reservoir storage (at least 25
   cubic kilometres enough water to flood the country of Luxemborg to a
   depth of one metre) or electrical generation capacity (at least 1,000
   megawatts sufficient to power a European city with a million
   inhabitants). In 1950, ten giants fell in this category, by 1995 the
   number had risen to 305, the leaders being US (50), ex-USSR (34),
   Canada (26), Brazil and Japan (19), with China and India at 10 and 7
   respectively.
   
   The increase in dam building has not been haphazard. Better river
   planning has implied identifying and siting dams to cover an entire
   river basin, of which the Tennessee river valley development project
   became a dam builders blueprint. Consequently, most of the worldís
   river basins are now choked with dams. As McCully describes, 'many
   great rivers are now little more than staircases of reservoirs'. A
   meagre 70 kilometers of the 20,00 kilometres of the Columbia River
   flows unimpeded by the slackwater of the 19 dams that cut across it.
   In France, a dam impounded the only free-flowing stretch of the Rhone
   in 1986. As for other European rivers, like the Volga, the Weser, the
   Ebro, and the Tagus, none of them has a stretch more than a quarter of
   length that has escaped being turned into a reservoir.
   
    Movement against Dams
    
   Where as dams have a very long history, large scale and concerted
   opposition to them is evident only since the seventies, world over.
   May be that is because the impacts of the post war dam building mania
   took about two decades to sink in. The early movements, notes McCully,
   were mostly inspired and led by conservationists in order to preserve
   wilderness areas, and many did not succeed. The notable of these
   struggles include the hard fought but unsuccessful campaign against
   the 191 metre New Melones Dam during the 1970ís, the struggle of Cree
   Indians against Quebec's mammoth James Bay Project (the last two
   phases being abandoned due to the struggle in 1994); that against
   Norway's Alta Dam between 1970 and 1981, the ongoing campaign against
   dams planned for Chileís spectacular Biobio River; the Katun Dam
   campaign in Russia (the dam has been suspended); the violent protests
   by the Igorot ethnic minority in the Philippines which stopped the
   Chico river dams and the struggles of the local people and their
   supporters against dams in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Nepal.
   
   These are examples of opposition and struggle from democratically
   constituted countries. Anti dam struggles in countries with closed
   political systems also became a symbol for the fight against the
   system itself. In September 1988, forty thousand Hungarians took to
   the streets of Budapest demanding an end, not to the communist rule,
   but to the damming of Danube at a place called Nagymoros. Yet one
   result of the anti-Nagymaros dam movement was that it helped the
   Hungarian people to gain confidence to speak against the prevailing
   political system. Similar stories lie behind the fall of authoritarian
   regimes in several other Central and Eastern European states, with
   environmental protests and opposition to dams in particular ñ acting
   as a lightning rod for public mobilisation against deeply unpopular
   regimes.
   
   The struggle against the Narmada dams in India since the mid eighties
   has, in the words of Washington Post become a global 'symbol of
   environmental, political and cultural calamity'. But Narmada is only
   one of a long list of examples of resistance to large dams in India.
   In 1946, thirty thousand people marched against the Hirakuud dam, the
   first huge multipurpose dam project completed in independent India. In
   1970, some 4,000 people occupied the Pong Dam construction site to
   demand resettlement land. The dam was completed, but fifty years
   later; a majority of the oustees are still to be resettled. The
   campaign against the Tehri dam in the Himalayas began in mid 1970s and
   still continues. In nearly all the cases, the opposition to the dam
   could not stop it, even though the people resisting were not far away
   conservationists, but those directly affected by displacement. It is
   therefore curious that the first successful anti-dam campaign in
   India, against the 120-metre Silent Valley dam in Kerela, was not due
   to displacement, but conservation. Unlike most Indian dams, few people
   would have been displaced by the project, but it would have destroyed
   a major rainforest of the country. In the end, the concern for
   rainforest and its endangered inhabitant, the lion tailed macaque,
   persuaded the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi to intervene and stop
   the project. The campaign against the dam is significant in political
   terms too. The political left in India has generally kept itself away
   from the anti dam movement. But one of the groups in the forefront of
   the Silent Valley campaign was the left oriented peopleís science
   organisation, the Kerela Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP; the Kerela
   Science and Literature Society). The success of the Silent Valley
   campaign spilled over to proposed dams on the Godavari and Indravati
   rivers, at Bhopalpatnam, Inchampalli and Bodhgat that together would
   have displaced over 100,000 adivasis and flooded thousands of hectares
   of forests, including a tiger sanctuary. Local people, adivasis and
   supporting environment and human rights activists combined to have the
   projects suspended.
   
   Dam building in India after independence in 1947 became a major symbol
   of modernisation, scientific progress and a matter of national pride.
   'Temples of modern India' is how the first Prime Minister of the
   country, Jawahar Lal Nehru described them. At the time of opening of
   the 226 metre high Bhakra dam in 1954, Nehru, ever eloquent, put his
   excitement thus: 'what a stupendous, magnificent work a work which
   only that nation can take up which has faith and boldness! As I walked
   around the dam site I thought that these days the biggest temple and
   mosque is the place where man works for the good of mankind. Which
   place can be greater than this, this Bhakra-Nangal, where thousands of
   men have worked, have shed their blood and sweat and laid down their
   lives as well? Where can be a greater holier place than this, which we
   can regard as higher?'
   
   Dam construction was combined with river basin planning for the first
   time to form the Damodar Valley Corporation. Modeled on the Tennessee
   River Corporation, the project envisaged many dams on the river
   Damodar and other works on a number of rivers in the eastern Indian
   state of Bengal, Though there was no visible campaign against this
   project, a former civil engineer, Kapil Bhattacharya, in a series of
   brilliant articles, little known outside since they were written in
   Bengali, and based on the project documents, analysed the consequences
   of the project, as it later on turned out, with magical prophecy
   (Raina, 1998). Though not necessarily opposed to dams in general,
   Kapil Bhattacharya contented that the Calcutta port remained
   functional only because of the flushing of silt that the rivers that
   flowed into the port managed during floods, and by damming these
   rivers for flood control, the port would become non-functional,
   reducing trade and commerce; which is exactly what happened. He
   predicted that in order to overcome the problem, the government
   engineers would be forced to divert water in to the port from the an
   upstream river flowing into the then East Pakistan (Bangladesh)
   through a barrage, the Farraka barrage, which would create
   international tensions, which is exactly what happened. And due to
   silt, when the Calcutta port's bed rose, the sewage flowing into it
   from the Calcutta city would have a back flow, and that again is what
   happened. He even mentioned that in such an eventuality, people will
   blame the local Municipal Council, little realising that it was a
   consequence of dams built far away from the city, outside the control
   of the Council that was the culprit. Damodar projects today are seen
   as a curse by hundreds of thousands who were affected by them but no
   one realises that one of the best social, economic and environmental
   impact analysis, perhaps in the world, could have saved a lot of
   misery, but Kapil Bhattacharya was writing much before anyone bothered
   about such things. He was in fact preceded by many years by the
   outstanding Indian physicist, Megnad Saha, who between 1922 and 1934
   wrote extensively and brilliantly on the rivers of Bengal and the
   misery they were causing due to various impediments in their flow, at
   that time due to the embankments of the freshly laid colonial railway
   system. His models of river planning, written some eighty years ago
   could be an environmentalistís delight today, even though he remained
   a staunch developmentalist till his death in the mid fifties. It is
   significant that technical writings that have questioned impediments
   to river flow, either through dams or through other means have had a
   history longer than peopleís campaigns against dams in India, and the
   relative success of the anti-dam movement today is not only because of
   participation of affected people and others from a broad spectrum of
   ideologies, but also because of the association of technically and
   scientifically trained professionals, who not only provide economic
   and technical criticism of state plans, but also suggest alternatives.
   
   So what is the general background in which the environmental and
   anti-dam movements need to be located in India? From its inception,
   the Indian state was confronted by two different visions of
   reconstruction; the Gandhian project of reviving the village economy
   as the basis of development, and the Nehruvian plan of prosperity
   through rapid industrialisation. Gandhi put his views together as
   early as 1921 in his book Hind Swaraj (Indiaís Self Rule). Many years
   later, on the threshold of Indiaís independence (October 5, 1945),
   Gandhi wrote a letter to Nehru in which he outlined his dream of free
   India. 'I believe that, if India is to achieve true freedom, and
   through India the world as well, then sooner or later we will have to
   live in villages - in huts not in palaces. A few billion people can
   never live happily and peaceably in cities and palaces...My villages
   exist today in my imagination.... The villager in this imagined
   village will not be apathetic.... He will not lead his life like an
   animal in a squalid dark room. Men and women will live freely and be
   prepared to face the whole world. The village will not know cholera,
   plague or smallpox. No one will live indolently, nor luxuriously.
   After all this, I can think of many things, which will have to be
   produced on a large scale. Maybe there will be railways, so also post
   and telegraph. What it will have and what it will not, I do not know.
   Nor do I care. If I can maintain the essence, the rest will mean free
   facility to come and settle. And if I leave the essence, I leave
   everything'.
   
   God forbid that India should ever take to industrialisation in the
   manner of the Westí, Gandhi observed. 'The economic imperialism of a
   single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in
   chains. If an entire nation of 300 million (nearly a billion today)
   took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare
   like locustsí. He had earlier in 1940 already expresses his misgivings
   regarding centralisation thus, ëNehru wants industrialisation because
   he thinks that if it were socialised, it would be free from the evils
   of capitalism. My own view is that the evils are inherent in
   industrialism and no amount of socialisation can eradicate them ' I do
   visualise electricity, shipbuilding, ironworks, machine-making and the
   like existing side by side with village crafts. But ' I do not share
   the socialist belief that centralisation of production of the
   necessaries of life will conduce to the common welfare'. The appeal of
   Gandhi lay in his programme of revitalising village communities and
   craft production by employing simple technologies to provide jobs and
   a decent livelihood to a predominantly rural population. The
   liberation that Gandhi promised was not merely an economic
   independence; it was, most profoundly, an assurance that the cultural
   traditions of the Indian peasantry would reign ascendant.
   
   Gandhi's vision struck no chords in the mind of Jawaharlal Nehru, who
   replied rather brusquely to Gandhi's letter of October 1945: 'It is
   many years since I read Hind Swaraj and I have only a vague picture in
   my mind. But even when I read it twenty or more years ago it seemed to
   me completely unreal ... A village, normally speaking, is backward
   intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a
   backward environment'. Having dismissed Gandhiís plea thus, Nehru's
   own ambivalence was to surface only a few years later when he talked
   of the evil of gigantic and mega projects.
   
   The Nehruvian developmental agenda has predominated for over fifty
   years now. There has of course been a great deal of industrialisation
   in these years and a basic technical and service infrastructure laid
   for self-reliant development. Poverty however persists unabated. Of a
   population of about a billion persons, more than half would have to be
   termed poor, which in absolute numbers is much larger than the total
   population of the country in 1945 that Gandhi was talking about.
   
   As a person associated with the struggle and the issues surrounding
   the Narmada dams I come across a large number of well meaning
   professionals, intellectuals as also ordinary middle class people who,
   in spite of not necessarily being actively pro-dam, have voiced a
   certain concern regarding the anti-dam movements with questions like,
   'Where will then power come from?', or 'How can we do without
   irrigation what about food?', and so on. These concerns, which need to
   be differentiated from similar sounding strident and aggressive
   postures of vested interests, of a politician, bureaucrat or a
   construction agent and their supporters in the media and academia,
   need to be considered seriously because they are at the heart of the
   development debate everywhere. It becomes necessary then to situate
   the movement against the Narmada dams within the larger
   socio-economic, political and cultural realities of India.
   
   It is generally believed, particularly by the governments, that any
   kind of development is finally for the benefit of the ëcommon maní.
   But who is a common man, or woman in India? The general consensus
   would be the ëpoorí man. Though a poor woman would be poorer in many
   ways, we shall assume that the word ëmaní is being used here as an
   equivalent to the often-used gender-neutral term ëpersoní. I believe
   that an adequate definition, in political and economic terms of the
   poor common man is missing in India, and the best approximation is
   that of the cartoonist, Laxman, that appears daily in the Times of
   India. In developmental terms, the Government of India defines all
   those who do not get to eat 2200 calories or more per day in terms of
   food as poor. It is highly debatable, methodologically, whether
   something like poverty should be characterised by an exact line,
   defined by a single parameter like ëless than 2200 calories of food
   per dayí. Such imported mathematical exactness in a highly complex
   socio-political issue would seem to be particularly irrational from a
   scientific viewpoint. In particular, enumeration of people on this
   criterion is liable to be extremely error prone. For example, in order
   to get a rapid assessment of poverty under this criterion, field
   agents of the National Sample Survey often ask poor adivasis and
   villagers : 'Do you get to eat two square meals a day?'. The answer is
   supposed to decide whether the questioner consumes around 2200
   calories per day or not!
   
   In the absence of reliable data, orders of estimates, based on
   qualitative criterion might be a better alternative in assessing the
   nature of poverty in India. Indigenous people, or adivasis, are at the
   poorest rung in the economic ladder of India. Out of a total
   population of nearly 1000 million in the country, they number about
   seven percent, which is around 70 million, or more than half the
   population of Japan. At par with them on this ladder are the landless
   labourers and marginal and subsistence farmers with up to an acre of
   land. Similarly, there is a large population of people who subsist on
   their traditional artisinal skills, as potters, iron smelters, bamboo
   and grass weavers, small scale handloom workers, leather flayers and
   tanners, wood, metal and stone craft persons. If we add to these the
   slum dwellers of the cities, living in abject poverty, the total may
   add to about 600 million people. India can therefore be seen as
   divided between a two third population that somehow manages to survive
   and subsist, and another one third, totaling around 300 million
   people, that is composed of lower, middle and wealthy classes.
   
   Except for the urban slum dwellers, the rest of the poor population of
   India subsists mainly from the availability of some or the other form