A Way For The Dammed

Why is one not surprised that TV news channels and most of our major dailies did not consider the news that the Narmada Control Authority has allowed the height of the Narmada dam to be raised from 95 to 100 metres fit to print? One reason could simply be journalistic fatigue: the struggle over the Dam has gone on too long. Media attention has therefore shifted to other more current issues. A second possibility is ignorance—what does a mere five metres extra matter when 95 metres of height has already been sanctioned. A third could be the undercurrent of hostility that all environmentalists face when they take a stand that can be interpreted as being 'against economic development'.

But the main reason is that we, the readers of newspapers and watchers of TV, have changed. With every passing year we have become more and more urban and less and less connected to the land. In the cities, a new generation has matured that is increasingly preoccupied with the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and increasingly unmindful of the fate of the poor. As its number has grown, and its money has talked louder, the poor have lost their voice. Today, a Medha Patkar needs to be assaulted by the police or an Arundhati Roy jailed to get the media's attention.

And yet, nothing really has changed. More than a quarter of the people of the country still survive precariously below the poverty line. The absolute number of the desperately poor has not declined. The pressure on the land has inexorably increased. The search for a livelihood outside agriculture has become ever more dispiriting. In the rural areas, the poor are trapped in a spiralling coil of hopelessness. With each passing year, their capacity to live off the bounty of the land becomes more uncertain. Yet, with the disappearance of urban jobs, their dependence upon the land increases. It is against this background that one needs to examine the consequences of the increase in the height of the Narmada dam, or for that matter the social cost of all such land-intensive development projects.

An increase in its height by a mere five per cent may look innocuous on paper but its impact on peoples' lives could be devastating. This is mostly because of the topography of river valleys. All river valleys are 'V' shaped, i.e more narrow and steep at the bottom than at the top. As a result, the area submerged by the reservoir behind a dam rises by a multiple of the height of the dam. What is more, the higher the dam goes, the higher becomes this multiplier. The five per cent increase in the height of the dam will therefore increase the area submerged by anything from 10-20 per cent. But that is only half the story. This is the second increase the Centre has allowed within a single year. In a patent effort to rally Gujarati sub-nationalism to the Hindutva banner, it had allowed the Gujarat government to raise the height from 90 to 95 metres only weeks before the last assembly election. Thus the real increase is of ten metres. It will be surprising indeed if this has not increased the area that will be submerged by a third.

Medha Patkar has correctly pointed out that the latest order, and for that matter the previous one, are in violation of the Supreme Court's order that those displaced by the project must first be given alternate land and compensation. For neither Maharashtra nor MP have completed the mandatory resettlement of those displaced so far. The Narmada Control Authority has got around this in a manner that only underlines the callous disregard for the poor that permeates every pore of the Indian state. A sub-group of the NCA 'accepted' Maharashtra state's 'undertaking' that it would complete the rehabilitation before the monsoons set in, before recommending that the NCA allow the height of the dam to be raised.Thus everything is hunky-dory on paper. The SC order is being obeyed. The only catch is that the poor will lose their land, which means life, security and status to them, in exchange for a mere promise. And that too in a country where every square mile is littered with the detritus of empty promises. Let us not fool ourselves. 'Development' has won again; the poor have lost and the politicians will gallop back to power on the back of the former.

Does it always have to be thus? Is there no way in which the poor can be made partners and beneficiaries of development and not its victims? There is more than one way, but all of them require a break with present practices that no one has been prepared to make. The time-honoured compensation has been a little land for a homestead, cash and bonds. In a country where there is too little arable land to start with, the land has never sufficed. The cash has invariably been consumed, and inflation has turned the bonds into worthless paper. In the end, most of the displaced families have become landless labourers or beggars.

Yet, an alternative has been staring us in the face all along. It is to reserve anything from a quarter to one per cent of the gross annual revenue generated by a project and distribute it to the people who 'donate' their land for it, in perpetuity. The displaced families can be given convertible bonds in proportion to the land they surrender. These can give them a fixed annual income during the period of construction and start yielding them a dividend once the project starts generating revenue. Add a little land for a homestead and the lives of the displaced persons will be transformed.