The Narmada River Gallery

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Ever since Nehru declared that "dams are the temples of modern India", India has pursued large dams with some vigour. The Indian government has major plans for the Narmada River which starts in the Amarkantah plateau in Madhya Pradesh and runs out into the Arabian sea in Gujarat. These include 3,200 dams of various sizes (30 of them large) along Narmada and her tributaries. This project will not only incur major environmental damage but also displace many thousands of people causing economic and social hardship. Many of those who bear the brunt of this development are Dalit (the untouchable cast) and tribal peoples (who call themselves Adivasi) are already under represented and disenfranchised from "main stream" India. Those who will benefit are largely rich and powerful people who carry great influence.

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The SSP dam benefited from World Bank funding, however, an independent report (the Morse Report) was so critical of the project and its treatment of Tribal people that the World Bank withdrew funding in 1993. The Morse Report pointed out that the Narmada Adivasi fulfil all of the World Bank criteria for indigenous populations and therefore are entitled to the protection granted by the World Bank to indigenous peoples. The view of developers at the SSP dam quoted in the Morse report that those in factory-made shirts are "detribalised" was found to be untenable. The World Bank had never before, or has ever since, allowed an independent report into any of the projects they fund.

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Much of the Morse Report's criticism was focused on the inadequate resettlement and rehabilitation of those who will be displaced by the dam. The Supreme Court halted Dam construction in January 1995 when the dam developers were challenged on the lack of progress with this resettlement and rehabilitation. Official figures estimate that 41,000 families (usually allowing 8 people per family) will be displaced by the SSP dam, building the irrigation canals will add about 23,000 families to this total. How this figure will relate to the final total is anyone's guess since the Bargi Dam, the first to the big dams to be completed in 1990, submerged three times more land than predicted and displaced 114,000 people instead of the 70,000 officials estimated.

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The NBA is made up from a wide variety of cultural and social groups including Adivasi and the full gamut of Hindu castes from Brahmin to Dalit. One of the major achievements of the NBA is that they have striven to create a movement where people who would normally be strictly segregated work together and treat each other as equals. This egalitarian approach and the creed of non-violence come from Gandhian roots.

67.7 million of the worlds 220 million indigenous people live in India making up roughly 8% of the population (Dalits make up a further 15%). Despite this minority status most of India's "development" projects seem to occur on tribal lands, resulting in their displacement. The tribal people of India collectively call themselves Adivasi and largely lack political representation. The Indian government has claimed that all Hindus in India are indigenous and the Adivasi are lapsed or "backward" Hindus existing outside of the caste system. Some right wing Hindus insist that the Adivasi should be brought back into the Hindu fold.

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Adivasi activists claim that development projects happen on their land because they are outside of the political system and can be manipulated. In the main, they are subsistence farmers and displacement by development removes their independence and forces them to enter "main stream" society, usually selling their labour for pitiful wages. In some Adivasi areas, where government has failed to do anything positive, the NBA are in effect an alternative state providing transport and running schools. They fight against the building of planned dams and where dams have been completed they fight for the social and economic welfare of the displaced and dispossessed.

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The NBA takes issue with the dam developers not only on points of law and human rights but also just about every fact and figure that they can muster. The NBA have carried out censuses in the Adivasi areas to challenge official estimates of how many people will be displaced, they have questioned the river's flow rate and silt volume, the cost of building, the cost of producing electricity and the feasibility of irrigation. The reasons for doing this are clear when the Bargi dam is considered; it flooded more land and displaced more people than expected, however, money ran out before the irrigation canals were built so that it irrigates only 5% of area developers said it would. This is about the same amount of land it submerged. Also, the Tawa Dam (on one of the Narmad's tributaries) has water logged and salinated much of the land it was meant to irrigate.

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The driving force behind the NBA is Medha Patkar who has been fighting the dams for over fifteen years. Medha Patka is the veteran of several hunger strikes and in 1999 she stood in the SSP reservoir ready to commit jal samarpan (sacrifice to the water) as it was swelling with monsoon waters. After being removed from the waters by the police she went straight back to the reservoir only to be removed a second time and then held without charge until the monsoon had finished and the waters began to recede. When the Supreme Court made their ruling she declared "I stand by my statement of last year, that if the dam is raised by an inch from 88 meters [its final height is planned to be 139 meters] I will sacrifice my life".

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Medha Patkar is a well-known figure to anti-IMF and anti-dam protesters around the world and took a delegation to the Seattle and Prague demonstrations. International awareness is critical, the World Bank may have withdrawn from the SSP but Siemens and a Japanese company have shown interest in investing in the Maheshwar dam. Also, Bill Clinton helped US firms invest in this same dam during his recent trip to India.

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Interest in the western press has been aroused by the involvement of Arundhati Roy, the Indian author who's first novel, God of Small Things, won the 1997 Booker Prize. Her second book, The Greater Common Good, was not a novel but an extended essay on the folly and human cost of the Narmada Project. Arundhati Roy has been vilified by much of the conservative Indian press and indeed by much of conservative India. A Supreme Court Judge referred to The Greater Common Good and related magazine articles as "objectionable writings" and accused her of "vicious stultification and vulgar debunking…[of] the stream of justice".