[sacw] Gail Omvedt on Dams and bombs

[Harsh Kapoor]

August 9, 1999
FYI- posted below is critical paper by well known Indian scholar &
activist. It sis circulated here in the spirit of democratic debate.
(South Asia Citizens Web)
--------------------------

>From The Hindu,
4-5 August 1999
Op-Ed Pages

Dams and bombs

By Gail Omvedt

``DAMS ARE the modern temples of India,'' said Nehru, in his well-known
celebration of the achievements of modernity. His was an expression of the
hubris of an age when newly- independent states were setting out to solve
the problems of their people and when science, technology, planning and
state control seemed the answer. Today, the pendulum has swung to the other
extreme, and Ms. Arundhati Roy can argue that ``big dams are like big
bombs,'' sources of destruction, not welfare. Throughout the world, the
stark cost of big dams, their frequent siltage and the harsh negligence of
rehabilitation for those who have to suffer their costs have led to a
massive disillusionment with not only dams but also modern science and the
dreams of development. From an Enlightenment faith in progress and rational
human planning, we have come to a post-modernist questioning of development
itself. Dams, like bombs, seem the products of an industrial era, and many
argue for rejecting that era entirely and returning to the presumed harmony
of a ``natural'' agricultural society.

But there are obvious differences between dams and bombs. Bombs, after all,
are built as weapons of destruction. Their only justification is that an
armed power will deter others from aggression (which, in the case of India,
it has clearly failed to do). In contrast, dams have their legitimation in
the goals of providing electricity and water for not only drinking but also
agriculture. They may fail to achieve this, they may exact a cost and that
cost has to be reckoned with and compensated for, but they are basically
agents of human advance.

Dams are hardly new to India; they were not brought by colonialism or the
age of modernity. Hymns in the Rig Veda, celebrating Indra's destruction of
the demon Vrtra and thereby releasing the waters, suggest that prior even
to the Aryan incursions the Indus Civilisation relied on some form of
harnessing the waters of the Indus for agriculture and survival. In the
time of the Buddha, there were reports of struggles among different tribal
oligarchies over the use of river waters. Traditional India knew many
village-level small irrigation projects, tanks, bundings, the famous phad
system of Maharashtra which channelled water to the fields. (These often
embodied relatively equalitarian methods of distribution among the land-
owning peasantry, but they also more often embodied caste differentiation).
But it also knew some relatively larger irrigation projects. For instance,
Madag lake, created by the engineers of Vijayanagar in the 16th and 17th
century, was 16 to 24 km long and irrigated perhaps hundreds of villages.
The Debar lake, Mewar, was 51 km in circumference, providing irrigation to
wheat cultivation. The Mughals also built canals.

Agriculture itself is hardly natural; it is a human mode of production with
ambiguous implications for nature. In contrast to the earlier hunting
systems, agricultural systems are oriented to the production of life and
requires nurturing the soil, in contrast to hunting which seems based on
extraction and the taking of life. But agriculture has its own element of
aggression against nature: agriculture cannot exist without a certain
degree of destruction of the forests and without forcing changes in the
livelihood on those who surround it. Peasants may be nonviolent or
disarmed, but they produce surpluses that can support armies as well art;
they provide the foundation for the city culture to survive. The
aggressiveness embodied in clearing the land for agriculture is also
symbolised in the Indian epics, in the stories of burning down the forests,
or killing the ``rakshasas'' (adivasis) who inhabited them.

Above all, agriculture requires water, and because water is not always
provided simply or in a guaranteed fashion by nature, agriculture has
required irrigation systems. This is something that the opponents of big
dams such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan and its new-found sympathiser
forget. The NBA has talked of drinking water, and it has argued for rain
water harvesting as its near-magic alternative to big dams and source of
water. But it has had little to say about water for agriculture. And the
fact is that rain water harvesting is insufficient in areas of very low
rainfall. This includes much of the Deccan, large parts of Gujarat,
Maharashtra and the southern States of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and
Karnataka. Here, much of the land is drought- prone, with 500mm of rainfall
or less per year. Villages in these regions face not only problems of
drinking water but that of even survival, for barren, dry, water-starved
fields do not grow very many crops. If floods and uncontrollable surging
waters represent the bane of much of northern and northeastern India,
drought and dry fields are the bane of the south.

Contrary to the images of pre-modern humans living in ecological balance
and at peace with nature, the age of agriculture in every country has been
one of attempted control of the natural environment. Sometimes, this
control has failed, efforts to harness river waters have backfired, forests
are burnt out for bricks, the environment has been destroyed and
civilisations have fallen. It may well have been that such failed ways of
living with the environment that destroyed the Indus cities from within -
though after centuries of a stable, peaceful existence - and not the
incursions of pastoral Aryan tribes. Similarly, the efforts to stabilise
floods or provide irrigation through premodern technologies were only a
partial success in India: they did nurture a productive agriculture, but
they also left humans prey to famines which struck from time to time.

Today, the innumerable villages of India nurture a population that has
grown fourfold or fivefold since the pre-colonial era. The methods of
production, the methods of irrigation and distribution of water that were
sufficient even at a relative level in the earlier period have now become
outmoded. The Indian state, at independence, was faced with the task of
raising agricultural production to meet the needs of this burgeoning
population. There may be countless problems with the way it has chosen to
do so, for one, it was perhaps too casual about the methods of building
dams, too fascinated with ``bigness' as such and indifferent to providing
compensation for the victims of progress. The industrial achievements
relied too much on the surplus extracted from agriculture by various forms
of levies and pricing policies. But it cannot be said that the project of
building dams was itself a mistaken one; and to equate the ``3000 dams''
built by independent India with nothing but disaster and destruction is, at
best, a writer's rhetorical flourish.

Kalahandi, in the largely adivasi and forested region of western Orissa,
has become the symbol of starvation and hunger in India. It is perhaps
natural that Ms. Arundhati Roy chose to make it a reference point for the
failure to deal with the problems of hunger. But it is a gross
misrepresentation to say that dams and development have led to the hunger
of the people of Kalahandi. If there is any stark reality that appears in
Kalahandi, it is the lack of development, the lack of industrialisation.
The area is innocent of factories, and it is certainly innocent of big
dams. Those that have been proposed to provide assured water for
cultivation in the area have not yet been completed. The hills are,
therefore, forested and green - indeed, 40 per cent of the area of
Kalahandi is under the control of the State - while much of the plains area
is relatively barren. This barrenness of agriculture and the lack of any
local productive employment drives the Dalits and other low castes to
scrounging for minor forest produce or to migration. The arguments that the
rural Dalits and Bahujans should continue to produce and live as their
ancestors did will only lead to more Kalahandis and not to solving any of
the problems of food.

As with Kalahandi, so is elsewhere: the really hungry areas of India are
the remote, adivasi areas, areas marred not by development but by the lack
of development. One may have many arguments with the forms of big dams, the
methods by which the Indian state has chosen to move towards
industrialisation, but the goal of industrialisation remains necessary and
the need for major irrigation projects continues.

THE NARMADA Bachao Andolan has by now become the most famous environmental
movement in India, if not in the world. It is seemingly powerful, it
commands widespread sympathy, it has forced the World Bank to back off from
the Narmada project and to support a World Commission on Dams that is
willing to re-examine all large irrigation projects in the world. Yet there
is a great weakness at heart. The NBA may have been able to move the World
Bank but it has not been able to shake the Government of Gujarat, not
because of the inherent repressiveness of that Government, but because of
its failure to address the concerns of the rural people of the State whose
support for the Sardar Sarovar rests on their demands for water.

In spite of Ms. Arundhati's Roy's reckless statement, dams are different
from bombs: bombs leave only a swathe of destruction but dams, when they
work, generate green fields and abundant crops which can be seen by all -
both the farmers who stand to benefit and those who stand to lose from the
dam. Dams do not always work, and they often create victims but unless all
those affected by an irrigation project come together to fight its negative
points and unite behind an alternative that can fulfil the promises of the
dam, the movement will be weak. The NBA has built an alliance which links
many of the Adivasis and caste Hindu peasants whose lands and villages are
being submerged with a worldwide network of environmentally concerned,
largely upper middle class and city-dwelling population of supporters. But
in doing so, it has been affected by the eco-romanticism of these global
circles, the rejection of industrial society, the feeling that
commercialisation and market economy are the enemy and that a better life
can be built on a subsistence-oriented agricultural production. In taking
up these themes, the NBA has neglected the real needs of farmers and rural
labourers in drought-prone areas. Indeed, this is the section that has been
entirely sidelined in the alliance over the Narmada.

The NBA has, in fact, fallen victim to one of the tactics of ``divide and
rule'' used by the state to push through projects. For the very nature of
the dam projects is to divide people - to divide farmers who will benefit
from irrigation water from those who stand to be victimised by it, to
divide the drought-afflicted from the dam-afflicted and those in the
``command area'' of projects from those in the catchment area. Not
addressing this division and the real needs of the drought-affected
farmers, the NBA has been caught in a trap: the stronger and more resource-
rich its international and national networks appear, the more the Gujarat
Government can depict it as alien to the needs and concerns of the people
of the State. In 1991, when I visited Ferkuva, it was clear that the
Gujarat Government was mobilising a show of support, not only by caste
Hindu farmers but by Adivasis as well. On the Maharashtra side, where Ms.
Medha Patkar's fast was going on, a group of the Niphad area farmers -
apparently some of those whom Ms. Arundhati Roy met, bragging of the sacks
of grain they could produce - said simply, ``people from both sides should
sit down and talk.'' They meant both the people standing to lose from the
land and those hoping to gain from it. People, they said, not governments,
not the movement leaders, but the people. This has never happened.

This does happen in other parts of India. In Maharashtra, a ``Dam and
Project-Affected Farmers' Conference'' has been working under the Left
leadership from the early 1970s, the main slogan being ``first
rehabilitation and then the dam''. Those who stand to be victimised by
irrigation projects have organised, they have fought for their rights, they
have indeed stopped work on dam projects but they have not opposed dams as
such. Indeed, one of the achievements of their movement has been to get
many claims to compensatory land within the command area of irrigation
projects recognised. Today, the theme on dam projects is one of
restructuring: minimise the heights of the dams, minimise displacement and
emphasise not only the building of reservoirs but the widespread and
equalitarian distribution of water. A movement involving farmers and
agricultural labourers of 13 taluks in five districts of the Krishna Valley
has been going on since 1993, demanding not only the completion of the dams
and reservoirs before the time-limit set by the Bachawat Award (which
allotted water among Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh) but also
equal water distribution. They have put forward an alternative proposal
that involved providing water to every family in every village in the
valley, arguing that 560 tmcft (thousand million cubic feet) is
Maharashtra's share which is sufficient not only for this but also for
industrial purposes and the existing sugar factories.

A similar alternative has been suggested for the Sardar Sarovar project. In
their book Sustainable Technology: Making the Sardar Sarovar Project
Viable, Suhas Paranjpye and K. J. Joy have argued that the height of the
dam can be drastically minimised, the submerssible area cut to one-third of
its present extent and the project restructured to be much more
decentralised. Their proposal is that a barrage can be built below the
existing dam to carry water to the drought areas of Saurashtra and Kutch;
there water can be stored in farmers' fields rather than in a huge
reservoir, used to grow biomass and even to generate electricity. It is an
example of how large irrigation projects need not be centralised, how they
can be restructured in the interests of social justice to make water
accessible to all. The real tragedy is that not that this alternative has
been ignored by the governments which are stubbornly going ahead with the
dam but that it has been ignored by the NBA as well. Apparently, the idea
of making the project, ``viable'' is not of much interest to the opponents
of big dams. The conclusion is inescapable that their main concern is to
question the entire goal of development itself.

Much of the environmental movement thus appears caught in an extremist
trap. Ms. Arundhati Roy's rhetoric of the common destructiveness of ``dams
and bombs'' is an example of this. The ``traditional'' way, as we have
argued, also involved interference with nature, sometimes aggression
against nature; it involved irrigation projects of various sizes and types.
The traditional way was also a way linked to caste hierarchies - even the
small-scale, local irrigation projects were often totally controlled by the
upper-caste, priestly landowning elites of the villages.

It was linked to a division expressed in the Marathi saying, ``in the house
of the Brahmans there is knowledge, in the house of the Kunbis there is
grain, in the house of the Mahars there is song.'' Needless to say, the
Brahmans also had sufficient grain and while the Kunbis may have been more
prosperous than the Mahars, both were deprived of the knowledge that is the
real basis of prosperity in the world. These forms of feudal bondage and
not simply the desire for economic progress lie behind the desire of
farmers, agricultural labourers and Adivasis themselves for development.

What they want is to learn from the best of traditional ways of life and
production, not to be limited to them; to fight the hierarchical and
exploitative aspects of traditional values in maintaining the positive
aspects; and to unite these with modern science and technology, not to turn
their backs on science as inherently destructive. The NBA has become the
voice of the eco- romanticists of the world, not that of the adivasis,
Dalits and Bahujan farmers of the valley.