Environment     
Damned If You Do... 2

The Damodar valley is one of those areas which enjoy the blessings of monsoon to an extent which many other areas in India do not enjoy. This is particularly the case with the western parts of Madhya Pradesh, Maharastra, Rajasthan and Gujarat. They are however served by the third largest river system of India, Narmada. During the British rule it was for the first time thought that the water of this river system should be tapped for extension of irrigation facilities to areas which are water-stressed and drought prone. But nothing came of it. After independence when a large number of river valley projects were being planned and implemented Narmada valley was also identified for a very ambitious project. Sardar Ballavbhai Patel, who hailed from Gujarat, was one of those who dreamt about such a scheme. On the 5th of April, 1961, Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime minister of India, laid its foundation stone. But this project bogged down in the quagmire of a dispute over the sharing of its benefits among the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharastra and Gujarat. To resolve this dispute an expert committee was set up in 1965 under the chairmanship of the famous river engineer and hydrologist Dr. A.N. Khosla whose award however failed to satisfy all the contending parties. Ultimately in 1969 the government of India set up the Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal (NWDT) under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act,1956.

After almost 10 years of legal wrangling the Tribunal came out with its final verdict according to which the states of M.P, Gujarat, Maharastra and Rajasthan will share 18.25, 9.00, 0.25 and 0.50% of
water and 57, 27, 16 and 0% of hydroelectricity respectively. This award is binding on all the parties concerned and till the year 2025 it will neither be reviewed nor changed. According to current plans the Narmada basin will have more than 3200 dams of which 30 will be big, 135 medium and the rest
small. The largest of them, the Sardar Sarovar Dam, will have a height of slightly less than 500 ft. The whole scheme has been phased out over a period of about a century. In financial terms the costs will be astronomical and like most of the big dam projects all over the world it will be funded
mainly by the World Bank loan.

Almost half a century has passed since its conception yet the project has not made much of physical progress. In its early stages disputes delayed its planning. Now stiff opposition from the adversely affected population has arrested its execution. The movement known as the Narmada Bachao Andolan or 'Save the Narmada' has brought out in sharp focus all the negative aspects not only of the Narmada Valley Project but also of all the large dam projects all over the world which are facing similar opposition from the adversely affected people. The tribal woman who inaugurated one of the dams of DVC became an outcast in her community. It was a token protest by the tribal people whose land had been desecrated and many of whom had been displaced and made landless without being adequately compensated or rehabilitated. They had also no share in the benefits that accrued from these dams. Their culture and the very way of their life were destroyed. The kind of environmental disaster these dams caused for these rural people could not be appreciated by the city based baboos who planned and executed them. In their calculation they never thought of taking into account the inestimable costs, not measurable merely in financial terms, these tribal people dumbly incurred. The urban baboos were still suffering from the nation-building euphoria which had gripped them during the independence movement and advised the people adversely affected by development projects to suffer for 'a greater common good', the good of the nation. In India this attitude was reflected in the legal provisions of the time which allowed only small compensation for lands acquired for 'public purposes' like development schemes. Such compensation was chiefly monetary and did not include any compensation for loss of income or means of livelihood.

At that time there was no Medha Patkar or a Sundarlal Bahuguna to agitate for the cause also of environment. Now the times have changed. The cause of these silently suffering victims of inequity and injustice has now been taken up in good earnest by many individuals and non-government organizations not to gain any political mileage but purely for humanitarian reasons. And those who have joined hands with these activists are many environmentalists who feel that large dams cause death and devastation not only to the rivers but also to the environment as a whole. How determined these agitators are is evident from the fact that one of them, Ms Arundhati Roy, has not been deterred by the punishment inflicted on her by the Supreme court of India for contempt. In fact the Narmada Bachao Andolan has today come to symbolize the fight for the causes of the victims of injustice and against the destructiveness of modern technology.

For time immemorial man has used water not only as it occurs in nature but also by 'managing' it, i.e. by interfering in its natural state. In the earlier stages of his civilization such interference was minimum because his life was simple and his number was small and hence his needs were limited. With the increase in population and progress of civilization his needs have increased and become sophisticated. This has necessitated increased interference in the natural sources of water. He manages his water resources by various means, one of which is by building dams across a stream, river or estuary. The purposes are to store water to supply for his domestic consumption, irrigation or industry; to reduce peak discharge of floodwater; to increase available water stored for generating hydroelectric power; or to increase the depth of water to improve navigation. The reservoirs created by dams are often used as lakes for recreation. In the beginning because of technological backwardness dams were built on a small scale mainly for domestic and agricultural purposes. Sometimes flowing water was used to run some mills no doubt but generation of hydroelectricity to run mills and factories was still a thing of the distant future. But with the progress in technology dams began to be built on larger scales to meet man's multifarious needs. Today they are constructed on gigantic scales.

Notable dams built to provide hydroelectric power include the Aswan Dam in Egypt, the Kariba Dam in Zambezi, the Daniel Johnson Dam in Canada, the Guri Dam in Venezuela, and the Itaip� Dam between Brazil and Paraguay, which at 623 ft (190 m) and generating more than 12,600,000 KW of electricity is the largest hydropower dam in the world. The Grand Coulee Dam, located near Spokane, Washington, is the largest hydropower dam in the United States, producing 6,465,000 KW. Over the past 100 years the United States led the world in dam building. There are approximately 75,000 dams greater than 6 ft and according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers there are tens of thousands of smaller dams across the country. The 20th century witnessed many great dam projects in the United States like the Central Valley Project; Missouri River Basin Project; and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Oroville Dam, located in California, the tallest in the United States, is 770 ft (235 m) high; the Rogun Dam, in Russia, the tallest in the world, is 1,100 ft (335 m) high. A large dam in Panama forms Gat�n Lake, the key to the Panama Canal system. Worldwide there are more than 45,000 large dams. They have played an important role in helping people to manage water resources and enjoying enormous benefits.

The credit for the opening and ultimate development and prosperity of the arid Wild West of the U.S.A. goes more to the dams than to the legendary cowboy. According to current estimates 30-40% of the 271 million hectares of irrigated land now relies on dams. One-third of the countries in the world rely on hydropower for more than half their electricity and large dams generate about 19% of world electricity. During the 20th century dams became one of the most significant and visible tools not only for water management but also for the socio-economic development activity as a whole. When Pandit Nehru called the dams 'the temples of modern India' he was not using empty rhetoric, it was the most appropriate expression of the perception about dams prevailing at the time throughout the world. From the 1930s to the 1970s, to most people construction of large dams became synonymous with development and economic progress. They were viewed as symbols of modernization and man's ability to harness nature and their construction therefore accelerated dramatically. This trend peaked in the 1970s, when on an average two or three dams were commissioned each day somewhere in the world. Dam building virtually became a kind of industry. And the enormous investment in large dams worldwide, estimated at more than $2 trillion, were justified not only by their immediate benefits but also by their secondary and tertiary benefits like food security, local employment and development of new skills, rural electrification, industrialization and development of other physical and social infrastructures which brought about revolutionary changes in the lives of the people at large.

These benefits were so obvious that nobody could raise any objections to such heavy investments, nor in the calculation of these investments did anyone think of taking into account anything beyond the costs of construction and operation. And the adverse consequences of damming were thought to be minimal and could easily be offset by its socio-economic benefits. This is the main reason why there was little, if any, opposition to dam building during its earlier stages. In over-enthusiasm the losses suffered by a few who were displaced by a dam and its reservoirs without being adequately compensated or rehabilitated were ignored for the benefit of many. And most iniquitous was the fact that these unfortunate few generally did not share the benefits which accrued from these dams. There could be no worse case of inequity and injustice. Have the poor people, the majority of whom are tribals, inhabiting the hilly jungles of the Chotanagpur plateau, where the DVC dams have been built, been 'rehabilitated' in the proper sense of the term? The jobs created by these dams require technical skills which these ignorant and illiterate rustics do not possess and hence they are unsuitable for them. They are mostly land-poor and their loss of land to DVC dams and reservoirs made them poorer. Moreover, as they were upstream their land cannot benefit from irrigation by DVC canals. And once agriculture began to prosper and industries to be set up land became more and more precious in the Damodar valley.

Many poor people lost their lands to the cunning speculators and kulaks . The urban areas and factories get the priority for electricity generated by the DVC power plants. How many village homes have been electrified by these plants? How many of them have found employment in the factories which came up in the Damodar valley after the commissioning of the DVC? What monetary compensation did they get for their poor possessions and was it sufficient for an alternative livelihood? Who knows how many of these illiterate people were swindled by the rapacious petty amlas at the time of disbursement of those petty sums? And finally, can any monetary compensation be adequate for the loss which they incurred? They were uprooted not only from their land but also from their 'habitat' � the physical and cultural environments in which these people grew up for generations. They were psychologically disoriented and found it difficult to strike roots in a new and alien environment.

The time gap between the Damodar Valley and the Narmada Valley Projects is nearly 50 years and in course of this time public perceptions about the benefits of dams have undergone a sea change. The questions which are being asked by the adversely affected people of Narmada valley today were not asked by the similarly affected people of the Damodar valley fifty years ago. Only the experience of the past half century has taught these otherwise silent people, accustomed for ages to suffer silently, to ask these questions. Investigations and studies by the scientific community during the last few decades have also added to our understanding of the effects of dams, both good and bad. Today it is found that the adverse impacts of dams are not small as it was earlier thought. Worldwide about 40 to 80 million people have already been displaced by dams and their reservoirs and more than 400,000 square kilometres of land � larger than Zimbabwe, 13 times the size of Lesotho and equivalent to the area of the state of California - have been lost. And the majority of the people affected belong to the socio-economically weaker sections of the society. Very few of them have recovered from the ordeal, either economically or psychologically. One-fifth of the world's freshwater fish are now either endangered or extinct. So are many aquatic plants.

The engineers and the planners are the least likely persons to consider these questions. They are technologists and are therefore concerned only with the technical aspects of the project. The professional politicians who take the final decisions � the so-called policy makers � usually take into account their own political prospects which depend more on the opinions of powerful pressure groups than on the views of the unorganized common people. And the people who form these pressure groups are technocrats, bureaucrats, industrialists, the urban elites, rich farmers, brokers, financiers,
consultants, dam building companies, contractors and suppliers who are the immediate beneficiaries of such projects. Often there are unholy alliances among some of these elements and in many cases there is corruption.

Corruption is generally thought to be an essential characteristic of capitalist societies. But the extent of corruption detected in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China, a country ruled by the
Communists, is stupendous. In this case a considerable part of the fund embezzled was meant for rehabilitation of displaced persons and the list of thieves is headed by high level functionaries.

Over the years vested interests in dam building have developed on global scales. For construction of large infrastructure like large dams involving heavy investments poor nations, with little savings and power to mobilize enough capital, have to seek outside financial assistance. This is provided by rich nations which invest through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international financial institutions. The motive of donor countries is never altruistic and the loans have strings attached to them; most familiar of these are the borrower country's compulsion to engage consultants and contractors of the lender's choice paying heavy fees and allowing big profits, to purchase equipments from the lending countries at prices which are very often much above the
competitive world market prices, and to pattern its economy to better serve the economic interests of the lending country. All these ultimately lead also to political interference. This is colonialism in a new guise. This has been shown by Teresa Hayter in her Aid as Imperialism in which she studied
the role of foreign aid in Latin American countries. The role of large dam building companies, according to the report Dams Incorporated, The Record of Twelve European Dam building Companies, prepared by The Corner House and sponsored and published by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, is revealing. "Dams do not build themselves. Nor are they the outcome of impartial decision-making by impartial political and economic actors responding to the pre-existing needs of society. On the contrary, underpinning each of the 40,000 large dams that now straddle the world's rivers is a well-developed political infrastructure that has enabled a small but powerful group of vested interests to direct water for their own benefit; to capture public subsidies; to crush, co-opt or bypass opposition; to filter out or suppress alternative solutions to water and energy problems; and to ensure their own institutional survival, or even expansion" � these scathing comments of the report about the role of the dam building companies are equally applicable to all the key players.

Construction of such large infrastructures are in many cases wasteful and are deliberately undertaken by corrupt politicians of poor countries because they give them enormous scope of pocketing large sums of money. A major portion of the loan amount ultimately lands up in private Swiss bank accounts back in the first world. A large dam is thus a kind of mutual benefit scheme for all these people. And to promote their benefit they have developed the sale of the idea of a dam into a fine art. The consultants and the self-styled experts, engaged by the hypocrite helpers - the World Bank or the IMF, as the case may be, - will pay visits to the poor country and draw a rosy picture about the benefits of a proposed dam � so many thousands of acres will be irrigated, so much electricity will be generated, so many jobs will be created, poverty will be alleviated and so on and so forth. Very few will know how these conclusions are arrived at, for the process of consultation is a top secret affair. Not to speak of the people who stand in danger of being ruined by the dam and its reservoirs, even very few, if any, of the would-be beneficiaries would be taken into confidence. They will also suggest some so-called 'structural adjustments' to be made in the borrowing country's economy as the precondition for sanction of the loan which in effect would reduce it, both economically and politically, to a satellite of the lending country. It will often find itself in a kind of 'debt-trap' because the actual cost will be found to be far more than the original estimate.

Investigations have shown that the rosy pictures painted at the time of the planning of many dams were highly exaggerated and based on unrealistic and false presumptions. A recent study, for example, � The Bhakra Project, the reality behind the legend - made by an Indian NGO, the Manthan Research Centre, has shown that increases in food production in the irrigated areas at the initial stages were modest and that it actually peaked only after the use of heavy doses of highly subsidized chemical fertilizers.

All these people often with ulterior motives and activated by highly unethical considerations, cannot be expected to view a river in the manner in which the early Vedic Aryans in India viewed the river Indus, for example, as recorded in the 7th Rik of the 10th mandala of the Rigveda �

'The irresistible Indus proceeds straight, white and dazzling in splendour! She is great and her waters fill all sides with mighty force. Of all the flowing rivers, none is like her! She is wild like a mare, beautiful like a well-developed woman!'.

Such a poetic view is beyond them no doubt, but what is really strange is that these self-styled experts are even incapable of recognizing the very prosaic and scientific fact that a dam is an antithesis of a river. In their efforts to tame the 'wild mare' they not only hobble and silence her but in most cases they kill her. Nor do they seem to recognize that our physical environment is a product of many factors which are inextricably interconnected in an organic whole. Any change in any of its parts affects the whole system. And a river is the most important factor of that system. Whenever there is any interference in its natural regime it changes the character of the entire basin � its hydrology, ecology, climate etc.

To meet man's increasing demands for fresh water as well as hydro-power there must needs be interferences which are not always and altogether harmful. But when such interferences are allowed to cross reasonable limits they endanger the river, its entire basin along with everything, both living
and non-living, that that basin supports. Damming is an extreme step which should be taken with extreme care. In damming the human interference in the natural regime of the river and consequently in the environment is total. It affects the environment very profoundly. It de-links the river from other
channels which together form a network or system of which the dammed river is an integral part. This de-linking does not augur well for the basins which this network serves, as the nervous system serves the living cells in an animal body. It affects the geomorphology of rivers by altering the natural
pattern of the discharge, the energy, velocity and direction of the flow, sedimentation, flooding etc which adversely affect the aquatic and riparian ecosystems both upstream and downstream. The dammed river will no longer be able to maintain its channel as an efficient drainage, receive supplies from its tributaries or distribute its water through its distributaries in the manner in which it performed these functions before its damming. It will no longer be able to regularly inundate, enrich by silt deposits and refresh the floodplains and maintain their prosperity which was the river's original gift. Because of the changes in temperature, oxygen balance and nutrients in its water many fishes, insects and aquatic plants will be threatened and gradually become extinct. With diminished flow and velocity it will lose the power to effectively flush its mouths where it meets the sea and thus fail to ward off the inland invasion of salt water which will salinize not only the surface water but also groundwater in coastal regions where vast areas supporting vast populations will become unfit for economic use and human settlement. The estuaries may become the breeding ground of toxic and harmful algae causing havoc to the estuarine ecosystems.

Such extreme steps should not therefore be taken without considering if the objectives sought to be achieved by damming could be achieved by some alternative means with less adverse environmental impacts. Past experience shows that in many cases this question was not adequately considered at the time of planning and such adverse impacts were downplayed to justify damming. The strongest argument in favor of hydro-power dams put forward is that they generate 'clean energy' and are therefore 'climate-friendly'. This myth has been exploded by the finding that large reservoirs emit large amounts of 'green house gases' like methane and carbon dioxide which cause global warming.

According to a study conducted in 2000 by a team of Canadian researchers of the University of Alberta, about 70 million tons of methane and around a billion tons of carbon dioxide are emitted annually by the reservoirs of all types and sizes worldwide. Such releases of the two gases combined contribute an estimated 7% of the global warming impact of other human activities calculated over a 100-year period. And this contribution would be considerably higher if measured over a shorter time span than 100 years. Another research by Dr. Philip Fearnside of the Brazilian National Institute for Research in Amazonia has shown that the rate of such emissions is much higher from tropical reservoirs than from those in temperate countries. The worst tropical reservoirs can contribute many times more to global warming than coal plants generating the same amount of power. Then there is the problem of eutrophication � the excessive concentration of nutrient, usually phosphorus, in large inland water bodies like lakes and reservoirs. In extreme cases it leads to algal blooms which are often followed by low oxygen levels when the algal material decays. High concentrations of algae cause taste and odor problems in drinking water, and some types of algae are toxic to animals.

Even very fundamental technical questions were not duly considered before building many dams. Normal life of a dam is between 50 to 100 years. What would happen after that? How a dam is to be decommissioned and how the river is to be restored? How to maintain the reservoirs which silt up gradually, progressively losing their live storage capacity? How to sustain the development which has already taken place as a result of the dam when its reservoir supplies less and less water as time passes? The quantity of water flowing through the channel of a river does not vary very dramatically over time. And a dam and its reservoir cannot by any miracle increase the total quantity of available water. On the contrary, it has been found that on an average 5% of the stored water is lost by a reservoir by evaporation. Can they therefore resolve the existing disputes among different parts of a river basin or between competitive sectors like agriculture and industry over its limited water supply? Instead, might not diversion and storage by dams and reservoirs multiply or exacerbate such conflicts? All they can do about quantity is to modify the seasonal variation in supply by making water available during lean months. But what about the quality of river water? Do they cause its degeneration? Scientific studies have shown that they do. In many cases they have been found to have caused degeneration of the land they irrigate. During his travels narrated in his Among the Believers V.S. Naipaul found such bad lands in Pakistan.

Over-irrigation from the Aswan High Dam has degraded the quality of land in vast areas of the proverbially fertile Egyptian delta. This dam has stopped the annual flooding of the Nile, on which one of the earliest civilizations was built. This has put an end to the building and natural fertilization of its basin. Now cultivators are forced to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides in heavy doses which in their turn have caused degeneration of the land and the environment as a whole. And what about the safety aspect of the dams? Are they properly designed keeping this aspect in view? Are their constructions monitored from day to day to ensure that they are built according to design? With so much corruption in dam building industry, is it not probable, nay certain, that there are large scale deviations and use of sub-standard materials? These allegations have been borne out by the large number of catastrophic disasters caused by dam failures throughout the world.

There are people who think that large dams and reservoirs cause earthquakes. In India the Koyna dam is generally blamed for the earthquake that took place on December 11, 1967, in the Koyna
region of Maharastra, so long considered aseismic. Similarly, the Latur earthquake of September 29, 1993, is also thought to have been caused by a small dam on the river Terna. Though this theory of reservoir-induced seismisity (RIS) is yet to be adequately verified by the scientists the protests of the anti-dam campaigners have stemmed also from this theory. The critics of this theory think that dams and reservoirs, however large, are too insignificant and cannot be sufficient causes of such colossal extreme geological phenomena as earthquakes.

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