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Arundhati Roy discusses the Sardar Sarovar dam with host Mishal Husain.
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Read the transcript.
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Do the benefits of India's Sardar Sarovar dam justify its costs?
In the ongoing struggle over India's Sardar Sarovar dam, can there be compromise between the need for economic development and local residents' rights? Ask your own questions in our debate between protest leader Medha Patkar, founder of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada movement), and S.K. Mohapatra, managing director of the company overseeing construction of the dam. Learn more in our handbook about the issues involved in other controversial dam projects around the world, or get a visual overview of India's water problems in our photo essay. Then, review the historical role of India's dams in our briefing by journalist Diane Raines Ward, author of the critically acclaimed WATER WARS.
Water Wants: A History of India's Dams
By Diane Raines Ward
September 14, 2003
Water in India is a matter of extremes, veering between drought and floods, life and death. There is no other place on the planet with such wide vacillations between wet and dry. Water weighs so heavily on the Indian mind that the Hindu faithful see the country's rivers as sacred. Yet, at the same time, mastery of these holy rivers has been vital to India's existence. It is a campaign that has been waged for millennia -- with mixed results.
The sub-continent is littered with evidence of the efforts. In central India, the 11th century Veeranam Dam once stretched for a full 10 miles. Two carved-rock slab dams from the same era created a 250 square mile lake in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Near Bhopal, the Mudduk Maur Dam was the highest earthfill embankment dam on earth for three centuries after its construction in 1500. Outside Hyderabad, Meer Allum, built over 200 years ago, was the first true multiple-arch buttress dam in history. Ancient waterworks are also still in use. In the desert states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, thousand-year-old, rock-carved step wells descend deep into the earth in tiers of ornate galleries to tap the water table.
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| 1901 |
Construction of dam on Narmada River proposed.
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| 1947 |
Investigations begun into Narmada's potential for irrigation and electricity.
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| 1961 |
Prime Minister Jawalarl Nehru lays foundation stone for Narmada dams project.
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| 1985 |
World Bank approves $450 million loan to India for Sardar Sarovar. Residents affected by the dam organize protest movement.
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Under the British Raj, dam building escalated. British engineers constructed some of the most advanced dams and canals in the world on Indian ground and by the time the Union Jack was lowered in New Delhi in 1947, they had put down 75,000 miles of irrigation canals to water the subcontinent's most valuable farmland.
After Independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, deeply determined that India should become self-sufficient in food production and economically self-reliant, advanced the campaign still further. A series of Soviet-style Five Year Plans resulted in multi-purpose river control works that included the four-dam Damodar Valley Project in West Bengal and Jharkhand, inspired by America's Tennessee Valley Authority, and, in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, the Hirakud Project, designed to irrigate over 1.5 million acres of crop land. Most promising of all was the Bhakra Dam, stretched across a 1,700-foot canyon on the Sutlej River to prevent floods and carry water and electricity to the fertile Punjab. At its dedication in 1963, Nehru famously called Bhakra, "the temple of a free India, at which I worship."
That veneration continues. India remains one of the most active dam-building countries on earth. After Bhakra, a solid and largely successful dam, enormous dams became the order of the day. But, often, projects were launched without adequate planning or finance. A 1995 Indian Environment Ministry report revealed that 87 percent of India's river-valley projects did not meet required safeguards. Recent reports show that larger dam reservoirs are silting up at rates far higher than assumed when the projects were built, that the life span of major Indian dams is likely to be only two-thirds of their projected life, and that every dam built in India during the last 15 years has violated various environmental regulations -- from siltation and soil erosion, to the neglect of health, seismological, forest, wildlife, human, and clean water issues.
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An engineer at work in India's Sardar Sarovar dam. Photo: Karen Robinson
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