He’s not alone. In recent months the Narmada residents’ plight has drawn supporters from all over India, including Arundhati Roy, whose novel, “The God of Small Things,” won the 1997 Booker Prize. This week in Domkhedi, Vasava’s village, Roy is scheduled to go on a three-day nationwide protest, billed as Rally for the Valley. Thousands of local inhabitants have joined the 15-year-old Save Narmada Movement, known as NBA (the group’s initials in Hindi). “Big dams are like nuclear bombs,” Roy declares. “Both are weapons of mass destruction.” She particularly worries that flooding the valley’s people out of their homes will obliterate their ancient culture and self-sufficient lifestyles.
Sardar Sarovar was meant to generate 1,450 megawatts of electricity and irrigate arid sections of Gujarat. Designed to rise some 138 meters high on completion, it was to be the key link in a vast chain of 30 large dams and some 3,000 smaller ones stretched along western India’s 1,300-kilometer Narmada River. Early this year Roy toured the valley and wrote “The Greater Common Good,” a scathing indictment of Sardar Sarovar and of India’s overall hydroengineering record. According to Roy, even as India has built more than 3,000 large dams, the country’s drought-prone areas have only expanded. More than 80 percent of rural households still have no electricity. Some 250 million Indians have no easy access to safe drinking water. According to Roy, India’s big dam projects have displaced nearly 40 million people.
Families dislodged by the rising Narmada were supposed to be resettled and helped to start over. The government said it would all be taken care of six months before the families’ old places were submerged. In many cases, however, the relief so far is mostly on paper. The states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, upriver from Sardar Sarovar, have announced they have no land available for resettling their displaced people. Some of their flooded-out neighbors downriver in Gujarat have fared no better. Kalidas Shekhji lost his home almost as soon as the dam began holding water in 1993. Today he and his family live in a one-room corrugated-metal hut. “We were brought here five years ago and promised a five-acre plot,” he says. “I’m still waiting.”
B. G. Verghese, a specialist in water issues at the Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi think tank, believes that once Sardar Sarovar reaches the height of 110 meters, its promises of electricity and irrigation water will begin coming true. Verghese suggests that Roy and her supporters should focus on making sure the displaced get all the compensation the government has promised them. Taming a river can be child’s play compared with making politicians keep their word.
