Tarun Jain and Ashima Sood
January 30, 2006

Narmada ki ghati mein, ab ladayi jaari hai,
Chalo utho, chalo utho, rokna vinash hai
Vikas ke hi naam par baandh ka yeh khel hai
Soch lo, jaan lo, labh-haani kitni hai
Sinchayi ki bhi bhool hai, dal-dal to honi hai,
Ganne ke kheth mein, mazdur pisaya hai
Bijli ka jaal hai, shehron ki chaal hai,
Tapi mein na ban saki, wahi haal hona hai
In the Narmada valley, the fight is on
Get up, get going, the destruction must be stopped!
In the name of progress, this game of the dam
Know and judge, the costs and the benefits
Irrigation is error, and quicksand it will be
In the sugarcane field, the labourer is crushed
The magic of electricity is the scam of the city
The Tapi did not happen; the mess will repeat here.
Source: NBA protest song, Medha Patkar

December 31, 2005 – Waterlogging, ineffective irrigation, changing crop patterns, the promise of electricity – these lines from a Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) protest song highlight the recurrent issues that plague not just the Sardar Sarovar Project, but large dams across India. In the forty odd years since Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru pronounced the Bhakra Nangal dam “the new temple of resurgent India”, policy discourse has followed a tradition of reverence towards large dams. Questioning either their efficacy or the processes of governmental decision-making that sanction their construction remained an act of sacrilege. In the years following Bhakra Nangal, dam construction proceeded at a furious pace.

* The percentage of Indian districts that house a large dam: 54 (any dam over 30 metres in height)
* The increase in large dams between 1970 to 1999: 2482
* The number of displaced persons: varying estimates, 21 million-40 million, perhaps higher.

With the dogged debate initiated by the NBA, the water resources establishment’s appetite for large dams diminished marginally in the late nineties. But encouraged by the World Bank’s low-key decision to restart funding large dams (New York Times, June 5, 2005), the state is ready to start building again, with an ambitious river-linking project and numerous projects proposed in the North-east (see map). Given the stakes involved and in the absence of reliable data, each side paints the other in sweeping simplistic terms. While this makes shooting practice easier, it also hinders forming an informed, democratic and rigorous conclusion about the efficacy of large dam projects in India. As a result, the uncontested social science and policy knowledge base remains small. “[This issue] was getting a lot of policy attention but little was known about the effect of the average dam and there is little literature on returns to infrastructure,” says Prof. Rohini Pande of Yale University, one of the authors of a new research paper on the socio-economic impact of large dam construction in India between 1970 and 1999. Along with Prof. Esther Duflo of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Pande has used publicly available data to develop a framework to evaluate the impact of public infrastructure projects and apply this framework to examine the case of large dams in India. Their research paper presents conservative but detailed bottom-line estimates for the net benefits from large dams in India. Duflo and Pande consider a number of arguments for and against dams.

* Food grain production increases – farmers harvest multiple crops every year, including in the mix more profitable but water-intensive crops such as sugarcane.
* Floods and droughts are controlled, though land is also destroyed through water-logging, increased soil salinity and submergence.
* Levels of inequality are impacted as people are displaced with uncertain compensation, land prices increase due to submergence and economic activity increases through development of fisheries and tourism.