Development To Displacement - Shifting The Discourse Is The Narmada Movement's Greatest Contribution

18/03/2024, 00:05 Development to displacement: Shifting the discourse is the Narmada movement’s greatest contribution
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DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT
The real price of development:

Shifting the debate is the Narmada
movement’s greatest contribution
The attacks on Medha Patkar have ignored the displacement of
Adivasis and the fact that fertile areas have been submerged for
irrigation.
Vikramaditya Thakur  
Oct 24, 2022 · 07:30 am
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Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan on November, 2000, | Reuters
For nearly four decades, the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project on the Narmada river has
been at the centre of the debate about the real price India has paid for development
projects in India. That was reiterated early in September when columnist
Swaminathan SA Aiyar wrote a two-part series in The Times of India about the
project.
In the first installment, he made an important point: mass politics works on

exaggeration in order to accentuate a core contention, so taking the rhetoric at face
value could be risky.
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He corrected Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that all those opposing the
project are “urban Naxals”, noting that in 1992, the North American members of an
independent review team of the World Bank recommended that the institution
withdraw from the project. These experts are unlikely to have any clue about the
meaning of the word “Naxal”.
However, by using his articles mainly to attack Medha Patkar, a leader of the
Narmada Bachao Andolan, Aiyar squandered the opportunity to join the debate
about the human and environmental costs of development. He claimed that Patkar
made a “fool” of him another, also called the Save Narmada Campaign, for making a
“fool” of him and others with purportedly exaggerated claims about the project’s
impending failure.
But it was not just Patkar who convinced the World Bank to stop funding the
project. The Narmada case was playing out just when non-profits in the Global
North and their middle class supporters, especially in the United States, were
clamouring for more accountability from their governments about the money they
were spending and the multilateral organisations they supported.
They were concerned by the total disregard for the environmental impact and
human displacement due to development projects such as large dams – especially
those affecting “tribal” groups, which had parallels to the way in which the US had
treated Native American groups over the course of its history.
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Activist Medha Patkar. Credit: Right Livelihood Award Foundation, Attribution, via Wikimedia
Commons.
A project from 1961

For readers unfamiliar with the project, some background. The Narmada largely
flows through Madhya Pradesh, touches Maharashtra and enters Gujarat to meet
the Arabian Sea via a steep valley. The valley is home to Bhils, an Adivasi group. But
the fertile plains of Nimar in Madhya Pradesh house multi-caste villages dominated
by prosperous Patidar farmers.
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After the project was launched by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961,
Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat found themselves embroiled in a
lengthy conflict about how to share its benefits. The Narmada Award of 1979 by the
Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal apportioned the river water between them and
fixed the height of the SSP at 138 meters.
Studies by several water management experts including SS Nadkarni and KR Datye,

neither of them part of the Narmada Bachao Andolan or opponents of the project,
showed how reducing the dam’s height by just a few meters would drastically
reduce the submergence area in the plains with little decrease in Gujarat’s share of
water.
Besides, it is a poor project that submerges fertile plains to irrigate similar or

inferior land. That is something Aiyar neatly skipped while haranguing Patkar.
Patkar did not work alone. The Narmada Bachao Andolan’s tasks – such as offering
a forensic critique of the dam’s irrigation potential, engaging the World Bank’s
panel of experts and leading a mass movement – required a diverse range of skills,
This rested on the shoulders of a range of committed people.
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An activist
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Agrawal, drew on official data pertaining to the various projects on Narmada and
its tributaries to frame the Narmada Bachao Andolan’s counter-narrative to the
government’s claims.
Arundhati Dhuru, Nandini Oza and others were active in spreading awareness
about the perils of the project in the villages that would be submerged. They also
represented the case of the Adivasis and villages at international forums in Japan,
Europe and North America to which they were invited.
By today’s standards, visiting foreign countries to disrupt a government project

would appear to be decidedly anti-national – but only to those who do not
appreciate the global nature of the multi-billion-dollar development industry.
Funding from the Global North

As is evident in countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, countries of the Global
North supply technology through their local firms and the expertise to install them.
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They also pump in money as loans through state-backed non-profits such as USAID
in the United States and DFID in the UK and control funding through multilateral
agencies such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. They finance
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Is shouting 'Pakistan zindabad' illegal? An SC order
projects from roads clarifies
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and dams to malaria eradication programmes‘mystifying’,in the saysSouth.
2
former chief
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partial funder while the turbines for its hydroelectric power plants were from
Japan.
The problem even with a relatively transparent agency such as the World Bank, as I
talked to its officials and NGO critics in the US and UK during my doctoral research
on the Narmada project in 2007-’14, is that it was largely dominated by economists
and engineers from the North.
A file photo of the Sardar Sarovar dam overflowing. Credit: AFP.
These technocrats have no clue of the ground reality in rural Nigeria or India about
the harm that a development project could cause by forcibly displacing residents or
of benefits getting cornered by a small dominant elite that controls the state. These
points are now conceded by the Bank’s own officials.
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The NGOs in the North countries were pushing for transparency in the 1980s just as
the World Bank decided to partially fund the Sardar Sarovar dam in 1985 while
flouting its own norms on environment and displacement. Unlike the Communist
Party’s dictatorship in China, another big beneficiary of development grants during
the 1990s, democratic India was more tolerant of protest and dialogue.
Bhils treated like encroachers

When the Sardar Sarovar Project was announced, many in Gujarat were wary
because of the experience earlier that decade relating to the Ukai dam. That project
on the Tapi had displaced thousands of Bhil families without their consent or giving
them viable compensation.
ARCH Vahini, a group working in that area and aware of Ukai’s human cost, did
pioneering work to mobilise the Bhils of Gujarat who were the first to face
submergence. Despite having lived in the hills for generations the community were
considered encroachers on the property of the government’s forest department
from the colonial period.
Until 2013, land acquisitions for development projects in India were undertaken
using the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. But instead of sharing data about
development projects that are for the public benefit, the colonial-era Official Secrets
Act was used to deny information requests.
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ARCH obtained several government of India documents about the dam from
Oxfam, UK, which had been funding their welfare activities even before the dam.
Oxfam in turn was getting them from the World Bank as the institution did not
believe that anything about the dam project was a secret.
The Indian state, following its colonial counterpart, has largely treated the Adivasi
areas in the hills and forest only as a source of raw material. For decades after
Independence, exploitation by moneylenders and dominant caste groups has been
the harsh reality for the Scheduled Tribe groups who live in these areas.
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@ANI · Follow
Some people tried to bring activist Medha Patkar, who

opposed Narmada scheme, into Gujarat politics from the
backdoor... will the youth allow her entry into Gujarat
(politics)? All who want to bring Medha Patkar, stop there
itself, Gujarat won't accept such people: HM Amit Shah
8:24 PM · Sep 4, 2022
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Read 69 replies
Contribution of volunteers
In many places, schools, health centres and roads were missing till the 1990s or
existed only on paper. The first all-weather road connecting the plains to
Maharashtra’s Narmada Valley, for instance, was constructed only in the early
1990s when the Bhil villages had to be evicted for the project.
Groups such as the ARCH in Gujarat and the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath in
Madhya Pradesh were active in the area before the Sardar Sarovar Project came
into picture. Their members were urban middle-class youth with professional
degrees who chose to live and provide health services and education. They also
mobilised residents to demand the implementation of the laws that existed on
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When the Narmada Bachao Andolan stepped in a little later, Patkar and the urban-
based activists were only one layer of the organisation. Patkar is an evocative
speaker and a gifted manager who boosted the prominence of the organisation.
But far from being a one-person show, the Narmada Bachao Andolan comprised
several groups, including the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath, Bhil leaders and
many Nimari Patidar leaders.
The urban activists got media attention because they were armed with facts,
figures, and spoke in English. Many of the Bhil and Nimari farmers facing
submergence sat on collective hunger strikes, organized dharnas (protest marches)
and faced police repression but the press chose to largely focus on Patkar.
The reader of this article is probably from the urban middle-class and was
educated in an English medium school where we read about the dams and mines
that helped industrialise rural India. Back in the 1990s, my high school NCERT
geography textbook did not mention the human cost of industrialisation. But it was
revised in the next decade to discuss dams and displacement.
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That has been the greatest contribution of the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
This is the first of a two-part series on the Narmada project. Read the second part
here.
Vikramaditya Thakur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at

the University of Delaware.
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Narmada Bachao Andolan Medha Patkar Sardar Sarovar Dam Project Gujarat
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18/03/2024, 00:05 Development to displacement: Shifting the discourse is the Narmada movement’s greatest contribution

DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT

The real price of development:

Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan on November, 2000, | Reuters

In the first installment, he made an important point: mass politics works on

A project from 1961

Studies by several water management experts including SS Nadkarni and KR Datye,

Besides, it is a poor project that submerges fertile plains to irrigate similar or

By today’s standards, visiting foreign countries to disrupt a government project

Funding from the Global North

A file photo of the Sardar Sarovar dam overflowing. Credit: AFP.

Bhils treated like encroachers

ound The India Fix ANI

Some people tried to bring activist Medha Patkar, who

8:24 PM · Sep 4, 2022

Vikramaditya Thakur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at

Buy an annual Scroll Membership to support independent journalism and

₹2,500 ₹5,000 ₹10,000 ₹25,000 Other

No ads Evening Edition newsletter

Continue to payment Already a member? Sign in

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

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