Volume 12, Number 2 / April 1997

The Holiest River

India’s Sardar Sarovar Dam will, if completed, displace 320,000 people. Those who have already been displaced find themselves exiled to "resettlement ghettos" on poor land, far from their former communities. The intolerable conditions that met the Narmada "oustees," combined with the government’s inability to rectify the project’s social and environmental problems, has given rise to one of the largest, most successful anti-dam movements in the world. The following excerpt from Catherine Caufield’s new book, Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations (Henry Holt), tells the story of people whose live have been turned upside-down for the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

They hadn’t believed it at first, that the government was going to build a dam across the Narmada River. Obviously those surveyors and engineers hadn’t seen the river in the monsoon, huge and powerful, surging through the canyons and across the plains. But the people of Gadher knew the power of the river. They had lived beside it, with it, for centuries. And even if it were possible to control such a force of nature, would anyone really dare to impound the most holy river in India? Shiva himself had named it Narmada, the ever-delightful. As the old people say, you wash away all your sins by bathing seven times in the Yamuna or three times in the Saraswati or once in the Ganges, but the mere sight of the Narmada has the same effect!

Well, in the last few years they had seen the dam rising, and now they believed. There would be a dam, and the village of Gadher – along with hundreds of others like it – would be submerged. They had to move, and soon. It wouldn’t be easy to find good land, especially with so many others looking at the same time, so it was a good thing that the government was helping them. The Land Purchase Committee had already found some land it thought the people of Gadher would like. When they visited it, what they saw was a pleasant surprise. The soil was rich, there was water nearby, and the previous owners had planted lots of banana trees. There was no forest, unfortunately – so it would be hard to find bamboo for building, fiber for rope, herbs for medicine, or fodder for the goats. And it was so flat! With no hills to hide behind, how would one find the privacy needed to perform the most basic functions? No, it certainly wasn’t home. But then home, Gadher, would soon be deep under water.

They were fortunate, they knew, to be offered a fertile plot. Nonetheless, it was strange buying land. Not something they’d ever done. They were adivasi, the original dwellers. They lived and farmed where their parents and grandparents before them had lived and farmed. They had little money – hadn’t had much need for it up to now – but the government had promised to pay them for the land they lost. They would get half in cash, and the government would use the rest to pay for their new land. Or so they understood. Actually the money would only cover a downpayment on the land; they would have to pay the balance – in twenty interest-free annual installments – from what they could earn by selling their crops.

The officials who had brought them here were anxious to make a deal. They explained that the government would build a school and health clinic here, and put in roads, electricity, and a water pump. And since the men from Gadher liked what they saw, they agreed to sign the papers. Well, not sign, because they couldn’t read or write, but put their thumbprints on. The officials congratulated them and said they were landowners now. The men went back to Gadher to tell their families, and a few weeks later they were ready to go. There were about 70 of them, more than a tenth of the village – sad to quit their lifelong home, but hopeful, too. They understood that by forsaking the beloved land of their fathers they were ensuring a better future for their children.

Moving day came. The people loaded their belongings onto the government trucks and climbed aboard. After travelling for an hour or so, the trucks stopped and the men jumped down, eager to show their families their new home. The first things they noticed were the corrugated tin huts, all close together in rows. With the hot sun beating on them, they weren’t inviting, but they would be replaced with wooden houses before too long. It was the land that mattered, and, as they looked around, it was the land that stunned them. There were no banana trees, there was no water, it was a wasteland! They walked around, confused, trying to orient themselves. They turned to the officials: This isn’t the land you showed us. Oh, yes, came the reply. This is your land. Here are the deeds you signed.

No, no, no. The villagers shook their heads. This is not it. The officials looked at one another. Then one spoke in soothing tones. You’re upset because you expected to see roads and schools – everything already in place. But you must understand, all that will take some time.

No, said the men. We were shown rich land; this land is useless. It is not what you offered us. The man in charge sighed. Look here, he said. Just give it a chance. See if you can make it work. If you really aren’t satisfied in a year or so, then we’ll find you some new land.

What could they do? They stayed.

That was in 1990. The people of Gadher stayed at the Timbi resettlement site for two years, struggling to make the saline soil produce. By the time I got there, in 1993, they had abandoned the place and moved back home. The dam was already half-finished and in a few months, when the summer rains came, Gadher would be one of the first villages to be flooded. Nevertheless, the people had returned to Gadher because they couldn’t feed themselves at Timbi and they had no place else to go. It was hard to tell that there had ever been a settlement at Timbi. The people had taken everything with them; the only evidence of their stay was a few blackened firestones scattered among the weeds. Since the government had never supplied any of the amenities it had promised, there were no roads, no electric poles, no school or clinic, no well or handpump to mark the site of what had once been, not a village exactly, more a refugee camp.

The neighboring hamlet had seen the Gadher refugees come and go. One man said, "If we had known that the land was going to be sold, we would have warned the buyers. The big landlords who had owned all this land had been trying to sell it for a long time, but no one around here would have it. It’s full of salt, no good at all." But the owners had finally gotten lucky: the Land Purchase Committee agreed to act as their broker, to sell the land for them. And even with thousands of desperate clients, the committee had had to resort to fraud to unload it.


The Sacred River

There is, in the heart of India, a sacred pool surrounded by temples and shrines. From this pool rises India’s holiest river, the Narmada. Since ancient times, pilgrims have come here to be blessed by the river as it begins its 800-mile journey through the hills, forests, and plains of three states westward to the Arabian Sea. Some go on to make the parikrama, the ritual circumambulation of the river, from its source to its mouth and back. This trip, from temple to temple along the riverbank, traditionally takes three years, three months, and three days to complete.

India began thinking about damming the Narmada, its fifth-longest river, in 1946. The official Narmada Valley Development Plan now calls for 30 major, 135 medium, and 3,000 small dams to be built on the Narmada and its tributaries over the next fifty years. The centerpiece of the scheme is to be the Sardar Sarovar Dam, stretching 4,000 feet across the river and rising to the height of a 45-story building. When its associated canals, irrigation works and power transmission lines are taken into account, Sardar Sarovar is the biggest water development scheme in India, and probably in the world. The multi-billion dollar venture is intended to irrigate nearly two million hectares of farmland and bring drinking water to 30 million people. It will also take the land of at least 320,000 people, many of whom are the indigenous or tribal people known in India as adivasis.

Gadher, home to 500 families, is one of the largest of the several hundred villages to be submerged by the dam. For centuries, the people of Gadher have lived peacefully as subsistence farmers, cattle and goat herders, and gatherers from the river and forest. It was, at least until the shadow of the dam fell across it, a thriving village, though poor by Western standards. Its thirteen hamlets are scattered across low hills, surrounded by forest, fields, and grazing land, and bordered by the river. There are no paved roads; oxcarts, bicycles, and a few motor scooters are the only transport. The houses, mostly wooden with thatched or tiled roofs, are spread out so that each family has room for a vegetable plot and a few animals.

When I first visited the village, a crowd gathered, curious to discover my business. Outsiders are rare here, and the villagers are understandably wary of strangers. Fortunately, I was with Balraj Maheshwari, a lawyer who is well known locally. Mr. Mahesh-wari works with the Rajpipla Social Services Society, a local organization founded in 1975 by a Catholic priest and dedicated to helping the poor of the region. Once he vouched for my good intentions, people were eager to tell their stories.

Several villagers expressed pleasure at having a chance to speak to an outsider. "When others come to get information, they go only to Kevadia [the dam headquarters]," said Ramsin Pijiyu. "Then government officers come and take one or two persons from here to tell the visitors that everything is fine. Sometimes we have to pretend that we are from a different village, or that we are resettled someplace. You are the first from abroad to come here. It is good because we can tell you how we are." A cynic called out, "But if they find out someone from abroad has been here, they’ll be patrolling in project trucks tomorrow."

By April of 1993 when I visited Gadher, most of its residents had been moved elsewhere – split up among 31 different resettlement sites. But roughly a third of them had returned to the village because of intolerable conditions in the resettlement colonies – ranging from barren land to polluted drinking water and outbreaks of cholera. The returnees – and the fifty or so families that never left the village – are under pressure to move before the summer monsoon begins. But they are wary: twice lately, officials have taken groups from Gadher to see potential resettlement sites and each time they have discovered that the land they were shown was not the land they were to move to. "We’ve been cheated once, so we look very carefully now," said a middle-aged man named Kanti Bhoga who had recently returned from Timbi. "If good land is given and we could cultivate the land and our life is happy, then we should go. But without good land – if they want to cheat us only – then how can we go?"

It’s not only the quality of the land they have been offered that concerns them. What they have tasted of the refugee existence has deeply discouraged them. They have discovered that in leaving their land, they are leaving behind a way of living. "Life in the other place was very congested – all the houses side by side," Mr. Pijiyu explained. "If we have a choice between the two, we will choose this. All the traditions, all the social life that we know and enjoy are here. If we move 100 kilometers away, the traditions will be different. So, will ours survive? That worries us. At the other place when someone died, we were not allowed to burn the body in the open in the natural way. We had to bury it on our land. That was a very bad experience. Here we can get everything free: water is free; wood and other things from the forest are free. It means that our livelihood is very easy and we are not in trouble. But if we go elsewhere, we will have to buy everything – water, forest produce, everything. So it’s not good to leave our homeland. Whether this dam is good for someone else or not, we don’t know, but for us it’s very bad."


Rocky Foundation

Work on Sardar Sarovar began in 1961. On April 5 of that year India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, flew to the remote dam site to lay the foundation stone. The helipad on which he landed was built – as were the dam’s offices and the guest quarters for visiting dignitaries – on land obtained by the forcible eviction of at least 800 families. As it turned out, the villagers had been forced from their homes somewhat prematurely: construction was stopped for 20 years by an argument over how the costs and benefits of the project would be divided between the three states through which the river flows – Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharastra.

In 1969 the government appointed a tribunal to settle the quarrel. After ten years, the Tribunal awarded most of the project’s water to Gujarat, the driest of the three states. The Tribunal also ruled, however, that Sardar Sarovar is not viable on its own. It requires three more reservoirs upstream so that the massive amounts of water during the monsoon season can be stored and released later in the year. Known as the Narmada Sagar Projects, these three reservoirs will displace another 200,000 people and cost another $1.6 billion dollars. Planners say this additional storage capacity is essential if Sardar Sarovar is ever to recoup its cost.

The World Bank had long been interested in helping to finance Sardar Sarovar, but it could do little while the Tribunal was still debating the matter. Once the Tribunal ruled, however, the Bank was swift to act. After the project plans were finalized, four delegations of Bank staffers and consultants visited India. They appraised the technical and economic aspects of the project, but did not consider social or environmental issues. This omission worried the Bank’s tiny environmental office.

There was cause to worry. India’s resettlement record is disturbing, to say the least. A conservative estimate of the number of Indians forced from their homes by large dams since Independence is 11 million, with another four million displaced by mines, industrial developments, and wildlife sanctuaries. Three-quarters were not "rehabilitated" – bureaucratese for returned to their previous standard of living. As a result, millions of poor but self-sufficient peasants have ended up as beggars in the slums of the nearest big city.

The World Bank too has had many bitter experiences with resettlement. According to its own experts, Bank-funded development projects across the world have displaced millions of people, pushing many into destitution. In 1980, belatedly recognizing the harm it had done, the Bank announced that all new projects must "ensure that, after a reasonable transition period, the displaced people regain at least their previous standard of living." By the time the Narmada loan was under consideration, the Bank had already adopted policies designed to prevent forcible relocation and to ensure that displaced persons, especially tribal people, would be protected from the negative side effects of development.

India has no national laws governing resettlement, but the Tribunal had imposed resettlement standards on the Narmada project. Ousted landowners were to receive not merely financial compensation but "land for land." In addition, India was a signatory to a 1957 United Nations convention that recognizes the rights of tribal people to their traditional land and requires governments to provide displaced tribal people with equal-quality lands to those they previously occupied. These high standards meant little, however, because India – with the Bank’s knowledge – violated them from the beginning.

In 1981, when construction resumed, five more villages were destroyed to make room for the holding tanks for the main irrigation canal. Construction workers and company officials pressured the villagers to affix their thumbprints to deeds of sale, or to blank sheets of paper to be filled in later. Some relinquished their land this way; others refused. The homes of those who resisted were demolished. When some villagers appealed to the Gujarat High Court for a stay against forcible removal, the contractors stepped up the pace of demolition so that the stay, when granted, was useless. Years later, the Bank reported that many of them "could be seen camping in extreme poverty at the edge of what remained of their lands."

Aware of this sorry history and prodded by its environmental office, the Bank sent Thayer Scudder, a CalTech socio-economist well-known for his studies of the impact of large engineering projects on the poor, to investigate the project’s resettlement plans. Scudder found that there was no resettlement plan and that the government had not begun to collect information needed to make a plan. No one even knew how many people the dam would displace. After Scudder’s report, the Bank dropped its insistence that India submit a resettlement plan before the loan was granted.

All Bank loans must be approved by the Board of Directors, which bases its decisions on the Staff Appraisal Report prepared for each loan application. The report for Sardar Sarovar acknowledged that the project had already harmed thousands of people, but offered assurances that India would correct those wrongs and treat all future oustees in accordance with Bank policies on resettlement. It did not mention that India’s Ministry of Environment had refused to approve the dam on the grounds that more information was needed about its environmental and social impacts. On March 7, 1985 the Board of Directors of the World Bank unanimously agreed to lend India $450 million for Sardar Sarovar.

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