Unruly Waters
Page 31
Sainath’s dispatches from rural India in the 1990s date from a time when climate change was not foremost among India’s concerns. To revisit his urgent reportage two decades later, when the signs of climate change are everywhere, reminds us that, in India and elsewhere in Asia, climate change comes on top of a mountain of intersecting ecological and economic crises that has been building since the 1980s.
II
If the ocean underground began to recede as a result of the unsustainable use of groundwater in the 1980s, Asia’s running waters—its rivers—were more visibly scarred. The rivers were the conduit between the countryside and the insistent demands of growing cities. Since the late nineteenth century, the engineering of rivers—damming, diverting, impounding them—has governed efforts to redistribute water. The twentieth-century quest for the “white gold” of hydroelectric power intensified that quest. In India and China alike, the abuse of rivers provoked a new environmental consciousness in the 1980s. The dreams of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to an unfolding nightmare. The circumstances under which the Indian and Chinese environmental movements emerged were very different from those of their counterparts in North America, Europe, and Japan earlier in the century. In Asia, rapid growth followed, rather than preceded, awareness of scarcity and natural limits. And a sense of fragility before the power of nature, a sense that hard-won gains were under threat, led authorities in India and China to the defiant, even violent defense of large technological solutions to the problem of water.
In India, the crisis of river pollution was clearly visible by the 1980s. In their first report on India’s environment, Anil Agarwal and his colleagues at the Centre for Science and Environment wrote that “river pollution in India has reached a crisis point. A list of India’s polluted rivers reads like a roll of the dead.” They described the holy Ganges as a “network of cesspools,” and came up with a grim list of industries responsible for the damage: “DDT factories, tanneries, paper and pulp mills, petrochemical and fertilizer complexes, rubber factories…”29 A few years later, Darryl D’Monte, a pioneer of Indian environmental journalism and a contributor to the Centre for Science and Environment’s report, declared that the “destruction of life support systems along the Himalayas” constituted “the world’s single biggest ecological crisis.”30
In 1985, a campaigning lawyer, M. C. Mehta, took up the river’s cause. Mehta, born in a small village in Jammu and Kashmir state, worked as a public interest litigation lawyer in India’s supreme court. A 1984 visit to the Taj Mahal awakened him to the harm being done to the monument by polluting factories nearby—by the early 1980s, the Taj Mahal’s lustrous marble had been stained a dirty yellow. Mehta filed a public interest case against the offending industries. The following year, he turned his attention to the pollution of the Ganges. In a series of landmark cases, heard weekly over several years, Mehta succeeded in having three hundred factories closed and five thousand forced to install cleaner technology; the court ordered 250 municipalities to install sewage treatment plants. Mehta’s were the most significant cases brought under India’s Water Act of 1974; their proceedings revealed the extent of river pollution in India by the 1980s. In its 1988 judgment on a case Mehta brought against the owners of tanneries in the industrial town of Kanpur, the Supreme Court of India noted that “any further pollution of the river is likely to lead to a catastrophe.” They noted the relentless discharge of sewage and chemical effluent into the river. In another case the same year, Mehta took on Kanpur Municipality. He brought as evidence a report from the Industrial Toxicology Research Centre, which showed that the water of the Ganges was completely unfit for human consumption.31 Mehta won his cases; the polluting industries were ordered to amend their ways. But in comparison with the scale of the problem of river pollution in India, these were small victories in an enormous battle.
Beginning in the 1980s, river pollution in India reached crisis proportions. CREDIT: Dominique Faget/Getty Images
PROPELLED BY ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION FAR MORE RAPID than India’s, China’s rivers endured a comparable assault. In China, too, under tighter political constraints, the 1980s saw the emergence of an environmental movement—and there, too, water was a prime concern. One of China’s first private environmental organizations, Friends of Nature, was formed by Liang Congjie in 1993. Liang Congjie’s grandfather was Liang Qichao, the prominent late-nineteenth-century reformer; his father was an architectural conservationist who suffered brutal persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Liang Congjie took a keen interest in environmental issues from the 1980s. His approach initially was cautious; his activism began with seemingly innocuous targets, like his campaign to save the chiru, or Tibetan antelope. But Friends of Nature, like its counterparts in India, harnessed the power of information to illuminate a slow crisis. The organization began to publish the China Environment Yearbook, which was akin to the State of the Indian Environment reports, if less overtly critical of the government. Anxieties about water pollution and water shortages multiplied in China in the 1980s and 1990s, prompted by the breakneck pace of urbanization.32
In the 1990s, around the same time that P. Sainath undertook his investigative tour of rural India, journalist Ma Jun published a series of articles for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on the state of China’s waters, culminating in his influential 1999 book China’s Water Crisis. He wrote of his realization that government officials and engineers were “trying to rob nature of the last drop of water to serve economic expansion.” He noted that “while most people regarded the floods, dry spells, and sandstorms as some sort of evil force that demanded even larger engineering projects, I began to view them as nature’s way of retaliating for man’s reckless attempt to conquer and harness nature.” He described how the flow of the Yellow River—the “mother river,” cradle of Chinese civilization—began to decrease from 1972. In 1997, for a period of 330 days, the Yellow River failed altogether to reach the ocean. Ma Jun called the abuse of China’s rivers a “heinous crime,” as he made an emotional appeal to the power of the rivers and the reverence with which they had been treated for centuries. “To rescue the dying rivers with our devotion and work would be our most glorious effort,” he urged.
The most shocking passages of his book described the pollution of the lower Yangzi River—we can see similarities in both tone and content with the writings of Indian environmentalists. Ma Jun described the river as “a vast open sea of garbage and sewage.” It was clogged by rubbish from the dense traffic on the river: “Styrofoam lunch boxes and vegetable scraps, toilet waste, cooking oil, machine oil and industrial muck.” Worst of all was the pollution from the cities. Ma Jun wrote that “day by day, week by week, month by month, in a monotonously inexorable fashion, they throw or pour the detritus of 400 million people into the waterway.” In China, as in India, minor triumphs, small cleanups, have failed to stem a hurricane of waste.33
FACED WITH MULTIPLE WATER CRISES, THE INDIAN AND CHINESE states fell back on the strategy that they had favored since the 1940s—to turn, again and again, to large-scale hydraulic engineering. Ecological and social harm reinforced each other in the case of large dams, which continued to be constructed on an ever-expanding scale even after groundwater became a far more important source of water for irrigation. While they drowned forests and flooded fields, they also displaced millions of people. Concerns with the social suffering caused by large engineering schemes joined fears about water pollution to form a second major strand of environmental activism. Here, too, India was at the vanguard. The 1980s saw an escalation in the scale and reach of protest against large dams in India.
In 1978, India sought World Bank assistance for the mammoth Narmada project, which called for the construction of 30 large, 135 medium-sized, and 3,000 small dams along the Narmada River, which flowed west through the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat to the Arabian Sea.34 In 1985, the World Bank committed US$450 million to the project, around 10 percent of its total cost. Little
had changed since the 1950s in the Indian government’s iron certainty that the benefits of the project would outweigh its costs. On their initial estimate, seven thousand families would be displaced by the project. Plans were made for rehabilitation, but in keeping with common practice, only those with formal title to their lands were included. As the true scale of displacement and environmental destruction emerged, resistance grew. In the late 1980s, a cluster of nongovernmental organizations—a broad coalition that included human rights groups, environmentalists, students, and local people’s associations—came together to form the Narmada Bachao Andolan, or NBA (“Save Narmada Movement”), led by the social activist Medha Patkar. Patkar, born in Mumbai in 1954 to parents who were active in the nationalist and labor movements, studied social work at the prestigious Tata Institute of Social Sciences, but abandoned the doctoral dissertation she had started as she became more involved with the struggles of marginalized communities along the Narmada valley. Under her leadership, the NBA harnessed the power of Gandhian nonviolent protest and drew on a rich vein of ideas that insisted on people’s sovereignty over their lands and landscapes. Among their most resonant techniques was the “monsoon Satyagraha”—silent demonstrations held as the river’s waters rose during the monsoon, slowly submerging the protesters until they stood waist-deep in water. It appealed symbolically to the power of climate and seasonality, which the dams sought to engineer away.35
The NBA succeeded in harnessing international support. In the United States, Lori Udall of the Environmental Defense Fund took up the fight. Patkar met with the World Bank in 1987, and pressure on the bank from international supporters of the Narmada movement led it, in 1991, to initiate an inquiry into the project. The bank’s decision to withdraw funding for the project in 1993 was a victory for the Narmada movement, and marked a shift in the bank’s previously uncritical support for large dams.36 But the Indian government’s response was defiant. Alongside nonviolent resistance, the Narmada movement took to the courts: they had some early success, and then, from the late 1990s, faced a series of defeats as the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the project’s continuation. The World Bank’s withdrawal served to harden the government’s resolve to find private finance for the Narmada project. When the Sardar Sarovar Dam was finally declared open in autumn 2017 by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi—who had strongly supported the Narmada project when he was chief minister of Gujarat, condemning environmentalists as “anti-development” and purveyors of a “campaign of misinformation”—he took pains to point out that “with or without the World Bank, we completed this massive project on our own.”37
Environmental activist Medha Patkar, leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, joins a protest against the construction of a court complex at Pipliyahana Reservoir near Indore. CREDIT: Hindustan Times/Getty Images
Resistance to the Narmada Dam drew attention to the harm, both environmental and social, that arose from India’s post-independence addiction to large dams. Research undertaken by scientists and activists in the 1980s and 1990s showed that these problems combined to devastating effect. In the first two decades after India’s independence, an estimated half-million hectares of forest was submerged by dams; this loss of land accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s with ever-larger projects like the Narmada scheme and the equally controversial Polavaram Dam in Andhra, along the Godavari River. The dams themselves suffered from the failure of their designs to take into account the quantity of silt the rivers carried. Their architects had underestimated the extent of the problem, as silt-heavy rivers clogged up reservoirs. The lifespans of the great Bhakra and Hirakud Dams—two of the first to be built after independence—was significantly reduced by higher rates of siltation than planners anticipated. Large dams also caused a major problem with waterlogging—inundating agricultural land beyond its capacity to absorb moisture and so rendering it infertile. An estimated thirty-three thousand hectares of productive land were lost as a result of the Tungabhadra Dam. Here we see yet another contrast—as India’s arid regions drew down their water tables by pumping groundwater, well-watered areas near the headworks of large dams suffered from excess. As they interfered with the ecology of water, dams also created the conditions for water- and insect-borne diseases to thrive. Many studies around large dams in India and elsewhere showed a significant rise in the incidence of malaria, as large reservoirs and canals provided conditions for the anopheles mosquito to flourish.38
All the while, the social disruption caused by large dams continued unabated. As we saw, the most comprehensive estimate for the number of people that have been displaced by dams in India since independence reaches 40 million people. The projects with the highest cost in lives disrupted were those of the 1980s: two of the largest dams in the Narmada project, the Sardar Sarovar and the Narmada Sagar, displaced two hundred thousand people each. A high proportion of those displaced were marginalized adivasis (tribal peoples), who had little power to negotiate adequate compensation from the state.39 The fate of these internal refugees—refugees from water development projects—too often goes unrecorded. The work of journalists like P. Sainath and environmental campaigning organizations like the NBA has brought some of their stories to light. Novelist Arundhati Roy found a wide international audience with a visceral essay on the profound costs of India’s addiction to large dams, though her polemical style also drew criticism.40 Others have turned to fiction to depict their suffering. In 2001, Vairamuthu—a prolific lyricist who has written the words to more than seven thousand Tamil film songs—wrote a novel, Kallikaatu Ithihaasam (“Saga of the Drylands”), which won him the Sahitya Akademi award in 2003, India’s highest literary honor. Vairamuthu chose a historical setting from his childhood to explore the suffering of those displaced in the name of progress. As a child, in the 1950s, Vairamuthu lived in one of fourteen villages flooded by the Vaigai Dam in Madurai, in southern Tamil Nadu. The wide attention his work received had a striking contemporary resonance in the 2000s, when debates about dams and displacement raged in India.41
AFTER ITS NARMADA DEBACLE, THE WORLD BANK SUPPORTED THE creation of a World Commission on Dams in 1997, charged with assessing the benefits and costs of dam building worldwide over the previous half century. The commission’s membership included strong supporters as well as opponents of dams, among them Medha Patkar—but its report, when it appeared in 2000, was more critical of large dams than most critics expected it to be. The commissioners estimated that on average dams were 56 percent overbudget, and that they delivered less irrigation water and hydropower than they promised. The commission’s assessment of their environmental impact was equally bleak. Challenging the view that hydropower was an ecologically preferable alternative to the use of fossil fuels, the commission’s studies pointed to the large greenhouse gas emissions from rotting vegetation in the reservoirs of large dams. It also pointed to the ecological consequences that Indian scholars and environmentalists had long highlighted—dams altered river flow to the detriment of aquatic habitats; they interfered with the paths of migratory fish. By impounding silt, they robbed lands downstream of fertility.42
One of the consultants to the World Commission on Dams was Ramaswamy Iyer, a career civil servant who served as India’s secretary of water resources in the mid-1980s. Iyer’s intellectual rigor and honesty set him apart, reflected in his willingness to change his mind. As water secretary, Iyer had taken for granted the value of large dams. He played an important role in pushing through government approval for the Narmada project. But by the end of the 1980s, he began to be influenced by what he called “newly emerging concerns about environmental impacts and the displacement of large numbers of people.” Environmental thinking began to influence government decisions in the late 1980s, he recalled, but the growing force of popular opposition to dams led to what he describes as a “retreat from enlightenment” in the 1990s. Indian administrators and policymakers came to view Medha Patkar and all that she represented with antagonism, particularly after the World Ba
nk’s withdrawal of funding for the Narmada project. The Indian government’s response to the World Commission on Dams was brusque dismissal. The cavalcade of arguments about the harmful effects of large dams fell on deaf ears. Searching and thoughtful in his analysis, Iyer turned to history for illumination. The fundamental problem, he discerned, was the persistence of a deep legacy of water engineering, going back to Arthur Cotton; this had bequeathed to India a Western tradition of water engineering, to which Iyer had no objection, “but also the underlying Promethean attitude to nature,” which he had started to see as more problematic. To that tradition was added a distinctively postcolonial addiction to what Iyer called the “magic spell of gigantism.”43
Far from retreating from dam construction, the Indian state redoubled its efforts in the 2000s. It embarked on a scheme to link India’s rivers, through one of the largest and most expensive construction projects in human history. It plans to spend at least US$80 billion on a project to link thirty-seven of its rivers through 14,000 kilometers of canals, transferring 170 billion cubic meters of water across India. Among the promised benefits of the scheme are an additional thirty to thirty-five gigawatts of electricity and better water supply for irrigation. The roots of the river linkage scheme lie in the nineteenth century, in the dreams of Arthur Cotton. More proximately, it was the brainchild of irrigation engineer K. L. Rao, who had worked alongside Kanwar Sain and A. N. Kholsa to launch India’s dam-building revolution after independence. The idea gained traction in the 2000s, under the coalition government dominated by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. In 2012, the Indian Supreme Court decreed that it was a matter of “national interest” and that the project should be completed as quickly as possible. Environmentalists have raised concerns about the project’s consequences and its disruption to already fragile hydrological systems.44