My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  In the French-Canadian wars of the 1770s, Lord Amherst exterminated most of Canada’s Native Indians by offering them blankets infested with the smallpox virus. Two centuries on, we of the Real India have found less obvious ways of achieving similar ends.

  The millions of displaced people in India are nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we, like the citizens of White America and French Canada and Hitler’s Germany, are condoning it by looking away. Why? Because we’re told that it’s being done for the sake of the Greater Common Good. That it’s being done in the name of Progress, in the name of the National Interest (which, of course, is paramount). Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we’re told. We believe what it benefits us to believe.

  Allow me to shake your faith. Put your hand in mine and let me lead you through the maze. Do this because it’s important that you understand. If you find reason to disagree, by all means take the other side. But please don’t ignore it, don’t look away. It isn’t an easy tale to tell. It’s full of numbers and explanations. Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not anymore. Not since I began to follow the direction in which they point.

  Trust me. There’s a story here.

  It’s true that India has progressed. It’s true that in 1947, when colonialism formally ended, India was food deficient. In 1950 we produced 51 million tons of food grain. Today we produce close to 200 million tons.20

  It’s true that in 1995 the state granaries were overflowing with 30 million tons of unsold grain. It’s also true that at the same time, 40 percent of India’s population—more than 350 million people—were living below the poverty line.21 That’s more than the country’s population in 1947.

  Indians are too poor to buy the food their country produces. Indians are being forced to grow the kinds of food they can’t afford to eat themselves. Look at what happened in Kalahandi District in western Orissa, best known for its starvation deaths. In the drought of 1996, people died of starvation (sixteen according to the state, over one hundred according to the press).22 Yet that same year rice production in Kalahandi was higher than the national average! Rice was exported from Kalahandi District to the center.

  Certainly India has progressed, but most of its people haven’t. Our leaders say that we must have nuclear missiles to protect us from the threat of China and Pakistan. But who will protect us from ourselves?

  What kind of country is this? Who owns it? Who runs it? What’s going on?

  It’s time to spill a few state secrets. To puncture the myth about the inefficient, bumbling, corrupt, but ultimately genial, essentially democratic Indian State. Carelessness cannot account for fifty million disappeared people. Nor can Karma. Let’s not delude ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless, and 100 percent man-made.

  The Indian State is not a state that has failed. It is a state that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India’s resources—its land, its water, its forests, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air—and redistributed them to a favored few (in return, no doubt, for a few favors). It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up elite, consummate in its methods of pulverizing those who inconvenience its intentions. But its finest feat of all is the way it achieves all this and emerges smelling sweet. The way it manages to keep its secrets, to contain information—that vitally concerns the daily lives of one billion people—in government files, accessible only to the keepers of the flame: ministers, bureaucrats, state engineers, defense strategists. Of course we make it easy for them, we its beneficiaries. We take care not to dig too deep. We don’t really want to know the grisly details.

  Thanks to us, Independence came (and went), elections come and go, but there has been no shuffling of the deck. On the contrary, the old order has been consecrated, the rift fortified. We, the rulers, won’t pause to look up from our groaning table. We don’t seem to know that the resources we’re feasting on are finite and rapidly depleting. There’s cash in the bank, but soon there’ll be nothing left to buy with it. The food’s running out in the kitchen. And the servants haven’t eaten yet. Actually, the servants stopped eating a long time ago.

  India lives in her villages, we’re told, in every other sanctimonious public speech. That’s bullshit. It’s just another fig leaf from the government’s bulging wardrobe. India doesn’t live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India’s villages live only to serve her cities. Her villagers are her citizens’ vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.

  This impression we have of an overstretched State, struggling to cope with the sheer weight and scale of its problems, is a dangerous one. The fact is that it’s creating the problems. It’s a giant poverty-producing machine, masterful in its methods of pitting the poor against the very poor, of flinging crumbs to the wretched so that they dissipate their energies fighting each other, while peace (and advertising) reigns in the Master’s Lodgings.

  Until this process is recognized for what it is, until it is addressed and attacked, elections—however fiercely they’re contested—will continue to be mock battles that serve only to further entrench unspeakable inequity. Democracy (our version of it) will continue to be the benevolent mask behind which a pestilence flourishes unchallenged. On a scale that will make old wars and past misfortunes look like controlled laboratory experiments. Already fifty million people have been fed into the Development mill and have emerged as air conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits—subsidized air conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits. If we must have these nice things—and they are nice—at least we should be made to pay for them.

  There’s a hole in the flag that needs mending.

  It’s a sad thing to have to say, but as long as we have faith, we have no hope. To hope, we have to break the faith. We have to fight specific wars in specific ways and we have to fight to win. Listen, then, to the story of the Narmada valley. Understand it. And, if you wish, enlist. Who knows, it may lead to magic.

  The Narmada wells up on the plateau of Amarkantak in the Shahdol District of Madhya Pradesh, then winds its way through 1,300 kilometers of beautiful, broad-leaved forest and perhaps the most fertile agricultural land in India. Twenty-five million people live in the river valley, linked to the ecosystem and to each other by an ancient intricate web of interdependence (and, no doubt, exploitation).

  Though the Narmada has been targeted for “water resource development” for more than fifty years now, the reason it has, until recently, evaded being captured and dismembered is that it flows through three states—Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat.

  Ninety percent of the river flows through Madhya Pradesh; it merely skirts the northern border of Maharashtra, then flows through Gujarat for about 180 kilometers before emptying into the Arabian Sea at Bharuch.

  As early as 1946, plans had been afoot to dam the river at Gora in Gujarat. In 1961 Nehru laid the foundation stone for a 49.8-meter-high dam—the midget progenitor of the Sardar Sarovar.

  Around the same time, the Survey of India drew up new topographical maps of the river basin. The dam planners in Gujarat studied the new maps and decided that it would be more profitable to build a much bigger dam. But this meant hammering out an agreement with neighboring states.

  For years the three states bickered and balked but failed to agree on a water-sharing formula. Eventually, in 1969, the central government set up the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal. It took the tribunal another ten years to announce its award.

  The people whose lives were going to be devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard.

  To apportion shares in the waters, the first, most basic thing the tribunal had to do was to find out how much water there was in the river. Usually this can only be reliably estimated if there is at least forty years of recorded data on the volume of actual flo
w in the river. Since this was not available, they decided to extrapolate from rainfall data. They arrived at a figure of 27.22 million acre feet (MAF).23

  This figure is the statistical bedrock of the Narmada Valley Projects. We are still living with its legacy. It more or less determines the overall design of the projects—the height, location, and number of dams. By inference, it determines the cost of the projects, how much area will be submerged, how many people will be displaced, and what the benefits will be.

  In 1992 actual observed flow data for the Narmada—which was now available for forty-five years (from 1948 to 1992)— showed that the yield from the river was only 22.69 MAF—18 percent less!24 The Central Water Commission admits that there is less water in the Narmada than had previously been assumed.25 The government of India says: “It may be noted that clause II [of the decision of the tribunal] relating to determination of dependable flow as 28 MAF is nonreviewable”!26

  Never mind the data—the Narmada is legally bound by human decree to produce as much water as the government of India commands.

  Its proponents boast that the Narmada Valley Projects are the most ambitious river valley development scheme ever conceived in human history. They plan to build 3,200 dams that will reconstitute the Narmada and her forty-one tributaries into a series of step reservoirs—an immense staircase of amenable water. Of these, 30 will be major dams, 135 medium, and the rest small. Two of the major dams will be multipurpose megadams. The Sardar Sarovar in Gujarat and the Narmada Sagar in Madhya Pradesh will, between them, hold more water than any other reservoir on the Indian subcontinent.

  Whichever way you look at it, the Narmada Valley Development Projects are Big. They will alter the ecology of the entire river basin of one of India’s biggest rivers. For better or for worse, they will affect the lives of twenty-five million people who live in the valley. They will submerge and destroy 4,000 square kilometers of natural deciduous forest.27 Yet even before the Ministry of Environment cleared the projects, the World Bank offered to finance the linchpin of the project—the Sardar Sarovar Dam, whose reservoir displaces people in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra but whose benefits go to Gujarat. The Bank was ready with its checkbook before any costs were computed, before any studies had been done, before anybody had any idea of what the human cost or the environmental impact of the dam would be!

  The $450 million loan for the Sardar Sarovar Projects was sanctioned and in place in 1985. The Ministry of Environment clearance for the project came only in 1987! Talk about enthusiasm. It fairly borders on evangelism. Can anybody care so much?

  Why were they so keen?

  Between 1947 and 1994 the World Bank’s management had submitted six thousand projects to the executive board. The board hadn’t turned down a single one. Not a single one. Terms like “moving money” and “meeting loan targets” suddenly begin to make sense.

  India is in a situation today where it pays back more money to the Bank in interest and repayment installments than it receives from it. We are forced to incur new debts in order to be able to repay our old ones. According to the World Bank Annual Report, last year (1998), after the arithmetic, India paid the Bank $478 million more than it borrowed. Over the last five years (1993 to 1998) India paid the Bank $1.475 billion more than it received.28

  The relationship between us is exactly like the relationship between a landless laborer steeped in debt and the village moneylender—it is an affectionate relationship, the poor man loves his moneylender because he’s always there when he’s needed. It’s not for nothing that we call the world a global village. The only difference between the landless laborer and the government of India is that one uses the money to survive; the other just funnels it into the private coffers of its officers and agents, pushing the country into an economic bondage that it may never overcome.

  The international dam industry is worth $20 billion a year.29 If you follow the trails of Big Dams the world over, wherever you go—China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala—you’ll rub up against the same story, encounter the same actors: the Iron Triangle (dam jargon for the nexus comprising politicians, bureaucrats, and dam-construction companies), the racketeers who call themselves International Environmental Consultants (who are usually directly employed by dam builders or their subsidiaries), and, more often than not, the friendly neighborhood World Bank. You’ll grow to recognize the same inflated rhetoric, the same noble “Peoples’ Dam” slogans, the same swift, brutal repression that follows the first sign of civil insubordination. (Of late, especially after its experience in the Narmada valley, the Bank is more cautious about choosing the countries in which it finances projects that involve mass displacement. At present China is its most favored client. It’s the great irony of our times—American citizens protest the massacre in Tiananmen Square, but the Bank has used their money to fund studies for the Three Gorges dam in China, which is going to displace 1.3 million people. The Bank is today the biggest foreign financier of large dams in China.)30

  It’s a skillful circus, and the acrobats know each other well. Occasionally, they’ll swap parts—a bureaucrat will join the Bank, a banker will surface as a project consultant. At the end of play, a huge percentage of what’s called “Development Aid” is rechanneled back to the countries it came from, masquerading as equipment cost or consultants’ fees or salaries to the agencies’ own staff. Often aid is openly “tied” (as in the case of the Japanese loan for the Sardar Sarovar Dam—to a contract for purchasing turbines from the Sumitomo Corporation).31 Sometimes the connections are more murky. In 1993 Britain financed the Pergau Dam in Malaysia with a subsidized loan of £234 million, despite an Overseas Development Administration report that said that the dam would be a “bad buy” for Malaysia. It later emerged that the loan was offered to “encourage” Malaysia to sign a £1.3 billion contract to buy British arms.32

  In 1994 British consultants earned $2.5 billion on overseas contracts.33 The second biggest sector of the market after Project Management was writing what are called EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments). In the Development racket, the rules are pretty simple. If you get invited by a government to write an EIA for a big dam project and you point out a problem (say, you quibble about the amount of water available in a river, or, God forbid, you suggest that the human costs are perhaps too high), then you’re history. You’re an OOWC. An Out-of-Work Consultant. And oops! There goes your Range Rover. There goes your holiday in Tuscany. There goes your children’s private boarding school. There’s good money in poverty. Plus perks.

  In keeping with Big Dam tradition, concurrent with the construction of the 138.68-meter-high Sardar Sarovar Dam began the elaborate government pantomime of conducting studies to estimate the actual project costs and the impact it would have on people and the environment. The World Bank participated wholeheartedly in the charade—occasionally it beetled its brows and raised feeble requests for more information on issues like the resettlement and rehabilitation of what it calls PAPs—Project-Affected Persons. (They help, these acronyms; they manage to mutate muscle and blood into cold statistics. PAPs soon cease to be people.)

  The merest crumbs of information satisfied the Bank, and it proceeded with the project. The implicit, unwritten, but fairly obvious understanding between the concerned agencies was that whatever the costs—economic, environmental, or human—the project would go ahead. They would justify it as they went along. They knew full well that eventually, in a courtroom or to a committee, no argument works as well as a Fait Accompli.

  Milord, the country is losing two crore a day due to the delay.

  The government refers to the Sardar Sarovar Projects as the “most studied project in India,” yet the game goes something like this: when the Tribunal first announced its award and the Gujarat government announced its plan of how it was going to use its share of water, there was no mention of drinking water for villages in Kutch and Saurashtra, the arid areas of Gujarat. When the project ran into political trouble, the gove
rnment suddenly discovered the emotive power of thirst. Suddenly, quenching the thirst of parched throats in Kutch and Saurashtra became the whole point of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Never mind that water from two rivers—the Sabarmati and the Mahi, both of which are miles closer to Kutch and Saurashtra than the Narmada—have been dammed and diverted to Ahmedabad, Mehsana, and Kheda. Neither Kutch nor Saurashtra has seen a drop of it.) Officially, the number of people who will be provided drinking water by the Sardar Sarovar canal fluctuates from 28 million (1983) to 32.5 million (1989)—nice touch, the decimal point!—to 40 million (1992) and down to 25 million (1993).34

  In 1979 the number of villages that would receive drinking water was zero. In the early 1980s it was 4,719. In 1990 it was 7,234. In 1991 it was 8,215.35 When pressed, the government admitted that the figures for 1991 included 236 uninhabited villages!36

  Every aspect of the project is approached in this almost playful manner, as if it’s a family board game. Even when it concerns the lives and futures of vast numbers of people.

  In 1979 the number of families that would be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar reservoir was estimated to be a little over 6,000. In 1987 it grew to 12,000. In 1991 it surged to 27,000. In 1992 the government acknowledged that 40,000 families would be affected. Today, the official figure hovers between 40,000 and 41,500.37 (Of course even this is an absurd figure, because the reservoir isn’t the only thing that displaces people. According to the NBA the actual figure is about 85,000 families—that’s half a million people.)

  The estimated cost of the project bounced up from under Rs 5,000 crore38 to Rs 20,000 crore (officially). The NBA says that it will cost Rs 44,000 crore.39

  The government claims the Sardar Sarovar Projects will produce 1,450 megawatts of power.40 The thing about multipurpose dams like the Sardar Sarovar is that their “purposes” (irrigation, power production, and flood control) conflict with one another. Irrigation uses up the water you need to produce power. Flood control requires you to keep the reservoir empty during the monsoon months to deal with an anticipated surfeit of water. And if there’s no surfeit, you’re left with an empty dam. And this defeats the purpose of irrigation, which is to store the monsoon water. It’s like the conundrum of trying to ford a river with a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain. The result of these mutually conflicting aims, studies say, is that when the Sardar Sarovar Projects are completed and the scheme is fully functional, it will end up producing only 3 percent of the power that its planners say it will. About 50 megawatts. And if you take into account the power needed to pump water through its vast network of canals, the Sardar Sarovar Projects will end up consuming more electricity than they produce!41