Those who had some land left tried to cultivate it, but Kevadia municipality introduced a scheme in which they brought in pigs to eat uncollected refuse on the streets. The pigs stray into the villagers’ fields and destroy their crops.
In 1992, thirty years later, each family has been offered a sum of Rs 12,000 per acre, up to a maximum of Rs 36,000, provided they agree to leave their homes and go away! Yet 40 percent of the land that was acquired is lying unused. The government refuses to return it. Eleven acres acquired from Deviben, who is a widow now, has been given over to the Swami Narayan Trust (a big religious sect). On a small portion of it, the trust runs a little school. The rest it cultivates, while Deviben watches through the barbed-wire fence. On two hundred acres acquired in the village of Gora, villagers were evicted and blocks of flats were built. They lay empty for years. Eventually the government rented them for a nominal fee to Jai Prakash Associates, the dam contractors, who, the villagers say, sublet them privately for Rs 32,000 a month. (Jai Prakash Associates, the biggest dam contractors in the country, the real nation-builders, owns the Siddharth Continental and the Vasant Continental Hotels in Delhi.)
On an area of about thirty acres there is an absurd cement Public Works Department replica of the ancient Shoolpaneshwar temple that was submerged in the reservoir. The same political formation that plunged a whole nation into a bloody, medieval nightmare because it insisted on destroying an old mosque to dig up a nonexistent temple thinks nothing of submerging a hallowed pilgrimage route and hundreds of temples that have been worshiped in for centuries.
It thinks nothing of destroying the sacred hills and groves, the places of worship, the ancient homes of the gods and demons of the Adivasis.
It thinks nothing of submerging a valley that has yielded fossils, microliths, and rock paintings, the only valley in India, according to archaeologists, that contains an uninterrupted record of human occupation from the Old Stone Age.
What can one say?
In Kevadia Colony, the most barbaric joke of all is the wildlife museum. The Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary Interpretation Center gives you quick, comprehensive evidence of the government’s sincere commitment to conservation.
The Sardar Sarovar reservoir, when the dam reaches its full height, is going to submerge about 13,000 hectares of prime forest land. (In anticipation of submergence, the forest began to be felled many greedy years ago.) Between the Narmada Sagar dam and the Sardar Sarovar dam, 50,000 hectares of old-growth, broad-leaved forest will be submerged. Madhya Pradesh has the highest rate of forest-cover loss in the whole of India. This is partly responsible for the reduced flow in the Narmada and the increase in siltation. Have engineers made the connection between forest, rivers, and rain? Unlikely. It isn’t part of their brief. Environmentalists and conservationists were quite rightly alarmed at the extent of loss of biodiversity and wildlife habitat that the submergence would cause. To mitigate this loss, the government decided to expand the Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary near the dam, south of the river. There is a harebrained scheme that envisages drowning animals from the submerged forests swimming their way to “wildlife corridors” that will be created for them, and setting up home in the New! Improved! Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary.
Presumably wildlife and biodiversity can be protected and maintained only if human activity is restricted and traditional rights to use forest resources curtailed. Forty thousand Adivasis from 101 villages within the boundaries of the Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary depend on the forest for a livelihood. They will be “persuaded” to leave.
They are not included in the definition of “Project-Affected.”
Where will they go? I imagine you know by now.
Whatever their troubles in the real world, in the Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary Interpretation Center (where an old stuffed leopard and a moldy sloth bear have to make do with a shared corner) the Adivasis have a whole room to themselves. On the walls there are clumsy wooden carvings, government-approved Adivasi art, with signs that say tribal art. In the center there is a life-sized thatched hut with the door open. The pot’s on the fire, the dog is asleep on the floor, and all’s well with the world. Outside, to welcome you, are Mr. and Mrs. Adivasi. A lumpy papier-mâché couple, smiling.
Smiling. They’re not even permitted the grace of rage. That’s what I can’t get over.
Oh, but have I got it wrong? What if they’re smiling with national pride? Brimming with the joy of having sacrificed their lives to bring drinking water to thirsty millions in Gujarat?
For twenty years now, the people of Gujarat have waited for the water they believe the Wonder Canal will bring them. For years the government of Gujarat has invested 85 percent of the state’s irrigation budget into the Sardar Sarovar Projects. Every smaller, quicker, local, more feasible scheme has been set aside for the sake of this. Election after election has been contested and won on the “water ticket.” Everyone’s hopes are pinned to the Wonder Canal. Will she fulfill Gujarat’s dreams?
From the Sardar Sarovar dam, the Narmada flows through 180 kilometers of rich lowland into the Arabian Sea in Bharuch. What the Wonder Canal does, more or less, is to reroute most of the river, bending it almost 90 degrees northward. It’s a pretty drastic thing to do to a river. The Narmada estuary in Bharuch is one of the last-known breeding places of the hilsa, probably the hottest contender for India’s favorite fish.
The Stanley dam wiped out hilsa from the Cauvery River in south India, and Pakistan’s Ghulam Mohammed dam destroyed its spawning area on the Indus. Hilsa, like the salmon, is an anadromous fish—born in freshwater, migrating to the ocean as a smolt, and returning to the river to spawn. The drastic reduction in water flow, the change in the chemistry of the water because of all the sediment trapped behind the dam, will radically alter the ecology of the estuary and modify the delicate balance of freshwater and seawater, which is bound to affect the spawning. At present, the Narmada estuary produces 13,000 metric tons of hilsa and freshwater prawn (which also breeds in brackish water). Ten thousand fisher families depend on it for a living.67
The Morse Committee was appalled to discover that no studies had been done of the downstream environment68—no documentation of the riverine ecosystem, its seasonal changes, its biological species, or the pattern of how its resources are used. The dam-builders had no idea what the impact of the dam would be on the people and the environment downstream, let alone any ideas on what steps to take to mitigate it.
The government simply says that it will alleviate the loss of hilsa fisheries by stocking the reservoir with hatchery-bred fish. (Who’ll control the reservoir? Who’ll grant the commercial fishing to its favorite paying customers?) The only hitch is that, so far, scientists have not managed to breed hilsa artificially. The rearing of hilsa depends on getting spawn from wild adults, which will in all likelihood be eliminated by the dam. Dams have either eliminated or endangered one-fifth of the world’s freshwater fish.69
So! Quiz question—where will the 40,000 fisherfolk go? E-mail your answers to The Government That Cares dot com.
At the risk of losing readers—I’ve been warned several times, “How can you write about irrigation? Who the hell is interested?”—let me tell you what the Wonder Canal is and what she’s meant to achieve. Be interested, if you want to snatch your future back from the sweaty palms of the Iron Triangle.
Most rivers in India are monsoon-fed. Eighty to eighty-five percent of the flow takes place during the rainy months—usually between June and September. The purpose of a dam, an irrigation dam, is to store monsoon water in its reservoir and then use it judiciously for the rest of the year, distributing it across dry land through a system of canals. The area of land irrigated by the canal network is called the “command area.”
How will the command area, accustomed only to seasonal irrigation, its entire ecology designed for that single pulse of monsoon rain, react to being irrigated
the whole year round? Perennial irrigation does to soil roughly what anabolic steroids do to the human body. Steroids can turn an ordinary athlete into an Olympic medal–winner; perennial irrigation can convert soil that produced only a single crop a year into soil that yields several crops a year. Land on which farmers traditionally grew crops that don’t need a great deal of water (maize, millet, barley, and a whole range of pulses) suddenly yield water-guzzling cash crops—cotton, rice, soybeans, and the biggest guzzler of all (like those finned fifties cars), sugarcane. This completely alters traditional crop patterns in the command area. People stop growing things that they can afford to eat and start growing things that they can only afford to sell. By linking themselves to the “market” they lose control over their lives.
Ecologically too this is a poisonous payoff. Even if the markets hold out, the soil doesn’t. Over time it becomes too poor to support the extra demands made on it. Gradually, in the way a steroid-using athlete becomes an invalid, the soil becomes depleted and degraded, and agricultural yields begin to decrease.70
In India, land irrigated by well water is today almost twice as productive as land irrigated by canals.71 Certain kinds of soil are less suitable for perennial irrigation than others. Perennial canal irrigation raises the level of the water table. As the water moves up through the soil, it absorbs salts. Saline water is drawn to the surface by capillary action, and the land becomes waterlogged. The “logged” water (to coin a phrase) is then breathed into the atmosphere by plants, causing an even greater concentration of salts in the soil. When the concentration of salts in the soil reaches 1 percent, that soil becomes toxic to plant life. This is what’s called salinization.
A study72 by the Center for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University says that one-fifth of the world’s irrigated land is salt-affected.
By the mid-1980s, 25 million of the 37 million hectares under irrigation in Pakistan were estimated to be either salinized or waterlogged or both.73 In India the estimates vary between 6 and 10 million hectares.74 According to “secret” government studies,75 more than 52 percent of the Sardar Sarovar command area is prone to waterlogging and salinization.
And that’s not the end of the bad news.
The 460-kilometer-long, concrete-lined Sardar Sarovar Wonder Canal and its 75,000-kilometer network of branch canals and sub-branch canals is designed to irrigate a total of 2 million hectares of land spread over twelve districts. The districts of Kutch and Saurashtra (the billboards of Gujarat’s thirst campaign) are at the very tail end of this network.
The system of canals superimposes an arbitrary concrete grid on the existing pattern of natural drainage in the command area. It’s a little like reorganizing the pattern of reticulate veins on the surface of a leaf. When a canal cuts across the path of a natural drain, it blocks the flow of the natural, seasonal water and leads to waterlogging. The engineering solution to this is to map the pattern of natural drainage in the area and replace it with an alternate artificial drainage system that is built in conjunction with the canals. The problem, as you can imagine, is that doing this is enormously expensive. The cost of drainage is not included as part of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. It usually isn’t, in most irrigation projects.
David Hopper, the World Bank’s vice president for South Asia, has admitted76 that the Bank does not usually include the cost of drainage in its irrigation projects in South Asia because irrigation projects with adequate drainage are just too expensive. It costs five times as much to provide adequate drainage as it does to irrigate the same amount of land. It makes the cost of a complete project appear unviable.
The Bank’s solution to the problem is to put in the irrigation system and wait—for salinity and waterlogging to set in. When all the money’s spent and the land is devastated and the people are in despair, who should pop by? Why, the friendly neighborhood banker! And what’s that bulge in his pocket? Could it be a loan for a drainage project?
In Pakistan, the World Bank financed the Tarbela (1977) and Mangla dam (1967) projects on the Indus. The command areas are waterlogged.77 Now the Bank has given Pakistan a $785 million loan for a drainage project. In India, in Punjab and in Haryana, it’s doing the same.
Irrigation without drainage is like having a system of arteries and no veins. Pretty damn pointless.
Since the World Bank stepped back from the Sardar Sarovar Projects, it’s a little unclear where the money for the drainage is going to come from. This hasn’t deterred the government from going ahead with the canal work. The result is that even before the dam is ready, before the Wonder Canal has been commissioned, before a single drop of irrigation water has been delivered, waterlogging has set in. Among the worst-affected areas are the resettlement colonies.
There is a difference between the planners of the Sardar Sarovar irrigation scheme and the planners of previous projects. At least they acknowledge that water-logging and salinization are real problems and need to be addressed.
Their solutions, however, are corny enough to send a Hoolock gibbon to a hooting hospital.
They plan to have a series of electronic groundwater sensors placed in every 100 square kilometers of the command area. (That works out to about 1,800 ground sensors.) These will be linked to a central computer that will analyze the data and send out commands to the canal heads to stop water flowing into areas that show signs of waterlogging. A network of “Only irrigation,” “Only drainage,” and “Irrigation cum drainage” tube-wells will be sunk, and electronically synchronized by the central computer. The saline water will be pumped out, mixed with mathematically computed quantities of freshwater, and then recirculated into a network of surface and subsurface drains (for which more land will be acquired).78
To achieve the irrigation efficiency that they claim they’ll achieve, according to a study done by Dr. Rahul Ram for Kalpavriksh,79 82 percent of the water that goes into the Wonder Canal network will have to be pumped out again!
They’ve never implemented an electronic irrigation scheme before, not even as a pilot project. It hasn’t occurred to them to experiment with some already degraded land, just to see if it works. No, they’ll use our money to install it over the whole of the 2 million hectares and then see if it works.
What if it doesn’t? If it doesn’t, it won’t matter to the planners. They’ll still draw the same salaries. They’ll still get their pensions and their bonuses and whatever else you get when you retire from a career of inflicting mayhem on a people.
How can it possibly work? It’s like sending in a rocket scientist to milk a troublesome cow. How can they manage a gigantic electronic irrigation system when they can’t even line the walls of the canals without having them collapse and cause untold damage to crops and people?
When they can’t even prevent the Big Dam itself from breaking off in bits when it rains?
To quote from one of their own studies: “The design, the implementation and management of the integration of groundwater and surface water in the above circumstance is complex.”80
Agreed. To say the least.
Their recommendation of how to deal with the complexity: “It will only be possible to implement such a system if all groundwater and surface water supplies are managed by a single authority.”81
Aha!
It’s beginning to make sense now. Who will own the water? The Single Authority.
Who will sell the water? The Single Authority.
Who will profit from the sales? The Single Authority.
The Single Authority has a scheme whereby it will sell water by the liter, not to individuals but to farmers’ cooperatives (which don’t exist just yet, but no doubt the Single Authority can create cooperatives and force farmers to cooperate).
Computer water, unlike ordinary river water, is expensive. Only those who can afford it will get it. Gradually, small
farmers will get edged out by big farmers, and the whole cycle of uprootment will begin all over again.
The Single Authority, because it owns the computer water, will also decide who will grow what. It says that farmers getting computer water will not be allowed to grow sugarcane because they’ll use up the share of the thirsty millions who live at the tail end of the canal. But the Single Authority has already given licenses to ten large sugar mills right near the head of the canal.82 The chief promoter of one of them is Sanat Mehta, who was chairman of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam for several years. The chief promoter of another sugar mill was Chimanbhai Patel, former chief minister of Gujarat. He (along with his wife) was the most vocal, ardent proponent of the Sardar Sarovar dam. When he died, his ashes were scattered over the dam site.
In Maharashtra, thanks to a different branch of the Single Authority, the politically powerful sugar lobby that occupies one-tenth of the state’s irrigated land uses half the state’s irrigation water.
In addition to the sugar growers, the Single Authority has recently announced a scheme83 that envisages a series of five-star hotels, golf courses, and water parks that will come up along the Wonder Canal. What earthly reason could possibly justify this?
The Single Authority says it’s the only way to raise money to complete the project!
I really worry about those millions of good people in Kutch and Saurashtra.
Will the water ever reach them?
First of all, we know that there’s a lot less water in the river than the Single Authority claims there is.
Second of all, in the absence of the Narmada Sagar dam, the irrigation benefits of the Sardar Sarovar drop by a further 17 to 30 percent.
The End of Imagination Page 17