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In the valley of India's sacred Narmada River, strong political wills and firmly held values have reached a new stage of confrontation. The struggle over the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project (SSP) has escalated this past year into a battle with high stakes for both major sides. Development engineering and finance interests have converged in support of the SSP, which is Asia's largest hydro project, while anti-dam forces have organized an impressive grassroots movement which has widened the parameters of democratic discourse on the SSP's alleged benefits and hazards. Within this debate are heard the values and arguments of indigenous peoples, mostly Bhil tribals, who face tremendous uncertainty as the subject of the massive displacement planned for their population. Also in the fray are anti-dam forces (like the Narmada Bachao AndolanSave Narmada Movement), government spokespersons, resettlement site residents and various non-govern-mental organizations.
The Narmada conflict occurs within a larger context that extends across India, all of Asia and elsewhere in the world. The challenge presently to generally all of India's tribal peoples (adivasis) is to preserve the values which have sustained them in their environment for millennia. Four principles constitute the immutable code of life for the adivasis. Of primary importance is the fundamental principle of susangatharmonious coexistence with and adjustment to one's environment. Also, samanta (roughly translated as "equality"), samuita (collective action with mutual consent) and sharkaria (cooperation) guide autochthonous existence. These concepts and the tribals' claims to their land, which is the basis of their livelihood, stand in extreme contrast to the modern vision of "progress."
In opposition to tribal traditions are "development" values reflecting now-global concepts based on the experience and technical standards of western "modernization." Rooted therein are assumptions which many politicians and government planners take for granted: that market economies can expand infinitely, that the resources needed to accomplish this task ultimately fall under the ownership of the state, and that land-based peoples have a "national" duty to subsidize increased urbanization, through personal and collective sacrifice of substantial elements of their life ways.
At the time of Indian independence, in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru promoted the construction of hydro-dams as "the secular temples of our time." Thus, carrying the ideological centrality of its founding fathers, medium and large dam projects in India have numbered 3,000 since 1947; these include 1,589 with reservoirs covering 60 square kilometers or more. Most of these have been failures in technical, economic and human terms.
Dam-building projects directly impact the formerly remote and peripheral zones in the wooded hill and river valley regions which are the habitat of the majority of India's 60 million adivasis. Many tribals have found refuge and maintained separate societies in those areas since the Aryan invasions of the second millennium B.C. However, such lands and the resources on them have recently dramatically increased in exchange value as commoditized objects. Just as the British Crown previously exercised control of those objects, the Indian government today is doing the same, forcing rural peopleprimarily adivasisoff their primordial lands. This process has been directed by rich and powerful social sectors which have expropriated the nation's natural resources for their own purposes, using modern technology (dam building and electrification, in this case) as a major instrument to achieve that end.
Displacement of adivasis for all state purposes has swelled the ranks of the country's impoverished masses, who number some 40 percent of the total population. Their numbers include some 21.6 million people who have been dispossessed and scattered within India solely to permit the construction of large dams. Sixteen million of these people have still not been resettled, and their disposition is unknown, because the Indian government does not keep track of them. Between independence and 1989, 15 percent of adivasis lost their lands and homes to development schemes.
The World Bank has contributed to the development and dispossession process in India through financing 32 medium and large dams, from 1978 to 1990. The Sardar Sarovar Projects are by far the biggest. With a total estimated cost of $3 billion, the World Bank's financing of $450 million in current loans and its promise of some $440 million in additional future loans have made the SSP possible. Bank funds also have helped pay for the removal of 100,000 land-based people from the 37,000-hectare submergence zone behind the dam. Funds have also been allocated for the eventual removal of another 140,000 people, who are not eligible for compensation lands, from the 800,000-hectare canal and command area below the dam.
World Bank guidelines for projects affecting indigenous and tribal peoples were first formulated in 1980; the rules were updated and revised in the Bank's Operational Directive (OD) 4.20 of 1991. Written in reaction to the disastrous consequences arising from previous Bank-funded development projects, the guidelines are supposed to provide minimum standards for the resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) of indigenous "oustees." They require loan-partner governments to resettle and compensate tribals so as "to ensure that indigenous peoples do not suffer adverse effects during the development process and that they receive culturally compatible social and economic benefits" (OD 4.20, Paragraph 6).
Fourth World Bulletin • July 1993
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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