Village Power Wins Victories in India

HURTLING ALONG A ROAD IN WHAT SEEMS LIKE A SUICIDE RUN, I pray there are Hindu gods to look after foreigners. India is like a different planet, where one’s every assumption, value, and belief simply has to be suspended. I’m here for a special program on dams for The Nature of Things.

Like many other nations in the less-industrialized world, India has been beguiled by the twentieth-century illusion that bigger is better and that what is modern is superior to ancient traditional ways. This attitude has been encouraged by agencies such as the World Bank.

The Narmada is the largest river flowing west in central India. It supports rich forests and wildlife, as well as tens of thousands of tribal people, who continue to live off the surrounding land. But its most potent value to Indians is spiritual: many consider the Narmada even more sacred than the Ganges. The modern perspective views the river in economic terms, however.

With forty major tributaries, the Narmada River basin drains water from an area of almost 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles). For decades, proposals had been made to harness the flow for drinking water, but especially for power and agricultural irrigation. So since the 1960s, the Indian government has pursued a plan to build two superdams and thousands of major and minor projects on the Narmada. The scheme will be the largest irrigation strategy in the world and will affect 12 to 15 million people in four states. There will be enormous economic, social, and ecological costs.

This is a country where the poor and powerless have always been pushed around by those with wealth and power. But since arriving, I have learned of two remarkable people who have given a sense of power to those at the bottom of the economic and political pile. Mehda Patkar is a Hindu woman who learned of the huge proposed Sardar Sarovar Dam, which will flood hundreds of villages of tribal people. Since the mid-1980s, she has single-handedly galvanized the inhabitants of the villages into action by informing them of the government’s plans. Walking hundreds of kilometers from village to village, Patkar marshaled opposition to the dam so that by the nineties, unprecedented public demonstrations involving tens of thousands of protesters were held. Thousands have been arrested, and in 1993 police shot and killed a teenage boy. The protests created so much pressure that the World Bank eventually reneged on its promised loans.

In spite of the expense, the Indian government continued with the dam building. Opponents contended that the dams would be ecological and social disasters. But the most potent criticism was that most of the water would be used for large-scale irrigation of cash crops, which would enrich only wealthy landowners and big companies. Yet in the same part of the country, another person provided an alternative strategy that works.

During the 1965 war with Pakistan, Anna Hazare was driving a Jeep in a convoy that came under fire. Everyone except Hazare was killed. He decided that he had been spared to be reborn again and so dedicated his second life to serving the people of his village, Ralegan Siddhi.

Returning home, Hazare found the people and the land in a terrible state. The main sources of revenue were forty distilleries and a tobacco industry. Hazare wanted an alternative to the alcohol and tobacco industries and looked to the village’s agrarian roots. But groundwater had been depleted, leaving little for crops. He recognized that when it did rain, the runoff carried away the meager soil. To Hazare, soil is the life of the village and the village is the unit of survival that must be protected at all costs. So he began to work on “watershed development,” with the aim of keeping both soil and water in the community. That involved planting trees and crops that would retain the water and digging a series of horizontal pits that would collect water and slow its flow down the hills. Within four years, Hazare could point to dramatic results—decreased soil erosion, recharged groundwater, water flowing in once-dry riverbeds, and increased crop yields.

Today the distilleries are gone. The village is surrounded by lush green fields and actually exports water to neighboring communities. Hazare’s work has been recognized, and he is now coordinating the application of his approach to watershed development in three hundred other villages.

All over the world, people like Hazare and Patkar are rallying support for community-based ideas and technology and taking charge of their own destiny. It’s an inspiring lesson for us in the so-called developed world.

Update

Under pressure from environmental and social justice groups, the World Bank established a committee to assess the ecological, social, and economic impact of Sardar Sarovar. Headed by Bradford Morse and Tom Berger, the committee released its report, “The Independent Review—Sardar Sarovar Project,” on January 15, 1994. The report was a severe indictment of the claimed benefits of the dam and concluded, “the wisest action would be to step back from the project.” The World Bank abided by the recommendation and declined to fund the dam. This decision was unprecedented for an organization enthralled with megaprojects and almost messianic in its faith in development. India found funding elsewhere and continues with the dam. Later, India announced it had a vigorous nuclear program and detonated a series of nuclear bombs