#dnaEdit: Height of folly

The permission granted to Gujarat by the Narmada Control Authority(NCA) to raise the Sardar Sarovar Dam’s (SSD) height to its full reservoir capacity of 138.62 metres from the present 121.92 metres is the NDA government’s first major policy decision. Without Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention there was little likelihood of this decision fructifying so quickly. After all, he had lobbied for this clearance without success for the past eight years. The dam, the world’s second largest concrete gravity dam, has been raised periodically from the initial 80 metres, despite stiff opposition from the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) that built a powerful movement of displaced tribals and farmers. But the SSD’s proponents, the Gujarat government, had held firm citing that its benefits far outnumbered its cons. When fully completed, the project has set a target of building a 75,000 km canal network, irrigate 1.8 million hectares, and provide drinking water to nearly 9,600 villages and 131 towns in Gujarat. Apart from its installed hydel capacity of 1,450 MW, Modi had launched an innovative scheme to cover the canals with solar panels which he claimed provided twin-benefits of generating solar power and preventing evaporation.

That the NCA’s decision was taken without consulting the NBA will rile activists who have raised concerns about the rehabilitation of families displaced by raising the height of the dam. However, the Centre has claimed that the rehabilitation effort is on track though the NBA alleged that over 1,000 tribal families in Maharashtra were left out. The onus is now on completing the canal-building works which have lagged behind the dam construction. Without completing the canals, water-starved areas like Saurashtra and Kutch cannot benefit. However, the construction work on increasing the dam’s height from 121 to 138 metres will take another three years giving the state governments an adequate window to expedite the work on the branch canals. 

But the SSD’s 50-year-long tryst with planning, construction, inter-state wrangles and peoples protests raises concerns about financial costs, human displacement and ecological damage that offers lessons to the Modi government’s ambitious programme for infrastructure development. The wide disparity between governmental claims and those of independent researchers are too stark to escape notice. The project’s cost has spiralled from Rs650 crore at inception to Rs65,369 crore in March 2014 and could exceed Rs90,000 crore at completion. Though the Sardar Sarovar Punarvasat Agency identified 11,044 project-affected families in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra, a 2007 NCA status report had identified 48,304 families displaced by the project. In its obsession with mega-projects, the State’s indifference towards human displacement, ironically, represents an unbroken link from the British Raj through the Nehruvian era to present times. The 37,533 hectares submerged in three states also includes 13,385 hectares of forest land besides at least 50,000 hectares by the canal network. Gujarat claims to have completed compensatory afforestation on 4650 hectares of non-forest area in Kutch district, an additional 9,300 hectares in degraded forest area, and plantations on 4,593 hectares near the dam and canal banks. But various field assessments by district forest divisions have pointed out a very low survival rate for compensatory afforestation. With a contested past, the Gujarat government’s salvation will lie in fulfilling SSD’s human development potential and rectifying the ecological damage it has wrought.