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"There is a fury building up across the country"

In this excerpt from a much longer interview, Arundhati Roy updates her essay on the Narmada issue,The Greater Common Good, published in 1999 inFrontline. The interview was done byShoma Chaudhuriover a period of several days, in person and on email.

— Photo: K. Gopinathan

Arundhati Roy: "The fundamental issue is that `a country is not a corporation.' It cannot be run like one. Nothing can justify the violation of the fundamental rights of citizens."

The media has been playing the Supreme Court Verdict as a victory for all sides. How do you read it? What does this verdict really mean?

It may well be a victory for the Gujarat Government but it's by no means a victory for the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The Prime Minister has washed his hands of an unequivocal report by members of his own Cabinet. The Minister for Water Resources, Saifuddin Soz, had the rare courage to put down on paper what he actually found — the fact that rehabilitation in Madhya Pradesh has been disastrous. The logical thing for the Supreme Court to do would have been to say "Stop construction of the dam. We know there's a problem, let's assess the problem before we go ahead." Instead it did the opposite. Every metre the dam goes up an additional 1500 families come under the threat of submergence. This interim order is inconsistent with its own October 2000 Narmada judgment.

Water for Gujarat is obviously an urgent issue. How do we reconcile these polarities?

The urgency is a bit of a red herring. Gujarat has managed to irrigate only 10 per cent of the land it could have irrigated and provide only a fraction of the drinking water it could have provided at the current dam height. This is because the canals and delivery systems are not in place. In other words, it has not been able to use the water at even the current dam height. This is an old story with the Narmada dams. In the case of the Sardar Sarovar, raising the dam height immediately is just hubris. It has no practical urgency.

If we could go back to the beginning of your involvement, why were you drawn to the Narmada issue? Why has this become such a powerful symbol?

Because I believe that it contains a microcosm of the universe. I think it contains a profound argument about everything — power, powerlessness, deceit, greed, politics, ethics, rights and entitlements. For example, is it right to divert rivers and grow water-intensive crops like sugar cane and wheat in a desert ecology? To me, understanding the Narmada issue is the key to understanding how the world works. The beauty of the argument is that it isn't human-centric. It's also about things that most political ideologies leave out. Vital issues — rivers, estuaries, earth, mountains, deserts, crops, forests, fish. And about human things that most environmental ideologies leave out. It touches a raw nerve, so you have people who know very little about it, people who admit that they know very little and don't care to find out, coming out with passionate opinions.

The battle in the Narmada Valley has raised radical questions about the top-heavy model of development India has opted for. It also raises very specific questions about specific dams. And to my mind, though much of the noise now is centred on the issue of displacement and resettlement, the really vital questions that have not been answered are the ones that question the benefits of dams. Huge irrigation schemes that end up causing water logging, salinisation, and eventual desertification have historically been among the major reasons for the collapse of societies. We've already destroyed most of our rivers. We have unsustainable cropping patterns and a huge crisis in our agricultural economy. The real issue is not how ordinary farmers in Gujarat will benefit from the Sardar Sarovar, but how they will eventually suffer because of it.

That's controversial. Could you elaborate?

I have written at length about it in my essay The Greater Common Good — but let me just raise a few simple points here. The Sardar Sarovar was built on the promise that it was going to take water to the drought-prone areas of Kutch and Saurashtra. That's the emotive, frenzied, political point that is made all the time. Because of the huge propaganda machine around it, year after year this dam has soaked up almost 95 per cent of Gujarat's irrigation budget at the expense of other, more effective, more local schemes. Gujarat has among the largest number of high dams of any State in India and continues to have such an acute water problem! If you look at the Gujarat Government's own plans for the Sardar Sarovar, you'll see that Kutch and Saurashtra lie at the end of the canal. Even if everything goes brilliantly, supernaturally, if the river has as much water as the project engineers says it has (which it doesn't), and if it can achieve an irrigation efficiency of 60 per cent (when no dam in India has achieved more than 40 per cent), even then, the project is designed to irrigate only 2 per cent of the cultivable area of Kutch and 9 per cent of Saurashtra. The loot of canal water has already begun.

The tragedy is that if they would only use more local, effective, rainwater harvesting schemes, for less than 10 per cent of the cost of the Sardar Sarovar, every single village in Kutch and Saurashtra could have drinking water. The Sardar Sarovar has never made sense, ecologically or economically. But in politics there's nothing as effective as a potential dam which promises paradise — it will soothe your sorrows, it will bring you breakfast in bed. The Sardar Sarovar has been the subject of frenzied political campaigning for every political party in Gujarat. Look at the recent spectacle we witnessed: Narendra Modi, claiming to speak on behalf of poor farmers and the corporate cartel, sitting on a symbolic hunger strike, a Gandhian satyagraha — and simultaneously issuing threats of violence. Incredibly, he went unchallenged by a single person in the UPA Government. That's how deep the mainstream political consensus is.

I see your point about forcing a riverine ecology on a desert, and the political lobbies at work. But what about electricity?

Recently, a group of international engineers has challenged the claims made by the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam about power generation. So has Himanshu Thakker, an engineer who has studied the Sardar Sarovar in some detail. I would like to make three points.

Having an installed capacity of 1450 MW means that the power generating machinery that has been installed is capable of producing 1450 MW of power. What is actually produced depends on actual water flows — which we know is much lower than the Sardar Sarovar Project was designed for.

Second, in a multi-purpose dam like the Sardar Sarovar, for the most part you can either use the water for irrigation — or for power generation. In fact, as more and more water is used for irrigation, calculations show that the electricity from the riverbed powerhouse will be virtually zero. So to claim its benefits on both fronts simultaneously is dishonest.

Third, in power distribution India has among the highest transmission and distribution losses in the world. Across the country, avoidable losses add up to more power than is generated by dozens of big dams. So before we go building more big dams and destroying communities, forests, rivers, and ecosystems, maybe we could do something about how much electricity and water we waste and misuse. It would make a serious, radical difference.

The NBA has been protesting for several years. Why do you think the protest reached such white heat this time?

Obviously because of the profile and commitment of Medha Patkar and the reputation of the NBA and the fact that the indefinite fast took place in Delhi. But I think it's also because displacement is becoming an urgent issue for millions, both in cities and in villages. The situation is out of control. Every single development project — the first move is to take land from the poor. People are being displaced at gun-point. Cities like Delhi and Bombay are become cities of bulldozers and police. The spectre of the shooting of adivasis in Kalinganagar in January — all this hung over the protest at Jantar Mantar. There is a fury building up across the country.

The whole argument against big dams has been submerged by the rising waters of the reservoir and narrowed down to the issue of rehabilitation. But even this vital, though narrow, issue of rehabilitation, which should be pretty straightforward, contains a universe of its own: of deceit, lies, and utter callousness. To pay lip service to rehabilitation is easy — even Narendra Modi does that. The real issue, as the Soz report points out, is that there is a world of difference between what's on paper and what's on the ground.

Could you draw a thumbnail sketch of what you mean by that? Talk about the issue of displacement and rehabilitation.

One of the major tricks played on the poor and on the public understanding of what's going on in these `development' projects is that large numbers of the displaced do not even count as officially `Project Affected.'

In the case of the Sardar Sarovar, the tens of thousands who will be displaced by canal construction in Gujarat are not counted as Project Affected. Those displaced by the sprawling Kevadia colony at the dam site and the compensatory `afforestation' project don't count. Thousands of fisherfolk who lose their livelihood downstream of the dam don't count. Only those who are displaced by the reservoir count — and even there there's a problem. In Madhya Pradesh the poorest of the poor, the landless, mostly Dalits and Adivasis who depend on the river for their livelihood — those who depend on seasonal cultivation on the riverbed, fisher-folk, sand-miners — are not counted as Project Affected. The whole discourse of land for land leaves these people out.

There's another problem: when communities are uprooted and given illegal cash compensation, the cash is given only to the men. Many have no idea how to deal with cash, and drink it away or go on spending sprees. Automatically the women are disempowered.

As for those who are lucky enough to be counted as Project Affected, we know now they are being displaced without rehabilitation in utter violation of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award and the Supreme Court's own verdicts, all of which specify that displaced families must be given land for land. The Madhya Pradesh Government is trying to force people to accept what it calls SRP — Special Rehabilitation Package — which is cash compensation. That's illegal. The technique is to show hundreds of families the same plot of uncultivable land, and when they refuse to take it, force cash compensation on them.

We are currently being promised that the Saradar Sarovar R&R policy will be used by the River Linking scheme — more disastrous than hundreds of Sardar Sarovars — in which lakhs, perhaps millions, of people will be displaced.

Given the relentlessness of the onslaught of globalisation, would you say your views paint you into a small corner?

I'd say our views paint us out of the small corner — the small, rich, glittering, influential corner. The corner with `the voice.' The corner that owns the guns and bombs and money and the media. I'd say our views cast us on to a vast, choppy, dark dangerous ocean where most of the world's people float precariously. And from having drifted there a while, I'd say the mood is turning ugly. Go to Kalinganagar, Raygada, Chhattisgarh — you'll see there's something akin to civil war brewing there. The adivasis of Kalinganagar have blocked the main highway to Paradip Port since January. There are districts in Chhattisgarh which the Maoists control and the administration can't reach. We could, as a society, be convulsed with all kinds of violence. Criminal, lumpen, political, mercenary. So it really is in the enlightened self-interest of those jitter-bugging in the glittering corner to sit up and pay heed.

Another strong criticism of you and the NBA is that you oppose a particular world view, but present no alternative vision. Is there an alternative vision?

There is an alternative vision. The world we live in right now is an enormous accretion of an almost infinite number of decisions that have been made: economic decisions, ecological decisions, social, political, pedagogical, ideological. For each of those decisions that was made, there was an alternative. For every high dam that is being built, there is an alternative. Maybe no dam, maybe a less high dam.

The fundamental issue is that `a country is not a corporation,' as Paul Krugman says. It cannot be run like one. All policy cannot be guided by commercial interests and motivated by profit. Citizens are not employees to be hired and fired, governments are not employers. Newspapers and TV channels are not supposed to be boardroom bulletins. Signing over resources like forests and rivers and minerals to giant corporations in the name of `efficiency' and GDP growth only increases the efficiency of terrible exploitation of the majority and the indecent accumulation of wealth by a minority — leading to the yawning divide between the rich and the poor and the kind of social conflict we're seeing.

The keystone of the alternative world would be that nothing can justify the violation of the fundamental rights of citizens. You cannot say I'm taking away the livelihood of 200,000 to enhance the livelihood of two million. Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India's richest people and redistribute it amongst two million of India's poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?

Full Interview

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