Copyright 2000, Environmental News Network
October 19, 2000
By Tharuka Dissanaike

Medha Patkar does not look like a woman who could drive the mighty bureaucracy in India to wit's end. But the slight, saree-clad, soft-spoken activist has led a huge wave of public opinion against the controversial Narmada River dam project.

The protests prompted the Indian government to reconsider the project and all its ramifications on the environment and communities in 1998.

The multi-dam Narmada project, which will displace an estimated 40,000 people, is moving ahead. But nothing comes easy for a project drowning in public rage, and S. Kumars, the Indian textile concern promoting the dam, finds itself confronted by opposition at every turn.

In neighboring Pakistan, a controversy erupted when the Kalabagh Dam in the Indus Valley became embroiled in interstate politics. Pakistan’s military government decided to shelve the project, viewing with alarm the growing disharmony between the state government’s of four provinces that could not reach consensus on sharing Indus River water.

Conceived in the early 1950s, the Kalabagh project represented an important power and irrigation project in Pakistan’s development scheme. Successive governments failed to implement the project and today’s estimated price tag is a staggering US$12 million.

In Sri Lanka, an island nation off the southern tip of India, the last viable hydro-electric project has been tossed around without a decision for nearly a decade. Its adverse impact on seven of the country’s most picturesque waterfalls bogged the project at the environmental impact assessment stage for more than four years.

Finally, the Ministry of Power and Energy overrode opposition and gave the project a green light, much to the outrage of the environmental lobby. But now funding agent Japanese Overseas Cooperation Fund has cold feet about plowing money into a controversial dam project that would contribute only 150 megawatts of electricity.

There was a time when large dams were synonymous with development in southern Asia. But so many river dam projects have been swept up in violent bursts of protest that governments have become hesitant to proceed.

The World Bank, once the key financier of large dam projects for irrigation and electricity in southern Asia, has been forced to review its role in the region.

In 1996, when the World Bank reviewed 50 large dam projects that it agreed to fund, the bank found five projects that were unacceptable even under its own criteria — criteria in force at the time of approval. Two of these were in southern Asia: Mangala Dam in Pakistan and Kulekhani Dam in Nepal. Both suffer poor performance and unmitigated social and environmental costs even today.

While the anti-dam lobby has often been characterized by politicians and industrial interests as hysterical, unrealistic and impractical, the costs associated with massive dam projects suggests there is method in their alleged madness.

Flash flooding, drought, lack of proper resettlement, deforestation and other environmental problems are surfacing at almost every dam site. Sharing the waters of Himalayan-born rivers that often flow through two or three countries compounds the problem in the subcontinent.

Within countries, different states argue over water-sharing issues. While the benefit of large dams can be quantified in measures of electrical power or irrigated land, their costs, socially and ecologically, keep metamorphosing into bigger problems. This year alone, Indian plains were hit by severe drought followed by monsoons and violent floods. Many blame the consequences on river-damming upstream.

But in a region with some of the world’s poorest and most populated nations, can southern Asians continue to snub large dams that are primarily aimed at improving irrigation and power supply?

India’s population numbers roughly 1 billion. Together, the nations of southern Asia constitute a quarter of the world’s population, great numbers of which live in dire poverty. Volatile politics, lack of food and energy crises threaten these countries every day.

There is a hitch, however. About 80 percent of the water in southern Asia arrives in the short summer monsoon months of July and August. To increase irrigated agricultural land and produce more megawatts of precious electricity, water has to be stored in large reservoirs, says the pro-dam lobby. Moderate representatives maintain that building better-planned dams will answer many criticisms.

The anti-dam lobby will have none of it. They say solutions to the development issue are to be found in traditional, indigenous technologies often neglected by modern planners and technocrats. Water harvesting, ancient cultivation techniques and small-scale, decentralized hydropower plants they say, work just as well, if not better, as dams in the long run.

In India's drought-stricken Rajasthan state, villages that implement rainwater-harvesting methods manage to keep their fields green until the rains come. Many environmental organizations are also promoting microdams, water management systems and the revival of traditional technologies. Error: Unable to read footer file.