“Privatization” is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it’s not a choice at all. It’s only made to look like one. Essentially, privatization is a mutually profitable business contract between the private (preferably foreign) company or financial institution and the ruling elite of the third world. (One of the fallouts is that even corruption becomes an elitist affair. Your average small-fry government official is in grave danger of losing his or her bit on the side.)
India’s politicians have virtually mortgaged their country to the World Bank. Today, India pays back more money in interest and repayment installments than it receives. It is forced to incur new debts in order to repay old ones.33 In other words, it’s exporting capital. Of late, however, institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which have bled the third world all these years, look like benevolent saints compared to the new mutants in the market. These are known as ECAs—export credit agencies. If the World Bank is a colonizing army hamstrung by red tape and bureaucracy, the ECAs are freewheeling, marauding mercenaries.
Basically, ECAs insure private companies operating in foreign countries against commercial and political risks. The device is called an export credit guarantee. It’s quite simple, really. No first world private company wants to export capital or goods or services to a politically and/or economically unstable country without insuring itself against unforeseen contingencies. So the private company covers itself with an export credit guarantee. The ECA, in turn, has an agreement with the government of its own country. The government of its own country has an agreement with the government of the importing country. The upshot of this fine imbrication is that if a situation does arise in which the ECA has to pay its client, its own government pays the ECA and recovers its money by adding it to the bilateral debt owed by the importing country. (So the real guarantors are actually, once again, the poorest people in the poorest countries.) Complicated, but cool. And foolproof.
The quadrangular private company–ECA–government–government formation neatly circumvents political accountability. Though they’re all actually business associates, flak from noisy, tiresome nongovernmental organizations and activist groups can be diverted and funneled to the ECA, where, like noxious industrial effluent, it lies in cooling ponds before being disposed of. The attraction of the ECAs (for both governments and private companies) is that they are secretive and don’t bother with tedious details like human rights violations and environmental guidelines. (The rare ones that do, like the US Export-Import Bank, are under pressure to change.) It short-circuits lumbering World Bank–style bureaucracy. It makes projects like Big Dams (which involve the displacement and impoverishment of large numbers of people, which in turn is politically risky) that much easier to finance. With an ECA guarantee, “developers” can go ahead and dig and quarry and mine and dam the hell out of people’s lives without having to even address, never mind answer, embarrassing questions.
Now, coming back to Maheshwar . . .
In order to place India’s first private Big Dam in perspective, I need to briefly set out the short, vulgar history of Big Dams in India in general and on the Narmada in particular.
The international dam industry alone is worth $32–46 billion a year.34 In the first world, dams are being decommissioned, blown up. That leaves us with another industry threatened with redundancy desperately in search of dumping grounds. Fortunately (for the industry) most third world countries, India especially, are deeply committed to Big Dams.
India has the third largest number of Big Dams in the world. Three thousand six hundred Indian dams qualify as Big Dams under the ICOLD (International Commission on Large Dams) definition. Six hundred and ninety-five more are under construction. This means that 40 percent of all the Big Dams being built in the world are being built in India.35 For reasons more cynical than honorable, politicians and planners have successfully portrayed Big Dams to an unquestioning public as symbols of nationalism—huge, wet cement flags. Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech about Big Dams being “the temples of modern India” has made its way into primary school textbooks in every Indian language.36 Every schoolchild is taught that Big Dams will deliver the people of India from hunger and poverty.
Will they? Have they?
To merely ask these questions is to invite accusations of sedition, of being anti-national, of being a spy, and, most ludicrous of all, of receiving “foreign funds.” The distinguished Home Minister Mr. Advani, while speaking at the inauguration of construction at the Sardar Sarovar dam site on October 31, 2000, said that the three greatest achievements of his government were the nuclear tests in 1998, the war with Pakistan in 1999, and the Supreme Court verdict in favor of the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam in 2000. He called it a victory for “developmental nationalism” (a twisted variation of cultural nationalism). For the Home Minister to call a Supreme Court verdict a victory for his government doesn’t say much for the Supreme Court.
I have no quarrel with Mr. Advani clubbing together nuclear bombs, Big Dams, and wars. However, calling them “achievements” is sinister. Mr. Advani then went on to make farcical allegations about how those of us who were against the dam were “working at the behest of . . . outsiders” and “those who do not wish to see India becoming strong in security and socio-economic development.”37 Unfortunately, this is not imbecilic paranoia. It’s a deliberate, dangerous attempt to suppress outrageous facts by whipping up mindless mob frenzy. He did it in the run-up to the destruction of the Babri Masjid. He’s doing it again. He has given notice that he will stop at nothing. Those who come in his way will be dealt with by any methods he deems necessary.
Nevertheless, there is too much at stake to remain silent. After all, we don’t want to be like good middle-class Germans in the 1930s, who drove their children to piano classes and never noticed the concentration camps springing up around them—or do we?
There are questions that must be asked. And answered. There is space here for no more than a brief summary of the costs and benefits of Big Dams. A brief summary is all we need.
Ninety percent of the Big Dams in India are irrigation dams.38 They are the key, according to planners, to India’s “food security.”
So how much food do Big Dams produce?
The extraordinary thing is that there is no official government figure for this.
The India Country Study section in the World Commission on Dams Report was prepared by a team of experts—the former secretary of Water Resources, the former director of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, a former secretary of the Central Water Commission, and two members of the faculty of the Indian Institute of Public Administration.39 One of the chapters in the study deduces that the contribution of large dams to India’s food grain produce is less than 10 percent.40 Less than 10 percent!
Ten percent of the total produce currently works out to 20 million tons. This year, more than double that amount is rotting in government storehouses while at the same time 350 million Indian citizens live below the poverty line.41 The Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies says that 10 percent of India’s total food grain produce every year is spoiled or eaten by rats.42 India must be the only country in the world that builds dams, uproots millions of people, and submerges thousands of acres of forest in order to feed rats.
It’s hard to believe that things can go so grievously, so perilously wrong. But they have. It’s understandable that those who are responsible find it hard to own up to their mistakes, because Big Dams did not start out as a cynical enterprise. They began as a dream. They have ended as grisly nightmare. It’s time to wake up.
So much for the benefits of India’s Big Dams. Let’s take a look at the costs. How many people have been displaced by Big Dams?
Once again, there is no official record.
In fact, there’s no record at all. This is unpardonabl
e on the part of the Indian state. And unpardonable on the part of planners, economists, funding agencies, and the rest of the urban intellectual community who are so quick to rise up in defense of Big Dams.
Last year, just in order to do a sanity check, I extrapolated an average from a study of fifty-four dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration. After quartering the average they arrived at, my very conservative estimate of the number of people displaced by Big Dams in India over the last fifty years was 33 million people. This was jeered at by some economists and planners as being a preposterously exaggerated figure. India’s secretary for rural development put the figure at 40 million.
Today, a chapter in the India Country Study says the figure could be as high as 56 million people.43
That’s almost twice the population of Canada. More than three times the population of Australia.
Think about it: 56 million people displaced by Big Dams in the last fifty years. And India still does not have a national rehabilitation policy.
When the history of India’s miraculous leap to the forefront of the Information Revolution is written, let it be said that 56 million Indians (and their children and their children’s children) paid for it with everything they ever had. Their homes, their lands, their languages, their histories.
You can see them from your car window when you drive home every night. Try not to look away. Try to meet their eyes. Fifty-six million displaced, impoverished, pulverized people. Almost half of them are Dalit and Adivasi.44 (There is devastating meaning couched in this figure.)
There’s a saying in the villages of the Narmada valley: “You can wake someone who’s sleeping. But you can’t wake someone who’s pretending to be asleep.” When it comes to the politics of forced, involuntary displacement, there’s a deafening silence in this country. People’s eyes glaze over. They behave as though it’s just a blip in the democratic process.
The nicer ones say, “Oh, but it’s such a pity. People must be resettled.” (Where? I want to scream. Where’s the land? Has someone invented a Land-Manufacturing Machine?)
The nasties say, “Someone has to pay the price for National Development.”
The point is that 56 million is more than a blip, folks. It’s civil war.
Quite apart from the human costs of Big Dams, there are the staggering environmental costs. More than 3 million acres of submerged forest, ravaged ecosystems, destroyed rivers, defunct, silted-up reservoirs, endangered wildlife, disappearing biodiversity, and 24 million acres of agricultural land that is now waterlogged and saline. Today there are more drought-prone and flood-prone areas in India than there were in 1947. Not a single river in the plains has potable water. Remember, 200 million Indians have no access to safe drinking water.45
Planners, when confronted with past mistakes, say sagely, “Yes, it’s true that mistakes have been made. But we’re on a learning curve.” The lives and livelihoods of 56 million people and all this environmental mayhem serve only to extend the majestic arc of their learning curve.
Will they ever get off the curve and actually learn?
The evidence against Big Dams is mounting alarmingly. None of it appears on the balance sheet. There is no balance sheet. There has not been an official audit, a comprehensive post-project evaluation, of a single Big Dam in India to see whether or not it has achieved what it set out to achieve.
This is what is hardest to believe. That the Indian government’s unshakable faith in Big Dams is based on nothing. No studies. No system of checks and balances. Nothing at all. And of course, those of us who question it are spies.
Is it unreasonable to call for a moratorium on the construction of Big Dams until past mistakes have been rectified and the millions of uprooted people have been truly recompensed and rehabilitated? It is the only way an industry that has so far been based on lies and false promises can redeem itself.
Of the series of thirty Big Dams proposed on the main stem of the Narmada River, four are megadams. Of these, only one—the Bargi dam—has been completed. Three are under construction.
The Bargi dam was completed in 1990. It cost ten times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more land than engineers said it would.46 To save the cost and effort of doing a detailed survey, in order to mark the Full Reservoir Level, the government closed the sluice gates one monsoon and filled the reservoir without warning. Water entered villagers’ homes at night. They had to take their children, their cattle, their pots and pans, and flee up the hillside. The Narmada Control Authority had estimated that 70,000 people from 101 villages would be displaced. Instead, when they filled the reservoir, 114,000 people from 162 villages were displaced. In addition, 26 government “resettlement colonies” (which consisted of house plots but no agricultural land) were submerged.47 Eventually there was no rehabilitation. Some “oustees” got a meager cash compensation. Most got nothing. Some died of starvation. Others moved to slums in Jabalpur, where they now work as rickshaw pullers and construction labor.
Today, ten years after it was completed, the Bargi dam irrigates only as much land as it submerged. Only 5 percent of the land its planners claimed it would irrigate. The government says it has no money to make the canals. Yet work has begun downstream, on the mammoth Narmada Sagar dam, which will submerge 251 villages, on the Maheshwar dam, and, of course, on the most controversial dam in history, the Sardar Sarovar.48
The Sardar Sarovar dam is currently 90 meters high. Its final projected height is 138 meters. It is located in Gujarat, but most of the villages that will be submerged by its gigantic reservoir are in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. The Sardar Sarovar dam has become the showcase of India’s Violation of Human Rights Initiative. It has ripped away the genial mask of Dams-as-Development and revealed its brutish innards.
I have written about Sardar Sarovar extensively in a previous essay (“The Greater Common Good”), so I’ll be brief. The Sardar Sarovar dam will displace close to half a million people. More than half of them do not officially qualify as “project-affected” and are not entitled to rehabilitation. It will submerge thirty-two thousand acres of deciduous forest.49
In 1985, before a single study had been done, before anyone had any idea what the human cost or environmental impact of the dam would be, the World Bank sanctioned a $450 million loan for the dam. The Ministry of Environment’s conditional clearance (without any studies being done) came in 1987! At no point in the decision-making process were the people to be affected consulted or even informed about the project. In 1993, after a spectacular struggle by the NBA, the people of the valley forced the Bank to withdraw from the project.50 The Gujarat government decided to go ahead with the project.
In 1994 the NBA filed a petition in the Supreme Court. For six years, the court put a legal injunction on further construction of the dam. On October 18, 2000, in a shocking 2–1 majority judgment, the Supreme Court lifted the injunction.51 After having seen fit to hold up the construction for six years, the court chastised (using unseemly, insulting language) the people of the Narmada valley for approaching it too late and said that on these grounds alone their petition should be dismissed. It permitted construction to continue according to the guidelines laid down by the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal.
It did this despite the fact that it was aware that the tribunal guidelines have been consistently violated for thirteen years. Despite the fact that none of the conditions of the environment ministry’s clearance have been met. Despite the fact that thirteen years have passed and the government hasn’t even produced a resettlement plan. Despite the fact that not a single village has been resettled according to the directives of the tribunal. Despite the fact that the Madhya Pradesh government has stated on oath that it has no land on which to resettle “oustees” (80 percent of them live in Madhya Pradesh).52 Despite the fact that since construction began, the Madhya Pradesh government has not given
a single acre of agricultural land to displaced families. Despite the fact that the court was fully aware that even families displaced by the dam at its current height have not been rehabilitated.
In other words, the Supreme Court has actually ordered and sanctioned the violation of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award.
“But this is the problem with the government,” Mr. and Mrs. Well-Meaning say. “It’s so inefficient. These things wouldn’t happen with a private company. Things like resettlement and rehabilitation of poor people will be so much better managed.”
The Maheshwar experience teaches you otherwise.
In a private project, the only things that are better managed are the corruption, the lies, and the swiftness and brutality of repression. And, of course, the escalating costs.
In 1994, the project cost of the Maheshwar dam was estimated at $99 million. In 1996, following the contract with S. Kumars, it rose to $333 million. Today it stands at $467 million.53 Initially, 80 percent of this money was to be raised from foreign investors. There has been a procession of them—Pacgen of the United States and Bayernwerk, VEW, Siemens, and the HypoVereinsbank of Germany. And now, the latest in the line of ardent suitors, Ogden of the United States.
According to the NBA’s calculations, the cost of the electricity at the factory gate will be 13.9 cents per kilowatt hour, which is twenty-six times more expensive than existing hydel power in the state, five and a half times more expensive than thermal power, and four times more expensive than power from the central grid. (It’s worth mentioning here that Madhya Pradesh today generates 1,500 megawatts more power than it can transmit and distribute.)