The development-induced displacement (DID) amounts roughly about 10 million every year globally (0.17% of the global population) and that too a very conservative estimate by the World Bank’s Environment Department (WBED). The Government of India admits officially that, ever since independence, the DID figure in India is about 40 million but researches and other non-governmental estimates posit a figure close to 8 crores! More than 70% of this is due to the construction of over 3500 large dams along with their related infrastructure, power stations and irrigation canals in last fifty odd years in India. 421 sanctuaries and 75 national parks have displaced more than 6 lakhs; urban infrastructural development, natural resource extraction activities (exploration and mining) and defense projects largely contribute for the rest. And on an average, the tribes and aborigines (In our land, they are called Adivasis, the first-settlers on the mother earth) comprise more than 50% of the total displacement ever since independence. The first-settlers are evicted from their traditional habitats, mainly the forestland (say, for example, the Narmada Valley. The valley was under dense forest cover to host the prehistoric civilization of about 5 lakhs adivasis spread over 2500 villages) under the pretext of development (and modern civilization) of the ‘forth-comers’, conservation of forests and wildlife.
Numbers come and numbers go rarely leaving indelible footprints on public memory. Indeed, numbers do not matter much when the questions looming large are on ethical plain; under what conditions, if ever, can a developmental project justify displacement? Is it justified to displace people so long as they are compensated? What type of compensation is owed to the displaced persons? Why sustainability is still hesitant to take into consideration the externalities related to displacement and rehabilitation? And, why displacement, at all, is considered morally objectionable when the Nehruvian alibi was to bear with the sufferings (of displacement) for the sake of the larger interest of the country? Question is, whose country? Certainly not of anyone from the 800 families displaced on the first occasion to host the foundation-stone-laying ceremony (by PM Pundit Nehru) of Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) on April 5, 1961.
It is known that, the height of a dam is a technically cardinal parameter to determine the extent of hydroelectricity generation, which is a much eco-friendly (and sustainable) form of energy. But the height of the dam is also directly related to the area of submergence. If it is settled to make someone pay for the betterment of the other then the issues of egalitarianism, equity and human rights are altogether discarded. Can ‘larger interests’ be upheld at the cost of the interests of the displaced mass? The choice is mutually exclusive, as least as it seems today in the heyday of globalization.
A development paradigm should ethically encompass the issues of self-determination, equitable distribution of benefits, voluntariness and democratic participation, human rights and environmental protection. Call it Blue, call it Green or call it Sustainable, the occidental model of development in the ambit of globalization has compartmentalized human society where a particular section is blessed with all the fruits of development to climb up to emulate the western (i.e., developed) standards (convergence !) and the other section is inevitably sliding down to the dump. In this era of minimum state, the investment decisions are based on accountant’s balance sheet, which only takes into explicit consideration the financial costs and benefits, no wonder that the humane and ethical issues of development would be skirted. The bliss of development if confined only to a segment (may be the larger one) of the human community, if the pompous splendor rests upon the debris of another segment of the same community, then whatever be the name, this developmental process is cyclopean and immoral.
India, ever since Independence, has constructed over 3,500 large dams and about 700 more large ones are under construction. This huge number of large dams taming almost every major Indian river and their tributaries are made in the name of controlled irrigation and food security, flood control and drinking water supply and hydroelectricity generation. More than half the number of these large dams are constructed with direct financial support from the World Bank. It has been estimated that, the large dams contribute about 12% of the country’s total food grain production. But as the matter stands today, in more than 70% cases, the construction works are still incomplete and in numerous other cases, the dam and the reservoir were built years back but the allied network of irrigation canals are yet to be constructed. In general, in several reports and submissions (including reports submitted to the World Bank, viz. Thayer Scudder Report: 1989, Bradford Mores & Tomas Berger Report: 1992, Asia Watch Human Rights Group Report 1992, and a barrage of submissions to International Commission on Large Dams and many others) it has been pointed out that, the large dams in India failed miserably to deliver even half of the proposed benefits and that too at dreadfully huge social and environmental costs.
Amartya Sen defines development as the process of expanding the real freedoms enjoyed by the members of the society. Without undermining the roles of growth of GNP and personal incomes, industrialization and social modernization in expanding the freedoms of the people, Sen’s analysis puts forth social & economic arrangements (viz. the enabling conditions of good health and basic education and social power) and political and civil rights (viz. liberty of political participation, opportunities of open dialogue and debate) as constituent components of development. Development, he opines, requires removal of major sources of Unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states. Sen, illustrating the dissonance between economic wellbeing and freedom, advocates that development should be primarily evaluated in terms of whether the freedoms that the people have are enhanced.
While the official (state) stance is to portray large dams (and the plan of further construction of many more of such dams) as propellants of the nation’s economic growth and development, it is a bare truth that these entail the gross violation of freedom primarily of the displaced people and secondarily for the nation as a whole resulting from denial of economic opportunities, political and civil liberties by the state itself. Particularly when the fact of environmental degradation caused by the construction of these dams is taken into account, the contraction of freedom, as conceptualized by Sen spills over the dam sites and affects the entire nation as such. Mass eviction (GOI presents a very conservative estimate of 40 million people displaced over the last fifty years, but there is no dearth of studies that believably land up to much higher estimates, even double the number cited by the government) and the obvious loss of endowment vector leads to the contraction of capabilities which in turn deteriorates the entitlement relations and hence results in the pruning of freedom. With the squeezing of freedom, development as an integrated process of expansion of substantive freedoms loses momentum. Probing the case of large dams in India
I seek to look into the case of Indian dams more studiously. In recent years, for the last couple of visits to places of Sikkim (the state that I frequently visit) and North Bengal, every time I went past to Kalijhora, I turned my face to hide my tears....the belly of Tista is inundated with lumps of concrete....where is the stone on which I wrote my name in my first ever visit to the blue mountains in 1979....(we had a picnic on the bed of Tista, just below Kalikhora Forest Guest House. It was arranged by my uncle, who served some 8 years as surgeon at Kalimpong Sub-Divisional Hospital.) I must launch an intense search for that stone..I must.. 