Narmada Bachao Administration

In 1988, when the country approved the project, the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, at the instance of the Planning Commission laid down a parri passu clause, which said that the construction would be cleared only with the pace of rehabilitation and an environment plan. I know this for a fact, since I was the Planning Commission member who bore with the hours of grilling by the PM on technical, environmental and rehabilitation details. He then cleared the project and became one of its advocates. Finally grievance redressal authorities were set up, chaired by a retired judge approved by the chief justice of India, to which a dissatisfied project-affected person can go and, if they are not satisfied with the action of the authorities, they can move the Supreme Court.

I am not big on dams, in principle. I believe that there are good projects and there are bad ones, too. As a minister, I delayed Tehri by getting reviews of high-powered committees of the rehabilitation plan and the safety aspects. More recently I asked the Ken Betwa link to go back to the drawing board since it had obvious limitations. It is true that lakhs of persons are dislocated by projects which do not have a rehabilitation plans and they never get attention. With much less preparation, Indira Sagar has been completed. It is just that SSP is not one of them.

The decision to allow the dam height to reach 121 metres was taken by the Narmada Control Authority after going through the entire drill. They were empowered to do so by the Supreme Court in 2000, since the resettlement, rehabilitation and environment issues are in detail looked into by their bodies and what was earlier called the parri passu link of these issues with the construction would become transparent. There can therefore be no question of opening the issue again.

Some of the so-called larger issues being raised are tiresome repetitions. The argument of a small dam is based on the entire river being diverted into the Narmada main canal, sending more water into Saurashtra. This was earlier pooh-poohed but is at least now being accepted as a great engineering feat. That Saurashtra needs a larger inflow of water is beyond doubt, although some environmentalists contested this earlier. A well-known study by the present writer with Vora and Parikh has provided rigorous hydrological proof that the Saurashtra reservoirs (small dams?) do not help much. When it rains the farmer does not need water, and when it does not there is no water in the dams, since the catchment and command have the same rainfall regime. Hence the SSP water was doubly blessed.

The Narmada planners had wanted to take more water into Saurashtra by a higher lift and a garden canal in the plateaux, and proposed this in the published plan in a chapter called ‘Planning for Augmented Options’. But they knew that when Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra use up their share there would not be enough assured water. The proponents of the small dam proudly give Gujarat more water with a small dam, but don’t say that they are taking it away from the other states or other regions in Gujarat. The further arguments that the deficits would be met by integrating canals with village ponds and groundwater is ridiculous, since this integration was there in the SSP plan from the word go. In fact the famous Sherdi branch experiment in the Mahi canals was done on the SSP model to show that this was physically feasible. It does not take any reviews to show that there are no free lunches.

The union water resources minister and my friend and former colleaugue, Saifuddin Soz, has every right to review the progress of the implementation of decisions. He is in fact obliged to do so every quarter, since he is the chairman of the review committee of the Narmada Control Authority.

We are sure he will find ways to expedite the completion of the project for we have gone very far and the benefits of covering the last mile are tremendous for the people of MP and Maharashtra, who need power very badly and will now get most of it. The people of Gujarat and Rajasthan, who also need water, will also benefit. Anyone travelling the Narmada valley can see the Adivasi coming of age and thirsting for more energy — as a farmer, an artisan and a householder. This should not be allowed to come only from big companies importing gas when hydel energy is allowed to go into the sea unutilised.

The writer is chancellor, Nagaland University, and former union minister for power, planning and science