Swim out of ghost waters

The latest is that old allegation, that drinking water from Sardar Sarovar is a non-starter. On Sunday I was at Uddalpur near Mahesana in north Gujarat. Uddalpur is around 200 km from the dam at Sardar Sarovar. Mani Bhai Patel of that village had collected and spent Rs 3.5 crore on infrastructure, and the village was celebrating. They are a vikas village and I am a friend, so I was there. They plan to spend another Rs 1.5 crore on a medical facility and a village hall and we were plotting how to go about it. The drinking water facility was inaugurated by a friend who is a colleague of Kaka Kanti Shroff, who is the water harvesting hero. We were happy that the water was the green colour which Gujarat has learnt to love since it is the blessing of the Narmada river. But when you read reports in the press, drinking water from the Narmada project is a mirage. It will not come for it is not practical.

The first argument given is that the original project did not have a drinking water component. But that is wrong. It is true that the original published plan did not account for the benefits of the drinking water component. As I had explained then, this emerged from the fact that the SSP planners were good students of Indian planning. In those days drinking water was considered a basic need and so you only counted the cost and did not give it a monetary benefit value, since how do you value 8216;8216;life8217;8217;. In fact, even now Ramaswamy Iyer takes the valid position when consulting with the World Bank that drinking water is a fundamental right and you have to be very careful when you price it. The original 565-page Sardar Sarovar Plan developed in 1984 and published in 1989 says on page 546, detailing the costs and benefits of the project, that as regards drinking water, 8216;8216;The villages and towns would benefit in three ways. The service levels would go up in those localities which would augment their supply from Narmada waters directly or as a result of ground water recharge. Some localities would benefit from schemes of direct water supply. The number of settlements thus benefiting is estimated at about 8800. The use of water for meeting the basic needs is difficult to be quantified.8217;8217; The number of villages and settlements to be covered was given then and estimates of costs worked out. It is true that these have since gone up.

Since a big issue was made that the benefits of the proposal are not available and hence the project does not exist, in the early nineties the drinking water plan was subjected to a cost benefit analysis and published. The book has been well received professionally. Since the opportunity cost of the provision of reliable sources of drinking water was very high in Kutch and Saurashtra as well as in north-central Gujarat, the economic return of the project went up in a big way. It is in that context that the economist Jean Dreze made the valid proposal that since the benefits are estimated at such high levels, market methods should be used for rehabilitation also 8212; and this proposal was endorsed by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Environment, at that stage chaired by Jaswant Singh.

It is high time the Narmada debate moves on and is conducted in real time rather than remaining in a time warp. Narmada waters are being drunk in Gujarat and the possibility and benefit cannot be in doubt.