The End of Imagination (20 page)

David Hopper, the World Bank’s vice president for South Asia, has admitted
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that the Bank does not usually include the cost of drainage in its irrigation projects in South Asia because irrigation projects
with
adequate drainage are just too expensive.
It costs five times as much to provide adequate drainage as it does to irrigate the same amount of land
. It makes the cost of a complete project appear unviable.

The Bank’s solution to the problem is to put in the irrigation system and wait—for salinity and waterlogging to set in. When all the money’s spent and the land is devastated and the people are in despair, who should pop by? Why, the friendly neighborhood banker! And what’s that bulge in his pocket? Could it be a loan for a drainage project?

In Pakistan, the World Bank financed the Tarbela (1977) and Mangla dam (1967) projects on the Indus. The command areas are waterlogged.
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Now the Bank has given Pakistan a $785 million loan for a drainage project. In India, in Punjab and in Haryana, it’s doing the same.

Irrigation without drainage is like having a system of arteries and no veins. Pretty damn pointless.

Since the World Bank stepped back from the Sardar Sarovar Projects, it’s a little unclear where the money for the drainage is going to come from. This hasn’t deterred the government from going ahead with the canal work. The result is that even before the dam is ready, before the Wonder Canal has been commissioned, before a single drop of irrigation water has been delivered, waterlogging has set in. Among the worst-affected areas are the resettlement colonies.

There is a difference between the planners of the Sardar Sarovar irrigation scheme and the planners of previous projects. At least they acknowledge that water-logging and salinization are
real
problems and need to be addressed.

Their solutions, however, are corny enough to send a Hoolock gibbon to a hooting hospital.

They plan to have a series of electronic groundwater sensors placed in every 100 square kilometers of the command area. (That works out to about 1,800 ground sensors.) These will be linked to a central computer that will analyze the data and send out commands to the canal heads to stop water flowing into areas that show signs of waterlogging. A network of “Only irrigation,” “Only drainage,” and “Irrigation cum drainage” tube-wells will be sunk, and electronically synchronized by the central computer. The saline water will be pumped out, mixed with mathematically computed quantities of freshwater, and then recirculated into a network of surface and subsurface drains (for which more land will be acquired).
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To achieve the irrigation efficiency that they claim they’ll achieve, according to a study done by Dr. Rahul Ram for Kalpavriksh,
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82 percent of the water that goes into the Wonder Canal network will have to be pumped out again!

They’ve never implemented an electronic irrigation scheme before, not even as a pilot project. It hasn’t occurred to them to experiment with some already degraded land, just to see if it works. No, they’ll use our money to install it over the whole of the 2 million hectares and
then
see if it works.

What if it doesn’t? If it doesn’t, it won’t matter to the planners. They’ll still draw the same salaries. They’ll still get their pensions and their bonuses and whatever else you get when you retire from a career of inflicting mayhem on a people.

How can it possibly work? It’s like sending in a rocket scientist to milk a troublesome cow. How can they manage a gigantic electronic irrigation system when they can’t even line the walls of the canals without having them collapse and cause untold damage to crops and people?

When they can’t even prevent the Big Dam itself from breaking off in bits when it rains?

To quote from one of their own studies: “The design, the implementation and management of the integration of groundwater and surface water in the above circumstance is complex.”
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Agreed. To say the least.

Their recommendation of how to deal with the complexity: “It will only be possible to implement such a system if all groundwater and surface water supplies are managed by a single authority.”
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Aha!

It’s beginning to make sense now. Who will own the water? The Single Authority.

Who will sell the water? The Single Authority.

Who will profit from the sales? The Single Authority.

The Single Authority has a scheme whereby it will sell water by the liter, not to individuals but to farmers’ cooperatives (which don’t exist just yet, but no doubt the Single Authority can create cooperatives and force farmers to cooperate).

Computer water, unlike ordinary river water, is expensive. Only those who can afford it will get it. Gradually, small farmers will get edged out by big farmers, and the whole cycle of uprootment will begin all over again.

The Single Authority, because it owns the computer water, will also decide who will grow what. It says that farmers getting computer water will not be allowed to grow sugarcane because they’ll use up the share of the thirsty millions who live at the tail end of the canal. But the Single Authority has
already
given licenses to ten large sugar mills right near the head of the canal.
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The chief promoter of one of them is Sanat Mehta, who was chairman of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam for several years. The chief promoter of another sugar mill was Chimanbhai Patel, former chief minister of Gujarat. He (along with his wife) was the most vocal, ardent proponent of the Sardar Sarovar dam. When he died, his ashes were scattered over the dam site.

In Maharashtra, thanks to a different branch of the Single Authority, the politically powerful sugar lobby that occupies one-tenth of the state’s irrigated land uses
half
the state’s irrigation water.

In addition to the sugar growers, the Single Authority has recently announced a scheme
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that envisages a series of five-star hotels, golf courses, and water parks that will come up along the Wonder Canal. What earthly reason could possibly justify this?

The Single Authority says it’s the only way to raise money to complete the project!

I really worry about those millions of good people in Kutch and Saurashtra.

Will the water
ever
reach them?

First of all, we know that there’s a lot less water in the river than the Single Authority claims there is.

Second of all, in the absence of the Narmada Sagar dam, the irrigation benefits of the Sardar Sarovar drop by a further 17 to 30 percent.

Third of all, the irrigation efficiency of the Wonder Canal (the actual amount of water delivered by the system) has been arbitrarily fixed at 60 percent. The
highest
irrigation efficiency in India, taking into account system leaks and surface evaporation, is 35 percent.
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This means it’s likely that only half of the command area will be irrigated.

Which hal
f
? The first half.

Fourth, to get to Kutch and Saurashtra, the Wonder Canal has to negotiate its way past the ten sugar mills, the golf courses, the five-star hotels, the water parks, and the cash-crop-growing, politically powerful, Patel-rich districts of Baroda, Kheda, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, and Mehsana. (Already, in complete contravention of its own directives, the Single Authority has allotted the city of Baroda a sizable quantity of water.
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When Baroda gets it, can Ahmedabad be left behind? The political clout of powerful urban centers in Gujarat will ensure that they secure their share.)

Fifth, even in the (100 percent) unlikely event that water gets there, it has to be piped and distributed to those eight thousand waiting villages.

It’s worth knowing that of the one billion people in the world who have no access to safe drinking water, 855 million live in rural areas.
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This is because the cost of installing an energy-intensive network of thousands of kilometers of pipelines, aqueducts, pumps, and treatment plants that would be needed to provide drinking water to scattered rural populations is prohibitive.
Nobody
builds Big Dams to provide drinking water to rural people. Nobody can
afford
to.

When the Morse Committee first arrived in Gujarat, it was impressed by the Gujarat government’s commitment to taking drinking water to such distant rural districts.
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The members of the committee asked to see the detailed drinking-water plans. There weren’t any. (There still aren’t any.)

They asked if any costs had been worked out. “A few thousand crores” was the breezy answer.
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A billion dollars is an expert’s calculated guess. It’s not included as part of the project cost. So where is the money going to come from?

Never mind. Jus’ askin’.

It’s interesting that the Farakka Barrage that diverts water from the Ganga to Calcutta Port has reduced the drinking water availability for 40 million people who live downstream in Bangladesh.
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At times there’s something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.

Build a dam to take water
away
from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to
bring
water to 40 million people.

Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?

The last person I met in the valley was Bhaiji Bhai. He is a Tadvi Adivasi from Undava, one of the first villages where the government began to acquire land for the Wonder Canal and its 75,000-kilometer network. Bhaiji Bhai lost seventeen of his nineteen acres to the Wonder Canal. It crashes through his land, 700 feet wide including its walkways and steep, sloping embankments, like a velodrome for giant bicyclists.

The canal network affects more than 200,000 families. People have lost wells and trees, people have had their houses separated from their farms by the canal, forcing them to walk two or three kilometers to the nearest bridge and then two or three kilometers back along the other side. Twenty-three thousand families, let’s say 100,000 people, will be, like Bhaiji Bhai, seriously affected. They don’t count as “Project-Affected” and are not entitled to rehabilitation.

Like his neighbors in Kevadia Colony, Bhaiji Bhai became a pauper overnight.

Bhaiji Bhai and his people, forced to smile for photographs on government calendars. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, denied the grace of rage. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, squashed like bugs by this country they’re supposed to call their own.

It was late evening when I arrived at his house. We sat down on the floor and drank oversweet tea in the dying light. As he spoke, a memory stirred in me, a sense of déjà vu. I couldn’t imagine why. I knew I hadn’t met him before. Then I realized what it was. I didn’t recognize him, but I remembered his story. I’d seen him in an old documentary film, shot more than ten years ago in the valley. He was frailer now, his beard softened with age. But his story hadn’t aged. It was still young and full of passion. It broke my heart, the patience with which he told it. I could tell he had told it over and over and over again, hoping, praying, that one day, one of the strangers passing through Undava would turn out to be Good Luck. Or God.

Bhaiji Bhai, Bhaiji Bhai, when will you get angry? When will you stop waiting? When will you say “That’s enough!” and reach for your weapons, whatever they may be? When will you show us the whole of your resonant, terrifying, invincible strength? When will you break the faith?
Will
you break the faith? Or will you let it break you?

To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesn’t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you could press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You use caprice to fracture a people’s faith in ancient things—earth, forest, water, air.

Once that’s done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you because you’re all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the very breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe. They will live where you dump their belongings. They have to. What else can they do? There’s no higher court of redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the World. You are God.

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost but also by the gratitude of those who have (or
think
they have) gained.

This cold contemporary cast of power is couched between the lines of noble-sounding clauses in democratic-sounding constitutions. It’s wielded by the elected representatives of an ostensibly free people. Yet no monarch, no despot, no dictator in any other century in the history of human civilization has had access to weapons like these.

Day by day, river by river, forest by forest, mountain by mountain, missile by missile, bomb by bomb—almost without our knowing it—we are being broken.

Big Dams are to a nation’s “development” what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-
century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link—the
understanding
—between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.

Can we unscramble it?

Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways. We could begin in the Narmada valley.

This July will bring the last monsoon of the twentieth century. The ragged army in the Narmada valley has declared that it will not move when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir rise to claim its lands and homes. Whether you love the dam or hate it, whether you want it or you don’t, it is in the fitness of things that you understand the price that’s being paid for it. That you have the courage to watch while the dues are cleared and the books are squared.

Our dues. Our books. Not theirs.

Be there.