The media has been playing the Supreme Court Verdict on the dam as a
victory for all sides. How do you read it? What does this verdict
really mean?

It may well be a victory for the Gujarat Government but it’s by no
means a victory for the NBA. What it does do is signal formal entry
by the Supreme Court as well as the Prime Minister into treacherous
new territory. The Prime Minister has washed his hands off an
unequivocal report by members of his own cabinet. The Minister for
Water Resources Saifuddin Soz had the rare courage to put down on
paper what he actually found - the fact that rehabilitation in Madhya
Pradesh has been disastrous. It’s true that on a one-day visit,
ministers cannot possibly come away with an exhaustive survey, but
you don’t need to spend more than a day in the Narmada valley to see
that there is a massive problem on the ground.

There is a huge disjunct between the paperwork and the reality on the ground. What
will be submitted to the court - what has always been submitted to
the court is more paperwork. Two years ago, when I went to Harsud
which was being submerged by the Narmada Sagar Dam, I also went to
the so-called New Harsud, which the government claimed was a fully
functioning new city. There was absolutely nothing there - no houses,
no water, no toilets, no sewage. Just a few neon street lights and a
huge expanse of land. But officials produced photographs taken at
night with star filters making it look like Paris!

At the last hearing on April 17, the logical thing for the Supreme Court to do
would have been to say, stop construction of the dam. We know there’s
a problem, let’s assess the problem before we go ahead. It did the
opposite. It said we have a problem, let’s magnify the problem. Every
meter the dam goes up, an additional 1500 families come under the
threat of submergence. This interim order is clearly in contempt of
its own October 2000 and March 2005 Narmada judgements as well as the
Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal Award, which state in no uncertain
terms that displaced people must be resettled six months before
submergence. What do you do when Prime Ministers, Chief Ministers and
Supreme Court judges commit contempt of court?

Water for Gujarat is obviously an urgent issue. How does one
reconcile these polarities?

The urgency is a bit of a red herring. Gujarat has managed to
irrigate only 10% of the land it could have irrigated and provide
only a fraction of the drinking water that it could have provided at
the current dam height. This is because the canals and delivery
systems are not in place. In other words, it has not been able to use
the water at even the current dam height. This is an old story with
the Narmada Dams. The Bargi dam completed in 1990, at huge cost to
the public exchequer and to thousands of displaced people, today
irrigates less land than it submerged because canals haven’t been
built. In the case of the Sardar Sarovar, in fact, raising the dam
height immediately is just hubris. It has no practical urgency. The
fair thing to do would be to stop the construction of the dam and ask
the Gujarat government to construct the canals to use the water it
already has. That will buy time to do a decent job of rehabilitation.

If we could go back to the beginning of your involvement - why were
you drawn to the Narmada issue? Why has this become such a powerful
symbol?

Because I believe that it contains a microcosm of the universe. I
think it contains a profound argument about everything - power,
powerlessness, deceit, greed, politics, ethics, rights and
entitlements. For example - is it right to divert rivers and grow
water-intensive crops like sugar cane and wheat in a desert ecology?

Look at the disaster the Indira Gandhi canal is wreaking in
Rajasthan. To me, understanding the Narmada issue is the key to
understanding how the world works. The beauty of the argument is that
it isn’t human-centric. It’s also about things that most political
ideologies leave out. Vital issues - rivers, estuaries, earth,
mountains, deserts, crops, forests, fish. And about human things that
most environmental ideologies leave out. It touches a raw nerve, so
you have people who know very little about it, people who admit that
they know very little and don’t care to find out, coming out with
passionate opinions.

The battle in the Narmada Valley has raised
radical questions about the top heavy model of development India has
opted for. But it also raises very specific questions about specific
dams. And to my mind, though much of the noise now is centered around
the issue of displacement and resettlement, the really vital
questions that have not been answered are the ones that question the
benefits of dams. Huge irrigation schemes that end up causing
waterlogging, salinisation and eventual desertification have
historically been among the major reasons for the collapse of
societies, beginning with the Mesopotamian civilisation. I recommend
Jared Diamond’s wonderful book Collapse to all those who wish to take
a slightly longer, and less panicked view of ’development’. India
already has thousands of acres of waterlogged land. We’ve already
destroyed most of our rivers. We have unsustainable cropping patterns
and a huge crisis in our agricultural economy.

Even vast parts of the command area of our favourite dam - the Bhakra - is water-logged and in deep trouble. So the real issue is not how ordinary farmers in
Gujarat will benefit from the Sardar Sarovar, but how they will
eventually suffer because of it.