Ramesh Bhatia & R P S Malik: Don't damn the dam

The Bhakra Dam in north-west India was described by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as a "temple of modern India". Bhakra is widely believed to be the platform on which the economic growth of the richest region of India has been based.

Anti-dam activist Shripad Dharmadhikary and colleagues at the NGO Manthan Adhyan Kendra have recently published a book Unravelling Bhakra: Assessing the Temple of Resurgent India that tries to portray that Bhakra was a disaster. It is being described by such activists within India and abroad as "debunking a dam legend".

Based on extensive fact-based research, which we have undertaken over the past several years, we believe that this depiction of Bhakra is fundamentally wrong.

This article briefly focuses on two main areas of concern. First, the select "errors of commission" of the Manthan book in addressing the issues of the impact of Bhakra on agricultural production and the fall in ground water tables. Second, the "errors of omission" "" the electricity and indirect economic benefits, which the book ignores.

The Manthan book claims that although Bhakra started delivering water in 1953, "the rate of growth of agricultural production during the period 1950-51 to 1962-63 was only modest".

The catch lies in the choice of years for comparison. The initial year of water delivery, when water is delivered from a huge project built over several years in different stages, can obviously not be taken as a proxy for the full development of the services from the project.

If one takes more reasonable pre- and post-project milestones for comparison, say between 1950-51 and 1967-68, the results are quite different.

The production of various agricultural commodities like rice, wheat, oilseeds and cotton in Punjab were respectively 3.9 times, 3.3 times, 4.1 times, and 3.1 times higher after the project (1967-68) than before the project (1950-51). Surely this is not "modest"?

Manthan further opines that the increase in agricultural production and productivity in Punjab and Haryana had nothing to do with Bhakra but was achieved due to chemicalisation and industrialisation of agriculture "" with massive inputs of financial subsidies, chemicals and energy and an explosive growth in groundwater pumping.

What the authors fail to understand (or acknowledge) is that it was the availability of irrigation water from Bhakra that made the "chemicalisation and industrialisation of agriculture" possible.

High-yielding crop varieties (HYVs) respond to chemical fertilisers only when adequate quantity of water at the desired time is also applied.

Availability of adequate water, the "leading input", mainly through the Bhakra system, was one of the principal reasons why introduction of HYV crops occurred much earlier in Punjab and Haryana than in any other state of the country.

In keeping with the beliefs of most anti-dam activists, the book also blames the dam for the serious problem of falling groundwater tables in Punjab and Haryana.

It is important to note that the phenomenon of falling water tables in the region was noted around mid-1980s, decades after the commissioning of Bhakra.

The fall in groundwater table has largely been the result of large-scale cultivation of rice/ wheat and the governmental policies relating to the supply and pricing of electricity. These factors have been well-researched and extensively documented.

The dam is, in fact, an important source of groundwater recharge. Without recharge from the canals fed by the Bhakra dam system, Punjab would have been able to sustain only about 50 per cent of the 1.1 million tube wells on which farmers depend.

The reality is exactly the opposite of that claimed: Bhakra has ameliorated rather than exacerbated the serious problem of groundwater over-extraction.

A reader of the book would believe that the only benefit of Bhakra was its direct effect on irrigation, a subject on which the book is, as briefly shown above, misleading.

But equally seriously, the authors do not choose to inform the reader that direct irrigation benefits were only about one-third of the total benefits from the project, the other benefits being hydropower generation and the indirect benefits induced by the increased power and irrigation availability.

The hydro-power stations installed in the Bhakra system have a combined generating capacity of 2,880 MW that currently generate about 14,000 million kWh of electricity every year.

The value added from this electricity output, is Rs 35 billion a year, valued at a shadow price of Rs 2.6 per kWh (equal to marginal supply cost of a thermal plant). This is roughly one-half of the value added from additional agricultural output from the Bhakra dam system.

The irrigation and hydropower from Bhakra are "direct benefits", which in turn generate both inter-industry linkage impacts and consumption-induced impacts on the regional and national economy.

Increased electricity output and irrigation from Bhakra have resulted in significant backward linkages (demand for higher input supplies) and forward linkages (providing inputs for further processing).

Using SAM-based models we have attempted to assess the magnitude of both direct effects (from irrigation and power) and the indirect effects (which operate through the linkages described above).

The results are dramatic and show that the "indirect" effects of Bhakra are huge. The results give a multiplier value of 1.90 indicating that for every rupee (100 paise) of additional value added directly by the project in the agricultural sectors, another Re 0.90 (90 paise) were generated in the form of downstream or indirect effects.

The results of our empirical study on the impacts of the Bhakra dam on income distribution show that the gains to the agricultural labour households from the dam were higher than gains to other rural households and to urban households.

The Manthan book, through gross mischaracterisation of very large benefits of Bhakra, does a grave disservice to the facts and the fundamental role that Bhakra has played in regional and national prosperity.

Ramesh Bhatia is President,
Resources and Environment Group,
New Delhi

R P S Malik is Acting Director,
Agricultural Economics Research Centre,
University of Delhi, Delhi.

The views expressed are personal.