Gujarat Govt Hopes To Resolve Narmada Issue

With a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in office in New Delhi, the Gujarat government is hoping it can finally have its way on the controversial Sardar Sarovar dam.

Gujarats Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel of the BJP has dropped hints to the local media of a likely understanding with his partys national leadership on the issue. BJP president and home minister L K Advani, elected to the Lok Sabha from the Gandhinagar constituency, had declared during his election campaign that the Narmada project would be given national status by a BJP government.

Then member of Parliament Sanat Mehta, a former chairman of the project, had raised the issue in the Lok Sabha last year. To his surprise, he found support from senior members of the then United Front government for the states demand to raise the dam height.

 

Work on the dam, which is now about 81 metres high, was stayed last year under Supreme Court orders on petitions by the anti-dam Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Madhya Pradesh government challenging Gujarats proposal to raise the height to 110 metres.The apex court is scheduled to hear the case next week.

The state government argues that raising the dam to this height would stretch its irrigation potential to the dry lands of Kutch and Rajasthan besides facilitating the building of a 250 mw power plant. It has also claimed that the delay is pushing up the project cost. It had spent more than Rs 6,000 crore when the work was stopped and is now having to pay more than Rs 2 crore in interest charges.

The project cost, which was estimated at Rs 1,250 crore in 1969, had shot up to Rs 13,180 crore in 1992.

The Gujarat government is countering the charges of anti-dam activists by citing the findings of a survey conducted by the Madhya Pradesh-based Environment Protection Group, which investigated the effect of increasing the dams height on the 110 villages located in the submergence zone in the state.

The EPG is led by Sharad Jain, former president of the Narmada Valley Development Authority in Madhya Pradesh.

The survey has pointed out that the residences and farms of only 16 villages would be affected by the increased height, while 14 villages would not be touched at all by water.

Of the 7,906 families to be affected by the increased height, less than 4 per cent would have their lands submerged a total of 184 hectares. Around 7,590 families will lose their houses.

The survey found that 22.28 per cent of the affected families are willing to be resettled in Gujarat, while another 62.24 per cent would prefer to remain in Madhya Pradesh. Some 15.48 per cent, most of them well-to-do farmers, do not want to move out of their present villages. The proposed Narmada embankments of three to ten metres height, with full pitching on the reservoir side and adequate drainage arrangements, will preclude loss of farmlands and displacements in 67 villages.

The survey claimed that a lot of misinformation was being spread in the villages to be affected by the dam and that was fuelling protests against the dam.

Surprisingly, those families to be affected and wanting to stay put in Madhya Pradesh would also like no less a benefit package offered by Gujarat.

Narmada Bachao Andolan defends a tribal lifestyle that is in any case increasingly unsustainable. No surprise, those agitators sitting in developed countries simply cannot imagine what benefits such a dam could mean to those living in and around the forests since centuries. It could perhaps mean a resurgent new literate and modern class of people who would not tolerate any economic hegemony of non-tribals or some super power, said a top project official.