Troubled Waters

Bul

jiya Munde has had enough. His cow is sick, sprawled at the edge of the Narmada River, refusing to move. There is hardly any food in the house, and now the children have to go without milk. In the water are the remains of his home. All that is standing are the wooden staves that once supported his mud and straw shack, and the bright pink door that led into it. Late in July, when the sluice gates at a dam upstream were cranked open, his home was washed away. It happened in the middle of the night, and he barely managed to gather up his family—brothers, sons and nephews, their wives and numerous grandchildren—and scramble into the cowshed, which is on slightly higher ground. The cow was forced to graze outside, where it slipped and hurt itself. Now Munde does not know what do and stares disconsolately at the beast, his only remaining wealth. "We are all going to drown anyway because of these dams," he mutters, shrugging his bony shoulders. "Maybe I should just push her into the water now and end her misery."

Munde is one of thousands who will lose their homes this year because of the large dams that are being built on the Narmada River. His village, Domkhedi, is in the submergence zone of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. It is monsoon season, and the reservoir level has risen to over 100 meters and is likely to increase. Munde should have been relocated a long time ago, but there is no land to give him, and all his belongings are lying at the bottom of the muddy lake. Munde's daughter-in-law Khyali, a friendly 23-year-old mother of two, apologizes for the milk-less tea she is serving. "It is raining all the time and we have water coming down from above and rising from below," she says. "Our life is over."

The Sardar Sarovar Dam is part of the Narmada Valley Development Project, an ambitious plan to provide water and power for India's enormous infrastructure requirements. Electricity shortages are a national problem, with regular breakdowns that bring factories, schools and farms to a standstill. But opponents argue that the nearly 3,000 dams planned for the Narmada Valley will destroy far more than they deliver. As if to prove their claim, an earthquake measuring 4.3 on the Richter scale shook the Sardar Sarovar Dam on July 27. There is concern that the dam, which is built on a fault line, could be leveled by a stronger tremor. A just revenge, say locals; they believe the Narmada will hate to see herself shackled and the people who worshipped her driven away.

The Three Gorges Dam in China also completed its initial construction this summer, but the residents of the submerged villages along the Yangtze didn't have much chance to voice their opposition. By contrast, the Narmada project has been the subject of a six-year court case and nearly two decades of controversy. Celebrities like actress Shabana Azmi and author Arundhati Roy have rallied to the cause; Drowned Out, a documentary on the dam's victims and its larger consequences, played this summer to strong reviews in Britain and the U.S. and was screened last week in Bombay. The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), led by Bombay social activist Medha Patkar, has fought for 18 years for the rights of people like the Munde family, who are members of a forest-dwelling tribe which relies on pocket-sized farms, cattle and forest produce to subsist.

The NBA won several international awards and gained numerous supporters around the world, including the California-based International Rivers Network. It won some big battles; in 1993 the World Bank withdrew its funding for the dam on the basis of human rights abuses. But in October 2000, the NBA lost the war. India's Supreme Court, which had initially stayed construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, ruled that the state should be allowed to go ahead with the 138-meter high project—but that it could only be done in five-meter increments to ensure that the affected people were properly rehabilitated. Once this part of the project had cleared the courts, it paved the way for the rest to follow. For the next two summers, however, the monsoon rains failed, and the dams couldn't collect water even as the height of their walls began to climb. Nature had saved the people of the Narmada valley.

Now, as our motorboat chugs across the giant reservoir that has drowned villages, farms, forests and temples, it seems that Nature had merely delayed the inevitable. For all the NBA's celebration and recognition, their protest was ignored and eventually defeated. Rakesh, a 20-year-old NBA activist who still remembers swimming and fishing in the river, sat staring at the vast expanse of water as lightning lit up the monsoon sky. "This is not the Narmada anymore," he said. "This is frightening. They have turned the river into an ocean."

The Sardar Sarovar Dam is already 103 meters high, and Buljiya Munde has not been resettled. The government claims that the villagers in harm's way have been rehabilitated, but according the NBA that claim is completely false. "The people remain in the village because they have nowhere to go," says Umesh, a local activist. Instead of helping out, the state has cracked down. (TIME's reporter was summoned for questioning by the police and accused of spreading 'disturbance'.) In Chimalkhedi village, police arrested 74 villagers, smashed their homes and threw their belongings into the water, insisting that the people leave and never come back. According to the NBA's Patkar, even the wood that the villagers could have used to build new huts was sawn into small pieces. "I don't know whether to cry or be angry," she says.

Yet the NBA refuses to give up. Now that the dams are being built, the group is lobbying for adequate compensation for residents. Kamla Yadav is 48 years old; she has been beaten so often by the police that her backbone is damaged and she can barely walk. A village woman who was once expected to cover her face in front of strangers, Yadav has transformed into a stubborn activist who says the people cannot afford to back down. She plans to join an ongoing hunger strike by displaced locals. "We have courted arrest, we have met ministers, presidents and officers, begged and pleaded with everyone," she says. "But we have to keep doing that because the peaceful way is the only way." Sitting nearby, a younger man is already snorting in disgust. "They will never listen to all this," he says. "What this government responds to is bombs and guns. That is what we have to take up. We have to become terrorists." The mood in the valley swings like this, from maudlin to militant. Some villagers have agreed to meager cash settlements as a way to grab what little the government is offering. Unfortunately, since most of them are tribal folk that have never dealt with cash, they often spend it on useless electronics or motorcycles and can end up as beggars or migrant laborers in the cities.

The NBA and its tireless supporters are still trying to fight for villagers' rights, but nothing has worked. Pairavi Singh's home in Jalsindhi village is already under water. "If the government cannot give us our land," she says, "we will have no option but to find our rest in the belly of the Narmada." Four people have already lost their lives, two of them swallowed by angry crocodiles whose once sunned themselves on the rocky riverbed. Their home too, has vanished.