THE north-eastern edge of India ranks among the wildest parts of the country and the most gorgeous. This is where the Tsangpo cleaves its way down from Tibet, gathering the waters of several tributaries before announcing itself as the mighty Brahmaputra. As the rivers descend, high forests with spectacular biodiversity, breathtaking gorges and mountain farms give way to fertile plains, braided riverine islands, masses of fish and birdlife, and a landscape dense with human settlement. The ecological and economic well-being of the downstream areas of Assam and Bangladesh hinges upon the integrity of these upland rivers in Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Bhutan and Sikkim.

The fluvial connections that create the Brahmaputra basin currently face their biggest threat. Large dams, many proposed, some already under construction, are to be built on each river that flows into the Brahmaputra. Since 2006, the Government of Arunachal Pradesh alone has signed Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) for 103 large projects on the Kameng, Subansiri, Siang, Dibang and Lohit rivers and their tributaries, an epidemic of agreements that the then Power Minister, Jairam Ramesh, described as the ‘MoU virus’. These hydropower projects are massive. They propose to generate a total of 30,000 megawatts (MW), doubling India’s entire hydel capacity, with plans for additional dams worth 27,000 MW. The dams are presented as a win-win proposition: they help meet the nation’s exploding energy demands while bringing scarce infrastructure to ‘under-developed’ areas and revenues to a state government hit hard by the ban on commercial tree felling.

Also, as the terrain is sparsely populated, human displacement, the prime obstacle in projects like the Narmada dams, is not a major issue. In 2005, the World Bank stated that these ‘hydropower sites are, from a social and environmental perspective, among the most benign in the world.’ This claim is endorsed by the Arunachal government which gets Rs 7 lakh per MW upfront as earnest money for each MoU it signs with a private company. With Rs 21 billion already in hand, it is no surprise that the Arunachal hydroelectric power policy states that, ‘If the available potential can be harnessed, the state would be floating in "hydro-dollars".’

 

These hydro-dollars may, however, come at an exchange rate that is ruinously high. The scale of the projects and the speed at which they are being pursued has alarmed academics, rural activists and legislators in Assam, the state that stands to be most drastically affected by changes in the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra. As Dulal Goswami, a fluvial geomorphologist who headed the Environmental Sciences department at Gauhati University, has pointed out, when large dams impound water, they also trap the silt essential for fertilizing downstream plains. The Brahmaputra, famous for the heavy silt load it carries, keeps the soil of Assam alive, a role that upstream dams will cut. Without sediment, a river flows faster, abrading its channel and eroding its banks. The water is clearer and less capable of sustaining aquatic life, including the fish and shrimp that are an essential and cherished part of local diets.

Dams also interfere with the flow of a river by changing its quantum and rhythms, at times amplifying floods and at others drying it up to a trickle, as has been the case with Tehri and other dams in the upper reaches of the Ganga basin. In a region known for seismic volatility and marked by ‘geological surprises’, the inherent uncertainties of complex geographical and biological processes are exacerbated by building dams. The exponential rise in the risk attached to local ecology and livelihoods has led Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, a farmers’ organization in Golaghat district, Assam, to ask for an immediate assessment of the downstream impacts of the Arunachal dams, a demand debated in the Assam legislative assembly which set up a house panel to investigate the issue in July 2009.

That potentially devastating downstream impacts are being ignored is a legitimate and serious concern. For most dams in Arunachal Pradesh, the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) required by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) have shockingly limited terms of reference. The EIA for the Lower Demwe dam on the Lohit, for instance, studies impacts only up to a distance of 10 km downstream, for a river that flows for hundreds of kilometres and has Tezu town, the district headquarters, on its lower banks. With a narrow geographical focus and a tight time frame that precludes any detailed investigation of hazards, and carried out by consultants for whom positive appraisals translate into repeat contracts (no EIA in Arunachal Pradesh has ever recommended that a dam not be built), shoddy EIAs allow the MoEF to approve potentially disastrous dams.

 

Even worse, from the point of the view of downstream populations, is the fact that the ministry does not require basin-wise study on the cumulative impacts of the dams before projects are approved. As Neeraj Vagholikar, an environmentalist with Kalpavriksh and an expert on the North East dams, points out, studies of individual dams do not reveal the combined effect of hundreds of dams in the Brahmaputra basin, effects that the people of Assam will have to contend with in the years to come.

In the Dibang valley in Arunachal, home to Idu Mishmi who number only 12,000, the dam brings the fear of being swamped by the influx of thousands of migrant workers who will stay for years on end, forever changing local culture and landscape. For tiny tribal communities whose way of life has already been encroached upon by the increasing inroads made by the armed forces, Hindi-language education, and the rest of the development package, the prospect of long-term settlers whose presence will inevitably affect earlier residents’ access to land and forests, jobs and business opportunities, is a troubling one. The North East region’s history of ethnic conflicts engendered by similar demographic shifts makes their concern a matter for serious consideration. What the dam projects make clear is that the cultural survival of the upstream Mishmi and that of the downstream people of Assam is threaded together by the Brahmaputra and tied to its imperilled future.

 

For most readers who have followed the unfolding tragedy of the Narmada displaced, the controversy over Tehri, and the recent reports of conflicts over Polavaram and Tipaimukh, the story of the north-eastern dams is depressingly familiar. Change the place names and the same fifty-year-old script unfurls itself: claims about meeting urgent national demands for power, irrigation and flood control; arguments about bringing jobs and development to a backward region; pressing forward on the basis of incomplete and inadequate project evaluations; environmental clearances given despite evidence to the contrary; public objections overruled; public hearings choreographed to create the illusion of consensus; financial costs that escalate exponentially as the project is constructed; and finally, irreversible environmental and social consequences that reveal themselves to be far more damaging than first anticipated, by which time, of course, it is too late to do anything about them.

This narrative is now so familiar that it seems to induce only fatigue in the minds of observers as well as the media. Journalists and commentators are tired of covering it, even though the issues remain alive and urgent in the lives of the people thus affected.

Yet if we revisit these issues around rivers and dams, what is remarkable is the fact that nothing has changed. The repetitions of history – the same old projects and same old sob stories that seem tiresome to observers but are tragic for the displaced – demand explanation. Why do we not learn from the past? Why has the water establishment – the government institutions that regulate water use and the funding agencies, public and private sector companies that are involved in its extraction and redistribution – not incorporated any lessons from its experience with previous projects? Decades of popular mobilization on the ground should have brought home the fact that the social costs of building dams cannot be underestimated or dismissed.

The accompanying growth in studies that point to technical and managerial alternatives to large dams should, likewise, have been hard to set aside. The declarations at the level of international and national policy, including the assertion by the World Commission on Dams that hydraulic projects which displace people should be thought of as the last option and not the first, should also have influenced the water establishment’s orientation towards the building of mega-projects. Yet these changes in the public discourse on dams do not seem to have had any effect at all. Why is it that neither resistance on the ground nor reasoned arguments about policy reform have succeeded in at least bringing about the gradual, incremental shifts in attitude and action that signify institutional learning over the long term?

 

The water establishment’s imperviousness to collective resistance and reasoned critique has a great deal to do with the enduring political economy of water. The colossal scale of large dams is underwritten by an equally staggering amount of public expenditure. When the price tag of each project runs into thousands of crores, the scale of contracts and commissions is commensurably large. This nexus between politicians, project-granting authorities, builders and contractors is an open secret in Indian public life – everyone knows that powerful private players drive decisions that are meant to represent the public interest, but no one directly challenges ‘the twenty per cent rule’ anchoring corruption.

 

This logic of kickbacks is all-pervasive, permeating the entire edifice of the water establishment. From the investment that families make to get their sons an engineering education to the premium paid to secure government jobs, from the junior engineer in the irrigation department to the managing director of the Jaypee Group, India’s biggest dam-builder, the movement of money and the mind-set of men (and the water establishment is overwhelmingly male) combine to create business-as-usual. Critiques may come and go but, as long as the bottom line of private profit at public expense remains stable, large dams will continue to be built.

If this is the private logic underlying public decision-making, what explains the wider approval that adheres to large dams in the public imagination? Why should metropolitan middle class audiences, who stand to gain little or nothing from the private profiteering around such projects, regard them as the cornerstone of national development?

Urban populations, however distant, are, of course, the direct beneficiaries of projects that bring water and electricity to their homes and offices, usually at a huge subsidy. Their ability to ignore the immense human and environmental cost entailed in providing them these resources is based upon two key ideological feats: one, middle-class monopoly over representing the ‘national interest’ in a manner that excludes the concerns of the poorest citizens; and two, the hegemony of the idea that large dams symbolize progress and modernity. The notion that a large dam serves the nation can only be sustained through the sleight of hand of making its victims – the displaced, the ecologically ravaged – disappear from view. This conjuring trick is accomplished by presenting middle-class concerns about ‘bijli, pani, sadak’ (electricity, water, roads) as the only legitimate causes in political life.

At the same time, the aspirations of the middle classes and their monopoly over definitions of ‘the public’ and the nation, have a profound bearing on how ideas of Indian modernity are actualized. Questions about what constitutes modernity and progress have preoccupied Indian minds and public life since colonial times; independent India’s tryst with destiny involved making a public commitment to capital-intensive technologies that promised to bring the benefits of science and technology to the masses. Within this worldview, the large dam is a spectacular statement of benign state power at the service of the nation. The power of this symbolic equation continues to endure, as protestors seeking to unsettle it have discovered to their cost.

 

The question of costs has several crucial aspects. We have already discussed the costs incurred by the public exchequer to facilitate private gains and the costs borne by the displaced while the benefits accrue to other, already well-off groups. There is also the issue of costs that are systematically underestimated by discounting the future. What does it matter if dams and embankments cause devastating floods in Bihar or Karnataka that affect millions of people? Or if dam related deforestation in the Himalayas precipitates landslides and the permanent loss of biodiversity? These costs lie in the distant future; today’s builders don’t have to deal with them – how can we expect them to feel a sense of responsibility for future generations when they are demonstrably callous about the present? Costs that unfold over time – the incremental debilitating effects of degraded riverine ecosystems – remain consistently uncalculated in the equations around large dams.

 

Finally, the failure of the water establishment to reform itself has to be seen in terms of the opportunity cost of adopting alternatives. The solutions urged by social movements call for a complete overhaul of the developmental worldview, underwritten by a radical transformation of how decisions are made. The notion of democratic and sustainable design based on the Gandhian principle of ‘the last first’, together with a respect for ecological integrity, requires that dams be examined within a larger scrutiny of resource politics and technologies. This kind of thoroughgoing review, or even a partial adoption of the recommendations made by its proponents, would turn the water establishment on its head. Even its atypical members (and I have met one or two) who may be open to such critical urging and willing to shed their encrusted culture of techno-managerial prerogative, find the transaction costs of such encounters too high. The humility to listen, compromise and surrender calls for hard work; business-as-usual is easier and more profitable.

 

The opposition to large dams has worked along two axes: resistance on the ground and reasoned critique that engages with the water establishment on its own terms. If the former has been (wrongly) condemned for polarizing the debate, for being anti-national and anti-development, the latter strategy has tried to occupy the middle ground, employing rational-legal arguments to urge the state to live up to its claims of legitimacy. If resistance has been led by social groups and activists that the establishment finds disreputable – adivasis and low-caste peasants, students and khadi-clad ‘jholawalas’, the strategy of rational-legal engagement has involved lawyers, engineers, economists, sociologists and policy analysts – professionals who deploy the cultural capital that they share with the water establishment to promote institutional reform.

Among this small but dedicated set of public intellectuals who go against the grain of received wisdom to persuasively put forth unpopular views, Ramaswamy R. Iyer stands out for his reasonable tone and radical vision. A former Secretary in the Indian government’s Ministry of Water Resources, Iyer has vast hands-on experience of large dams and a deep knowledge of the institutional arrangements around them. These qualities may be common to many senior bureaucrats and engineers, but Iyer brings a rare eloquence and passion for social justice and the environment to his work. Each of his essays on water is notable for its principled arguments, informed understanding and lucid exposition.

While Iyer is best-known for his articles in the press on inter-state and international water disputes, it is his larger perspective on reforming the water establishment that deserves to be discussed and incorporated into public policy. This vision is laid out in his books Water: Perspectives, Issues, Concerns (Sage 2003) and Towards Water Wisdom: Limits, Justice, Harmony (Sage 2007) and in the concluding chapter of his edited volume, Water and the Laws in India (Sage 2009). One of his basic arguments begins by reminding us of the uncomfortable truth that water is finite. Therefore, managing demand by making existing water use more efficient, equitable and ecologically sustainable is crucial. When water orthodoxy is firmly premised on supply-side solutions – building more, bigger dams and interlinking rivers, extracting groundwater at unprecedented rates – the wisdom embodied in Iyer’s arguments seems impeccable and yet earth-shaking. Similarly, I found myself reading and re-reading his simple statement about the basic propositions about rivers that need to be kept in mind when deciding their future course – a river must flow, a river needs space for its flooding, a river is part of a larger ecosystem. The case of the dams in the North East reiterates that we revisit these principles.

 

Closer to home, when the floodplain of the Yamuna in Delhi is being destroyed with the blessings of the Supreme Court which has over-ridden all ecological caution to allow the construction of luxury apartments for the Commonwealth Games 2010, sundry malls and a metro depot, as well as the Akshardham temple complex, Iyer’s words become even more pertinent. The judges of the Supreme Court need to heed these essential, irrevocable ecological truths, best expressed in the words of the late Kashinath Trivedi, a Gandhian and one of the founders of the Narmada movement, ‘Nadi ka dharma hai ki veh behti rahe’ (It is the dharma of a river to keep flowing).

 

* The material in the earlier part of the essay was previously published in modified form in Outlook, 7 September 2009.