IT IS ONLY in the last few months that people in the west are likely to have heard about the Narmada river valley project since novelist Arundhati Roy became involved in the campaign against it. Roy, whose book The God Of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997, joined the fight by writing an essay in a Indian magazine, later republished in the west, attacking big dams for displacing 50 million tribal people in India in the past 50 years.
The essay "The Greater Common Good" aroused so much fury in the area of the projected dams that Congress Party youth made a bonfire of it, as well as threatening those who stocked it.
The project is a series of over 3000 cascading damns costing £6.4billion along the 1300 km river. The project seen as a symbol of progress by the governments of the states directly affected: Gujarat, Rajistan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. They claim that the project will generate electricity and provide clean drinking water. Certainly there is a demand for electricity. from large farmers and industrialists in the region who put their thirst for profit way above the lives of the people whose homes will be destroyed. But the campaign against the damn did not start with Roy's intervention. For 14 years the project has been dogged with controversy both because of its For 14 threat to the environyears the ment and to the many tribal people who will project has be displaced by it.
In 1993 the World been dogged Bank was forced to with withdraw support because of the controversy strength of local campaigning. Then work on the last dam, the Sardar Sarovar, was suspended in January 1995 following a court order on a petition filed by environmentalist Medha Patkar's Free Narmada movement (NBA) alleging large-scale displacement of tribals living in the area where the dams are