Narmada Dam

Drowned Out

The Narmada Dam is supposedly being built to provide water and electricity for a large part of the population that has been experiencing a devastating drought. However, at the same time as helping some people, the reservoir has covered up villages where people have lived for hundreds of generations. A large canal system has been built as well that is pushing people off of there own land. The government that has been behind the project the entire time has promised to relocate the 16 million people who have been adversely affected by the dam, and they see the dam as progress for the greater good while villagers see it as their entire family's home and are tied to the land by much more than farmland.

The relocation program set up by the government doesn't seem to be working very well either. There simply isn't enough land for all of the people being relocated, especially considering that most of them are self-sufficient farmers which requires land of a certain quality. Since there isn't enough land, the government gives people a cash settlement instead. The farmers will then spend the money which lasts them only a couple of weeks and then they are stuck in a world run by money and have no skills to apply to the workforce. The government says that the dam is supposed to help the Indian economy become more self-sufficient by supplying more resources for itself. This is ironic because the people that are being pushed off of there land were perfectly self-sufficient before their land was covered in water. This shows the triumph of the localized solution over the nationalized one. There are even a couple of instances in which villages that were experiencing drought that found a way to store water and support themselves.

The worst part of the problem is that when loan officers from the IMF came to inspect the dam they found that data had been altered making the dam look