Autopsy of a betrayal
the controversy over the Sardar Sarovar Project has turned extremely murky over the last fortnight as the bureaucracy kept up a strange game. First, on July 16, it got the chief ministers (cm) of the four contending states - Madhya Pradesh (mp), Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan, to sign a "consensus agreement", temporarily fixing the height of the dam on the Narmada at 436 ft (132.9 mts) and keeping options open for raising it to 455 ft (138.68 mts) after five years. Then, on August 2, the Prime Minister (pm) H D Deve Gowda assured a delegation of the dam- people affected by the dam of reviewing the "agreement" among other things in the presence of the four cms on August 16.But apparently over-riding that assurance, the ministry of water resources issued a press release on August 7, stating that the July 16 agreement stands and that only the rehabilitation issue will be taken up. Meanwhile, Gujarat has announced that it will boycott the August 16 meeting and has urged the Maharashtra and Rajasthan to do the same.
The August 2 meeting was significant. This is possibly only the second time in the history of independent India (and only on the insistence of the Union home minister, Indrajit Gupta) that a pm has met a delegation this size. During the meeting, Medha Patkar, leader of the delegation, unambiguously accused him of flouting the United Front's Common Minimum Programme and allowing lakhs of people to be submerged without even giving them a hearing. The pm assured them that a solution will be attempted with a view to "minimising the misery of displacement". He said that the concerned central ministers will also attend the August 16 meeting. But now, strangely, the ministry press release has gone back on the pm 's assurances.
The story behind the agreement, as Down To Earth found out over the last fortnight, was a diabolic plan. The construction dam of the had been stopped at 270 ft after a Supreme Court ( sc ) stay order, with effect from January 1995. The nba had demanded that construction be stopped at that height and the dam be used for the drought-prone areas of Kutch and Saurashtra in Gujarat. The sc stay order had taken into account the statements of the nba , the mp government, as well as the rehabilitation sub-committee of the Narmada Control Authority ( nca ) on the sad state of rehabilitation measures.
The sc had also ruled that there was no point in hearing further arguments unless the states resolved their own disputes. It had fixed July 16 as the day within which that solution had to be arrived at. It was on the penultimate day, July 15, that the concerned state governments hurriedly met to work out a plan acceptable to all the parties. "To kill the snake and keep the rod intact" as the saying goes.
But the July 15 meeting flopped due to the intransigence of mp and a solution remained elusive that day. The politicians met again the next morning, and the sc was requested for an adjournment, as the pm 's meeting was on. It is not known what transpired within that one night, but on July 16 afternoon, the "consensus agreement" was announced. What is known is that the Union water resources ministry, which always wanted as high a dam on the Narmada as possible. It had worked hard to bypass the multiple barriers of the sc petition, the intransigence of mp and the opposition of the nba .
Interestingly, after the July 16 agreement both Gujarat and mp claimed victory. But victory of both the adversaries was not possible because mp at least, has been saying that Gujarat and Rajasthan's share of water can be satisfied even with a 384 ft dam. In any case they did not agree to retaining the design features of the dam at 455 ft, as the mp chief secretary told Down To Earth . But Gujarat's Narmada development minister Jaynarayan Vyas was emphatic that they had been allowed to go ahead upto 436 ft without changing anything else. Essentially, therefore, no agreement had been reached and none has emerged till the time of going to press, though four drafts have been proposed by the Union government. The agreement was a eyewash.
The logic behind the agreement was that even if all four states agreed to 436 feet as the presently acceptable height, all the villages would be submerged, leaving the nba without its raison d'etre ; effectively finishing off the real opposition to the dam. Once that was done, the height of the dam would become a matter of mutual agreement between consenting politicians. Now, the nba activists are hoping that the pm will this one last time take a pro-people viewpoint and manage to scuttle the machinations of the bureaucracy.