Open Letter on Dams and Development

Dear All: Below excerpts from a remarkable “ Open Letter To Arundhati Roy“ (from more than 12 years ago) by Gail Omvedt.  What is remarkable about this piece is that Gail is far from an armchair critic. She is married to an activist, lives the life of a farming family and has been at the forefront of issues around development for more than a decade..She brings to this piece her remarkable insights combined with pragmatic and practical approach to resolving the issues of development, rural poverty and displacement related to development projects.

Her “Open Letter” is a refreshing change (and very welcome development) in the current high-on-decibels and low-on-reason atmosphere and cacaphony of protests and agitations against development and related issues (including land acquisition). Please do read and share widely.

*** Excerpts from the “Open Letter” (emphasis added) ***

Arundhati, I’m sorry to have to write a critical letter to you. I very much liked The God of Small Things. I also appreciated your intervention on the nuclear issue…

I can understand the urgency you feel for the people of the valley and the victims of misguided development projects everywhere, but I feel that you’re missing many things.

…The first time I even heard of the Narmada dams was around 1984. ..A little after that, in 1986, many of the same activists of the Shramik Sanghatana and SMD organised an “Adivasi-Forest Conference” in Shahada. I had come to Dhule to help in rallying support among the social and political activists of the district.This was just after Medha had made her first visit to the district. She had crossed the Narmada with Achyut Yagnik of Ahmedabad; their boat had capsized but somehow they had made their way down through the district, stopping off at Shahada to meet Shramik Sanghatana people the main organisation of adivasi toilers in the region-and then coming to Dhule where she formeda support organisation. All this was fine. There were only two critical questions raised. One was mine: Medha at that time was following the guidelines of the World Bank in demanding justice for evictees, and these guidelines identified only male heads of families as eligible for alternative land. We were at the time already starting to raise the question of land for women, and I felt it was too bad that the landlessness of women was being neglected in the process of rehabilitation and building anew.
But that was minor. Looking back, probably a more important negative reaction came from Waharu Sonavane, at that time the leading young adivasi activist of Shramik Sanghatana. Waharu had been in the movement since 1971-72, working with Ambarsingh Maharaj, a truly unique indigenous leader and with the Shramik Sanghatana and Shramik Mukti Dal, a Maharashtra-wide organisation of Marxist activists. Waharu is a poet and an intellectual though he has never had the opportunity to learn English, and I will quote for you a few lines of one of his poems.. It is given as a title the English word (a word that also has come in Marathi) “Stage”.

We did not go on to the stage, neither were we called.

We were shown our places, told to sit.

But they, sitting on the stage, went on telling us of our sorrows, our sorrows remained ours, they never became theirs.

There is more but that is the main point. ..More recently also it was Waharu who raised the question to Sanjay Sanghvi (sic) of the NBA, “Why is it that there is no top ranking adivasi leadership in the NBA?” This was at a seminar organised by the Pune University Women’s Studies Centre. Sanjay could not answer except to say “But all our village leaders are adivasis.”

…There were and are real questions about the way in which the leadership of the NBA relates to and “represents”, uses, its adivasi and non-adivasi farmer following. One of these has to do with an area you should be an expert in : words.
Why the term “tribal”? I know, nearly every English speaker in India, apparently including supporters and activists of the NBA, uses “tribal” for adivasis when speaking in English. (In Indian languages all now use “adivasi” or some equivalent). But, though established now, the term “tribal” is an insulting and demeaning word, inaccurate even from a social-scientific point of view; and I don’t know of any group of indigenous people the world over who would accept it for themselves. (I won’t here go into the debate about whether or not “adivasis” should be called “indigenous people.”)
The only reason it survives in India is that because of the abysmal state of education in general among adivasis and even worse state of English education, there is no one really in a position to protest. Otherwise there would be massive objections, just as Dalits have thrown out the term “harijan.” Those classified as “scheduled tribe” in northeast India – people like Mr. Sangma made clear long ago their feelings about being called “hill tribes”. The fact “tribal” is still a widely used word in English, I think, has something to do with the way people are a little careless about the identities and real feelings of those they represent. And if this includes you and the NBA, then you should think about it.
In any case, Waharu’s earliest objection was in terms of non-recognition of what they had done before; and this was very early on in the anti-Narmada movement, when there was no NBA as such and Medha and others were still talking mainly of rehabilitation and not of total opposition to big dams as such. But the tendency of not recognising the work of others, or really being willing to admit that there has been a history of struggles, has remained.

…In Maharashtra the largest “peoples’ organisation” or alliance working on rehabilitation issues is the Maharashtra Rajya Dharangrast va Prakalgrast Shetkari Parishad (Maharashtra State Conference of Dam and Project Affected Farmers), which has been working since the 1970s. It has been a broad platfor…These have nearly all been involved on issues or irrigation and water as well as problems of dam evictees.

People in these organisations were concerned about the social justice of dams and the sustainable use of water from very early. But they never opposed dams as such. The main slogan of the people involved in their struggles was “first rehabilitation, then the dam”. Later this was linked to “equal water distribution” the demand that irrigation projects should be restructured to provide water to every family in every village in a watershed area. Movements are going on for this, for example in regard to the Krishna Valley dams.

…Why does anybody need “big dams” or “big irrigation projects”? Arundhati, there is a very simple issue here that urban people – I hope this doesn’t sound too sarcastic – find hard to understand. Water is needed, not only for drinking, but for agriculture….You cannot grow crops without water, and when there is only 500mm of water per year – this is true of three-fourths of the Krishna valley area in Maharashtra and of much of Gujarat including Saurashtra and Kutch – then some external water, provided by canals, is necessary to supplement rainfall.

…You say that the thousands of dams built in India since independence have simply led to eviction on one hand and waterlogging on the other, but this is not true. So many farmers have benefited from irrigation water, and millions who have not can see this, and want such benefits also. Our arguments are not against big irrigation projects as such, but against badly conceived ones; big projects can be sustainable and work in a decentralised manner.

…In any case, most of those who stand to lose their lands for dam projects are farmers, whether adivasis or non-adivasis, who understand the need of water for agriculture. Their refusal to be victims of development does not mean an opposition to development; they would like a share in it; they would like it to be just and sustainable.

…I ask myself, what kind of movement is this, what kind of movement is the NBA? Whose movement is it, anyway?

…That requires a few comments about the question of development. You are, like many urbanites and many people in Europe and North America who buy food from the market every day, very pessimistic and even antagonistic to the idea of Indian farmers getting into “commercialised agriculture”.

…Economists have even argued that the average wage for agricultural and basic manual labourers at the time of the Arthashastra represented the same in money terms as the average wage during colonial times; and it has not changed very much in the 50 years of independence. That is your traditional, non-commercialised society. Do you really think the adivasis, dalits and shudra or Rajput farmers of the Narmada valley want to keep that? Are you so convinced that the thousands of dams built since independence have been an unmitigated evil? Or that the goal should not be to restructure and improve them rather than abandon them?

*** End of Excerpts ***

Read it in full here.  Related Posts: Of Kondhs, Aluminium and Vedantapur, “Kaam Aadmi” Politics – Can it work?

Also read: Obstruction As Ideology by Madhu Kishwar and the counter-response.