Big dams in India: Necessities or threats?

Abstract

Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) has become a vocal critic of the construction of big dams in India, particularly the Sardar Sarovardam presently under construction on the Narmada river. (For a recent summary of her position see The Cost of Living [HarperCollins, 1999J.) In July 1999 Gail Omvedt published an open letter to Arundhati Roy in which she claims that Roy is “missing many things” in her efforts defeat the dams. “Are you so convinced,” she asks Roy, “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? Or that the struggle should not be to unite all the rural people aspiring to a life of prosperity and achievement in the modern world—drought-amicted and dam-afflicted— rather than to just take up the cause of the opposition to change?” Roy has not replied in public to Omvedt's open letter but other activists have responded in various forums. In this “critique and rejoinder” we publish one such response: by Ashish Kothari, an anti-dam activist who drafted the first detailed critique of the Narmada projects back in 1983 (as amember of Kalpavriksh, an environmental group). Omvedt replies to Kothari's criticisms of her position and Kothari responds in his own defense. © 1999, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.