I recently watched a news programme on TV that sought to convey the plight of those who are about to lose their homes, thanks to dam-building activity on the Narmada river. The journalist intervewed a number of residents of a certain temple-town that was about to get submerged once an adjacent, recently built dam became operational. The town was seeped in tradition. Deeply religious, with a number of temple-ghats on the banks of the Narmada river, in the remote hinterlands of Madhya Pradesh, it seemed the perfect poster-boy for the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
The plight of the residents was bemourned by a local author who blamed the corporation that had constructed the dam, for the mess that they'd been making in the town. As a gesture of goodwill, the corporation had tried to contribute to the local community by restoring a section of the crumbling ghat-temples. What displeased the author-historian is the manner in which the restoration work was carried out. He claimed that since the corporation was into the hospitality industry, all they knew was building hotel lobbies and that is exactly what,he said, they had renovated the temples into: glorified hotel lobbies.
There were people in the town who were afraid that the local heritage was disappearing into oblivion thanks to dam-building and token temple renovations that did more to obliterate local tradition than restore it. There were a group of nomadic-weavers who complained that they couldn't receive any compensation from the government like other residents had, because they had no permanent dwellings. They depended entirely on the local economy which was about to vanish thanks to the dam devouring the town. Everyone who depended on the erstwhile local economy should receive compensation, they said. A local boatman who ferried on the waters of the un-harnessed river supported the argument.
All through the programme, the construction company that built the dam and the state government came across as villains....terminating the life of a heritage town and depriving people of their livelihood. And the same case is made at every town that's part of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Now, as an uninvolved, yet concerned outsider, I often find myself asking questions as to which is more important: allowing locals to live their lives in harmony and tradition or providing power and irrigation to the millions of rain-dependent farmers of the country? Can a balance be striked? Or is this an impossibly one-sided situation where you're either for one side or against it...no middle grounds and sitting on the fence?
Can India move forward without sacrificing local closed economies and traditions on the altar of economic and infrastructural growth? It's a question that haunts me very often. One that I have no answers to. After the news programme ended,the channel aired an advertisement for the same construction company.
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