Mail Middle-class assertion
In last month's issue, Kanak Mani Dixit and Sripad Dharmadhikary fluently illuminated the enduring legacy engendered by centralised dam projects in Southasia: mass displacement and the failure to provide rehabilitation for the inhabitants of the disrupted areas. Dixit urges us to take another look at the re-emergence of the big-dam phenomenon in the context of India's changing economic conditions – or warns that we will have little realistic chance of combating the environmental degradation, displacement and mass impoverishment that result from existing and planned projects.
Further, the articles emphasised an evaluation of our rejection of big dams based not merely on claimed economic viability divorced from social factors, but also on how economic decisions impact social realities on the ground. Such an evaluation needs to involve the role of the rising Indian middle class, which subsequently implies securing their interests as well. However, this cannot happen without a restructured vision, in terms of how development operates in the interest of a progressive nation, as well as how development mandates continual, proper valuation before projects are planned in the first place. The environments and needs of each part of India, after all, differ vastly from one another.
Middle-class assertion on this issue would aid on two fronts. First, it would spur needed debate on individual development projects before implementation. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it would help to thwart the meaningless 'good for India/bad of India' binary on the issue of 'development'. This would subsequently eradicate overly simplistic notions of 'progress' and 'traditionalism', which have done little more than to thwart honest, complex dialogue from the thickets of the decision-making process. There has only been one lasting result from the lack of amenable dissension among parties to whom the state and planning commissions are most likely to listen: lives being endangered by those who bear the burden for dam projects undertaken without proper evaluation.
Ashwin Parulkar
Syracuse, USA