from an interview in the Financial Times Weekend Edition:
"Like all my generation," Roy told me as we sat down in the cafe at Sotheby's, "I was taught to believe Nehru's famous speech about dams being the temples of modern India."
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Roy did not have to rehearse to me the reasons why she abruptly stopped believing in that mesage from Nehru, since they are eloquently told through the statistics that crowd into her small book [The Cost of Living], and which I had absorbed with a sort of fascinated horror.
For the story of this vast project of 3,300 dams and associated canals, far from being an idealistic vision of bringing water to the thirsty and crops to the parched land of Madhya-Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra, is a grim, 15-year tale of misery: thousands of people wrenched from their livelihoods, with no compensation (only those who own land are legitimate PAPs -- Project Affected Persons -- so what about the hundreds of fisher-families, the thousands of nomads, the poorest of the poor, Dalits and Adivasis?); the death toll of children in the disease-ridden "resettlement" accommodation; the all-too-familiar story of the third world debt cycle (this is, she claims, the only project the World Bank has ever pulled out of, after protests).
And what she calls the "development racket," whereby richer countries provide funding to poorer ones in return for the employment of armies of engineers, developers and "experts," and the purchase of equipment.
There are ironies: some estimates say that the huge network of dams and canals within the project area will actually consume, in their own workings, more electricity than they could ever generate.
And there is the prospect of ecological devastation on a vast scale: monsoon irrigation without drainage leads to waterlogging, which causes salinisation that renders the land useless. Here is Roy, venting her full fury on the subject: "David Hopper, the World Bank's vice-president for South Asia, has admitted tha the bank does not usually include the cost of drainage in its irrigation projects . . . because irrigation projects with adequate drainage are just too expensive.
"The bank's solution . . . is to put in the irrigation system and wait -- for salinity and waterlogging to set in. When all the money's spent and the land is devastated and the people are in despair, who should pop by? Why, the friendly neighbourhood banker! And what's that bulge in his pocket? Could it be a loan for a drainage project?"
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__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com