India: Who gives a dam?

The completion last week of a significant milestone in the construction of one of India’s largest hydroelectric projects, the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River, was greeted largely with indifference in the country and abroad, even though it puts an end to one of the longest-running controversies in the country’s modern history.

The contrast with China’s more majestic Three Gorges project

is quite stark, particularly in terms of implementation speed, objectives and methods. The wrenching shortage of physical infrastructure in India cannot be resolved with an ambivalent attitude toward such projects; therefore there is much to learn from the Chinese approach in this matter.
Dams are controversial projects everywhere in the world, because of their high environmental impact, displacement of people and the large costs required to be borne up front. In the case of such countries as India and China, such hydroelectric projects prove to be essential because of their role in reducing dependence on non-renewable sources of energy, as well as the efficiencies to be had in the storage and distribution of fresh water. In essence, dams are a compromise between current costs and future benefits, and therefore require adroit management of society’s expectations to have any chances of success.

The scale of people benefiting from both these projects far outweighs the number of people facing displacement in both countries. While the Chinese Communist Party has managed to keep the calculations fairly simple and straightforward for the Three Gorges project, democratic India has had to fudge its accounts to push its project through. For China, the cost of the project has been compared to the economic benefits in terms of power generated and additional benefits from regulating the shipping on the river.

In the case of India, though, the calculations have been skewed for various reasons.

Asia Times