Arundhati Roy replies to Dr. Bhalla and suggests that his numbers are all wrong. She further adds that big dams have "contributed only 12% of the total produce" in agriculture.

In which Mr. Bhalla gets his sums wrong

The well-known novelist takes on her critic Surjit Bhalla, pointing out the huge mistakes in his reading of simple numbers on the Dam project- don't miss the jugular and hit the funny bone instead, she says.

ARUNDHATI ROY

Though the saints amongst us may disagree, I'd say that ridiculing someone is not necessarily a bad thing to do. When that someone is a famous writer who's won a big prize, you could even argue that it's a good thing. When that someone is a publicity-seeking, anti-national, anti-development, pro-poverty famous writer (cum Foreign Agent) who's won a big prize, why then I'd go so far as to say that ridiculing her is, or ought to be, every right-thinking citizen's public duty.

There's only one rule: (for heaven's sake) get it right.

Don't write a piece so full of basic mistakes that even the people whose side you're on (in this case the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam) would not want to post on their website. In other words, don't do what Mr. Bhalla did (Going wrong with figures in a Big Dam way, The Indian Express, September 6th 1999) Don't miss the jugular and hit the funny bone instead.

When I was writing The Greater Common Good, one of the things that shocked me was that there were no official government records of how many people have been displaced by Big Dams. The fact that these figures (whatever they are) do not exist is not just an unpardonable failure on the part of the Indian state, it is an unpardonable failure on the part of all of us- the writers, the thinkers, the economists, the planners. (Yes Mr. Bhalla, you and I.) I don't understand how the benefits of Big Dams can be trumpeted from the rooftops when the costs are not factored into the arithmetic.

How can Big Dams be credited for India's ‘development' when there hasn't been an official audit? Who says that the 140 per cent increase in irrigation area and food grain production is because of Big Dams? Are we supposed to accept this unquestioningly as an article of faith? When we know that huge questions are being raised about the costs, benefits and impact of Big Dams? When the only study that's been done (as far as I know) says irrigation from Big Dams has contributed only 12 per cent of the total produce? When millions of hectares of land in Punjab is waterlogged? When we have realized that agricultural yields in areas supposed to be at the heart of the green revolution are not sustainable? When public protest against Big Dams refuses to shut up and go away?

Given all this, I thought it necessary to make an attempt to put a figure on how many people have been displaced by Big Dams. To do a back-of -the-envelope calculation. The point was (and I've said as much in my essay) to throw up a figure so that we could at least begin to bring some perspective to the debate. I used a study of 54 Large Dams collated by the Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA) and the Central Water Commission's estimate that India has built 3300 Large Dams since Independence. The average number of displaced people (only reservoir displaced) per dam came to 44,000. Correcting for the fact that the dams that IIPA chose to study may have been the larger among the Large Dam projects, and for the spiraling of population in the large 50 years, I pared down the average number of displaced people to 10,000 per dam. Using this average, the total number of people displaced by Large Dams worked out to a scandalous 33 million.

In the interest of "an academic and policy debate", Mr. Bhalla swoops down on this and declares it to be the heart of my argument against Big Dams. It isn't. I believe that even if the displaced people were resettled in paradise, there would be a powerful argument against Big Dams. (And please, being against Big Dams doesn't mean that you are against irrigation and electricity). There are economically more viable, ecologically more sustainable and politically more democratic ways of irrigating land and generating electricity.

But... " It is the case that the larger the number of people that have to be resettled, the greater the potency of the argument against Big Dams," Mr. Bhalla says. Having dumbed down the debate in this spectacular fashion, he then sets about demolishing the figure I mentioned, with great statistical flourish. He outlines several different ‘methodologies' for how to calculate the numbers of displaced people. I won't waste my time (or yours) discussing each of them. But here is one as a sample. Method No: 3 (and by no means the most absurd). I quote:

All-Dams-as-Bad-as-The-Sardar-Sarovar-Project (SSP) - Method - 17 million  

The SSP project contains one very large dam and 29 other Big Dams. The people displaced from this project can be used for an estimate. But this raises a problem - whose figures does one believe- the government (about 40,000) or the NBA (about 4,15,000)? Neither. Instead, the estimate provided by the "objective" Morse Commission Report…is accepted. The report suggests that 1,00,000 is a "conservative figure" and that the likely number displaced is about 1,50,000. In stark contrast to the IIPA's average figure of 44,000 the most controversial project in (1,50,000 people, 30 dams). Thus, the SSP based estimate is about 17 million displaced. (3.300 dams, 5000 per dam).

What I have to say is this:

- The SSP project does not contain one very large dam and 29 Big Dams. It's just one single very big dam. Any child in the Narmada Valley could tell you that. Mr. Bhalla is confusing the Sardar Sarovar Dam with the entire Narmada Valley Development Project (NVDA) of which the Sardar Sarovar is a part.

- The Government estimate of 40,000 (in1999) that Mr. Bhalla quotes is the number of households displaced by the Sardar Sarovar reservoir, not the number of people. So even the Government estimate is 200,000 people.

- The Morse Commission report (1992) estimate of 1,50,000 people is only the number likely to be directly displaced by the Sardar Sarovar reservoir. Much of the rest of the report talks about other categories of people (for instance those affected by the canals) ought to be counted as project affected, but aren't. (Which is also what the NBA says and which is why there is such a huge discrepancy between the government's figures and the NBA's.

Could some one give Mr. Bhalla a calculator that says ‘people' against the numbers every time he punches his buttons? 17 million people, 200,000 people. Just to remind him that we're talking about human beings. Not onions or edible oil. People. Like himself. Like his wife and children. Like his friends. What can I say? Mr. Bhalla gets his sums wrong. Not just wrong, but egregiously wrong. (If you were to correct his figures and use his "method" you'd get a total of 660 million displaced people!). Using his other ‘methodologies' he arrives at figures of 3.4 and 3.7 million people as the total number of people displaced by large dams. Figures which he quotes approvingly. We already know that the reservoirs of the 54 large dams studied by the IIPA (using actual Central Water Commission data) displaced a total of 2.37 million people.

This is fact, not speculation or estimation. So, according to Mr. Bhalla's ‘methods' the remaining 3,246 dams have, between them, displaced 1 and 1.4 million people. Which works to an average of between 308 and 430 people per large dam! Consider this- Just the dam site and the housing for the officers and contractors for the Sardar Sarovar Dam in Kevadia Colony displaced nearly 5,000 people. And that was in 1961. (They don't count as Project-affected and haven't been rehabilitated. They live as squatters on their own land. They work as servants in what were once their own homes.) What surprises me is the disdain with which Mr. Bhalla dismisses my essay (my "explosive pamphlet"), without bothering to really read it. At no point in my explosive pamphlet have I "rounded off" the figure of 33 million and claimed that the total number of people displaced by dams is 50 million. (50 million was the estimate put forward by a former Secretary of the Planning Commission of the number of people displaced by all Development Projects in the country) And when I write "Big Dams are to a Nation's ‘Development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal", it's an analogy for god's sake! It doesn't mean that Big Dams are radioactive when they explode! (For example when I said "paying cash compensation to a farmer is like giving a judge a bag of fertilizer" was I saying that fertilizer is cash? Or that a judge is a farmer?) Clearly, Mr. Bhalla is as loose with language as he is with numbers. And clearly he, like so many others, has decided to deny my argument even before he knows precisely what it is. Why? What has frightened hem so? I'd really like to know. What is a man like him so desperate to protect? What is this complicity, this deafening silence all about? What makes hem want to dismiss an entire fifteen year old people's movement as a fashion statement? Like short skirts or puff sleeves. "Everybody in the chattering class today is an expert on the horrors of Big Dams," Mr. Bhalla complains. If this is true, (though I don't believe it is), all I can say is Good on you Chattering Classes! Maybe there is hope after all.

Apart from the statistical delights of his calculator based "methodologies", he also treats us to some challenging rapid fire statistics- like food grain yields have gone up by 140 percent (I've said so too) and overall electricity consumption has gone up 25 times. "So much for the pop fiction of poverty," he says. Omitting to mention of course, that most of the rural population has no access to electricity. Or that while we play tricks with the poverty line, and millions of people go hungry, millions of tones of food rots in Government godowns. Everybody knows that there's enough food in the world to go around. And most people know that the science of understanding who gets fed and who goes hungry is called politics. Distribution is not some small, technical glitch in the system- it's the heart of politics.

Do we really need statistics to tell us whether or not there's something going terribly wrong in this country? You can feel it in the air; you can smell it on the streets. Put away your calculator Mr. Bhalla. It'll only let you down. Put away your calculator and take a good look around you. Pop fictions could well be the truest thing you ever touched.

As for the gentleman on the side- Mr. Jain- he begins his piece (More ‘Dam' Facts) with what is fast becoming a mandatory opening gambit when it comes to matters concerning me: "Since it's next to impossible for a mere moral to match Arundhati Roy's ‘facility with the language…' As though ‘facility with the language' is something I keep in my closet and wear when I go out. The implication of course, is that underneath the finery of good language, I'm a poor cretin who doesn't really understand the real world. I have news for you Mr. Jain, Language is thought. It's what I'm saying that enrages and intimidates you. Not how I'm saying it. Having taken his swipe, Mr. Jain then categorically says that there can be no alternatives to Big Dams for generating electricity. Of course this isn't true- there are alternatives, but as long as those like him and the powers whose views he appears to represent refuse to consider them, they will never be allowed to become viable. Alternatives, if they are to be properly developed, require passion, commitment, research, funds and a real desire to arrive at a solution. You can't threaten a people with submergence and when they protest, ask belligerently what alternatives can suggest. As though it's their duty to come up with a solution to your needs. Alternative Number One, as far as I can tell is to clear up the mess that has already been made before causing further destruction. Complete the canals (of existing dams), install the drainage, maintain the transformers, minimize distribution and transmission losses, monitor the siltage. Let's learn to trim the waste. Stop the leaks. Fix the pipes. Stop the haemorrhaging. Recently the Chairman of the Power Finance Corporation said that more than 40 per cent of the electricity generated is lost in transmission.

Also I just wondered- what are you going to do when you've built all the dams that you can build? After all, we have just so many rivers, just so much water, just so much forest. What when it's all used up? (We're pretty far-gone already). What when the waters begin to lap at your own front door, perhaps then you'll be willing to at least mention the fact that there ought to be a management of Demand. Sustainable Development we're allowed to talk about. But what about Sustainable Consumption? There's nothing like an economy of shortages to encourage innovation. Let me give you a simple example. Today, an architect designing an office building simply assumes that it will be air-conditioned. The building is designed in such a way that there is almost no natural ventilation. Air-conditioning then becomes a necessity, not a luxury. But if air-conditioning were not that easily available, the architect would be obliged to arrive at a in which air-conditioning was not vital. But she's not going to do that, unless she has to. Intellectual laziness can be a super consumer.

So can a lack of information about the huge costs that someone, somewhere faraway is paying for our wasteful ways. I am sorry that The Indian Express published Mr. Bhalla's and Mr. Jain's views so prominently. I'm sure they represent the views of a good section of the English reading public. It's better aired than hidden away. It's time to be open about these things. As the century comes to a close, chilling though it is, it's important to know that there those who believe that the State has the right to submerge the lands and homes of a people without consulting them. When it runs out of funds for these projects, does it also have the right to commandeer the bank accounts of its richest citizens and use the money to complete the construction?

If it does will it exercise that right? Without consulting the people concerned? Anything, for The Greater Common Good. Right?