Damn dams

You would think that dams would be a no-brainer in a country that gets all its rainfall in three months of the year and has no significant snowcap to slow its release into the rivers and the ocean, where most people still work in agriculture and where drought and starvation are constant problems. Certainly, every government in India has built them, and every political party has supported them, and they’ve done more than any other modern invention to raise living standards for the poor.

But along comes an expert who knows better than all these people, a person of such excellent insight in civil engineering and agriculture she puts all the experts to shame, exposing hidden facts that dams actually cause flooding, disease, and even earthquakes. This genius is Arundhati the novelist, champion of the poor:

Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them – the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they’re being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic. They’re a Government’s way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.

That’s some heavy stuff.