The Hindu Business Line : Whiff of mortality in the dam industry

Unlike rivers, dams are ephemeral, and will eventually die, portends Jacques Leslie, in his book Deep Water. The bigger the project, the more contentious, as it "touches on every dimension of controversy — displacement of people, environmental impact, water scarcity, energy production, political and corporate corruption and human rights". Equally crucial, as dams age, the cost of repairs gradually overtakes the profits. And the risks keep growing. D. Murali concludes that the book's message is too perilous to ignore.

Dismantling or decommissioning a mega dam that has outlived its use is not easy given the levels of accumulated sedimentation. And the expense may surpass the cost of erecting it. - M. Balaji

WHAT do you see in a dam? Gardens that can serve as a picnic spot, a large expanse of water that calms your mind or, gushing through the sluices, lifts your spirits, an icon of infrastructure to signify economic development, vast tracts getting the benefit of irrigation, and so on. To Jacques Leslie, however, dams are `loaded weapons aimed down rivers, pointed at ourselves'! Why so? Because, unlike rivers, dams are ephemeral. We assume dams will stay forever, but they will all die; what is unknown is the manner of their passing, portends Leslie.

"Some dams will crumble into the basins from which they rose, while others may still be intact but no longer storing water, which instead runs over or through or around them. They'll be relics of the 20th century, like Stalinism... They'll be reminders of an ancient time when humans believed they could vanquish nature, and found themselves vanquished instead," reads the back cover of Leslie's Deep Water, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (www.fsgbooks.com). What an ominous forecast! Can it be true?

There are 45,000 large dams across the world, generating a fifth of global electricity supply and helping grow about a sixth of our food production. However, these dams have shifted "so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered earth's rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field." An appreciation of dams' `monumental destructiveness' and also the lack of space to build have slowed dam construction that had reached a peak in the early 1970s, when the rate was nearly a thousand a year, writes Leslie.

The author extols the 400-page report of the World Commission on Dams titled Dams and Development: A new Framework for Decision-Making for the 26 guidelines it lists to replace the existing arbitrary and politically weighted process of dam decision-making. Dams don't score over fossil-burning energy in contributing to global warming, the commission had observed, because "dams — particularly shallow, tropical ones — emit greenhouse gases released by vegetation rotting in reservoirs and carbon inflows from watersheds". Medha Patkar was one of the commissioners, and part I of the book opens in Domkhedi, where she was once again trying to drown at the peak of the 2001 monsoon season! But the monsoon often failed, and when it didn't, the police intervened, to save the Government the embarrassment of her death, writes Leslie, quite wryly. "It probably wouldn't be a failure if she didn't drown, but the drama of the spectacle pulled us in," narrates the author, justifying his visit to "a remote malarial hamlet on the lip of a Narmada tributary".

The Narmada Bachao Andolan's chief architect, Ms Patkar has power not in her words, but in her actions, her example, says Leslie. "She earned the affection of tens of thousands of tribal people by spending years walking from one tribal village to another, talking with the inhabitants, explaining the grievous impact of the dam."

Sardar Sarovar is a wall, a modern ziggurat — it's as voluminous as two or three Great Pyramids, describes Leslie. "If the project is completed, presumably around the mid-century or later, the Narmada and its 41 tributaries will be home to 30 large dams, 135 medium dams, and 3,000 small ones. The world's largest canal will traverse 19 major rivers and 244 rail lines and roads on its way toward delivering water to a 45,000-mile network of canal branches."

And Sardar Sarovar, the biggest dam in the project, is "the world's most contentious", notes Leslie, because it "touches on every dimension of controversy', viz. "the displacement of indigenous people, environmental impact, resettlement, water scarcity, energy production, spirituality, political and corporate corruption, human rights".

Leslie discusses some of the unthinkable compromises made in the case of Sardar Sarovar. For instance: "The last nineteen feet of the dam's height were added not for water storage, the project's main goal, but for power generation in Madhya Pradesh, as payback for the State's acceptance of the inundation of its rich agricultural land." A horizontal price `about a hundred square miles — four times the size of Manhattan' for the vertical reward!

While the additional height "will increase submerged cultivable land by half and the reservoir-affected population by three-quarters," there would only be a 10 per cent increase in the power generated. An eminent case of flawed cost-benefit analysis.

Sardar Sarovar is a specimen of a gravity dam, being "a straight cement salient across a bed nearly a mile wide". The alternative form for large dams is the arch, as in the case of Hoover, 30 miles from Las Vegas, which was dedicated seven decades ago, on September 30, 1935. It uses the massive force of reservoir water to fortify its walls, explains the author. During the Great Depression, Hoover provided jobs to thousands of workers "whose desperation compelled them to accept risky, exhausting labour for $4 a day".

Hoover is estimated to last another 1,100 years, "by which time Bureau of Reclamation officials say Lake Mead will be filled with sediment, turning the dam into an expensive waterfall". It is proving to be expensive in many ways already, Leslie points out. For instance, over the years, the dam has stopped millions of tonnes of salt that the Colorado used to carry to the sea, and strewn it "across the irrigated landscape, slowly poisoning the soil".

Part II of the book takes you to Southern Africa, where you learn about Kariba, `an artless slab of arched cement', completed about five decades ago, rising to `the equivalent of a forty-eight-storey building' above the Zambesi River floor. Kariba Dam is as utilitarian as an execution chamber, describes Leslie. "It is massive but entirely plain, verging on Stalinist." Kariba is the first large dam financed by the World Bank, he informs.

"To make room for the reservoir, the dam's British colonial builders uprooted 57,000 Tonga, two-thirds their entire number, and forced them into resettlement sites on barren land." Leslie writes about professor Thayer Scudder, who had explained to the villagers, with the help of miniature Karibas constructed in termite mounds, how their land would be inundated. They had reacted with `great merriment and disbelief' at the thought that a structure 60 miles away could affect them, only to be proved wrong later.

The dam was aimed at providing energy for the copper mines in Northern Rhodesia. "The mines ran on coal, which was delivered from Southern Rhodesia on a single overburdened railroad track for most of a 450-mile journey, and wood, whose use denuded more than 2 lakh acres of forest in less than a decade — enough to be deplored even in the pre-environmental era."

According to Scudder, involuntary resettlement is a repulsive idea. He'd say that almost three out of every four large dams in the world `should never have been built'. As for the remaining 30 per cent, "the problem isn't dams but the way people plan and build them." A book of Scudder's that finds mention is The Future of Large Dams: Dealing with Social, Environmental, Institutional and Political Costs.

Scudder supports the idea of Nam Theun 2 — `the largest planned development project in the history of Laos to deliver 920 megawatts to Thailand and another 75 megawatts to the Laotian grid. Though the dam will inundate about two-fifths of the highly degraded Nakai Plateau, a remote region in central Laos, and impact about 50,000 people, "the entire $30 million a year that the dam is expected to earn will be placed in a fund for national poverty alleviation", one learns. Down Under is where Leslie takes you to in part III of the book. He writes about a plaque installed in 2002 near Lake Victoria that reads: "In remembrance of the Rufus river massacre on August 27, 1841 and the two tribes — Barkindji and Maruara — who occupied the Lake Victoria area." It was on that date that "South Australian police closed in from opposite sides on a group of spear-bearing Aboriginal fighters and gunned down at least thirty." The Rufus River Massacre, as the incident came to be called, "marked the end of Aboriginal resistance to European settlers in south-eastern Australia." Further damage happened, about a century later, when the River Murray Commission turned the lake into a water storage. "The commission added 32 miles of levees to the lake's shoreline, thereby lifting its water level from a varying 69-80 feet above mean sea level to a more constant 89 feet, inundating much of the land that Aboriginals once occupied." Does that remind you of New Orleans? Leslie tries to read the destiny of the earth and notes that "the whiff of mortality has reached the dam industry, driving some multinationals out of the business". As dams age, the cost of repairs increases and gradually overtakes profits, he states. "Over the last century and a half, owners have often abandoned unwanted dams: they became the ultimate litter. Out of the American inventory of 75,000 dams over six feet high, some 15 per cent are of `indeterminate ownership'." Dismantling, or decommissioning isn't easy either, given the level of sediment accumulated. "In the case of a hydroelectric mega dam, the expense may surpass the cost of erecting it."

To wrap, here is a dangerous visualisation exercise: "Imagine these dams in five hundred or a thousand years, after their useful life has ended, when an earthquake from the fault line beneath Sardar Sarovar fractures it, or the bankruptcy of Zambia and Zimbabwe leads to Kariba's fatal neglect, or Three Gorges fills with sediment, or... " Still waters run deep, they say. Trouble runs deep in dammed waters, you'd agree. Deep Water has a message that is too perilous to ignore.

Economics@TheHindu.co.in

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