COLOMBO : Local Communities in South Asia prefer small water schemes to large dams that uproot people and spawn social and environmental problems.
For two days last week, citizen's groups from India, Pakistan. Nepal. Bangladesh and Sri Lankan testified in Colombo before the World Commission on Dams (WCD), set up earlier this year to review the impact of dams around the world.
The Commission has to submit a report with recommendations on internationally acceptable criteria and guidelines for planning, designing, construction, operation, monitoring and decommissioning of dams at the end of its mandated two years, by mid-2000. The 12-member WCD. an independent group, is based in South Africa.
On Friday, the final day of the widely consultative process at the WCD's first regional hearing, speakers from India and Nepal stressed that small projects keep people in the villages.
"Establishing 2.500 small water structures in India's Rajasthan state, is a case in point," said H Thakkur. researcher at the Centre for Water Policy.
Previously the mostly poor people from this region migrated to big cities like New Delhi in search of jobs and a better quality of life, he explained. However after these projects came on stream, development activity took off and migration stopped.
A grey (poor) zone become a white (rich) zone. The villages are even exporting their products today," Thakkur said.
Many of the opponents of big dams in South Asia, aired similar experiences of displacement. promises of adequate land not being fulfilled, inadequate compensation, loss of water rights, corruption and political influence and environmental issues.
The official response, in most cases, was that large dams were necessary and couldn't be
replaced by small projects although they conceded that current strategies regarding displacement and the environment needed to be reviewed.
Nepal's Bikash Pandey, director of REPSO (Renewable Energy Program Support Office) also reiterated the "small is beautiful" concept, urging his country's planners to concentrate on small projects, which meet local power and irrigation needs, rather than big ones.
Though Nepal has only small hydro power and irrigation schemes. Pandey said the government had been unable to undertake the resettlement process properly in the schemes completed.
Some of the points stressed by him were that large, foreign-funded projects were too costly: had too many aid-related conditions attached by funding agencies like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank while smaller projects reduced the dependence on foreign aid.
Nepal, unlike other parts of South Asia, has a large water resource base, which it wants to tap for hydropower and export to India and Bangladesh. It signed a treaty in 1996 with India to jointly develop the Mahakali river basin, the centerpiece of which is the 6,800-megawatt Pancheswor project.
Negotiations also were underway with US and Australian companies to develop two other gigantic projects to export electricity to India.
Both India and Bangladesh want Nepal to build high dams to help augment dry season water flows of the Ganga river and to hold back monsoon flood waters.
Nepal official B. Chand said there has been little displacement of people and environmental problems in the past but these issues were cropping up now and needed to be addressed.
Chand, project director at the Ministry of Water Resources, said landslides and flashfloods were a recurring problem while the problem of sediment in dams was also becoming an issue.
Highly critical of non-gov-. ernmental agencies was India's
Dr M S Reddy, vice-president of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID). "If there is a’referendum, 'Creation of Storages' (creating large dams) will win hands down. But then the anti-dam activists, will dub democracy as a sham." he said.
Reddy, rejecting many of the cases buttressed by opponents of dams, said NGOs believe the vocal minority is always right.
"Politicians are corrupt, engineers are corrupt, bureaucrats are corrupt and only NGOs are honest angels."
Why have dams been isolated in the corruption argument, he asked. "Is there no corruption in building roads, bridges, railway tracks, public buildings? Corruption in dam construction is no more or no less than in any work falling in the domain of public works or for that matter in any public-speech." •
Reddy said there was no denying the fact that the displacement of people is a sociological problem. But. he asserted. that if displacement is bad. "not creating storage to avoid displacement of tribal (communities) is worse."
Bangladesh official Anwar Khan from ICIDS Bangladesh National Committee said his country strongly advocated the implementation of large dams which was the only way millions of people would be benefited in terms of power and irrigation needs.
He said there were valid arguments in favour of small dams or mini hydro schemes all of which reduced human displacement and environmental concerns but these were not alternatives to large dams and were "additional to rather than substitutes for dams."
The case of the region's first environmental refugees was raised by Saleem Samad, coordinator of Bangladesh's Like-Minded Environmental Activists Group, when he spoke of how 60.000 tribal people were forced to migrate to India and Burma, after being removed by a multi-purpose project in Bangladesh in the early 1960s.
Samad said the Kaptai Dam inundated 253 sq. miles, including 10 sq. miles of forest reserves. submerged 22.500 hectares of ploughed land and displaced approximately 100.000 tribals to create the biggest-ever reservoir.
He said it displaced one sixth of the indigenous population in Chittagong Hill Tracts and thousands of hill residents migrated to sparsely populated regions of Mizoram, Tripura. Assam and Arunachal.
The commission's mandate is of an advisory nature, and the WCD does not respond to petitions or calls for intervention. Its recommendations will be synthesised after the widely consultative, process.
The Colombo hearing was earlier planned in India in September but was suddenly capcelled by the government which cited a case pending in India's Supreme Court on the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam as reason for backing out. The dam project on the Narmada River was not among the cases presented to the WCD because the matter is sub-judice. Sripad Dharmadhikary of the NBA, a coalition of groups against the project said.
Construction of the massive dam in India's western state of Gujarat has been delayed by several years because of litigation in the Supreme Court by the NBA.
Among others schemes scrutinised were the Kotmale and Victoria dams in Sri Lanka and Pakistan’s proposed 3,600 MW Kalabagh Dam. which is opposed by three of that country's four provinces — the exception being Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs home state Punjab.
Non-governmental organisations said big dams have been detrimental rather than beneficial to local people, even as officials argued that expanding areas under irrigation was critical for the region's good security concerns.
— IPS •