SARDAR SAROVAR DAM (India): It is held up as a flagship for the development of modern India, and reviled as a symbol of how the rights of the poor are trampled upon.

As neighbouring China puts the finishing touches to the Three Gorges Dam just nine years after first breaking ground, work on western India’s Sardar Sarovar dam has taken more than three times as long.

Even today it remains the subject of a fierce, seemingly interminable Supreme Court battle and still inflames enough passion to prompt hunger strikes, protests, riots and suicide by self-immolation. And all the time the costs have risen.

“The delay has been due to democracy,” said Pankaj Patel, speaking in front of the 100-metre-high wall of concrete he is in charge of building. “We want to take a decision consensually, and for that we have to pay.”

The Sardar Sarovar is the centrepiece of India’s efforts to tap the waters of the Narmada, the largest of 30 big dams planned or being built on the country’s fifth-largest river. But it has also been the focus of one of the world’s longest social and environmental campaigns.

Nearly a decade was lost to a dispute between rival states over how to divide water and power from the dam, and at least five more years in protracted legal battles with activists from the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), or Save the Narmada Movement.

The NBA says the dam will displace 320,000 people — many of them poor tribal farmers who have not been properly resettled on cultivable land, and disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands more.

The government of the western state of Gujarat boasts proudly of the benefits the dam will bring.

Some 80,000 km of canals, longer than the country’s railway network, will one day carry irrigation water to 1.8 million hectares of agricultural land in western India.

Electricity will power industries and homes in the states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh and 20 million people will get drinking water from the reservoir, they say.

“For the construction of the dam, some people will have to suffer,” Patel says. “But there will be many benefits.”

Siddhartha Roy, economic adviser to India’s Tata Group, said the issue of land acquisition dogs many infrastructure projects in India, especially given the powers of individual states.

“All this requires consensus building between different segments of society, and that takes time. It is not easy to do anything in a limited time period like the Three Gorges.”

But there is very little consensus when it comes to the Narmada Valley, with opponents of the dam fiercely contesting every figure the government supplies, even down to the amount of water flowing in the river itself.

“They promise dreams and heavens,” the NBA’s 51-year-old leader, Medha Patkar, told Reuters on a tour of villages threatened by the dam’s rising reservoir. “The benefits of the dam have always been overstated but the reality is totally different.”

If the promised canals were ever built, there would be scarcely enough water left to power the turbines, she says. And big dams hardly ever irrigate as much land as they promise to.

“That point is valid,” admits P.K. Laheri, chairman of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam, the Gujarat state government body in charge of the project.

“The development of the canal network and irrigation takes a long time and is a major concern of planners in India. But the construction of the dam is not negated by this argument.”

Twenty years ago, when work began in earnest on the Sardar Sarovar, planners estimated it would cost Rs64 billion and displace about 6,000 families.

Today they admit it could cost 360 billion rupees and displace 50,000 families.

“The intervention or agitation and litigation have been primarily responsible for complicating and delaying the project,” said Laheri, who blames not only the NBA but also the government of neighbouring Madhya Pradesh for dragging its feet for two decades on the question of granting land to displaced farmers.

But inflation and population growth are only part of the story of mushrooming expenses. The NBA says the costs of the dam were always grossly underestimated, and there was never enough available land to resettle farmers fairly.

In 1991, the World Bank commissioned an independent report on the project, which came back a year later with the conclusion that the Sardar Sarovar project was “flawed”.

Resettlement of the displaced was not possible, it said, while the “environmental impacts of the projects have not been properly considered or adequately addressed”.

In 1993 the World Bank withdrew funding.

Patkar sees that verdict as a victory for the NBA, a milestone in a global campaign against big dams.

The battle, she acknowledges, would have been much harder in a country like China — but says Indians should not be too swift to congratulate themselves on the benefits of democracy.

“Democracy is a fiction,” she said. “We should be heard in a democracy, but in the name of development and rapid urbanisation, the voices of farmers and the poor are not being heard.”—Reuters