Narmada Valley Project

Controversial US$5 billion project to build more than 3,000 dams on the Narmada River, which runs for 1,245 km/778 mi through western India, to supply water to irrigate farmland for 30 million people and provide hydroelectric power. The project has been fiercely opposed by environmentalists in India and abroad. They believe it will lead to the displacement of 300,000 people, chiefly from small tribal communities; disrupt downstream fisheries; increase the risk of earthquakes; submerge forest land; increase the spread of insect-borne diseases; and threaten the fragile regional ecosystem through reducing, by two-thirds, the flow of water from the Narmada into the Arabian Sea.

The Narmada Valley Project was first envisaged in the 1940s by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Its start was delayed until 1979 as a result of legal arguments and disputes among the various states it affects (Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan). The project involves construction of two huge dams: the Sardar Sarovar, on the east edge of Gujarat, which will submerge 40,000 hectares of land and be the world's second largest dam; and the Narmada Sagar, in Madhya Pradesh. There will be a further 28 large dams, 135 medium ones, and 3,000 small dams, used to channel water into thousands of miles of irrigation canals. Protest against the project has been coordinated since the mid-1980s by the Narmada Bachhao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), and was influential in persuading Japan, in 1990, and the World Bank, in 1993, following an independent review, to end funding of the project.

Women have taken a leading role in the movement, including Medha Patkar and the novelist Arundhati Roy. Patkar led non-violent resistance by the villagers of Manni Belli that resulted in the Indian Supreme Court halting construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam in 1995. However, in October 2000, with US$400 million already having been spent and construction half completed, the Supreme Court allowed construction on the Sardar Sarovar dam to continue on condition that its height did not exceed 90 m/295 ft (40 m/130 ft less than the height originally proposed). A further request to increase the height of the dam was refused by a government committee in April 2001.