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'We never had to give up our homes so a dam could be built'

The day after I returned from a trip to Domkhedi on the banks of the Narmada River two months ago, I got a call from a friend. He had been in Domkhedi too, and was passing through Bombay on his way home to Bangalore. I remember clearly what he said that day, because he put his finger right on what I had felt in Domkhedi without knowing how to articulate it.

He said: I really felt that the Narmada Bachao Andolan is stronger and more full of spirit than ever before.

He was right. When we were there, the place was swarming with farmers and tribals and rural women in purple saris and hundreds of laughing kids. And there were dozens of NBA activists, journalists, academicians and visitors from such exotic places as Glasgow and California, Hamburg and Ottawa. Everyone chatted and drank far too much chai and had the same gooey khichdi meal after meal and, somehow, it still tasted so fine. Yes, it was a friendly, colourful, high-spirited gathering. And they came together to make some fine magic in Domkhedi: optimism and hope and good cheer surrounded us like so much sparkling confetti.

All this, despite some substantial irony. For this is a spot which will disappear into the Narmada, as its waters rise behind the Sardar Sarovar dam.

So why this nearly-tangible charge in the air, why so much energy coursing through us all? What is this spirit all about?

My answer to those questions is in three things. Simple things. Every one of you reading this is utterly familiar with them. But, in Domkhedi, they are rather unfamiliar. Here they are: drinking water, electricity and school text books for the kids from here and the surrounding few hamlets.

In my column The Bulb Brought The Tears, I told you how two young engineers from Kerala built a small dam and installed a tiny generator here: this little device turns on bulbs in six huts in Domkhedi. Because of the way the system has been designed, it also supplies clear drinking water to the village through a pipe. And in Nimgavhan, a village a few minutes away, a school operates out of the largest of the huts. The kids who attend the school use simple texts written in their own language. Not shabby Hindi or Marathi or English texts from the Maharashtra government, referring to objects and experiences entirely foreign to these kids, but beautifully printed books that they use, understand, identify with and seem to enjoy.

(I brought home one of these, Aamra Kanya. Those who know Hindi or Marathi will recognise that this means Our Stories and that it is different from those tongues).

So why are these three things so special? That's easy. In the 53 years that India has been independent, years in which you -- I really mean you, reading this -- have grown up, gone to school and college, found a job, got familiar enough with the Web that using it is like combing your hair each morning, and done all that without ever -- not even once, perish the thought -- having to worry about water to drink or a light to read your Harry Potter in bed at night by -- yes, in all those years, there are people exactly like you who have had no school to go to. No electricity. No supply of water.

Lots of people. Exactly like you, all of them, except for one detail.

This detail: they live in Domkhedi. Or in any of hundreds of thousands of settlements like Domkhedi all over India. Only because they do, they never got those things you did. Think of what that means. You simply clicked on a few links to read this. In Domkhedi, they have never had the electricity that makes links meaningful, that produces light to read anything by. They have never even had the schools, the education, that make reading possible in the first place. Exactly like you, all those people, Indians all: but think how fantastically unlike you they also are.

This is how we have brought India into the 21st century. This is what we have built: a place where lots of Indians like you are Net-savvy like nobody else on earth, but where lots of Indians exactly like you worry because they don't know where their next gulp of clean drinking water will come from.

That is why three familiar things are so special, so unfamiliar, in Domkhedi. Of course, it is a tiny effort that you see there. Six huts with one bulb each; one school with its good textbooks; an inch-pipe through which clean water flows. Not quite putting man on the moon, yes. But spare this next minute -- yes, stop reading and spend one minute -- to think how special those things would be to you had you, your parents and, in fact, every one of your ancestors had never ever known them.

And that is the magic we felt in Domkhedi. That is what the Narmada Bachao Andolan brought to that little village: what over 50 years of Indian nationhood did not care to bring. For the NBA runs that school. The NBA asked those Kerala engineers to come to Domkhedi, got them to enlist the villagers in the effort to build the system that supplies water and electricity to the village. These are things that gave the residents of Domkhedi a hope, faith and life that their own country has done its best to kill.

Yes, that kind of magic.

And one Supreme Court judgement has turned all that to mush.

The state's own plans are to take the dam's benefits to its most proclaimed beneficiaries -- people in Kutch and Saurashtra -- in 2025. And that was the plan before construction on the dam stopped six years ago. When can those people in Kutch and Saurashtra now expect their dam benefits to arrive? While you do your fresh calculations to answer that question, think of this. In 2000, Domkhedi's residents learned how to give themselves water and electricity today, locally. It was a lesson that might have gone out all over Gujarat, and indeed all over India: find your solutions now, here.

Instead, a message comes down from a room in far-off Delhi -- that this is hardly the way to carry on. That we must all go back to our old ways. To that old, practically nonexistent hope that a state will provide schools, water, health care, electricity. To finding governmental intent and purpose and will in a promise that lies a full generation in the future. To finding all that where there has never been any real intent and purpose and will.

And that's why this Supreme Court judgement is so tragic. Because it tells millions of Indians, in hundreds of thousands of little villages just like Domkhedi, to give up hope.

And what's more, it also tells them that they must also give up their homes and lives so other Indians may be given good things. Indians like you -- I really mean you, reading this -- and me. I write this as I do because some Indians in a place like Domkhedi once (or twice) left their homes so a dam could be built. You read this as you do for much the same reason. We never had to give up our homes so a dam could be built.

And so finally, I cannot help wondering what would have happened if we had. If some gigantic project was to inundate much of Bombay or Delhi, forcing the city's residents from their homes, would we have had this kind of judgement from the Supreme Court? Would there have even been such a case in the Supreme Court? Would such a project have even been planned?

You haven't sacrificed measurably for the country to "progress." Nor have I. Why are you content that we extract sacrifice from Indians in Domkhedi? Why do you think they should be content?

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Dilip D'Souza