A Temple of Modern India

Jawaharlal Nehru called Bhakra a temple of modern India. Today, that evocative image and the Bhakra Project itself are being sought to be debunked by a school of thought that believes that small alone is beautiful and big is necessarily bad. Rangachari's treatise confirms that Bhakra stands and stands tall; the counter-argument does not.

The down-with-Bhakra campaign was launched on the premise that in order to defeat the very idea of a large dam like Sardar Sarovar being viable, it was essential to prove that large dams, especially Bhakra, with which it is often compared, had not fared anything as well as imagined. It had done little good and much harm. Demolish Bhakra to win the battle against Sardar Sarovar. This is the basis on which the Narmada Bachao Andolan appears to have sponsored Shripad Dharamadhikary's tirade against Bhakra entitled "Unravelling Bhakra: Assessing the Temple of Resurgent India" (Manthan, Badwani 2005).

This was a mistaken effort based on premises that Rangachari comprehensively rebutted in a well-documented rejoinder that needs to be read as a complement to this volume. ("Unravelling the 'Unravelling of Bhakra'", by R Rangachari, Indian Water Resources Association, November 2005).

As Dr Asit Biswas, President of the Third World Centre for Water Management, writes in his Foreword, many projects are assailed by critics on conjecture rather than fact. The Government of India too has been remiss in not insisting on completion reports on all major water resource projects, setting out the reasons for construction, the perceived costs and benefits as against the end result, and a host of other relevant details, not only to measure achievements against targeted outcomes but as a learning tool. If anyone doubts this, he has only to read the fascinating three-volume "Report on the Ganges Canals from their Commencement until the Opening of the Canal in 1854", by Col. Sir George Cautley in 1860, to see how wonderfully instructive such a document can be.

Rangachari's book is possibly the first completion report on a major water project in India since Independence. Many other projects commenced in the 1950s and 1960s are not yet "complete" because funding for new projects was difficult to come by and could be best justified in the guise of "extensions" to old ones, a subterfuge that would not be available if a project were to be formally declared "complete"!

Rangachari notes that Bhakra irrigates 2.68 million hectares in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, much of this being new acreage or areas where supplies have been firmed up. Surface irrigation has also sustained considerably increased groundwater utilisation through conjunctive use, a factor commonly misunderstood and cited to denigrate the contribution of canal flows. Assured irrigation has made famine a thing of the past.

Punjab-Haryana is the country's foremost bread basket and anchor of the first Green Revolution, based on substantially higher farm productivity and agro-employment. The 1,430 Mw of installed generation capacity has also been a mainstay of the Northern grid and the primary source of energy for groundwater lift, farm processing and a network of small and medium industry.

The notion that waterlogging, salinity and alkalinity have increased exponentially is incorrect. Rangachari's finding is that the high water table and waterlogging remain confined to small regions around Faridkot and Ferozpur in Punjab while the area subject to salinity in that state has been declining. Furthermore, the Bhakra reservoir has been able to moderate all peak flood flows that have passed through it over the past four decades. Without the dam, the severity of floods would have been far greater. Sedimentation, however, remains a problem and 15 per cent of overall storage has been lost in the past 40 or more years. But the rate of sedimentation is expected to decline hereafter with enhanced watershed management and the construction of upstream dams.

Bhakra's benefits have clearly been impressive. Those displaced are by no means badly off, whether rural or urban. The project, fully amortised long back, has brought India food security, enhanced living standards, given a fillip to livestock farming, helped rehabilitate refugees from Pakistan, supplied drinking water, reduced female drudgery, thereby making for gender justice, facilitated reclamation of state wastelands, and promoted rural electrification, pisciculture, social and farm forestry and industrial development.

This is a truly informative volume of writing and should be a model for more to follow on other great projects so that we learn from experience and are able to plan, execute and maintain them better.

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BHAKRA-NANGAL PROJECT
SOCIO-ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

R Rangachari
Oxford University Press
Price: Rs 495; Pages: 256