ABSTRACT
On 31 December 2006, the concrete work on the Sardar Sarovar Project, a multipurpose dam built on the Narmada River in Narmada district in central Gujarat, was brought to completion, with the dam standing at 120 metres (Bavadam 2007). Across the border, in western Madhya Pradesh, 127,000 people faced imminent submergence by the dam reservoir without prospects for adequate resettlement and rehabilitation. The following day activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) – the popular movement that has been fighting against the project since the late 1980s – decried the event as ‘a total betrayal and a clear message for all adivasis, farmers, fishworkers, labourers and urban poor to traders: all who are being promised rehabilitation only to be ousted, forcibly evicted in the name of development’ (NBA 2007). In blatant defiance of the protests of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the dam builders staged a ceremony in Gujarat on 19 January 2007 at which the Sardar Sarovar Project was dedicated to the Indian nation (Bavadam 2007). Following in the wake of the completion of the upstream Indira Sagar dam in Madhya Pradesh two years earlier and coinciding with the resumption of construction on the Maheshwar Hydroelectric Project and Omkareshwar Project, the events that unfolded around the completion of the Sardar Sarovar Project in late December 2006 and January 2007 constituted the endgame of a process of dispossession and resistance that has played itself out over two decades in the Narmada Valley in western and central India.
