ABSTRACT
The Bargi dam is one of the more than 3,000 dams making up the Narmada Valley Development Project—a river basin development project that seeks to harness the waters of the Narmada river as it winds its way from the Maikal ranges in Amarkantak in Shahol district of Northern Madhya Pradesh to the Arabian Sea at Bharuch, Gujarat. Chetram Narte and his fellow villagers are only some of the many Adivasi peasants who have joined the ranks of India’s 645 million poor people as a result of being displaced by large dams. The consistent distributional bias of large dams points to how large dams have been instrumental to a process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ which has concentrated property rights in water in the hands of an emergent class of capitalist farmers while generating pressures towards the partial proletarianization of subaltern groups.
