by Robert Alstead

When the Grand Coulee dam was completed on the Columbia River in 1942, it was the largest dam in the world and held up as a marvel of US engineering power and prowess. Woody Guthrie even sang a song about the “greatest wonder of the world” at the opening ceremony.
As with subsequent big dam projects in the States and this side of the border, the economic benefits that were trumpeted to the electrified rooftops, eclipsed the plight of the displaced peoples, often indigenous, or the prime farmland, forests, ecosystems and the salmon runs that would be ruined in the process.
If the true cost of big dams is now sinking in here, the old-style, mega-is-best mentality is still mesmerizing governments in rising economic powerhouses like China and India.
Drowned Out is a jam-packed DVD documentary about one such project, the huge Sardar Sarovar dam project in India and the plight of the adivasis, indigenous tribal farmers, whose ancestral lands have been submerged.
McLibel filmmaker Franny Armstrong picked up a DV camera and a solar power pack and journeyed to the lush, valley village of Jalsindhi in Madhya Pradesh. There she stayed with healer Luhariya Sonkaria and his young family in their village hut, the lowest on the riverside, and documented their struggle against political indifference and the rising waters of the Narmada River.
The DVD, which includes the 75-minute feature and a 15 minute update, shot for PBS television earlier this year, charts the history of the Sardar Sarovar project from when the late prime minister Nehru laid the foundation stone in 1961 up until April of this year when rising waters forced the family to abandon their home and move higher up the slopes. Nehru’s view that dams are “temples of modern India,” quoted in school textbooks, is particularly ironic when you see temples and the ancestral lands, which the adivasis believe are inhabited by gods, disappearing under the floodwaters.
Armstrong gives ample space to the official explanation of why Sardar Sarovar, the keystone in a staircase of 3,000 dams, must be built. We hear an ebullient dam engineer, for whom the project has become a matter of national pride and self-satisfied irrigation minister Jay Narayan Vyas, wax about how poor, drought-ridden regions will soon have water and power. Vyas even refers to the dam and its 75,000-kilometre canal system as a “wonder of the world.”
But if the politicians haven’t learned from experience, the people have. “There’s a lot of money in poverty,” says author and longtime protester, Arundhati Roy, and, as the film reveals, the real beneficiaries are the industrialists.
Faced with a stark choice between meagre cash compensation or poor unfarmable land, the adivasis choose to stay with their waterlogged homes. They need to farm to survive and, as the sweet-natured Luhariya says, they would rather drown with their homes than take cash. A visit to a squalid city slum shows why: a family of nine, displaced by another dam, is shown living in misery off a dollar a day earned in manual labour. Worse still is the sense of loss in the father’s words. “I still belong to my village,” he says, even though it is at the bottom of a lake.
The hope that arises from this situation is in the way that the farmers led by activist Medha Patkar rally together to form the powerful grassroots Save the Narmada movement, challenging the government to honour its promises all along the way.
We see Patkar leading hunger strikers in the 1990s, which caused the World Bank to withdraw from the dam project. Hugh Brody of the original World Bank review team said it found the construction and the resettlement plan “alarming” and “severely flawed” from its initiation.
When the government continued building with private money in spite of the WB report, Patkar and the farmers took the case to the Indian supreme court. Construction was halted for six years, while the court deliberated. Then to widespread dismay in 2000 it voted 2:1 in favour of raising the dam.
The DVD ends noting that thousands more homes will be submerged as the dam’s height is raised to 110 metres. The dam-builders are now seeking to raise it to a new height of 122 metres.
Battles continue to be waged. But the spirit of peaceful resistance exemplified by the Save the Narmada movement, and captured so well in this potent DVD, is an inspiration to others confronting mega projects like the mind-numbingly huge Three Gorges and Tiger Leaping Gorge dams in China.

View clips, photographs and order Drowned Out at www.spannerfilms.net. For latest news on Sardar Sarovar visit www.narmada.org. Robert Alstead writes for iofilm.