: The real price of development: Shifting the debate is the Narmada movement’s greatest contribution #IndiaNEWS For nearly four decades, the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project on the Narmada river has been

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The real price of development: Shifting the debate is the Narmada movement’s greatest contribution #IndiaNEWS
For nearly four decades, the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project on the Narmada river has been at the centre of the debate about the real price India has paid for development projects in India. That was reiterated early in September when columnist Swaminathan SA Aiyar wrote a two-part series in The Times of India about the project. In the first installment, he made an important point: mass politics works on exaggeration in order to accentuate a core contention, so taking the rhetoric at face value could be risky. He corrected Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that all those opposing the project are “urban Naxals�, noting that in 1992, the North American members of an independent review team of the World Bank recommended that the institution withdraw from the project. These experts are unlikely to have any clue about the meaning of the word “Naxal�. However, by using his articles mainly to attack Medha Patkar, a leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, Aiyar squandered the opportunity to join the debate about the human and environmental costs of development. He claimed that Patkar made a “fool� of him another, also called the Save Narmada Campaign, for making a “fool� of him and others with purportedly exaggerated claims about the project’s impending failure. But it was not just...Read more

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