Mr Vyas is the government Minister in charge of the Narmada dam project and is also the ex-chairman of the Sardar Sarovar Corporation. The interview was conducted by Franny Armstrong at the World Water Forum in The Hague. March 1999.

Could you please introduce yourself and explain your position?
I am Jay Narayan Vyas Minister in charge of major irrigations at Narmada project in the state of Gujarat, India.

How long have you held that position?
This is my second stint. I was also minister in charge of this department for about two years. I also headed the corporation as a chairman. Then I was the minister in charge of this department and now for a little over two years I have been in charge of this department.

Can you give us a broad picture of what the situation in Gujarat is with respect to water?
Gujarat is a state faced with a peculiar position. It accounts for almost a little over 5% of the population of the country and almost same area but in terms of water resources we could say that the state is blessed with only a little over 2 and a half percent of the water resources available in the country. One third of the coastline belongs to Gujarat, in terms of the other boundary we have, on one side, the little desert Ran of Kutch and the other side the Rahjastan desert. We have arid regions in North Gujarat, Restra and Kutch, which are very more sparcely populated and also the rainfall is scanty.

There is a region in south Gujarat where all the perennial rivers of the state are located, so again within this state the availability of water is very imbalanced. 20% of the area accounts for 80% of the water resources and 80% of the area could have hardly 20% of the water resources so in a sense, it is an area which is rain dependent, unless you have sufficient rains. Even then the dependability is not that reliable because at times you have intensive rains and then there is a lot of run off that is lost. So in terms of water availability I think we can safely subdivide the state in two broad regions. South Gujarat, which has 20% of the state area, is blessed with very good water availability, and North Gujarat and Kutch. Availability it is a major problem and quality of water also is a problem. The water is being tapped in north Gujarat from the depth of little over about 850, 900 feet. Its a fossil water, 15-17,000 years old with very high contamination of flouride, dissolved solids and nitrates. As a result a large population in these areas suffers from flurosis from which there is no cure in the known medical science. In terms of other diseases such as kidney stones, I think, again, we are one of the leading regions in the state and also in the country as far as the north Gujarat.

Worse still is that the women in most of these areas, of Sarastra and Kutch, have to travel a long distance, sometimes averaging around eight to ten kilometres to get water. It is not surprising to find that almost four to five hours a day are spent only in collecting water, which is just sufficient for keeping them going. Add that to the drudgery of cooking and rearing the family and I think this is a major problem for women in particular.

So for farmers, women and the population at large, because of the quality of water not being proper in all respects, these are the areas where we have to import water from outside. These are the areas where the average rainfall is scanty, around 16 to 18 inches, Kutch even less than that. This area is suffering from a severe drought condition. The rainfall was very scanty. Kutch had hardly any rainfall and therefore water conservation projects must supplement it, but only provided there is rain. But if there is no rain the water conservation, rainwater harvesting and such other projects, which are being talked about to supplement the area will not have much meaning during a crisis period. Therefore, we have no option but to import water from where it is available.

So how is the Narmada dam project going to help these problems that you are talking about?
Today almost 88% of the water from the Narmada goes away to the sea. Almost 90% of the concreting work has been completed on a terminal dam on river Narmada. The concrete work will be 400 feet high with 55 foot dam gates. So out of that concrete portion we have completed almost 90% of the structure and 10% of the spill away sight that is remaining, which is currently under observation.
In our experience we have found that a number of places we constructed, by the canals not being there or lack of apparatus, we were not able to use the water. Well, this time we are constructing one of the largest canals that has ever been constructed in the world. A 458 kilometre long, 40 thousand cosecs flow-line canal. I think this is a civil engineering marvel and rightly so. Time Magazine once described this as one of the engineering wonders of the world.
We have completed almost up to 263 kilometres out of 458 kilometres of the main canal. Structure, siphons, aquaducts, everything has been completed. The canal network is more or less ready so we are actually today in a position to take water to these drought affected areas. The remaining work in north Gujurat is just about starting. The honourable Central Minister inaugurated the ground breaking of north Gujurat canals just few days back.

So how many people and villages are going to benefit from…
As far as drinking water is concerned, 8215 villages, 135 urban habitats will benefit and I must once again emphasise that drinking water is a major problem. It will also benefit 1.8 million hectares of land in this most drought prone area. Most of that is to be brought under the permanent irrigation project and is for sustainable agriculture. In terms of electricity generation, it will generate 1450 megawatts of power, which will benefit the western greed. Thereby benefiting Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujurat. These are the benefits which will flow out of this project.

And what are the negative aspects?
Well I won't say there are any negative aspects. I mean this is not like civil engineering construction anywhere else in the world. It is a much larger construction, harder and much larger if you talk about the displacement of people. I mean there is a dam coming up elsewhere where compared to 14, 15 megawatts of power, this project will generate 18200 megawatts. And in terms of displacement of people we are talking about something like 37500 families with the other project I am talking about displacing almost about 1.2 million people.

This is just part of any development process, that somewhere something takes its place. I mean, if you have your railway lines, you have stations, then sometimes somebody might have been displaced. So, it is part of the development process. The only thing is that you should take care to see that they are properly rehabilitated and I think this is what is being done. This is one of the projects in a country where we ca we are proud saying that we have done the most moral rehabilitation work.

So could you explain what land for land compensation is?
Well, it is not land for land in this project. Even the person who did not have even a little bit of land gets five acres of land. Even if a person was an encroacher on the forest land, he gets five acres of land. His major son gets 5 acre of land. So it is not land for land. It is beyond that. Let me give you a comparison. In the state of Gujurat the availability of herd cultivatable land is less than one acre per person. We are a 196000 sq/kilo state and the availability of cultivatable land is less than 1 acre.

Compare that to the people who are project affected persons. Each one will get 5 acres as well as his major son, so its not land for land, it is much more beyond that plus house and then the primary education facilities, health facilities other infrastructure.

And where does this new land come from?
Well, we are purchasing it from the market, so it is not that we are forcibly acquiring from the farmers. They do not have any grievances because we are paying for it at the market price. We have so far resettled close to about 9500 families and they are happy. If you look at studies made by various economic and social institutions, in terms of their per capita income, their living standard, calorie input, health and also the opportunity for their children to get educated I think they are much better off than what they were.

So why do you think some people are moving back to their villages?
I would say that there are some people who have made them their constituency. They want to remain the way they are and therefore if they remain like that then they have a kind of a captain constituency about which they can talk to the world and tom-tom from the roof top. My logic behind this argument is that if you look at these people, I mean you are a very experienced telly journalist, can you tell me that have they, so far, even in this World Water Forum, got one representative of the people about whom they are talking?

I mean they are the educated, english speaking, elite class people who have taken this up as a business and today we have gone from an area of eco-romanticism to eco-naziism that we want to pursue something to the utmost extreme. That whatever comes, these are our views and in the name of environment we want to pursue it the way we want. This is something, which is perhaps, the driving force behind these people. And let me also tell you one thing I mean you might be interested and your viewers also might be interested that India was not self sufficient when we became independent.

It is because of the dams and the irrigation facilities that came from the dams, that today, despite we are two and half times the population, we are able to export and we can further produce for ourselves. We went from being dependent on donated milk powder for our children as a nutritional diet just four decades back.

Today we are number one milk producing country in the world. We are number two fruits and vegetables producing countries in the world. If we have now the energy, the economy which was 38th when we became independent, today is amongst top ten. We have some of the finest technically trained manpower. If we have energy we can do wonderfully well. And in terms of energy we are importing 45% of all petrol products and we cannot depend upon that. Coal has limitations. Hydropower is the one form of the energy where we have untapped resources available.

Can you generate electricity without having sufficient water storage or the height of the dam of the height to move the turbines? So why is there irritation against these power projects? You talk of Pursadasarur, you talk of Mysorar, you talk of any other power project in the country that are hydropower projects and, in fact, the environmentalists must be happy because this is the cleanest and the cheapest form of energy available. But then they want to oppose that. Perhaps the reason lies somewhere else. I mean we have reason to believe that there is some invisible hand playing behind them.

Some invisible hand, like what?
I don’t know even. In this present day complex world it could be anything. You know, I would just stop here because I mean you understand what kind of forces are operating.

What do you think of Medha Patkar and her motives?
Well I think she has lost her constituency in India. She is very fast loosing her constituencies elsewhere also. It was a fashion for her. First she said, “no dam” when she challenged the dam on technical counts, stability and so on and so forth. Then she came out with the observation that Indian engineers cannot build this kind of structure. We have we are shown that if anybody else in the world can do it, we can do it better. Then she tried to create some movement amongst the people from Gujurat and Maharastrah that are being resettled today. These people are not listening to her because they have realised that we are giving them more than what we’ve promised. Now she is fast loosing her constituency there, and elsewhere in the world also. The very fact that you are interviewing me indicates something. I mean, how many times have we, the ‘other side’, been put on the foreign network? I think now the world has started listening to the other side also.

They are all urban elites talking about these sophisticated things, maybe getting their expose on the external network and trying to take on the world. But then in the last few years, you [Spanner Films] have been working amongst these people. Now you are the people, you are in a democratic set up in which, ultimately, the people are the masters. You now take over your movement and I am there to back you up.

Why do they have to hold a rally and bring somebody who has a literary frame? Now this is the scenario today and I would say she has lost her credibility very fast.

I presume you are speaking about Arundathi Roy. She is a citizen of India who is concerned about a project. Do you think that they shouldn’t speak about it?
They should speak, but they should take a balanced view. You look at Arundathi’s novel she has written. The opening prologue is that I went to the valley and, I mean don’t remember the exact words, but looked towards the scattered huts, they lay scattered like peanuts on the ground and my heart filled with the pity for them. You don’t feel pity for about 10 million people who do not have proper quality and quantity of water. You turn your back to them.

Now if you are an intellectual you should take a balanced view. Yes, I will say that the people who are getting affected because of the dam have a right to resettle. They must be resettled. They are part of our own democratic set up, but then the other side also has a case. So why can she not take a balanced view. You cannot make this an emotional issue. It is not an emotive issue. That is where my objection lies. I don’t say that people shouldn’t talk about it. In a democratic set up you cannot throttle the voice of people. They must talk about it and there must be healthy debate, but then the other side, I also will have been happy if they would have seen the plight of the people who are suffering. I mean small children suffering from dental disease and fluorosis, this kind of thing is terrible.

So why do you think that many of the villagers have vowed that they will stay in their homes and drown?
Well I don’t think that is also true. This is a made up story. There are a few of these so-called activists or environmentalist that still have some kind of a foothold. The rest of them have supported the project. I would also tell these activists to do their homework; that Gujurat and Maharastra have completed the resettlement job more or less. In Madhya Pradesh there are people who are coming to Gujurat, almost close to four thousand families and most most of them are tribal or ‘adivasies’, I won’t say tribal. They are not like aboriginals elsewhere who do not have voting rights or who are gullible people and who are slaughtered for the benefit of the civilisations. They are as much part of the democratic decision making process as any member of the urban elite is, and they have the highest office of the speaker of the parliament, Mr. Sangma himself is an Adivassi.

When this project started our chief minister himself was an adivassi, so it is not true to say that they need leadership from outside. They are capable of leading for themselves and leading from the front. If you look at the people who are remaining in Madhya Pradesh to be re-settled, most of them are non-adivassi farmers whose cause you are championing. Now it is becoming clear that what are you talking about in the name of ideology, is resistance. If you and I are staying in one place and there is a general principal of management, there is a resistance to change.

If you want to sit in a one particular position in an office and somebody wants to tell you to sit in another corner you feel little bit uneasy. Here you are moving lock stock and barrel to a new location so, certainly, anxiety may be there. There may be some resistance but instead of helping them to better resettlement, they start fuelling these kind of anxieties though misinformation campaigns and gossips and this is not progressive.

So the Bargi dam...
Well I won’t comment on the Bargi or Maheshwar…

The resettlement from Bargi is not yet finished...
Let me tell you one thing. If you are comparing two cases, one where a fellow has qualified with distinction, and the other, where a person is passing with a passing marks then you cannot apply these standards to a fellow who has qualified with distinction. Here is a project that has shown not only to the country, but to the world, what could be an ideal rehabilitation process, something that has not been done anywhere in the last fifty years. Here something is being done. You cannot oppose that in the name of what has happened in the past or what has not happened somewhere else. How logical it that?

So you don’t think that the people who are being displaced from Bargi, who haven’t been resettled should be…
Why should we? It is Madhya Pradesh. So you know this is what I am telling you. This is a cleverly managed misinformation campaign, which makes links about some rehabilitation not being done somewhere from the day India became independent with something which is done ideally here now. And that is where my objection lies. This is a model rehabilitation project in which the draught rehabilitation policy of the government of India is now likely to be realised.

We will see when we go to the valley.
Well, what I would suggest to you is that you be our guests.
Come to India. Visit for yourself. We’ll not plan your itinerary. You have your own itinerary. Have a look at what is happening. I tell you, if they say they are put being put into a small kind of a house, that is again a misleading information campaign. You must compare them with the average Indian habitat as a base line. You cannot compare them with what is happening elsewhere in Europe or what is happening elsewhere in developed countries. Compared to what is happening there, they are housed in much better accommodation.

Even if we are making a comparison, five acres land holding in Gujurat belongs to only barely 2 - 2 and a half % of the people. So we are putting them all in that five acre bracket, and still we are being subjected to criticism because the developed world knows their own standards.

Your average person in my state has to travel about 6,7 kilometres for primary health facilities. The resettled get it at their doorstep. In my state even the best village will not have enough schoolrooms available to have all the children educated in the village itself. Here it is available at their doorstep.

Now you compare it with the local base, that should be the comparison when you take the data, not what you think is happening elsewhere. You are talking about a country where 65% of the people live below poverty line meaning their daily income is less than 1 dollar. You cannot make these comparisons. We have given them the best and put them in the bracket that belongs to the best people and we shall do that because they are our people. They are part of the democratic set up. We cannot wish them away. There cannot be such kind of an effort.

Where does that land come from?
With the process of urbanisation there are people like my father who own land but do not cultivate it as a farmer and so sell it off. There are certain people who are anyway moving out to other professions and that is natural in the any urbanisation process. Maybe there are some farmers who want to move to some other area of activity. It is not essentially that they will remain attached to the farming. So we are buying it over at a market price and then handing it over to them.

So you are just buying land that is already culturable?
Absolutely. So again, there is a misinformation campaign about where the land is going to come from.

I believe that you were not going to give licences to the sugar cane factories, but now some licences have been given. Is this true?
This is also a myth. Why are you making a case out of a sugar cane factory in the modern age when, on one side, you are talking about greenhouses, drip irrigation, modern cultivation management and water-use management techniques? You think that India will remain in the primitive stage of cultivation?

Whether you cultivate sugar cane, you cultivate potatoes, you cultivate any other crop. Now when you are given a measured quantity of water and out of that measured quantity of water, through better management, you can better cultivate; that is what the farmers have started. Without any spirit on the part of the farmers what would this country have become with a two and a half times population increase in last fifty years.

This country, which was getting donations of milk powder, has become the number one milk producing country in the world. We have a model to tell the world about white revolution. So we have the fight in our farmers. And as a manager of the water I’m going to give them water to grow whatever you want to do out of that. So why are there all these talks about sugar cane cultivation tomorrow? I mean it is the people who are sitting at a distance that could be lured into these kind of arguments but I don’t think this is an argument number one.

Number two, these areas, mainly south and central Gujarat as I was telling you, are the areas where 20% of the area of the state accounts for 80% of the water resources. Our two major command areas belong to these areas. They are already water rationing problems, not water users problems. So this again is something which has been propagated as a myth; sugar cane factories have come up and 60% of the land coverage grows sugar cane… what have you to say about that?

I’m asking the questions. On the 9th of December last year the NBA office was ransacked. Do you know or have you heard about that?
I stay 100 kilometres away from Baroda. I have been to Baroda for 11 years. I have got educated at Baroda. I still don’t understand the mysterious circumstances in which the office got ransacked. It was in the middle of the night and the police complaint was not lodged for as much as 6 - 8 hours. The people could only destroy something and then go away and there was nobody who raised the alarm. It is a thickly populated area where their office is.

I am leaving the conclusions open for any intellectual to draw. But in a thickly populated area in the thick of the night some ransacking of the office takes place. Some miscreants come. They break open the office, destroy the office and there must be a lot of noise. Yet nobody comes to find out about it and mysteriously the police complaint also doesn’t get lodged for quite some time. We also have started understanding these techniques a little bit now. These are the techniques that will not work now.

Why and what do you get ransacking the office of NBA? There are a number of people who are not in agreement with certain things. There are rebel leaders and in a democracy any opinion which is decent is accepted. And Gujurat is a state which belongs to Mahatma Gandhi, we don’t get into these kind of things.

Do you think they just made it up for propaganda?
Well, I’m leaving that open to interpretation. I have said logically that this is what has happened and… I would resist from making or drawing any conclusion out of that because the circumstances are so clear that I don’t have to spell out the conclusion.

What is your impression of the general population of Gujarat. Are they pro-dam or anti-dam?
Number one, if they are anti-dam the government would not have survived. This is a democratically elected government. We have several elections and the any government that has come would not have survived. Number two is that if the people are against this dam and if the activists are so popular why can they not get even one representative elected in this state assembly. But they failed in mass mobilisation, they failed in managing their case and they failed at the Supreme Court also. And therefore you want to take the matter to the streets. This just cannot work. In our democratic country, ultimately, we are bound by the constitution and there is something called law and order machinery.

Do you approve of the non-violent methods that Gandhi used?
Yes.

And do you see a parallel with that and…
The non-violent methods of Gandhi are used not only in India but a number of countries and there are still people who believe that Gandhi has been identified rightly as a man of the millennium or leader of the millennium. So I mean we are proud of the fact that we belong to the land from where Mahatma Gandhi conducted his non-violence agitation.

Do you see any similarities between his campaign and the NBA…
Not in the least, not in the least! Oh Mahatma Gandhi never was so volatile. I mean where our officers are beaten up where there are violent agitations. If you go into certain areas there you are manhandled. No, not in the least.

And speaking of violence, some of the NBA claims that the police have been manhandling them and beating them up.
Well they might say that and they might not have a single incident to support them because I have been minister for the last little over 2 years. I am not aware about one case where police has arrested anybody. But in any country if you try to take the law into your own hands and try to do certain things, which are just not permitted, you are prevented from doing that. Now if you if you consider that also as police intervention, I do not think democracy can be a passport to misbehaviour.

So before you became a minister, I know everybody asks you this, you very famously said that Narmada was a death noose not the life line and then you changed your mind when you…
Definitely not. Yesterday also I clarified this to the gentleman from IRN. I was speaking in the debate in the state assembly where the issue was how fast should this scheme be implemented and what kind of investment is going in. My comment was that if you do not implement this scheme in time, the interest and the other kinds of incidental expenditure that is going to be mounting, could become a death noose.

Now if you pick this up in isolation, interpret the speech, which is made in Gujurati and translate it and then make a circulation it changes. I think I told Medha also yesterday that she has been guilty of at least three things when talking about me. Number one, that I was on her side. I invited her to a dinner in presence of 12 to 14 families to know why she was opposed to them, and, as a representative of people, I thought it was my right because I wanted to understand what the logic behind it is.

I have seen the plight of the people who are thirsty for water. Why is she so vehemently opposed to the construction of the dam and taking water to these thirsty areas. She says I was with them, that, I was with her. Now that was once and once only I met her. I have no further clarification to make. Second is my assembly statement and third is that I have changed my mind after I became a minister, certainly not. I am a civil engineer and any engineer believes that natural resources must be used in the optimum manner and that is a wealth the country has.

You are talking about a country where only 22% of the water resources are used compared to examples like every drop of water from the Rio Colorado is used seven times before it goes. So you are talking about a country where there is lot of potential. India can ill afford this kind of a potential to just run away and go to sea. And second thing is that yesterday also she was trying to make an issue about where the energy is coming into the picture.

The farmer, he needs water. He does not need electricity and in Gujurat as much as 40% of the electricity is consumed by farmers for sucking water from 800 - 850 feet beneath the ground. He is doing two things. Number one he is exploiting the water, which is the fossil water stored 15 – 17,000 years back that he inherited. Some philosophers say that you have not inherited this earth but rather, what you are doing is you are borrowing from the mouth of the future generations. He is exploiting that reservoir by taking out the water. And on the other hand he is using up the power because he needs water. Now, 27,000 megawatts of power. If you want to provide it at a delivery point it would mean setting up 6000 megawatt of power station. Which, at the present day cost is 7.5 billion US dollars; more than the cost of the entire dam. Talk about economics and economic viability.

So just to be clear the thing about the death noose. You weren’t talking about the dam. You were talking about the debts that would come from the dam if it was made slowly?
Yes, because the benefits will not start flowing. Today we are in a very competitive economic world. Interest itself will be tremendous today. We have invested about 100 thousand million rupees. It will roughly work out to be a hundred billion rupees. That is roughly 2.5 billion US dollars. Now can a country like India afford an investment with 2.5 to 3 billion US dollars just lying idle and water still flows away to the sea.

If I just read you a quote from the Morse report perhaps you could respond to it? They concluded that the engineering and economic imperatives have driven the project to the exclusion of human and environmental concerns.
See the Morse commission, according to us, was a misguided commission. We never accepted the Morse observations. You see, basically any project any government does is first guided by concern of for the people. It is not a private sector project, which is driven by the instincts of economics and engineering. Any government doing any project with those kind of instincts would just not be able to survive. They will face a violent agitation if it is not harming the people. So it was rather unfortunate that Morse also did not find time to look at the other side. I mean there are other issues, which we believe there was time to look into. And then certain observations were made, which are not only according to us incomplete, but erroneous.

This project is driven by socio-economic priorities; that is first. For any elected government, to provide pure sustainable drinking water is the first and basic responsibility. After 50 years of independence how can you say that this responsibility can be skipped and that we are driven by engineering and economic aspects. The basic thing is that we want to provide a sustainable water supply to our farmers and also the drinking water to 8215 villages and numerous urban habitats. That has been the basic thrust behind planning this project not the economic priorities. The engineering is incidental. When you want to exploit the natural resources you can’t without engineering and engineering is one science that doesn’t know the answer “no”, only “at what cost”. So it is not true.

So why do you think that the World Bank pulled out as a result of that report?
Well, I went to World Bank and in 1992 also. I told them that pulling out of this project was unwise for the simple reason that if you are really concerned about this ‘green’, ‘friends of earth’ or whatever environmentalist movement, you should be with the project so that you are able to monitor and you are able to ensure that whatever is stipulated is implemented. They would have acted as some kind of an auditor – an external agency that would have been a positive intervention according to me. So I told the World Bank that it would be unwise for you and unfortunate for the project if you pull out. But then perhaps the World Bank is dictated by other pressures so they might have their own reasons

Next interview with Mr Vyas - recorded 2000