'Development refugees' resist Polavaram dam

Peddamettapally: Eight-year-old Sandhya Rani tries to walk faster. It is 6 p.m. already and soon the sun will set. But the three water pitchers balanced on her shoulders, filled from a borehole well about half a kilometer from her home - slow the child down.

Currently the well is the only source of drinking water for Rani's family and neighbors in PeddaMettaPally village, in the Chinturu block of Andhra Pradesh. In a few years time there will be abundant water here, thanks to a planned 50-metre-high, 2.3-kilometre-long megadam on the Godavari River.

But Rani will not benefit. Her home and those of hundreds of thousands of other tribal people will be drowned by the planned dam, and she and her family turned into what critics of the dam term “development refugees”.

Conceived in 1980, the Polavaram dam also known as the Indirasagar dam is part of India’s plan to inter-link its rivers, and to harvest and hold more river runoff, largely to use for agricultural irrigation as climate change-related droughts worsen.

The project is seen as crucial to the country’s water and food security by the current government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But critics say its benefits are outweighed by its effects on the region’s environment and its people.

Maneka Gandhi, union minister for women and child development, before taking office last year called the plan “extremely dangerous,” saying it would destroy the local ecosystem and cause huge losses of land.

At the proposed dam, 2.2 trillion liters of water from the Godavari River enough to fill more than 2,000 Olympic swimming pools a day will be diverted each year to the Krishna River, another river in the region.

The diversion is designed to capture some of the 700 trillion liters of Godavari River water that today flows out to sea via the Bay of Bengal each year.

The saved water will be used to irrigate over 700,000 acres of land, officials say. The dam will also produce 960 megawatts of hydroelectricity, a boost for Andhra Pradesh, which is seeking rapid development and to build a new capital city, but has a shortfall of just over 1,000 megawatts of generating capacity.