What Medha Patkar’s conscience costs

In the case of the Sanghi Industries project to put up a jetty off the Kutch coast for its cement plant, costs have gone up from the original Rs 664 crore to over Rs 850 crore, and the plant which was to have come upin October 1996 has still not got its clearances. In this case, to be fair to Patkar, it wasn’t her, but some other activists who were involved. Maneka Gandhi and George Fernandes, currently ministers in the Union Cabinet, for example, have both filed litigations on environmental grounds against projects of Cogentrix power and Reliance Petroleum — both were dismissed by various courts, but not before several years and crores of rupees had been wasted in terms of lawyer’s fees and delays in project completion.

That’s thousands of crores which has just been lost due to these activists. It hasn’t accrued to the `profiteering’ industrialists, but then it hasn’t gone to the poor and needy either. And since it didn’t go to industry, none of it came back to the government in the form of taxes on increased production or corporate profits either. It just vanished into the thin air.

What of the specific charges, the ones that show that tremendous environmental and human degradation takes place as a result of, say,large dams? After all, if pressed for a judgment, most of us would tend to go along with Patkar and argue that it just isn’t right to displace large number of people and submerge villages to set up power plants. In the case of the Sardar Sarovar project, for example, 20,000 hectares of land are to be submerged and 40,000 people are to be displaced — the Maheshwar project is to displace 13,500 families and submerge 5,000 hectares of land.

While one has to be very stupid as well as insensitive to downplay the tragedy involved in forced displacement, Patkar and her friends refuse to acknowledge that in all cases, in monetary terms, the displaced are being generously compensated. Each family, including encroachers and landless labourers, is to be given a plot of land, in all cases larger than what they owned. Each adult son of a family is to be treated as a separate unit and will get these benefits. Free housing is to be provided and the land that is provided to the oustees is to to be cultivable land. Add tothis the fact that, in the case of the Sardar Sarovar for example, the massive irrigation benefits (it will benefit 18 lakh hectares of land) have made it virtually the lifeline of Gujarat and large parts of Rajasthan.

That, of course, is also the reason why Patkar was forced to beat a hasty retreat from Gujarat and focus on projects like Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh where there are few irrigation benefits — the project is an out and out power project. But in this case as well, the arguments given by her group are quite unconvincing. Briefly, the arguments are as follows. One, Madhya Pradesh doesn’t need so much additional power as demand can be cut down by better management and replacing energy-guzzling bulbs and so on with more efficient one. Energy supplies can also be augmented by increasing the efficiency of existing power plants. Second, there are a host of other energy sources — diesel sets, bio-mass based power generation, solar power, etc — which are a lot less expensive and are alsoeco-friendly.

While very appealing, most of these arguments, however, are quite shallow — saving energy by using compact fluoroscent bulbs, for instance, is a costly solution as each such bulb costs around 40 times the conventional one. Solar power is certainly clean, but there are no established plants over the size of 1 MW anywhere in the world! And yes, solar power today costs in the region of Rs 40 crore per MW (contrasted with Maheshwar’s 3.9). And, if one is to put solar panels across the land, as you have to, one lands up taking around 5 hectares of land per MW of power capacity — that’s roughly the same amount of land that will be displaced by the hydro-project. Wind power, though not suggested by Patkar’s friends, costs around Rs 4 crore a MW and requires even more land. Indian experience with wind energy has also shown that the windmills draw more power from the grid to start working than they actually contribute.

Sure, there are serious problems with setting up fresh generation capacity withthe state electricity boards (SEBs) not even collecting money for half the power they produce — this is either lost in transmission or stolen. That this problem just has to be solved if our SEBs are to remain solvent is obvious, but has little to do with what Patkar is arguing. Similarly, no one’s arguing against protecting the environment or compensating oustees from big projects. The bottomline: can we afford the luxury of Patkar’s conscience? The answer seems obvious.