Uprooting Forests, Planting Trees: Success of Compensatory Afforestation Measures Mitigating the Deforestation for the Sardar Sarovar Dam, India Dipti Bhatnagar Abstract Large dams, found on practically all the major rivers of the world, have been criticized for negative environmental, social and economic consequences. This study assesses the success of a process known as Compensatory Afforestation, a measure to mitigate the deforestation of 13,000 hectares of forest land, caused by inundation of land by the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River in western India. Tribal people and peasants living in or near these forests, traditionally use the forests as an important community resource for firewood, medicinal herbs, forest produce, etc. The mitigation process involves tree plantations carried out on 13,000 hectares of land to compensate for the forests lost to flooding. The methodology used for the study included a combination of interviewing villagers, village heads, government and forest officials; visiting plantation sites to cross check interviewees claims; and analyzing government documents. It was found that each region displayed different shortcomings in the planning and implementation of CAF. However, results varied widely between different regions. Some sites had healthy plantations, albeit undesired monoculture plantations of invasive species. Other sites had unhealthy plantations with almost no tree cover and no protection. Still other sites have plantations in a different ecological zone from the submerged forests. Hence, the main conclusion of this study is that valuable forests are being lost to inundation by the dam, but they are not being compensated satisfactorily, as laid out by the government’s own mitigation policies described in its environmental management plan.Introduction “The current state of knowledge indicates that large dams have many mostly negative impacts on ecosystems…to date, efforts to counter the ecosystem impacts of large dams have had only limited success. This is due to limited efforts to understand the ecosystem and the scope and nature of impacts, the inadequate approach to assessing even anticipated impacts and the only partial success of minimisation, mitigation and compensation measures.” (World Commission on Dams, WCD, 2000) Over the last three decades, large dams have come under harsh criticism worldwide from environmental scientists, human rights activists, economists and intellectuals. Large dams have gained notoriety for the detrimental environmental and social impacts that they cause, and the huge economic burden of their costs. One of the earliest critiques emerged from Nicholas Hildyard and Edward Goldsmith’s famous 1986 book entitled “The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams,” where they claimed that large dams cause “massive ecological destruction, social misery, and increasing ill-health and impoverishment for those very people who are expected to benefit most.” As more and more evidence is gathered about the negative effects of large dams, the criticism has become harsher. McCully (2001) says that “dams have had massive negative impacts on nature and society, and their benefits have been exaggerated and could often have been produced by other less destructive and more equitable means.” While the social and human impacts of these dams have been the usual focus of criticism, it has also come to light that these dams can cause severe environmental and ecological damage. The quote from the World Commission on Dams (WCD) above indicates this reality, and the compensation and mitigation for this damage caused by dams is usually inadequate at best and non-existent at worst. Indeed, it is this ecological compensation for deforestation that is the subject of my study. India has 3600 large dams, 3300 of which have been built since the country gained its independence in 1947 (Roy, 1999). India is the third largest dam-builder in the world. It has spent a staggering Rupees 87,000 crores (a crore is equivalent to 10 million, this amount converts to $20 billion approx. using current exchange rates) on its irrigation sector which includes large dams, and about 50 million people have been displaced by these dams, most of whom are tribal people (Roy 1999). The enormity of these figures is noteworthy in that they reveal an alarmingly fast rate of recent dam building, and document the massive economic andsocietal costs of these enterprises. In addition, to address the severe negative environmental and ecological impacts that these dams cause, all projects in India are now required to conduct an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and prepare an Environmental Management Plan that details how the negative impacts will be mitigated (Morse 1992). My study is based on the Sardar Sarovar dam and irrigation Projects (SSP) being built on the Narmada River in western India. The SSP was envisioned as early as the 1950s, but the inter-state water-sharing plan, as outlined in the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award, was ready only by 1979 (Sangvai, 2002). The Award stated the water sharing plan, the height of the dam and other engineering features. There was no mention of possible environmental damage, or the need for any mitigation measures. The World Bank sanctioned credits and loans of $450 million for the project in 1985, even before the environmental and forest clearances were obtained for the project. The loan was used to put pressure on the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to give these clearances, which they did two years later in 1987. Later, due to sustained and vocal opposition to the dam by affected people who organized themselves as the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA, or Movement to Save the Narmada River), and after a scathing World Bank-sponsored Independent Review (also called the Morse Committee Report) labeled the project as “flawed,” the World Bank was pressured to pull out of the project in 1993 (Sangvai, 2002; Morse, 1992). Construction of the dam had begun around 1987, and today it stands at 100 meters out of a total of 139 meters. In 1994, the NBA filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court (SC) against the Indian Government, local governments and dam-builders, claiming that the project should be stopped. The judgment came in 2000, saying that the dam could go ahead, the dam height being raised five meters at a time, as long as rehabilitation and environmental work was proceeding
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