Development projects like the Sardar Sarovar dam have disrupted the lives and
livelihood of thousands of people. It is true that irrigation and power have been
produced and both are central to modern development. But for people who have
been displaced – and there are millions of them – modern development has been
unjust and destructive. Because of modern development projects, they have lost
access to their greatest resource, the local environment. This is a point that Bava
Mahaliya makes over and over again. Without the local environment, their lives
would be reduced to nothing. From a state of self-sufficiency, they would be flung
into scarcity. Now they can atleast take one crop and hope that, in the future,
irrigation would enable them to gradually move to multiple cropping. But with
displacement, their lives would become dependent on external forces and they
would fall into poverty.

For most rural communities, the link between the environment and the lives of
the people is very strong. Access to environment serves a large number of their
needs (like food, firewood, fodder, economically valuable articles etc.) which
otherwise they would have to pay for. As they lose this access to environment
either because of displacement, or becuase the environment is destroyed and
polluted, the poor are the greatest sufferers. The question of environment and
sustainability is intimately connected to the issue of equity.
It is also important to realise that not only do people lose out as they are
removed from their local environments. The environment is equally denuded of its
rich bio-diversity as traditional knowledge is lost along with the people. The stock
of knowledge has been built and enriched over generations. People like Bava
Mahaliya are the repositories of traditional knowledge. “We know the name of
each and every tree, shrub and herb; we know its uses. Ie cherished over the generations
will be useless and slowly we will forget if we were made to live in a
land without forests, then all this learning that we havt all.” Today, when the environment is

endangered in multiple ways, it is important to understand the contributions that these caring
communities can make.The resistance to Sardar Sarovar and other dams with similar consequences in
the Narmada valley has taken the form of a social movement. It is called Narmada Bachao Andolan (
NBA). You will read more about the issue of displacement and the environmental movement that has
built up around this and similar issues in the chapter on Social Movements.